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 …