Miscellaneous

This article presents a collection of regular expressions I frequently use to clean up HTML generated from some tools’ export routines, e.g., Typora. A PowerShell script automates the clean-up task.

That was a question I was asking myself more and more recently. After a bit of deliberation, I answered it with yes. This article summarizes my reasoning. My Twitter History I have been on Twitter for more than 11 years. If I remember correctly, Brian Madden - whose website was extremely popular in the Citrix community at the time - had urged people to join Twitter a little earlier. I responded to Brian’s call and quickly realized that Twitter was a great platform that allows people with a common interest to identify each other and communicate. In my case, that interest was end-user computing, of course, the products and technologies from companies like Citrix or Microsoft. After joining Twitter, at conferences, many of the names were known to me, and sometimes I to them. Getting into contact was so much easier. The major difficulty was recognizing someone from their Twitter profile picture (something we often joked about).

This is an attempt at guidelines to help in technology decisions about when and where to use blockchain technology. Blockchain in a Nutshell A blockchain is a distributed list more than one entity can add new elements to. Each list element cryptographically validates its predecessor. Combined with the fact that adding new elements is computationally expensive, this protects the list’s integrity.

Keyboard shortcuts are the key to productivity and efficiency. This is true for any machine, any OS and any application. This article lists shortcuts I personally find very helpful and use often. In selecting what to include I focused on shortcuts that might be less well known. Many shortcuts work in other than the described applications in a very similar way. Please do try them out in all your most frequently used applications.

VMware recognized my contributions to the virtualization community by awarding me their vExpert title. Many thanks to everybody who made that possible, the readers of this blog, the attendees of my presentations, the users of my tools and all the great people of the virtualization community!

In the past years I have attended many different conferences and user group meetings. Apart from the fact that every single one of them was great and definitely worth the while they all had another thing in common: getting there involved a significant amount of travel, in most cases to other countries or even continents. Whenever I read someone’s account of a local community meeting I was a tiny little bit envious that they had such things near their homes and I did not. High time to do something about it!

A Windows 7 start menu tells a lot about the user that, indirectly, created it. This is what mine looks like: Helge’s Start MenuSo what does that say about me?

While I am generally satisfied with the quality of Microsoft Knowledge Base articles (many other vendors’ KBs are far worse), from time to time I encounter articles that either lack even the tiniest bits of information or are unintentionally funny. Today I found one that fits into both categories: Unexpectedly slow startup or logon process in Windows Server 2008 R2 or in Windows 7.

In preparation for next week’s MVP summit I wanted to fill my iPad with movies for in-flight entertainment when I noticed that a large part of my iPad’s storage capacity was taken up by stuff from some unexplained “other” category. Here is my account of what I did to get rid of it and reclaim the lost gigabytes.

This is what I’ll be wearing at next week’s WINone: Setacl ShirtAnd yes, the letters are made up of actual source code ;-)

In my ongoing quest for the perfect way to back up my personal data I have tweaked the setup yet again. Most of what I wrote nearly three years ago (How to Build a State of the Art Backup System for Your Personal Data) still stands, so I will focus on off-site cloud backup in this article.

When travelling to the US with a smartphone, Europeans have a problem: either pay horrendous data roaming fees or use the device as a simple 1990’s style phone without any network connectivity. Neither option is particularly attractive. Luckily there is a third way.

I wish all my friends and readers a merry christmas and happy new year! I hope you like sepago’s annual Christmas comic. VXI: How a Customer With Real Scalability Problems Uses Virtualization(Click on the image for a full-size version)

ChromeOS seems to be the talk of the day. Why not? It is an interesting concept. But will it be successful? That is the wrong question, actually. It should be rephrased to: When will it be successful?

I just found out that the new firmware version 2.1 for my digital camera Panasonic Lumix LX3 has been published. Very nice, especially the speed improvements. So I downloaded the firmware, a self-extracting archive, started the executable and had it uncompress the actual firmware file (a .bin file). Interestingly, the “compressed” .exe file is larger than the uncompressed .bin file:

Which answer does a good consultant give to most general questions? “It depends.” Computer networks are complex systems, and usually there is no single option that fits all scenarios equally well.

On my computers I try to keep my data on its own partition, well away from program files and other stuff that gets (re-) created anyway when I install a new OS. Separation of data from all the other stuff is an old principle and makes it possible to just delete the OS partition whenever you feel like it without giving the safety of your precious data too much thought.

While browsing through the registry I found the following “gem”. It illustrates nicely how programmers are not supposed to store settings in the registry: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MenuExt\Nach Microsoft E&xcel exportieren] @="res://C:\\PROGRA~2\\MICROS~1\\Office12\\EXCEL.EXE/3000" "Contexts"=dword:00000001 What is wrong with this? Several things:

In the past few days I have been interviewed twice: in the German O’Reilly blog and in sepago’s marketing/HR blog. You can find the two (different) interviews here: Das Making-of der “Windowsbefehle kurz & gut” und der Admin-Alltag Einfach Helge Klein As you may have guessed from the titles, it helps to be able to read German.

How can you mess up a simple OS upgrade by using encryption? Simple. Here is what happened to me when I upgraded my Windows 7 beta system to the RC version.

I will be attending the combined Citrix events iForum, Synergy and Summit 2009 in Las Vegas, which start in just a few days. As always, I hope to meet great people and have interesting conversations there. In case you want to talk to me, you need to locate me first. That should not be too difficult, though, given that I will be wearing these shirts most of the time:

My colleague Thorsten Christoffers has started blogging, mainly on topics related to Microsoft System Center. If you can read German, check out his first article on the Key Management Service (KMS) for Windows.

Back in the old days, when 64-bit computing was still a novel concept and RISC vs. CISC wars were still fought, HP and Intel joined forces to develop the next-generation CPU. It would be 64-bit only and it would have a new type of architecture called EPIC. That was in 1994.

All the hype around Apple must have something to do with the quality of their products, it cannot be clever marketing and cool design alone. Example: Power Consumption This weekend I saw some interesting figures in the computer magazine. The new Mac Mini consumes only 11.7 Watts when idle. That is extraordinary! I did not know Desktop computers could be so energy-efficient.