Periodic Ramblings

This year I bought season tickets to the Foreign Film Series presented at the University of Wisconsin – Parkside.   My wife and I had talked about going in previous years, but never pulled the trigger on tickets until this year.  So about every two weeks we will now be attending a new film showing at 2pm on Sundays.  Which, by the way, means we will bring down the average age of the audience at that time by quite a bit.

This Sunday was the showing of a Japanese film by director Yôjirô Takita called Departures.  It is a film about a cellist who is forced to move back to his small town from Tokyo with his wife after the orchestra he is in dissolves and find a new job.  He answers an add in the newspaper for a job that advertises “departures” thinking that it is for a travel agent.  When he arrives he finds that it is not a job for a travel agent, but rather for preparing the dead for burial or cremation.  Too embarrassed to tell his wife, he attempts to keep the job a secret until finally he is forced to admit this is his profession and that he not only is good at it, but also enjoys the comfort that it gives the families he does work for.

This movie displays the uncomfortableness that we as humans have with the subject of death.  He is shunned by friends and family for his new job, his company has a non-descript office building and the families of the deceased do not appreciate the work until after they are finished preparing the bodies.  The preparation of the bodies is just as important within the film as the characters themselves.  The director painstakingly takes the viewers through the preparation process and shows the emotions on both sides change.  It takes the subject of death and shows just how as humans we need to embrace that death is inevitable and something not to shun, but rather to accept.  Throughout the movie we see the characters come to grips with death and go from shock and horror to appreciation for the process.

Our hero in the movie, Diago, himself needs to come with terms with not only his new career, but also with his job and relationships.  We see him deal with a wife who leaves because of his career, start a job that he does not think he can handle, the death of a family friend and then finally the death of his father who he has not seen since he was a young boy.  Diago grows through all these experiences, helped along by the kindly owner of the business he works at, Tampopo, who himself started the business after his wife passed away. His cello becomes his outlet instead of his focus, allowing him to comfort himself and others around him while they deal with the inevitability that death presents.
Overall the movie is brilliantly written and directed. There are pieces of humor thrown in, not to detract, but rather to show that the characters are human. The characters themselves display a true human emotion with their facial expressions and mannerisms. The director was able to capture all of the human emotions around death, while at the same time not bringing the audience down into a state of depression for two hours.

I inherited a 50 node school network.  The details behind that are not needed, but it was completely by accident.  One of the first things I wanted to do was setup the environment so I could remotely login in to each Windows XP machine to do maintenance.  The previous administrators had never done this, every time they wanted to do something they had to go into the school and sit behind the machine.  As I am doing this in my spare time and voluntarily, I wanted to make it as easy as possible.  Commercial options were out of the question and since I already configured VPN into the network, RDP made the most sense.

RDP can be enabled by setting the fDenyTSConnections registry key under the SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server tree on each Windows XP machine.  Instead of remotely attaching each registry, I decided Powershell could and should be my friend.  I exported the machines from the AD computer container into a text file and the parsed those machines, first making sure they were accessible.  That is the next part of what I want to do, is clean up the 300 or so computer container, when there are only really 50 or so actual machines.  Instead of deleting accounts, they just created new accounts everytime they rebuilt something.

Without further adieu, here is the script, hopefully someone else will find this useful.

# Name:			setRDP.ps1
# Author:		Tom Determan
# Date:			09.10.2010
# Description:		Enables Terminal Services on Windows Machines
#
# servers.txt is an output from the AD Forest of machines.
$servers = Get-Content 'c:\Users\tdeterman\Scripts\servers.txt'

ForEach ($server in $servers)
{
	$line = @($server.Split("`t"))
	$MachineName = $line[0]
	$responses = Get-WMIObject -query "select StatusCode from Win32_PingStatus where Address = '$MachineName'"
	$response = $false

	# Parse through array of responses from Win32_PingStatus and check for any valid responses
	ForEach ($i in $responses) {
		if ($i.statuscode -eq 0) {
			$response = $true
			break
		}
	}

	# If a response from ping succeeds then go ahead and set the registry key to enable remote desktop.
	if ($response) {
		# Attach to the remote registry
		$reg = [Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey]::OpenRemoteBaseKey('LocalMachine', $MachineName)
		$regKey = $reg.OpenSubKey("SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server",$true)
	
 		write-host ("Enabling Terminal Services on: $MachineName")
		$curval = $regKey.GetValue('fDenyTSConnections')

		write-host ("Current Value: $curval")

		# Set Value to 0 to Enable TS Connections
 		$regKey.SetValue('fDenyTSConnections',0)


		$newval = $regKey.GetValue('fDenyTSConnections')
		write-host ("New Value: $newval")
	} else {
		Write-host ("$MachineName does not response")
		}
}