Peter Hinchley

In this article, which follows on from my previous post, I explain how to configure Twhirl to integrate with a standalone instance of StatusNet. I also explain how to package Twhirl so that it can be silently deployed across an enterprise using a tool such as Microsoft SCCM 2007. A significant section of the article will focus on Windows Installer packaging techniques, and in particular, the steps required to create a custom MSI using Microsoft Orca.

I was recently asked to deploy an enterprise microblogging service. There were two primary requirements: it needed to support typical "twitter-like" capabilities, such as direct messages, @ replies, hash tags, and search; and secondly, it needed to be free. I initially looked at JaikuEngine, an open-source microblogging platform hosted on Google App Engine. It's a great offering, easily configurable, and ships with a stylish web interface, but unfortunately it does not support search, and had to be discounted. After investigating other alternatives, I decided to use another open source solution named StatusNet (formerly known as Laconica). The product is developed in PHP and implements the OpenMicroBlogging standard.

I often write blog posts that include code listings. Sometimes the code listings include HTML tags, or other programming constructs, that use special characters that should not be interpreted by the browser, but rather displayed literally. To do this, it is necessary to write the special characters as encoded HTML entities. For example, instead of writing <, it is necessary to write the encoded form of the character: <.

I use Markdown to convert the comments entered on this blog into HTML. Markdown is surprisingly feature rich, but its primary purpose, at least when it comes to formatting comments, is to wrap text into paragraph tags. The process works as expected when text is separated by two newline characters, but when two blocks of text are separated by a single newline character, Markdown merges them together as if they were a contiguous block.

The following is a list of every film I watched in the last 6 months of 2009. There is a strong bias towards Alfred Hitchcock, as I made a concerted effort to review a selection of the classics from his towering back catalogue. I also revisited Lost In Translation by Sophia Coppola; a film that tenders a stronger case as the greatest of all time with every rescreening.

These are the books I read in 2009, listed on the shelf in order of greatness.

Earlier this week I posted my top songs of 2009, and today I'm following up with my top 50 albums of the year.

Frank Zappa once said: remember, information is not knowledge; knowledge is not wisdom; wisdom is not truth; truth is not beauty; beauty is not love; love is not music; music is the best. And for the best of the best, let me unfold for you my top 50 songs of 2009.

At the office we use Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 to deploy Microsoft Windows Vista to desktop computers. We have an SCCM collection called PUSH-NOW, which, as the name suggests, is used to immediately push the operating system to all collection members. However, sometimes it's necessary to delay the deployment of the operating system to outside of business hours (so as not to interupt our hard working users). To address this requirement, I created a second collection named PUSH-LATER. I then use a scheduled task, which is configured to execute daily at 7PM, to move computers from the PUSH-LATER collection to the PUSH-NOW collection.

I received a call yesterday from a user that was unable to open Microsoft Word documents from Internet Explorer. When the user clicked on a link to a Word document, a dialog was displayed asking if they wanted to open or save the document. If the user saved the document, they were then able to open it; however, if they attempted to open the document directly from Internet Explorer, the browser would hang, and Microsoft Word would not be displayed.