Have you ever wondered how scientists calculate the age of dead plants and animals? This is a topic that has fascinated me for many years, because while it may sound very simple and straightforward on the surface, as you will see, it is really a rabbit hole that leads into all sorts of unexpected places. Come with me …

Prerequisite: XenApp6 PowerShell SDK Let’s say you want to copy all currently published applications into a folder named “Test” in the console tree, while simultaneously modifying the new published apps with different permissions and client folder settings. Here’s how: First, create the “Test” folder by hand (you can …

I ran into a little snag when executing some XenApp PowerShell commands. Certain commands like Get-XAFarm and Get-XAAdministrator would always give an “0x80060016” error. Here is an example and the fix: `PS C:\Windows\system32> Get-XAFarm Get-XAFarm : Error reading the current administrator data (0x80060016) At …

A few days ago I booted up my rather old HP workstation which is running Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS (Hardy Heron) and Firefox 3.6. I wanted to see how it would perform playing music from last.fm, so I browsed to the site, logged in, and tried to launch a stream. Well, nothing happened. I pretty quickly realized that Flash was …

A common problem programmers have with CakePHP is saving related models with a many-to-many relationship, something Cake calls “hasAndBelongsToMany” or HABTM. One of the things that makes saving HABTM models so challenging is that when you go to save your models, Cake will act like everything saved fine when in fact …

If you have a lot of duplicate data sitting around on laptops, USB drives, and external hard drives, you probably would like to clean it up and get back some of that wasted free space. But you probably don’t have time to go through and delete all the duplicates, or you’re concerned if you do you will mis-identify a …

Tonight I watched a documentary on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian who encouraged the Lutheran church to stand against the Nazi persecution of the Jews and later joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. The account of Bonhoeffer’s life led me to some of his writings on the role of Christians and …

The one theme that I keep hearing from those who attended Citrix’s yearly conference (Synergy) is that they weren’t sure if they were at a Citrix conference or a Microsoft conference. Citrix’s ties to Microsoft run deep and have for a long time. But just within the past couple years the Citrix-MS relationship has …