http://carsonfriday.com Robots are our friends. Sat, 04 Jul 2009 07:47:46 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've been wanting to get a new compact point-and-shoot camera for a while now, but every time I seem to find one I really like, there is always some absent feature that ruins it all.  To be fair, I have a pretty lengthy list of required features: 10+ Megapixels 5x Zoom (although ... http://carsonfriday.com/2009/finally-a-point-and-shoot-that-doesnt-suck/ I'll admit it: I'm a sucker for candybar smartphones.  Sliders are nice and feature-rich, but I prefer a front facing keyboard for the convenience it provides.  That's why I jumped at the chance to try Samsung's recent WM6.1 Pro candybar, the Epix: Samsung Epix Product Page On paper, it has all the ... http://carsonfriday.com/2009/samsung-epix-failure/ Although we have some user licenses for VMware workstation 6.0 at work, I still prefer the Server product, as it allows you to run VMs in the background as the local system account.  Additionally, the Server product can be configured to automatically startup/shutdown VMs based on the needs of the ... http://carsonfriday.com/2008/how-to-open-a-vmware-workstation-6x-vm-with-vmware-server-1x/ By default, Exchange creates email addresses based on the default smtp domain name and username.  If you want to customize email addresses, you can set the recipient policy to do so automatically, using special variables.  This can come in handy if you need to add a secondary domain address or ... http://carsonfriday.com/2008/customizing-email-addresses-with-the-exchange-recipient-policy/ I've talked before about Dell's remote access card, DRAC5 in a previous post.  Although a great tool, sometimes just accessing certain features is a pain.  Surprisingly, current DRAC5 cards don't have very good support for IE7 or Firefox, which comprise the lion's share of browsers out there. Although I haven't found ... http://carsonfriday.com/2008/how-to-access-the-virtual-kvm-on-a-drac5-equipped-dell-server-with-ie7/ Sometimes it's necessary to analyze (sniff) packets flowing thru a network for reasons such as congestion or virus outbreaks.  I can remember two specific occasions where I had to sniff: 1. A user had fired up a p2p tool and was downloading some music files 2. A user had set an OpenGL ... http://carsonfriday.com/2008/how-to-configure-a-cisco-switch-for-network-sniffing/ Windows Update is a great tool for keeping your computer up to date.  However, some updates require a reboot and will keep nagging every 10 minutes to reboot your system.  This can be quite annoying, but with a new system policy setting, you can tell the Windows Update interface to ... http://carsonfriday.com/2008/disable-windows-update-reboot-nag/ I prefer Firefox for most browsing these days but occasionally I still need to use IE.  Unfortunately, there is a hidden setting in IE that limits the number of simultaneous connections per website to 2!  That means if you need to download more than a few items from a particular ... http://carsonfriday.com/2008/internet-explorer-connection-limit/ At a previous employer, we used Citrix Metaframe Servers at four different sites, with one of the sites handling the central configuration of the Citrix Server Farm.  This worked great for the most part, but during extended MPLS WAN (Wide Area Network) outages, the remote servers started to hang up, ... http://carsonfriday.com/2008/forcing-a-remote-citrix-server-to-use-a-local-host-cache-file/ I was cleaning up Outlook recently in an effort to be more organized when I realized that I have accumulated a lot of personal technotes over the years, and I decided it would be a good idea to publish some of the more useful topics. I'll start by posting a new ... http://carsonfriday.com/2008/tech-notes/