Something that comes up irregularly with clients: How do I change the settings of the logon screen for Citrix’s web interface?

And the good news is that it’s quite simple.

Open up your webbrowser and goto https://nfuseserver/citrix/metaframe/wiadmin remembering to change nfuseserver with the name of your own server.

Once in, you can configure your farms and servers quite happily.

Oh, and always remember to click on Apply Changes once you’ve saved your new settings.

I’ve just been reading John Young’s post on his forum about paying for gigs where you live:John Young Message Board – New ways…...

It strikes me as an odd idea where you pledge an amount of money and once there’s enough money pledged, then it’s likely a gig will be arranged.

I suppose this explains it better (but it still leaves me a little confused):

How does it work ?? Well it’s easy some folks will sponsor shows i.e. $500 or £200 etc etc and some will just pay for a ticket or two and some who are curious will just turn up for free… it’s just a way to get heard and a way to make things happen.
Of course if you buy a share of the concert you can sell parts of that share to friends and we can also try and help you move those ‘tickets’ so it doesn’t cost you too much…and of course no money changes hands until the night of the show.
This is starting to get exciting although it will take time to grow…it means there will be an appreciative audience at the gig and that concerts will happen

So there you have it. It will be interesting to see how this comes together, and if it can make a good model for live music and smaller bands and artists.

I’ve just read Matt Mullenweg’s thoughts on starting a bank. Not just any bank – but a safe bank.

In the current climate of consumer resentment to their bank, it seems like Matt’s thoughts on starting an internet bank using tried-and-tested internet strategies is a geat idea.

Of course, there is all the fine details. How difficult would it be to get a loan from SafeBank? Or how would one deal with credit cards or “reasonable” fees…

Still, a very interesting premise and one that I might steal for a speech idea! Nice one, Matt!

I needed to delete a chunk of cookies today – but I didn’t want to delete them all.

Thankfully there is a handy command that is within Windows versions after XP such as Server 2003 and Vista that will enable to clean up without too many problems.

The forfiles command will allow you to set a specific date for a file so that you don’t delete recent cookies:

forfiles /S /p "C:\Users\John\cookies" /D -150 /c "cmd /c del @path"

If you wanted to be super cool and delete multiple user cookie folders you could do something like this:

for /D %D in (C:\Users\*) DO forfiles /S /p "%D\cookies" /D -150 /c "cmd /c del @path"

This will enumerate all of the user folders in the C:\Users folder and then clean up the cookies folders inside.

If you wanted to – you can change the amount of days from 150 days to any other amount you like by changing /D -150 to any other number of days (or even use a specific date).

Anyone using Facebook will know that it’s quite annoying losing a good chunk of screen real estate to the adverts on the right hand side.

Of course, many others think so and there is a nice extension that will block various adverts around the internet including Facebook’s own.

Now, I’m not going to get into the morality of blocking adverts on websites here – I’m simply showing you how to do it. If the internet goes bust, it isn’t my fault.

1. Open Firefox
2. Click ‘Tools’ > Add-ons
3. Click ‘Get Add-ons’
4. Type adblock plus into the search box
5. Click on the Adblock Plus extension and then click Add to Firefox…
   
6. Click Install Now
7. Click Restart Firefox

Firefox should restart – so now we can use a subscription to block the adverts. If the Welcom to Adblock Plus window doesn’t open, click on Tools > Add-ons > Adblock Plus > Preferences. Click on Filters > Add filters subscription.

1. Select the Easylist USA option and click on subscribe.
   
2. Click OK

That’s it! Now that you have the ad filtering installed – Facebook should now be advert free in the right-hand side of the page.

Hurrah!

I’ve found the BBC iPlayer client very frustrating to use. Even though the client is cross-platform thanks to Adobe Air – it’s slow and sometimes doesn’t allow you to download a programme when you should be able to.

Also, it doesn’t work properly on 64-bit platforms such as Ubuntu (which is what I use), so the process becomes even more difficult.

So, after getting quite fed up with iPlayer still not quite delivering – I had a scoot around the internet and found a very useful program which will download those videos very nicely.

get_iplayer boasts that it can download BBC TV, radio and ITV onto your computer. Not only this, but it can also be scheduled to download your favourite programmes just like a PVR. So it’s like Sky+ or TiVo, but better. But bear in mind the disclaimer:

Of course, to respect the content providers’ wishes and fair-use legislation, you should keep the recorded content for no longer than 30 days (in the UK), not attempt to obtain it from outside of the UK and not redistribute it. get_iplayer is not intended for use in making illegal copies of copyrighted content. Please respect the rights of the content owners when recording. get_iplayer will attempt to remove its recorded content which is more than 30 days old.

Getting Started
First thing’s first, we need to install it. I’ll assume that you’re using Ubuntu Linux for this, but you can install this on Linux, Mac or Windows.

First of all, download the get_iplayer package from the download page. You’ll also need the flvstreamer package to download the high quality videos.

Once downloaded and installed, you’ll be all set to start downloading. The first thing to do is get an up to date list of programmes. Running

get_iplayer

On its own will refresh the BBC feed and list all the programmes curently available. There may be a lot so you might want to search by the title of the programme:

get_iplayer "Top Gear"

will list all of the BBC iPlayer programmes matching the phrase “Top Gear”

Now you decide that you want to download all of the “Top Gear” series, you can download them with:

get_iplayer "Top Gear" --get

This will download all the available episodes of Top Gear as a .mov file. Using additional parameters, you can also download in various formats such as HD .mp4 files.

Alternatively, if you’ve got the link to a program and you want to download it without any fuss – then you just need the URL or the ID of the programme to download it instantly:

get_iplayer --get --pid http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b007vl20/Will_Smith_Presents_The_Tao_of_Bergerac_Episode_3/

This will download the radio show The Tao of Bergerac onto  your computer without the need for searching for the programme through the get_iplayer command line tools.

There is loads more you can do, such as using get_iplayer as a PVR. The documentation covers the different commands well, and is definitely worth having a squint through. Just remember to watch how much you’re downloading if you have capped bandwidth from you internet provider.

If you feel like something a bit more graphical, the is also a get_iplayer PVR Manager available to try.

Happy downloading!