Blogs

Here's a quick way to remove blank lines from a file using PowerShell. This will also remove lines that only have spaces.

(gc file.txt) | ? {$_.trim() -ne "" } | set-content file.txt

When working with group policies, if you get this error, make sure that you are not setting up Security Filtering for let's say, "Authenticated Users" (which is the default for a new GPO) when you're trying to set computer-level group policy settings.

C:\Users\administrator>gpupdate /force
Updating Policy...

User Policy update has completed successfully.
Computer policy could not be updated successfully. The following errors were encountered:

Let's say you want to use PowerShell's Get-WmiObject commandlet to retrieve a list of files older than a certain amount of time. Here's one way to do it.

If you're wondering "Should I turn off the Windows Firewall service to disable the Windows Firewall?" The answer is NO!

I just transferred this site (pixelchef.net) to www.nearlyfreespeech.NET webhosting!

I ran into a lot of trouble with PHP Safe_mode restrictions. I tried everything I could find on the web to no avail. So I caved in and set the site mode to PHP Flex, which does away with Safe_mode, and everything is fine now. It sounds like the site is less secure, but I don't know what else to do. And I found in the official PHP docs, Safe_mode has been depreciated and should not be relied on anymore. So maybe it doesn't really matter.

Here's a quick one-liner to retreive the status of a Windows service on a remote computer using Powershell. You don't need PowerShell remoting for this to work because it uses WMI.

This example uses the SNMP service, so just replace that text with the particular service you're looking for. Also replace remotecomputer with the name of the computer you are querying. If you remove '-computername remotecomputer' you will query your local computer.

If you send a lot of emails to distribution lists that you also belong to, it can be annoying and unproductive to move those same emails from your inbox. However, with the Rules feature in Outlook, it is easy to have your computer do this for you.

Here's how:

When you deploy Office 2010, users are prompted to make changes to "Use Recommended Settings", "Install Updates Only", or "Don't make changes" when they open Office 2010 for the first time. These relate to software updates for Microsoft Office, as well as the customer feedback program and other miscellaneous things.

When I upgraded my site from Drupal version 6 to 7, something happened that caused some comments to go haywire. As this was many months ago, I do not have any backups. Unfortunately, I had to delete the comments.

Somehow, the body of some comments was removed from the field_data_comment_body table. Interestingly, the author and subject information was not deleted - it is stored in another table.

If you're using Excel's "Scaling" feature to automatically size a spreadsheet to fit the dimensions of a printed page, you may have a problem where the page is printed much too small. Both print preview and the printed speadsheet do not fill the page, but instead appear as a small thumbnail or in miniature size rather than filling up all of the available space. This can be caused by the "print titles" feature in the page setup window.