Why I love comic books, cartoons and comic-film conversions

There are quite a few simple reasons for this;

  1. It takes me back to my childhood (or the last time I read said comic)
  2. There's that hero fantasy angle and living through the comic/film
  3. The gadgets
  4. The envitable women (in some story lines)

I'm sure that there are others, but they're just not springing to mind immediately. Why am I on this tack today? Well that's easy; another Ironman trailer was launched a few days ago and I've just seen it. It. Looks. Awesome.

Around summer last year we saw one of the first teasers for Ironman launched and it looked good then, so it seems that things are well on course. From what I've seen first time director (according to IMDB) Jon Favreau is doing a fantastic job.

However, I do hope that it's a long film, because it looks like they're craming a fair bit of the Ironman evolution into the film, and there's Stark's change of perspective. I love the fact that he's an arrogant bastard - that's absolutely fucking spot on - I just hope that they don't send it too far into the "I've now got a conscience" direction.

What with this and the Dark Knight shortly afterwards, its looking to be a really good summer cinema experience!

Jumper

I got the opportunity to see Jumper this weekend. Whilst it was a very good concept for a SciFi film I felt that the film could've been so much more. The story line was slow to advance and I found myself wondering if it was suddenly going to just end half way through the plot. The reason for this was that the most interesting part of the film, and the majority of the wrapping up and introduction of part of the story, occured in the last 5-10 minutes of the film.

This film strikes me more as an extended prologue, or a TV series pilot. For that reason I can only hope that they were planning on some sort of Bourne-esque franchise, because if they weren't, then they've seriously cocked up the pacing.

Scripting is important

If you support any company's computer infrastructure you will often find that being able to script, or at least having someone who can script on your team, is very useful.

This coming week a client is relaunching an internal initative and wanted a popup to start up on each user's session advertising the relaunch. When they came to us originally and asked for it to be done we were having a bit of trouble coming up with a decent idea. We're sodding busy and we didn't think that writing and compiling some small application to do this was worth it, and we were asked with a little over 1 working day to come up with something.

Over night I had an awesome idea; why create a new application? This client is running a Windows only domain, and the one thing that we know is on all desktops, laptops and terminal servers? Internet Explorer. We also use a login script that executes every logon.

If you're not aware most things in Windows are controllable via the various Windows Scripting technologies. Whilst a lot of the documentation is tricky to find, Internet Explorer is no different. Here's what we've eventually ended up deploying.
Option Explicit ' We need the on error.. incase the user closes the window before the sleep finishes, ' this prevents any error popups On Error Resume Next Dim ie, sh, widthscreen, heightscreen, widthwindow, heightwindow Set sh = CreateObject("WScript.Shell") Set ie = CreateObject("InternetExplorer.Application") ie.ToolBar = False ie.StatusBar = False ie.Resizable = False ie.Navigate("http://webserver/yourfile") ' Wait until ie is ready Do Until ie.readyState = 4 Wscript.Sleep 25 Loop ' Screen dimensions widthscreen = ie.document.ParentWindow.Screen.AvailWidth heightscreen = ie.document.ParentWindow.Screen.AvailHeight ' We wanted a 90% screen size widthwindow = ie.document.ParentWindow.Screen.AvailWidth * .9 heightwindow = ie.document.ParentWindow.Screen.AvailHeight * .9 ie.document.ParentWindow.resizeto widthwindow, heightwindow ' Center the ie window ie.document.ParentWindow.moveto ((widthscreen - widthwindow) / 2), ((heightscreen - heightwindow) / 2) ' We wanted to disable the scroll bars ie.document.ParentWindow.document.body.scroll = "no" ' Show the window ie.Visible = True ' Hello! sh.AppActivate "Your title" ' Wait 10 seconds Wscript.Sleep 10000 ' Close ie.Quit ' Clean Up Set ie = Nothing Set sh = Nothing
Simply create a webpage, add it to an internal web server, and then call this in your logon script (with the relevant changes), and you're well away. Since we use a simple batch file, rather than another script, all we needed to add was (I added the "start" command as I didn't want the logon script to block until the popup was closed):
start cscript \\path\to\popup.vbs

Just make sure that you get your web address correct!

The great HP Procurve rebate!

Like a modern day gold rush, for geeks, you should pick up any HP Procurve switches you were planning on buying before the 31st of March 2008, or before they're all out of stock with your respective suppliers. The reason for this is that HP are giving UK purchasers a "Cash Back Promotion" on a selection of switches which are suitable for edge deployment (or core in smaller networks).

Do you administer Windows Servers? You might be interested in this!

The 'Ask the performance team' blog has been running a daily article on technical information behind the scenes of Windows Server 2008. These articles will be continuing until the launch day.

A lot of the content of the articles isn't required for administrating a Windows Server in the least, but it will enhance your understanding of some of the decisions and technology that you may well be implementing over the next few years!

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