So, you are running SCCM 2003 to deploy your Operating Systems, Software, and patches, etc. Even though you set a Maintenance Window (MW) on a Collection that you are Advertising a Task Sequence (TS) to and the computer fails to re-clone within that MW, you find that when you try to reboot the machine it immediately attempts to re-clone, then there is a nice little dirty workaround.

The reason behind the system re-cloning outside of the MW is something to do with PXE, which at boot the system doesn't know about the MW and hence cannot follow the rules set up. You could set it so that it doesn't boot to PXE, and do it from Windows, but obviously this is not possible on a bare-bones machine with no OS installed.

The dirty workaround

Simply stop the WDSServer service. It's that simple. It won't effect software pushes, only clone pushes.

"But wait," I hear you say, "What about when I want to schedule clone pushes?"

Simples. Create a basic script that you run via Task Scheduler each night prior to your clone pushes that start the service, and another script to stop it when you no longer wish clones to be pushed.

Remember to remove the un-cloned systems from the collection after the scheduled re-clone of course, otherwise when you start up the service for they clones will "possibly" get pushed and ruin a users day.

Keep a copy of the start service script on your Desktop in case you get a clone push request during the day, so you can ensure you can push a clone when requested.

Stop
net stop WDSServer

Start
net start WDSServer

This was another help-myself-and-maybe-help-someone-else-blog-post-of-the-day

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoxJq1A7Udk&feature=g-all-c

that is all.

so i spent the weekend casually getting into tsw. i thas some pretty cool stuff, but i only showed a few things in my videos.

for the most part even though the game does have quest helper, it's not very hand holdy at all. once you get to the area of the quest you're going to take some time finding the thing w/e it may be that you're there to look at or talk to or pick up or w/e. some are very obvious. others very much less so.

the guys in irc also seemed to have a grand time doing the ARG style investigation missions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3Zs-Hk3Ip8
there was a lot more options this weekend than in the previous dev demo videos, but still kinda weak. the female faces are ugly as fuck in my opinion, and don't really fit the bodies or clothes at all. i played around with teh character creation quite a bit though and made an imgur album for most of my creations- http://imgur.com/a/O6ufm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOYJP1Ywjm4
then i did up some video of the combat tutorial, which features the shotgun with some more advanced skills that you won't get for a while. nice thing is that if you've done this before in future betas or toons, you can choose to skip it by turning around and running up the stairs at the start of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFOq5cg0G-I
then i did some demonstration of shotgun + elementalism, which i found a little lacking. no commentary on this video as i was a little too drunk for it and too much into my music. so i just muted the whole thing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuU6jOVlkJs
so the next day i did a combat demo with commentary this time, although a bit derpy due to hang over with chaos magic and blades. iwas pleasantly surprised to find out chaos magic is kung fu style.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIhsujAMsRA
then finally here's a bit of a run down about the ability wheel and how it works. note there are probably better videos out there showing this better with better commentary.


all in all although i wish combat was more mobile or as mobile as gw2's combat, i was very pleased with the weekend. there were some minor bugs, i got a ctd when i tried to enter a certain area in dx11 mode that wasa fixed by using dx9 mode for a bit, but otherwise it's in a lot better shape than i remember aoc being at launch(funcom's previous mmo, with a infamous rep for being nearly unplayable at launch)

Hopefully this will be a new regular posting from myself which will cover all the interesting/funny stuff I have found of late. It could be that this becomes a weekly occurrance, but probably more like monthly. Either way, be sure to keep checking for new posts, others may be posting as well.

Dotcom & Banks

There has been news of late of a New Zealand politician, in fact the front-runner for mayor-ship of one of their cities embroiled in some kind of donation scandal involving Kim Dotcom and MegaUpload, you watch the story from 3News.
Dotcom has produced a song about the donation issue, which can be seen below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CvRSZxqk_I

Kopimist Wedding

The first ever Kopimist wedding took place over the last week or so. If you haven't heard of Kopimism, it's an officially recognised religion in Sweden which enshrines Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V as holy symbols. Congratulations to the happy couple, and the religions first ever wedding.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRMPcFexWlk

DK drinking & chatting

Apparently, something was happening the video posted below, I can't really make head nor tail of it, but it sounds very much like a lot of voice chats I have with my friends too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVOhpM679f8

RIP MCA :'(

To end the post on a low note, it should be mentioned that MCA of The Beastie Boys died earlier in the week, it's a very sad event, he was only 47. Democracy Now! did a short tribute to him (below). As did Rockstar Games (includes classic Mr. Magic world premiere of "Hold It Now, Hit It").

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTHoQT4s2JU

Went to see this the other night before going to the pub.
Very enjoyable and highly recommended. This is not a film to worry too much about the plot but just enjoy some good superhero action and some very funny one liner’s. These mostly come from Robert Downey Jnr as Iron Man but even Hulk gets the odd one in.
All in all well worth 2hrs and a bit of your life and a £10 of your ill-gotten gains.

So prompted by Mr Orange’s request I had a look at Legend of Grimrock and quickly dismissed it as “not my cup of tea”.
Browsing for other games I ended up buying Anno 2070, a Sim City style resource management strategy game. This has kept me very entertained for a good while now and I would think for a while yet. There is not much new in this game that has not been done in other such games but a few quirks are nice, the main one is building underwater as well as above ground.
I have yet to play a multiplayer game either against another player or as a co-operative and more than likely never will but in the mean time I enjoying the fun of creating something and tweaking it towards the higher levels of evolution.
The only downside is dreaming of fish shortages!

This blog entry is purely for my own information, it is not intended to teach anyone anything, as this is really simple stuff (even though it took me a while to get the short form version working). If it does help anyone else, well that would be an unexpected bonus (it really is so simple as to be ridiculous though).

Aim: To either delete, move, copy or rename a number of files of the same name held in a number of different folders all of which are held in a single folder.

Long Form
$loc = "C:\Users\testuser\testfolders"
$fldrs = Get-ChildItem $loc | Select-Object Name
foreach ($f in $fldrs)
{
$fName = $f.Name;
Copy-Item $loc/$fName/text.txt $loc/$fName/copiedText.txt;
}

Shorter Form
$loc = "C:\Users\testuser\testfolders"
$fldrs = gci $loc | Select-Object Name | foreach { $_.Name }
foreach ($f in $fldrs)
{
Copy-Item $loc/$f/text.txt $loc/$f/copiedText.txt;
}

Copy-Item shown above, remaining commands:

Rename-Item
Delete-Item
Move-Item

As rename and move are essentially the same, can forget one or the other.

NOTE: This is not a useful program, it's really only a test to see how to extract the folder name and utilise it in another command (in the above case, Copy-Item). It does not perform any error checking, there is no verification or anything similar.

So after a couple of days struggling to get my payment to Steam to work (it seems that because my IP is in Italy and my payment details are in the UK, payment is refused), eventually Steam Support got back to me, giving me a link to a working page after unlocking my localisation settings on my account (or whatever), I finally managed to make a payment on two new games.

Those games were the new Telltale Games production Walking Dead Episode 1, and The Legend of Grimrock.

Sprinting Dead

Firstly, my thoughts on Walking Dead; whilst it is a very well made game, the graphics are very comic-book like, the story gripping, and the gore quite intense, one or two problems remain.

1. The puzzles are just not hard enough.
2. The game had only 3 hours gameplay, which for around a tenner a pop is way too pricey.

So, I did enjoy the game, but it was over so quickly as to depress me, I could tell that it was about to finish after about 2.5 hours in too, and I was right. So, whilst I do definitely want to play the remaining 5 episodes, I won't be paying the price they are asking for each episode, I would rather wait until they are all released and Steam puts them on offer like they did with the Sam & Max series.

Dungeon Crawling

After completing Walking Dead, I moved my attention to The Legend of Grimrock, which unlike the aforementioned game, didn't end after playing it for 3 hours. In fact I'm stuck at a particularly tricksy part of the game involving a few rotating teleporters that keep pushing me back to the start of the puzzle. I must admit, this game is far more puzzling than The Walking Dead could ever dream to be.

In TLoG you basically get to pick four characters from 3 different classes (Fighter, Mage, a thiefy type - can't remember the actual title right now), and they are all chained together and thrown into a lovely big dungeon. It's basically an RPG dungeon crawler of ye olde worlde type that I used to play back in the days of yore. And I must admit its bloody great. Google the bloody name if you want to know/see more.

So my single-player game recommendation of the month is The Legend of Grimrock, go out and buy it today (or stay in and buy it - it's on Steam after all).

tbh it's not first impressions, but since i wasn't able to talk freely about it until now, this will have to do.

well lots of qq and people having issues connecting and errors and problems zoning and shit.

for our part we all ended up getting scattered for the most part and then the core of us got forced on teh last server we wanted to land on, because basically i knew that the people advertising the server were going to go cap the whole fucking wvw map as soon as they got in game and leave nothing for the rest of us, which they wen ahead and did in teh first couple hours.

anyways aside from that, and a few members getting log in errors, it was overall not too bad. some pretty hardcore lag, some low fps(though you'll see what low fps looks like in the video below, where i was hitting 15-20fps average but still very playable)
we didn't get to do wvw as planned which was a shame though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_X9MlHqWVM

theres a couple things i screw up in this vid. first you can't hear me talking about weapon switchign vs elementalist's attunment switching in teh first part.

later on i call something a skill point challenge which is out of date information. idk wtf it even was, i guess a DE.

i don't really show how mobile the combat becomes because i didn't get to teh content that you really need to run around at all times to progress through.

(or how i spend time between mmo's)

so i've basically been looking at my steam library lately and seeing there's a number of games i haven't played yet that i got gifted or bought at xmas. and since i've been basically dicking around doing a little of this or that on beer nights i decided why not do some let's plays.

i fyou'r enot sure what a "let's play" is, it's basicalyl a type of youtube video where some dick (me) records himself playing a game for the first time, or on a first playthrough. sometimes i have friends with me when i do mine, or not, but i always do them while drinking beers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2M4Mm3X-eE

so our first let's play is from psiderweb software, which is an old favourite and an early pioneer of the current indie game dev scene. i played a demo for a gmae by these guys back in 98 or 99 called exile3, which was later renamed to avernum 3. i got about 40-60+ hours out of the demo before hitting the edges. unfrotunately my parents weren't keen on shopping online back in those days, so i had to go without doing it. fastforward to earlier this month, and a friend in irc i had talked to about this studio months ago linked me the page of this game telling me it was on steam for $10. ofc i had to buy it, and it's only fair seeing as, if i on;ly played 20 minutes 10$ was a small price to pay for that late 90s experience.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIQvv06EcrA
my buddy sundial was bored and said he was haivng fun with the puzzles in trine. he asked me if i wanted to play, i said my game budget was drained, seeing as i'd spent 100$ on gw2 prepurchase, avadon, and some other game i forget, that i'm sur ei will link below. he said he'd gift it to me, and we went ahead and got some beers and spent a couple hours dicking around. as you can see i am terrible at both puzzles and platforming. as well i am terrible at drunk editing extended gameplay into something interesting and coherent within a 5 minute time frame.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPnkwWtxGHU
last xmas a few of us decided to buy each other xmas gifts via steam, and terraria was one that device bought me, but we hadn't played together yet. it's kind of a sidescroller platform version of minecraft. and as you can see i'm not too fond of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQhxkCNTY8M
this isn't a let's play, but after terrraria i needed a taste of the real thing, and ofc i missed my house. also device is an asshole.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg5NeiwirJM
this is what happens when you drunkenly decide to pick a random f2p game on steam to do a let's play. let's just say that i hate hate hate this game. maybe if i had a jstick i'd like it more.

so i ran out of money this month already doing drunken let's play videos, so i haven't made any more as of this post. maybe there will be more to come, who can say.