Out of the Box and Free

Vendors and Kool Aid drinkers love to tell you that everything can be solved with off-the-shelf products and services.  To me that's no different than saying every known disease can be cured by a visit to the drug store.  Thankfully, we aren't all Kool Aid drinkers.  And thankfully we have Microsoft's myriad platform technologies, which happen to be FREE. 

Paul Thurrott has said many times that Microsoft isn't really a product builder, they're a platforms creator.  They are indeed the king (or queen, if you prefer) of platforms.

Without going into a lot of messy detail, I will just say that you can do some pretty damn interesting things with a mixture of WMI/WBEM scripting, Windows Search scripting, System Center Configuration Manager and Group Policy.  I'm not just tossing names out.  These can indeed be combined into a cohesive solution to a complex problem.

Another recipe might involve SQL Server, ADSI/LDAP interfaces, WMI, scripting, SCCM, ASP and Task Scheduler.  I'm almost done with a project that broils all these in the oven at once to make a very tasty dish.

Another recipe might involve Gmail or Live Mail, a smartphone, Active Directory, SQL Server, EVENTTRIGGERS, ASP and a six-pack of Belgian Trappist Ale in a ice cooler, relaxing on a sunny beach.  That was a fun project indeed.

The coolest part is that all of these ingredients are FREE and come bundled neatly inside every installation of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.  Even cooler? These barely scratch the surface.  There are hundreds of little building block platform resources tucked inside your Windows boxes.  Unleash them.

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Weekly Summary

MED-V, Group Policy, SCCM, SQL, WMI, SWBEM, ADSI, LDAP, ASP, Javascript, XML, CSS, Scripting, McDonalds, Starbucks, Kindle reading, 7-Eleven coffee. And the week is not yet over.

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LDAP / AD script stuff

Given an LDAP distinguishedName (dn) value, such as "CN=JohnDoe,OU=Sales,OU=Users,OU=Corporate,DC=contoso,DC=msft" you can strip out just the value assigned to the first CN= set using VBscript as follows:

CleanName = Replace(Split(DN,",")(0), "CN=", "")

This will return "JohnDoe"

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Democracy 101

So, this morning, after six or seven hours of light snowfall, the city public schools announced they would be closed today.  On the city's Facebook page, they responded to comments and complaints about various decisions the city also announced (the "city" and the public school systems are independent of each other in almost every aspect):

• Schools closed - Half the people are happy.  Half are pissed off.
• Circuit Courts, Juvenile Courts closed - Most are pissed off
• City operations departments open for business as usual, no delays - about half are happy, the other half are pissed off

The roads are clear.  Clear as a normal rainy day.  The snow has only stuck to the the lawn areas, tree limbs (barely), and vehicles.  The roads are in great shape.  Which brings me to another point:

• Everyone mocks the school system - until they have a special needs child that needs special services
• Everyone mocks doctors - until they, or a close friend, learn they have Cancer
• Everyone mocks the police - until they've had a break-in or a friend shot by someone else
• Everyone mocks the city public works people - until their pipes break at 3:00 AM
• Everyone mocks plumbers - until they need a pipe fixed under their house
• Everyone mocks garbage collectors - except for the first pick-up after Thanksgiving

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Stupidity

The nearby Animal Jungle store on Holland Road has a special enclosed room in the middle of the store about the size of a standard house closet. It has a door with a plexiglass window. Inside is a lone Jaguar or Bobcat. They can't sell it to a customer because it's not legal to have in a home. So it sits there day-in and day-out, trying to ignore the pounding on the window from kids and ignorant adults, all of whom ignore the "don't knock on window" sign. It exists only to impress the simpleton customers. How f-ing stupid is this?



Many houses, like mine, have an aquarium. Ours is filled with plants and rocks and tries to mimick a natural setting. Many others prefer to stuff the idiotic ship wreck and pirate lore decor or the garishly ugly colored glass beads. As if it's not enough to shove these creatures into a tiny space, they feel the need to fill it with what is essentially human waste. That is like putting people in a cage and filling it with animal crap. How f-ing stupid is that?



We still pay attention to a groundhog every year? We care whether it sees its shadow? We believe it can predict the seasons? Never mind that it's been proven to only be correct 36 percent over the past 50 years. How f-ing stupid is that?



My semi-retired neighbor spent hours bitching about "Obama-care" and how it was going to destroy America. When the GOP announced they were going to repeal it all, elhe spent another hour whining about losing the new Medicare features and worrying how he could afford his prescriptions. I love how people can't stick to a perspective. How f-ing stupid is that?

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Food for Thought

When was the last time you ran Windows Update (or Microsoft Update) on each of your Windows computers?

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Misperceptions are Often Impossible to Change

It seems that the general perception held by the news media, newspapers (the ones still in business), coworkers, neighbors, and so on, is that everyone who works in city and state government is useless. Every single person. They are completely incompetent and of no value. I find if extremely difficult to find many examples to the contrary.

Yet the evidence I see and experience as a consultant working within one of several municipal IT environments does not at all agree with that.

It's really about generalizations. Most people make quick judgements and refuse to consider their own myopathy. Service was bad on a particular visit to a fast food or coffee shop, and likely they will repeat ad nauseum that the entire franchise, from corporate down to each and every local outlet, is worthless. They are all bad.

This is the same dangerously ignorant mindset that decides all blacks are bad because one or two black people treated them poorly, or Jews, or hispanics, Asians, women, or men, or caucasians, or short or tall (yes, everyone can be prejudiced).

When you turn that logic around and tell them that their employer sucks because they have one bonehead on their staff, they don't usually take it so well. People love to dish out judgement, but freak out when they are judged, especially when falsely judged. After all, it is impossible that they could dish out a false judgement. Human nature is indeed a fucking mess. Utopia is an impossible myth. But whatever, back to my angst-ridden diatribe...

Nobody wants their taxes increased. Nobody wants fees added. Not even when the backend costs (materials, services, logistics) are always creeping upward. And forget paying anyone enough to entice quality talent to do the work. Ultimately, everyone wants a free lunch and a gourmet lunch at that.

The word is IGNORANT

Is there waste and ineptitude in municipal tax spending? Sure. Is your company impervious to similar failures and oversight? Of course it is, because you work for Perfection LLC (shit, that's probably trademarked. Oh well)

The inequitable aspect is that municipalities keep their laundry out on the line in full view. Businesses do not. Even publicly traded companies do not expose their inner workings to the same extent government does. It's written in the laws. News media loves to explore the systemic and isolated failures of municipalities because it's easy prey. They rarely poke at the waste and fraud that exists in private businesses, even corporations or conglomerates. Why? Because they don't ever hear about those failures until government exposes them. Think Enron, Tyco, Worldcom, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and so on.

Need more examples of privatized failures? How about IBM and the State of Texas, or VITA and the DMV, or the never-ending FBI database upgrade project, or Haliburton. The list goes on and on. Does that mean I am implying one "side" is superior? No. It means both are vulnerable to failures and malevolence, but one side remains under the greater, and more immediate scrutiny, with an incessant emphasis on the negatives.

The point is that, like all aspects of life: stop generalizing. Focus your judgements on facts and specifics. As soon as you make broad, sweeping generalizations, you are then admitting laziness, ignorance and stupidity.

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