One small bug fix to FileHunter today:

• Ignore symbolic links when searching the haystack

FileHunter-0.4.tar.gz

I got bored waiting for KB976002 to show up in my WSUS install so after a little googling I discovered you can manually sync it in to WSUS.

On the front page of the WSUS console under resources there’s a link to “Microsoft Update Catalog”. If you click through that you’ll be asked to install an ActivX control at which point you can search Microsoft Update for KB976002 and manually sync it on to your WSUS install.

Once it’s synced over, you can then manually approve or decline it as you wish.

Apparently it won’t be showing in WSUS automatically until April.

Today we needed to copy a file to a whole bunch of users home folders, and fix the permissions after copying.

Here’s what I came up with:

ls -A | xargs -n 1 -IUSERNAME cp source_file.txt ~USERNAME/eportfolio
ls -A | xargs -n 1 -IUSERNAME chown USERNAME.staff ~USERNAME/eportfolio/source_file.txt
ls -A | xargs -n 1 -IUSERNAME chmod 664 ~USERNAME/eportfolio/source_file.txt

The cwd was the directory containing the home directories for the users I wanted to copy the file to.

1st of March brings the “Browser Choice” screen to all XP SP2 or later users via Windows Update, or in my works case via WSUS.

If you don’t want your users to be presented with a choice of browsers to run, (because either they don’t have permission to install software or because you already give your users a choice of browsers – as we do) then there’s a couple of options:

• Decline update KB976002 in WSUS (you might want to set your WSUS server not to auto-approve updates until you’ve seen it arrive and have declined it).
• Add a registry key to disable showing the balance screen after the update installs.

The update hasn’t appeared on our WSUS server yet – in fact I can’t find anyone on the Edugeek forums who have sucessfully located the update in WSUS yet.

When will manufacturers learn?

JVC seem to record their footage in MOD format – which is some strange MPG variant. Very few video editors will touch that, hence the need to convert it.

Trusty ffmpeg to the rescue:

ffmpeg -i input.mod -b 9191k -aspect 16:9 -s 720×576 -acodec wmav2 output.wmv