Back in December I wrote a posting on “Discovering Stale Computer Accounts with PowerShell”.  Today I received an email from one of my readers (Thanks Matt for writing!) trying to adjust the script to query for stale user accounts.  The script that I created in the previous entry is a good starting point, but requires some modifications to work properly for user accounts. The biggest change in the script is that the DirectorySearcher filter has to be modified to look for user accounts.  Simply changing  the filter to “user” from “computer” doesn’t quite work as for some reason ADSI will retrieve both the user accounts as well as the computer accounts.  We can further limit the search by adding the ObjectCategory in addition to the ObjectClass. This particular example will query on the last password change date. function Get-StaleUserAccounts { # Use Directory Services object to attach to the domain…

Picked this up last weekend. Netbooks are all the rage right now. A simple, compact laptop that provides enough power and performance to do email, offer Internet access, and use Office apps. Battery life is between 4-8 hours depending upon what you do. The Acer that I purchased is suppose to get about 7-8 hours of power. The first batch apparently is shipping with the larger (longer lasting) battery, while later productions will ship with a smaller battery capable of 4-5 hours; which is still great. I loaded mine with Windows 7, Office 2007, and a few other apps that I use regularly. This is the perfect device for travelers who regularly have to present (VGA output), like to take notes in a meeting or lecture, or just need quick access to email. It weighs under 3 lbs., so you can’t ask for much more. It ships with 1GB RAM,…

I was looking for a creative way to be able to share my USB hard drive that I had formatted for the Mac with my PC. HFS Explorer, worked fine, but required me to extract files instead of being able to expose the volume as a drive letter. I decided I would search for something that would allow my Mac to not only read (which OS X does by default), but also write to an NTFS partition. I was going to reformat my USB hard drive as NTFS since I now primarily use it with my PCs. My search turned up an app called MacFUSE. MacFUSE, as the website indicated, “implements a mechanism that makes it possible to implement a fully functional file system in a user-space program on Mac OS X (10.4 and above). It provides multiple APIs, one of which is a superset of the FUSE (File-system in…

Modifying pre-existing WordPress themes… That’s my extent of PHP programming. I got to thinking that it would be cool to turn my weather site into a regular WordPress blog and somehow incorporate the data that I currently have into some sort of theme. All of my historical data is stored in a SQL Server database, while forecast and current conditions data is stored in XML. I did some searching on PHP with SQL Server and came across the blog for the Microsoft SQL Server Driver for PHP Team. Who knew such a team existed? From there I found a link to an article on MSDN, “Accessing SQL Server Databases with PHP”. Exactly what I was looking for. So, in the coming days I plan to explore PHP territory. I’ve used .NET for all of my web programming. We’ll see what kind of learning curve I run into. What is your…

Jim Souhan did a nice article on Dick Jonckowski in today’s Star Tribune. Dick has been a figure in Minnesota sports for some time including the Vikings, Gopher Baseball and Gopher Basketball. He’s only the 2nd announcer to ever take the mike at Williams Arena. For those of you that don’t know Dick, he’s got a great radio voice and unique personality. He’s the current PA announcer for Gopher Basketball and Baseball. He’s also got a lot of passion for the games he calls and has shown up over the last several years for his reading of “The Night Before Christmas” as part of my niece’s Christmas dance recital. I had the opportunity to coach against him in American Legion baseball several years ago when he assisted his son, Jeff, in running the Shakopee ballclub and I was coaching Prior Lake. Always joking around and had plenty of stories. He’s…