Powershell is a ton of fun, particularly if you're a network or server administrator. I wrote this script to scan subnets and get information from the nodes it finds, using DNS and WMI information. Obviously, if the node it scans is not a Windows machine, it's not going to return WMI information, but you'll still get a DNS name if available. The only way the scan will miss the node entirely is if it doesn't respond to an ICMP ping.

I work in a unique environment where I have to manage servers in three different sites scattered about the metroplex, each site having multiple subnets, all of which are completely mixed up within two different domains with no trust relationship. It's a mess, but it's a challenging environment to work in and has taught me a lot.

So to that end, I've put as much customization into the script as I can think of.

Enjoy.

Why don't they take the acknowledgement number out of the TCP header and just use the sequence number for acknowledgement purposes, thus eliminating 32 bits of redundancy from every TCP packet in the world? You heard it here first...

At this particular moment, blogging is a very boring activity for me. No one really cares about anything that I have to blog about, and therefore, I don't do it. I have some pretty neat IT stuff to post as my career in technology progresses, such as how awesome MS Powershell is and all the neat things I can do with it, but I don't feel like blogging about it right now. Sorry.

My GTX 260 died. And get this: It was actually not overclocked at all when it died. And it was in a very well-ventilated case. And the only thing going on at the time was my girlfriend was playing solitaire on it.

That's right, solitaire brought my GTX 260 to its knees.

Actually it was probably the PSU just got old and it was only 630 watts so I probably outgrew it. So I've replaced it. And I went to Fry's to find a cheap card to get by on while I RMA this one. And is it just me, or has the box art on video cards always sucked. Even in 2010, they have the exact same cheesy, generic graphics on them.

Just wanted to throw that out there.

Remember when it used to be a significant achievement to overclock your 486 processor from 66MHz to 75MHz? My boss handed me a brand new Gigabyte EP45-UD3P motherboard the other day, which I've been experimenting with. I quickly realized that overclocking has come a really long way since I started doing it back in junior high. The BIOS settings in this thing are insane, requiring you to have a degree in electrical engineering (or spend a few hours on the web researching) to even begin to have a clue as to what most of them do. Sure, I knew all about CPU multipliers and front side bus speeds, but what the hell is PLL voltage? Termination voltage? GTL Reference voltage? Load Line Calibration? Clock skew? Wha... does "ps" stand for picoseconds? Well, maybe I'll just change the clock to the right time...

But no, I can't stand just not knowing what shit does. So I had to look it up. And I found a wonderful article here that explains it all pretty well.

My current rig:
GA-EP45-UD3P v1.6 BIOS FE
C2D E8500 @ 4GHz (422x9.5) 1.25v (1.2375 after vDrop and vDroop)
4GB OCZ DDR2-800 4-4-4-15 @ 844MHz, 2.08v
EVGA GTX 260 @ 666MHz, 1404MHz, 1107MHz
640GB Western Digital
Windows 7 64-bit

It plays the fuck out of Minesweeper.

This is my production environment.

So I was out to lunch with the guys from work yesterday, and as we were joking around (and eating ridiculously large American restaurant portions,) the topics of genetically-modified crops and the world's food supply in general came up. Being the problem-solvers that we are, a debate arose on whether "world hunger" is solvable. One guy dismissively said, Another guy responded with the statistic So as I sat listening to the two sides, I thought to myself what sort of stance I took on the issue. The way I see it, it's not a black and white, yes-or-no issue.

1. First of all, who is "we" in the phrase "we could feed the world?" I don't believe that there is any sort of distribution network and/or manpower infrastructure, real or imagined, that could even reach every hungry mouth in the world. Let alone while bringing fresh food with them. That would take some crazy world government that hasn't even been read about in the darkest of Orwellian sci-fi novels. There are starving people right here in the US that we can't even help. And in much of the rest of the world, oppressive regimes keep people too poor to feed themselves and make things impossible for any outside aid organizations to help. And that's just where there are luxuries like roads and fresh water. Let's face it: there are a lot of people living in places where human beings should not be living.

2. If you think Sally Struthers and her "feed the children" campaigns are really about feeding the hungry... well, they're not. They're about spreading the Gospel of Jesus to those poor Godless Africans.

3. Robert Malthus. If you hadn't read about him by the time you left high school, go and ask for your money back. (Wait, what?) Yes, I am as cynical as they come, but in the immortal words of the late Bill Hicks: We are a virus with shoes. When fed and watered, we will propagate and multiply and fling ourselves farther and farther afield, stressing the limits of the available food supply until it all predictably collapses back in on itself. That's the immutable nature of all animals.

4. I was discussing this with my girlfriend last night, when she brought up the additional good point that people don't want to just be fed. They want to cook and hunt and farm and be self-sustaining. It's part of our self-actualization as human beings. We need to feel that control over our own environment and our own lives.

In fact, simply feeding hungry people may actually be exacerbating the problem, because we're feeding people that are living in places where, frankly, maybe people shouldn't be living if they can't feed themselves there. Maybe that sounds shitty of me to say that, especially as someone who literally pisses and bathes in fresh water (not at the same time) while other people around the world die of thirst. I know it's not those people's fault for having been born there. No one asks to be born into the situation that they're born into. No one asks to be born at all.

But that's the world we live in. Right now as you read this, human beings wasted away and died from a lack of food or water. People that no one who has food or water to spare could have or would have ever even known about, much less reached.

My dinner last night. My culinarily-inclined girlfriend prepared scalloped potatoes, short ribs, and fresh, buttery asparagus. I'd tell you exactly how good this was, but this is a family-oriented website.

Is an awesome game. It's really not like DoWI at all, and many people won't even call it an RTS. There's no base-building. In the single-player campaign, your men are just dropped off from a space-pod to complete their mission and that's it. There are control points around the map that can be captured that can beam down reinforcements to replace guys that have been killed. In multiplayer, you are given one building, an HQ, and you make every unit and every upgrade from that one building.

So it's really less about resource management and building structures, and more about the tactical movement and placement and skillset and loudout of your squads (a bit like the tabletop game, I suspect, I've never played it.) And the game has a little bit of World of Warcraft/Diablo on it, in the sense that sometimes the bad guys drop random pieces of "loot" on the battlefield, and when the mission is over you can go and equip this loot on your squad commanders. Like better guns, armor, etc. It's got a very WoW-ish feel to it. (Like "Heavy Bolter of Purgation, 11.5 damage per second" etc.) And each squad commander has 4 different stats to increase, and they gain XP and level, so right there the game has a ton of replay value, because you have to decide if you want your dudes to use their XP points in specializing in guns or melee weapons or HP, etc.

The game makes very heavy use of cover. You can go inside of buildings, and every little wall and tree will block enemy bullets from hitting you. And the physics is done in real-time, so when a grenade comes and blows away that wall you were using for cover, it looks awesome.

In the campaign, you fight Orks and Eldar and Tyranids. There are side missions and choices that you have to make, and in each mission you have to make a choice of which strategic asset on the map you want to secure... there are tons of choices to make, thus tons of replay value.

Oh yeah, and aside from the normal multiplayer, there's a co-op mode for you and an online friend to go through the singleplayer campaign together.