Sorry for the long delay, occasionally the many demands that life makes on a person with my varied skills overrun the amount of time available in the day and my dialogue with my loyal subjects suffers. To make up for that lapse I have three tasty pieces of knowledge to impart. The first you will receive today, then next two will come in due time.

As occasionally happens I recently ran into an Exchange server which has been violated by a cretinous spammer of one variety or another and is being forced to spew mail out into the world like a drunken hobo shouting his lunch at the curb. The most annoying side effect of this is that it creates hundreds of separate mail queues with hundreds of messages in each one. Emptying them all out can be quite cumbersome, but I have a shortcut for you.

The simplest and fastest way to purge your outgoing mail queue of unwanted detritus is to journey to X:\program files\exchsrvr\mailroot\vsi 1\queue\ where X of course is the drive letter of your exchange installation. Now a simple Ctrl-A, Delete will remove forever the fruits of your potential spammers labor and free your mail server of its burden. Just be sure to close whatever mis-configured relay allowed the spammer to hijack your system in the first place, or you’ll be doing this every week.

I’ve been on the hunt for an agentless Network Management tool for a LONG time now. So imagine my consternation when I literally stumbled across Spiceworks this is quite literally the most useful piece of software a Network/Systems Administrator can have that won’t cost you as much as your house. In fact, it won’t cost you anything at all.
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With the demise of Stage6 and the changes to Megavideo that severely limit content availability I frequently get asked, “My Liege, how is it that I might watch television on my pc with the greatest of ease?” I generally have the impudent questioner beheaded, but this time I will make an exception.

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You may be thinking to yourself, “What in the world is he babbling about? This isn’t the 80s anymore. No one says ‘To the max!’” , and you would be right. No one says that anymore. But that’s not important. What IS important is MaxTo which is one of the coolest little widgets I’ve run into recently.
“What does it do?” you might ask? Another excellent question! What MaxTo does is subdivide your monitor or monitors into regions which applications then use as their boundaries when being maximized. As an example I could split my primary monitor into 3 regions, two small squares and one larger rectangle. I could then drop my email app into one of the small squares, instant messaging into another, and keep my web browser in the rectangle. Now whenever I hit “Maximize” the window will only expand to fill it’s designated region. MaxTo is an excellent way to maximize your screen real estate and keep your windows organized. So far the only downside I can find is that it doesn’t appear to like setups with more than 2 monitors. But it’s still being rapidly improved so I expect that be remedied in the future.

*UPDATE* The issue with more than 2 monitors was caused by an old version of .NET being installed on my system. Newest .NET version solved the issue. All three monitors humming happily along.

Give it a spin and see what you think.

If you’ve ever felt the need for an online Virtual OS, maybe because you own a netbook and don’t want to weigh it down with office apps and whatnot then I’ve got the THE solution for you. G.ho.st is pretty much the slickest OVOS around. It offers a ton of apps including an office suite, calendar, and IM clients for AIM, Yahoo, etc… With a solid 15gb of space for signing up you can store a reasonable amount of stuff on there, as well as share it with other users. As a bonus you can “sideload” files from other websites directly into your G.ho.st machine.
There is also a huge library of public files available to browse through and a ton of community designed and provided apps. You can even write your own apps for it and upload them. I use it for documents or files that I want to have accessible from any internet connected PC as well as to transfer some of the processor load off of my system if I’m on a lightweight laptop or netbook.
If you’re interested in moving into “The Cloud” any time soon then G.ho.st is the place to go.