IT

Blogger vs WordPress

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

If you’re reading this, you’re reading it on my revamped site. The old site was http://adamfowlerit.blogspot.com – hosted by Google’s Blogger application. I’ve now moved to a hosted service on Bluehost with WordPress, and my own domain http://adamfowlerit.com.

Part of the reason for doing this was that on Blogger, I couldn’t do something I consider basic – add a twitter feed panel on the side. They used to have an addon that did this, but it has been broken for a long time. To it’s credit, Blogger is incredibly easy to set up – if you’re looking at just starting out and getting some content up, it’s a great platform for the basics and served me well. Once you want to start playing around a bit more, you’ll find Blogger limiting.

With my jump to WordPress, I was rather spoilt from the ease of use on the Blogger side. Not to say that WordPress is difficult, but it does take a lot more time and effort in comparison. There’s a lot more support for WordPress out there, with so many sites using it now. You can customise so much, and there’s different levels of customisation. A lot of the basics are quite easy to do with the web based GUI (in which I’m typing this post now), but if you want you can break out the CSS code and change anything.

There’s a huge amount of themes you can choose from as a starting platform, as well as plugins to add extra functionality (such as a twitter feed!). Someone’s even written an importer so it’ll grab all the content from your Blogger page (including comments) and put it into WordPress.

I’m still learning with it, so please feed back any suggestions.

So, for a lot of people, Blogger will do the basic job, and do it really easily. For advanced stuff, WordPress is the go. It’s ‘free’, but you’ll need to host it somewhere. I’m paying a few dollars a month for it to be hosted at Bluehost with a bunch of other features included.

Details available here:
BlueHost or if you want to give me a referral,copy and paste this: http://www.bluehost.com/track/adamfowl

Windows 8 – Easy Admin Access

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,
One of the difficulties I’ve had with using Windows 8 is getting access to stuff. Stuff I’m used to accessing easily, like being able to edit a text file under C:\Program Files\. In Windows 8, on a non-domain connected PC and using a Windows Account, you can’t do this. Even if you’re an Administrator, and you’ve turned off User Access Control (UAC):

This gets frustrating very quickly. I was really baffled by this behaviour – why am I, as a local administrator on Windows 8 using a Windows Account, getting ‘Access Denied’ when trying to edit a text file under a Program Files folder??

I posted onto the Microsoft Technet forums here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w8itprogeneral/thread/af7cfb87-769f-4789-b6ac-1894cc9ea581/ where I was advised that this was by design. The upside, was that I was told about a handy little feature on how to run anything as administrator easily. ‘Create New Task’ has a great little tickbox that says ‘Create this task with administrative privilidges’. I’m not sure why this is called ‘Create New Task’ as it looks exactly the same as the ‘Run’ window, even with the same text. To get this, open Task Manager and go to File > Create New Task.

You can run anything here just as you would from the ‘Run’ window, including ‘explorer’ which will bring up Windows Explorer, but with PROPER full Administrator access, finally allowing me to edit that text file I was going on about earlier.

Hopefully once you know this, you’ll also be less frustrated like me!

Quick Review – Convertpdftoword.org

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

I was sent an email asking to review this by someone at CometDocs, and it’s free, so I figured why not. It’s called Convertpdftoword.org which is also the website it’s hosted at, by no amazing coincidence. What is it? An online PDF to Word converter. Owned by Cometdocs.com who do a lot of different online file conversions.

PDF to Word? I know I get a lot of requests for this sort of thing, but historically the answer is either getting expensive software to convert, or ask the originator for a non-PDF version of the document.

This is cloud based, which always rings alarm bells for me. Do you want to send your documents to an unknown 3rd party, just because they’re offering a free service? That’s what you’ll need to decide, but this company resides in Canada and the servers for holding your files are located in the United States which matters to some people (the more security minded just won’t use this service).

So, how does it work? You just go to http://www.convertpdftoword.org/ , browse and upload your PDF, put in your email address and wait for the resulting Word document to arrive.

A few minutes later, and I’ve got emails for the two test PDFs I uploaded. They take you back to the site to download them, where they’re hosted for 24 hours. I don’t believe there’s any security behind this, apart from a unique URL – so again, you’d only do this with data you don’t care about others having.

Once you get back to their webpage to download, it sits ‘Processing’ for a few seconds and then starts downloading. It might be buggy with Internet Explorer 10, as it didn’t stop the ‘Processing’ dialogue even after the file had downloaded. This happened on both files.

The results were very impressive. They looked identical to the PDFs I had uploaded, with coloured pictures and all in the exact same positions. The file size blew out from 131kb to 2787kb on one of the examples, but probably expected with Word vs PDF compressions.

In summary, it seems to work really well in my random sample size of 2 documents. Handy if you want to edit a publicly available PDF, but I’m not sure how much demand there is for this.

As pointed out by the person who emailed me, the site gets it’s revenue from adverts. I didn’t get paid anything to write this, so I must have been in a good mood.

Citrix Access Gateway and Changing Passwords

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,
Recently we had two Citrix Access Gateways (CAG) installed, replacing our software based Citrix Secure Gateway (CSG). The CAG is a hardware appliance (here’s the install guide http://support.citrix.com/servlet/KbServlet/download/21072-102-665925/AG_HardwareInstallationGuide.pdf) while the CSG is a free software based solution that sits on a Windows box, but isn’t looked favourably upon anymore. Here’s a great article from Dan Brinkmann on that topic: http://blog.whatwoulddando.com/2011/10/12/citrix-secure-gateway-sigh/

We ran into an issue where some new users couldn’t log in to the gateway, getting the generic error “Try again or contact your help desk”. Everyone loves a generic error…

Anyway, we worked out that it didn’t like accounts where the password had expired, or set to change at next logon. After setting the option on the CAG to allow users to change their password, it looked like it was fixed. The user was prompted to change their password, but when they tried it bombed out again with the same generic error “Try again or contact your help desk”.

Restorting to Google at this stage, as I couldn’t find any logs or errors via the CAG web interface, I found that you need to set up your LDAP as a secure connection for this to actually work (over port 636 not 389). This also requires you to import your internal Root CA to the CAG.

Luckily Citrix doco had this covered, and here are the instructions:

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX127316

That all worked! So, LDAP over port 389 insecurely will allow authentication only, but for password changes etc you’ll need to use port 636 and use a certificate.

SCCM 2012 Unknown Computers

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,
While getting OSD (Operating System Deployment) working in SCCM 2012 I came across two little things.

First, I want to be able to specify the computer name as part of the deployment. Windows-noob has a great article on this, available here:
http://www.windows-noob.com/forums/index.php?/topic/5542-how-can-i-easily-prompt-for-a-computer-name-in-configuration-manager-2012/

It’s just specifying the variable OSDComputerName needs to be set for your Unknown Computers collection, which will work as long as you have your OSD task sequence advertised there too.

The second thing, which was more of an issue, was that my PC wasn’t detecting my PXE server after the first time, even though the OSD Task Sequence bombed out.

After reading this Microsoft TechNet thread: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/configmanagerosd/thread/b4c4ff5e-8e9b-41fd-a4ee-f21d7daccaaf/ I did a search for ‘Unknown’ in my devices, where 2 items popped up. In the properties I checked the MAC address, and sure enough one of the entries matched my PC.

In SCCM 2007 it didn’t quite work this way, generally if it bombed out there would be no record and you could continually PXE boot as many times as you liked. In 2012, as soon as you get to the list of available task sequences, the ‘Unknown Computer’ record is created.

A bit annoying, but there you have it.