Hello Blogger!

Well after an off again on again 2 week long hassle I've finally moved my blog over here to Blogger.

No more Drupal updates every week, just nice and easy blog platform.

All the Gremlins should be properly starved and locked away from the water, but if you find any problems leave a comment below!

Google Pictures (Picasa) and Google+

Great news for those of us who have been playing with Google+ recently - it appears that the Picasa Web Storage has gotten a huge bump as a result of Google+ membership!

I always liked Picasa (soon to be re-branded to just Google Pictures) but was never keen on the 1gb limit without dropping annual cash, now it appears us Google+ users get nearly unlmited space:

If you've signed up for Google+
Free storage limits
Photos up to 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes won't count towards your free storage.

Automatic resizing
All photos uploaded in Google+ will be automatically resized to 2048 pixels (on their longest edge) and won't count towards your free storage quota.


All photos uploaded to Picasa Web Albums over the free size limit will count towards your 1 GB of free storage. When you reach your storage limit, any new photos you upload to Picasa Web larger than the free size limit will be automatically resized to 2048 pixels (on their longest edge).

source: http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=1224181

Facebook Places - Here we go again...

Seems yet again Facebook has released a new privacy invading feature Facebook Places. Though I do have to give some credit, for the first time they actually limited it to Friends Only, and did disable one part of it by default, here is how to disable/hide the new Facebook Places features completely to maintain your privacy.


1. Login to your Facebook account

2. At the top right select Account -> Privacy Settings

While better that Everyone, "Places" is still enabled for Friends

Ignoring the Java version during Citrix Installs/Patches

I frequently get asked How can I install the latest Citrix Hotfix rollup (or Citrix itself) while keeping a specific version of Java on my server. For those of us with that server that for some crazy application reason can not move to Java 1.6 but you still need to install the latest Hotfix rollup that requires 1.6uXX you can get past this with a really quick fix.

msiexec /update PSE450w2k3x64R06.msp CTX_USE_EXISTING_JRE=YES

The CTX_USE_EXISTING_JRE=Yes will ignore the install stopping Java check that forces you to use a certain version (that seems to always change).

The only thing to note is that on 4.5/5.0 you will likely lose the ability to use the XenApp Advanced Configuration tool (formally the CMC) on this server, so you'll want to make sure you have at least one server that is updated to the latest Java required for the latest HFR patch (like your dedicated Data Collector I know we all have right?) - otherwise you won't have access to the handful of items still in the older Java based CMC tool.

Sometimes disabling the Java check is needed, and by adding this switch you can remove the Java requirement for any Citrix patch, hotfix, hotfix rollup or even the Citrix install itself with only a small loss of functionality to the CMC tool

Disabling Facebook Connect on Non-Facebook Websites

** Updated 7/19 - improved code after re-reading the ABPlus guide thanks to a user comment from Mr. Palant - also added Chrome code from reader tips**

Important, if you find a site where this does not work please include the URL in a comment below - as sites get tricky the code may need to be adapted or new blocks created

For reasons I won't get into in this post I'm very discouraged by the recent Facebook Connect changes that have, without my approval, spread my Facebook persona across various websites that personally I don't want integrated with Facebook. Some examples are the Gawker Media Sites, techcrunch or money.cnn.com - I've recently started seeing little things like this all over sites: 

As seen from money.cnn.com

Here is how to disable Facebook Connect completely

Citrix Reciever for Blackberry

Article invalid now that the BB receiver has been released...

XenServer: The host is still booting

Had a strange issue with some 5.5u2 servers in a pool yesterday I thought I might share, after rebooting 2 of the pool slave boxes both came up (after a very long boot) unmanageable - in both cases issuing most xe commands at the console returned "The host is still booting" as an error message. After some frustrating head banging of the keyboard the issue was tracked down to a problem with the server not being able to resolve the host name of the pool master.

Though this situation may be isolated to environments that match ours, the issue was quite frustrating, and very easy to fix once the problem was found. In our situation all servers are in a subdomain - for this article's sake let us say servers.dhcollier.corp - all XenServers were connected to the network, and in all cases had working DNS - but Xen was attempting to reach servername not servername.servers.dhcollier.corp (where the DNS entries are sitting).

To resolve the "still booting" issue on these disconnected XenServer Pool slaves they were moved to pool master temporarily (at this time they were disconnected from the pool and thought they were alone), the DNS suffix was added to the search order, and the master role returned to the true master server by doing the the following:

xe pool-emergency-transition-to-master
xe pif-param-set uuid=[management nics UUID] other-config:domain=servers.dhcollier.corp
xe pool-emergency-reset-master master-address:[name real pool master]

Right away (and after the subsequent reboots) they contacted the pool masters without issue.

You can also specify multiple search domains by separating the entries with a comma, such as:

xe pif-param-set uuid=[management nics UUID] other-config:domain=servers.dhcollier.corp,lab.dhcollier.corp,dhcollier.corp

See CTX118840 for more info on this setting.