Dan Cunningham

Hi there...

I'm Dan and this is my website. I’m an Irish IT infrastructure architect with 10+ years experience in a wide range of technologies. I spend most of my time designing, implementing, securing and managing the workstation infrastructure for a large multinational company in Dublin. I also do a bit of development. You will find some of the applications I've built here.

19 February 2010 1 Comment

Workstation Migration Assistant 1.09 Released

Second blog post of the evening, I’ve been a busy lad :)

Again, this is mainly a bugfix release – primary intended to resolve an issue on Windows 7 with USMT4. Here’s the changelog:

  • NEW: Command-line option /PRIMARYDATADRIVE <drive>. Required when user data is being restored to a different partition from C:
  • FIX: Migration Assistant would display an error relating to MigSys.XML on Windows 7 when the RuleSet wasn’t modified
  • FIX: Lots of smaller code fixes (I switched SVN repo and lost exactly what these were, but they were important!)

Download in the Migration Assistant section. Enjoy! :)

Incidentally, I’m not back developing these apps fulltime, and I really do hope that someone picks up development of these from GitHub.

 

19 February 2010 21 Comments

EncodeHD 1.1.182.0 Released

Hi all,

So I know I said I didn’t intend on releasing any more builds of EncodeHD, however, a fairly big issue has been reported to me frequently in relation to audio. Since around May last year, the FFmpeg team replaced libfaac with their own experimental AAC encoder. It’s certainly faster than libfaac, but there’s a noticeable difference in sound quality and frequent channel mapping glitches. So I’ve decided to revert back to a build still containing libfaac. This is at the expense however of the latest x264 changes, but hopefully this shouldn’t cause any noticeable degradation of picture quality.

While I was at it, I decided to add Nexus One support, and integrate changes made by KraftDinner in a GitHub branch. You can see his changes here.

Here’s the full changelog:

  • NEW: Profile for Nexus One
  • CHANGE: Merge GitHub changes by KraftDinner
  • CHANGE: FFmpeg reverted back to r18709
  • CHANGE: MediaInfo updated to 0.7.27
  • FIX: Revert to using libfaac instead of newer experimental AAC encoder. Produced terrible audio
And the download is in the EncodeHD section. Enjoy :)
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14 January 2010 0 Comments

Software Compliance Tool 1.0.72.0 Released

As promised, here’s the release version of the Software Compliance Tool, including fairly comprehensive documentation on how to use it. This has been tested extensively and is currently in-use on a 2,000+ workstation site, saving a huge amount of time in policing and removing unwanted applications.

This is being released as Donationware, as are all my other tools. I don’t get paid to write these apps, and there’s no obligation on you to donate. On this app in particular though, I think people should keep in mind that there’s a number of blacklisting (and whitelisting) tools out there that solely prevent new installations and don’t even attempt to remove unwanted applications, charging anywhere between $5 – $20 per workstation.  SCT compliments them wonderfully since it assists you in remediating back to your approved application list. If your company implements SCT, any sort of donation would be much appreciated :)

You can download the Software Compliance Tool in the SysAdmin Tools section.

If you hit any issues or need help in configuring, just get in touch on the Contact page.

Dan

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12 January 2010 0 Comments

New Year, New Site, New Stuff!

Oh hi! Welcome to my all new site, with extra shiny bits :)  I’m really pleased with the new layout, I hope you like it too.

So over the next few days I’ll get the remaining pieces of the Software Compliance Tool together and post it here. You might notice I’ve already made a start on it, and it’s already got it’s own section under Admin Tools.

Things have been pretty hectic for me work-wise for the past few months, and generally by the end of the working day I’m exhausted – but things should start calming down soon enough and I’m hopefully going to blog a bit more frequently on things I’m working on – both work projects and some of my own personal development projects.

Stay tuned! :)

8 December 2009 1 Comment

SCT, to be released I guess!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted – I’m up to my eyes in work I’m afraid. But since I’ve had quite a number of requests to release the Software Compliance Tool, I figured I should actually go ahead and do so. It’s working very well in my work environment at present, so I’m deeming it as pretty stable. I should probably do up some documentation to go with it first though, so I’ll get that together over the next few days and release something then :)

Dan

Update 15/12/09: Emm, actually this might have to wait until after Christmas. Due to some limitations with my current site design, I need to do a bit of an overhaul in order to post up new sections. This might take me a bit of time though – although feel free to get in touch if you want a copy of SCT now.