I’ve needed this info many times, so I figured I should probably put this down in my blog. If you encounter the error: “The terminal server has exceeded the maximum number of allowed connections” and “The system can not log you on. The system has reached its licensed logon limit. Please try again later. Please try again or consult your system administrator.” while trying to RDP into a Windows Server, that probably means someone closed their connection without logging off first. To get around this, follow the two command prompts below if you have rights. The easiest way to get rights is to map a drive with the administrator permissions.

query session /server:servername

This will provide you a list of  sessions. You should see sessions you can kill such as “rdp-tcp#1”.

reset session 2 /server:servername

This will kill the session associated with that ID which is found in the third column from your query command.

I’ve been increasingly “green” conscious over the past few years. I tend to buy anything a little greener such as biodegradable soaps, recycled paper towels, printer paper and cardboard boxes. I also try to remember to bring in the re-usable shopping bags to the grocery store, recycle as much as practically possible, and fill my vehicles with semi-renewable fuels such as E10 and E85.

Now plastic garbage bags have bothered me for years. Right now virtually every piece of plastic ever invented (unless it was incinerated) still exists. Americans use 3 billion pounds of plastic bags annually, the vast majority of which end up in landfills*.

I won’t resort to using paper bags because they don’t tie up and when they get wet from your garbage they fall apart. So I’ve always used plastic garbage bags to keep things sanitary. Some times evils in life are necessary for the greater good.

But awhile back I noticed a new garbage bag product on the grocery store shelf. After examining it I found an awesome alternative to my plastic garbage bags: a plastic garbage bag that goes away in the landfill with no harmful residue.

This bag has organic materials bonded with the plastic it’s made from. This bond allows the plastic to be eaten by microbes found in modern landfills resulting in just sugars, fatty acids,  amino acids. These leftovers are then eaten even more resulting in water, CO2, Methane, and biomass withing 1 to 15 years. There’s a big concern over CO2 (global warming), but I’d rather have a little CO2 released which is consumed by living plants than a garbage bag that will never disappear entirely. The Methane is also captured by many landfills to run generators to operate the facility and beyond.

These bags, in my opinion, are a little more flimsy than standard bags I tend to buy, but I’ve never had one fall apart on me yet. As an extra bonus this product was made from 40% recycled plastic, the box was made from 100% recycled cardboard, and it didn’t use any glossy ink. There’s more than one out there but this one was from “Green Genius” as cost around, if not less, than the other bags on the shelf.

I strongly recommend you switch to the product and help earth and humanity out just a little. As more and more people catch on it all ads up.

*Some information from thegreengenius.com

What happens when you tweet your car? Ha! Nothing – you have a dumb car.

But what happens when you tweet to the Mercedes Prototype? You get really close parking. The remote controlled Batmobile via Twitter has arrived.

Continue reading →

Yes, I’m Mr. Poker Face!

Today Andrew Wirick tweeted to check out secretpenguin.com’s about us page. Not only did it grab my attention right away (nice design) but after scrolling down a bit more I found quite the surprise looking at the photos of the staff. Not wanting to give it away check it out for yourself. Remind you of something in a movie you may have once saw? Very creative…

http://secretpenguin.com/about/

I found today my Dreamweaver CS4 hanging at the “Initializing Extension Data” startup screen. The resolution I found was to delete the site cache at “C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Dreamweaver CS4\en_US\Configuration\SiteCache”. I’m running Windows 7 on a domain so your path may vary a little.

After restarting Dreamweaver it updated the site cache and started working again.

I think it may have freaked out on a large cache after I deleted the actual folder.

I currently have a customer who is switching hundreds of websites over to us for hosting on a dedicated server. They currently use GoDaddy’s Total DNS and it works out pretty good for them.

While trying to find a way to switch all IP addresses without having to do them one by one I did a little research for bulk Total DNS updates. I quickly ran into it can’t be done. I could only export a DNS set and import it one by one. So basically we where stuck manually updating each domain manually.

Then I figured out I was looking for the wrong “term”. I needed to use the “Copy” function.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Log into the Domain Manager
2. Edit a domain you want changed to the new IP
3. Select Total DNS Control
4. Check the DNS entries you want duplicated
5. Click the Copy button at the top
6. Select the domains to copy the records to
7. Click “Copy Records”

My customer’s life just got a whole lot easier!

I went out for dinner last night and had some Grouper and Crab meat for dinner, it was pretty amazing. Sitting in the patio next to a lake with a small water fall and fountain. It was a perfect evening, with the sun slowly going down and about 72 degrees, hardly any wind. Then my phone buzzed… “Thunder storm warning issued”. I thought this can’t be right – not a dark cloud in the sky. So I pulled up “The Weather Channel” app on my droid and started the Radar loop. Ooh – dark red heading right for us and fast. Reading the alert – 60MPH wind gusts moving at 45MPH. So I kindly asked the waitress if we could move indoors because there was a nasty storm coming. She replied – “Really? Well you’re smarter than the average chicken”. So they moved us inside and we continued with dinner. Ten minutes later everyone is scrambling inside with the staff trying to hold down the fort – including condiments, umbrellas, and seat covers. Guess they where just “your average chicken”. “I love my droid”

Today an article on cnet news caught my eye: Get a 40-inch HDTV for $399.

I thought wow! After reading the specs it’s a 1080p w/ 2,000:1 contrast ratio w/ an average 4.5/5 review rating. I bought my 37″ Toshiba 720p LCD TV about two years ago for $750. So I can basically get a TV that is twice as good for a little more than half the cost. Not a bad deal. Even Amazon can’t touch this price that Walmart has. They list it for another $150.

However I do have to give Toshiba props for excellent customer service regarding a warranty issue I had. They replaced pretty much the whole guts of my TV at no cost, on site, and with awesome communication. This TV in the article is a Proscan brand. I wonder how they would handle a warranty claim? Would there be the trade-off?

It’s just always amazing how fast electronics drop in price. Just recently I remember speaking with my grandfather on how he bought two 5MB hard drives back in the day for a cool $3,500 – thinking he would never need more space than that. Good luck finding 5MB anything these days.

I use SVN on a regular basis to commit and update code either myself or my team is currently working on. However one issue I’ve had, that I’ve never really looked into, was notification of commits so that each programmer can be notified automatically of changes. I’ve heard of some scripts that can be created to email the proper programmers, but today I found a nice tool that makes this painless. By default this program, that hides away in your system tray for Windows, checks for a new commit every 90 minutes. When a new commit is found, it displays a small window showing an update, similiar to goodsystray for Google Wave. This small program can monitor multiple projects and there a few options you can customize such as running a script after a new commit is found or changing how often it checks for commits. The program is called CommitMonitor and can be found at http://tools.tortoisesvn.net/CommitMonitor.