en Passant

This updated version of the code will pull down the latest image from WorldofWarcraft.com from either their Blizzard images or the new Fan Art section randomly.

Recent Updates to code:

• July 9, 2010 - Added code to randomly pull from any image on page.
• July 22, 2010 - Added code to check what images were available last time it checked the Blizzard images, then download the newest if one is available. No changes - randomly between all Blizz images.Removing code and placing into ZIP attachment. Code appears to be causing formatting issues on later pages.

I was reading through Zanderfin's blog about the World of Warcraft backgrounds posted to their site.

At any rate, it may actually motivate me enough to monthly change my wallpaper. Now, if I can just figure out a way to automate that.

The default Outlook Address Book is saved in the Windows registry. I've created this script to be used to push down a new Address Book view at logon for a large group of users. The script will read the current default Outlook profile for the currently logged on user, then push down the address book view you specify.

As you may already know, I use my MP3 player simply to play audio-books (aka podcasts) while commuting to work.

I use Juice (fka iPodder) to capture these files. It does an excellent job of downloading content and placing it on my machine. Once downloaded, I drag and drop the files to my MP3 player.

I needed a quick script to create a series of distribution lists on an Exchange environment. I thought, "Cool, a chance to flex my PowerShell muscles!" From that I found new-qadgroup from the quest tools set and new-distributiongroup from the Exchange tools. After quite a bit of muddling around, I was never able to recreate my script.

Requirements I was trying to meet:

1. Read all data from a CSV file (easy import-csv)

Scenario: I was given a list of 15,000 email addresses and asked if they were still valid in our Exchange environment.

Easy method: I ran a simple VBScript that does an LDAP query against each email address. This worked great, except that it took close to 5 seconds per email address to query our environment. (~20 hrs!) The over-all run time was going to be too extreme.

This HTA applet allows you to grant extended AD permissions to a specific user. I use it to assign permissions to the Associated External Account of an AD user rights to modify their own delegates.

I found what values I needed by configuring a single user with permissions, then using Richard's DACL export script to dump that user. I then modify the script (see line 248) to match the permissions I want to grant.

I ran into an occurrence where I needed to create a really big file. I was having an issue with a backup procedure failing at only 16gb. After extensive troubleshooting, I thougth that maybe the issue was with the hard drive. The backup solution would reach the 18gb mark and fail due to some inconsistency.

So, where I can I find a big file?

1. Copy an existing large file off another server or workstation - great, but all the large files are open and I didn't want to shut something down.

The company I am working for has a slightly different security model than I've seen before. It is probably because the largest Exchange server I've supported previously only had 3,000 mailboxes. This one supports 10x that number, with plans to grow to over 100,000 mailboxes by this time next year.

The migration process used to move a number of mailboxes created a couple hundred dead mailboxes objects in our environment. Their mailbox information needed to be cleared before their mailboxes could be migrated to the server for the final time. To fix this, I looked into a script. First I found the script at TelnetPort25, here. This script goes through the entire environment and purges all deleted and non-system mailboxes.