I've frequently heard complaints about people forgetting to log off when they end a Remote Desktop session. Instead they simply close the window, leaving their session running on the server. This orphaned session becomes a problem in many cases because Windows Servers are typically only licensed for two simultaneous logged in users. Even worse, if you can't remote into the box, you may not be able to easily identify the culprit(s) who left their sessions active. This leaves you no-one to throw things at and generally a very grumpy person.

Fortunately there is a solution to this problem...

You can configure Terminal Services to terminate abandoned sessions fairly easily on Windows 2000 and 2003 servers by doing the following:

1. On the server, go to "Start > Programs > Administrative Tools > teminal Services Configuration"
2. Select "Connections", then right click on RDP-Tcp and select Properties
3. Select the Sessions tab and Check the "Override user settings" checkbox.
4. Choose the criteria under which you'd like to start killing off sessions.

That does it!

Working from home rocks! Working from home sucks! A lot of people I meet find out that I work from home and assume it's a nice fun thing to work from home all the time. It can be fun at times and it certainly gives me a little flexibility that I wouldn't have in a regular office job. However, it does have some downsides including lack of socialization and self motivation.

Don't get me wrong, I have some very productive days, but there are also days where you end the day realiseing that you didn't leave the house all day and maybe didn't even shower. That can be fun once and awhile but it can be a real downer to do regularly

After making a few posts to the ACFUG email list and a few friends who also work at home, a new word entered my vocabulary – "Coworking". Coworking is basically a gathering of people, sometimes in complimentary lines of work, who are all seeking a common place to do their work, bounce ideas off each other, and have some level of socialization.

So recently I've started looking round the interwebs looking for coworking places around the Atlanta area and so far I have found Jelly in Atlanta, which is a sort of informal Meetup group for coworking, and a Yahoo Coworking Atlanta Group which was started by Tim Moenk after he made this blog post about Coworking in Atlanta. Dean Saxe also sent me this great article about Office Nomads, which led me to find a great Google map of coworking spaces in the US.

Disappointingly, there is no very strong effort in any of those links that indicate anyone pursuing a serious dedicated coworking space in Atlanta. I'd love to see an intown space for coworking come into being so that I can have a little office space and social networking in the mix.

I've posted my name on the Jelly in Atlanta wiki but if there is anyone out there living in Atlanta who's also interested in coworking in the intown (specifically Imman Park) area, please feel free to drop me a line directly at cameronc@gmail.com.

When I am on the road, I use my laptop, when I am home I prefer to use my dual screen desktop. Over time this has created a little bit of a problem for me with similar but not identical sets of client files on both my laptop and my desktop. I'm not talking about code, I use SVN for synchronizing code. I'm talking about things like requirements documents, technical docs, PDFs of invoices, timesheets, and the like. These are things I could put in SVN I guess, but I would prefer not to.

So what to do? I use to copy files back and forth manually. I considered using RSync, but that requires quite a bit of fiddling to get it working. I wanted a nice native windows program that would be super easy to setup and maintain. After a little bit of searching, I found a Microsoft program called SyncToy

SyncToy may be old news for some, but I hadn't seen it before and it was the perfect answer to my needs. SyncToy will sync up files between any number of computers, handles two way and one way syncs, and also manages folder and file renames. If about 10 minutes I had it setup and syncing folders between my laptop and desktop, merging common directories and making sure all the files I needed were in both spots.

After I installed it, I found it was also handy for managing my photos. I frequently take photos on trips and offload them nightly onto my laptop using it's SD reader. By the time I get home from a trip there are a bunch of photos to move over to my long term storage location on my desktop. Sometimes I don't move them for weeks till I think of it and have time. With SyncToy I can do a one way sync from the laptop to the desktop, moving only the new photos over and leaving me with the option of deleting the pics from the laptop whenever I want.

You can run the syncs manually, or you can schedule the syncs (instructions are in the help). I'm sure I will find more uses for it over time, but it's quite a neat little app and (except for the cost of the OS it runs on) it's free!