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Manarin Orange Pound Cake

Equipment Needed:

• 10-inch 3-quart bunt pan
• Electric Mixer

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 24 tablespoons (3 sticks) unsalted butter; softened, plus 1 tablespoon for buttering the pan
• 2 cups sugar, plus 2 tablespoons for sugaring the pan
• 6 large egg yolks
• 2 teaspoons pure orange extract
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1 tablespoon grated fresh orange peel (about 1 orange)
• 1/2 cup buttermilk
• One 11-ounce can mandarin oranges, drained and lightly pressed in a sieve to remove excess juice; juice reserved
• 1 tablespoon orange liqueur
• 3 tablespoons powdered sugar, for garnish

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (180 degrees C). Butter and sugar the pan.

2. In a bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt.

3. Put the butter and sugar in a bowl and cream together using the electric mixer on high speed. Scrape down the bowl. Add the egg yolks, 2 at a time, beating for 20 seconds after each addition. Add the orange and vanilla extracts and orange peel, and beat using the mixer at low speed. Beat in the flour mixture in thirds, alternating with the buttermilk, beating for 45 seconds after each addition. Scrape down the bowl with a rubber spatula.

4. Add the mandarin oranges and beat on low speed until fully incorporated. Pour the batter into the prepared pan.

5. Bake for 55 to 65 minutes, or until a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove the cake to a wire rack and cool for 10 minutes, then turn it out on the rack to cool to room temperature.

6. In a small, heavy saucepan over medium heat, reduce the reserved mandarin orange juice until thick and syrupy, about 3 tablespoons in all. Stir in the orange liqueur. Brush the glaze over the still-warm cake and let dry. Before serving, dust the cake with the powdered sugar.

3 way battle!

Vista

Recently I decided I needed to try out Vista at home but not on exisitng hardware as I like to keep production machines stable (lol) so I researched a report I had seen online about using Virtual PC 2007 and the Vista Enterprise VHD image provided by Microsoft. I was pleasantly surprised about the speed of the download about 3 hours (thanks to Virgin Media's peak time traffic shaping, cheers Virgin!) and the speed of the speed of the install and the performance of Vista once up and running..

My hardware consists of the following:

• Dell Inspiron 6000 with a
• Celeron M 1.4Ghz processor
• 2Gb of DDR2 ram
  
• 60Gb Toshiba SATA HDD
• Windows XP Home
• A Western Digital 120Gb Passport USB HDD

I installed the 5Gb Image to my external HDD and ran it from there. Specification of the Virtual PC was:

• 768Mb of memory
• Priority to the Virtual Machine
• All the remainder of the settings as per default

Upon loading the image, had to run the remainder of the config but was up in Vista within 15 minutes. I was pleasantly surprised by the performance of my PC both in the host OS and the guest OS. However this was a clean version with all the defaults, nothing extra. If I load it up with Office, Internet progs and other tools this may slow it down. The VHD image is locked at 20 days use and is used primarily for IT departments to test the OS before a rollout. I found it very useful in the two days I have used it and may plump to install it after the final beta is closed (ie at SP1 LOL)

J.

Free PDF Writer

Hi,

Found this little gem tonight, thought I would spread the word! A free standalone pdf generator.

PDF Creator

Jon.

Amazon MisPrice Anyone??

Hi All,

I grabbed this into my basket to buy on pay day but after a day the price went up from around £10 to £200! Looks like someone missed the decimal place!



Jon.

Walkers does Fame Academy

Remotely Retrieve Service Tags from Dell PC's

Taken from LazyNetworkAdmin

Because most of the computers I work on are Dell's, a lot of times I need to look up the service tag for a specific machine. Without the need of bulky software, you can easily use WMI to gather this information. This article will show you how to remotely query your dell pc's for their service tags.

Open notepad and copy the following text and paste it into your blank notepad

----------COPY EVERYTHING BELOW THIS LINE----------
'
on error resume next
strIPAddress=InputBox ("Enter the IP Address of the PC you'd like to query for Service Tag")
Set objWMIservice = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strIPAddress & "\root\cimv2")
set colitems = objWMIservice.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_BIOS",,48)
For each objitem in colitems
Wscript.echo "Dell Service Tag: " & objitem.serialnumber
Next
'
----------COPY EVERYTHING ABOVE THIS LINE----------

PLEASE MAKE SURE NO WORD WRAPPING IS HAPPENING IN YOUR NOTEPAD!!!

save the file as DellServiceTag.vbs to a location you will remember

when you execute the script, it will prompt you for a computer name, type in the computer name of the dell machine you are trying to gather information from into the message box and hit OK

You will then receive another message box with the dell service tag.

If you want to run this against multiple machines then do the following:

Open notepad and copy the following text and paste it into your blank notepad

----------COPY EVERYTHING BELOW THIS LINE----------
'
on error resume next
Wscript.echo strComputer & ": " & objitem.serialnumber
Set objWMIservice = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
set colitems = objWMIservice.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_BIOS",,48)
For each objitem in colitems
Wscript.echo "Dell Service Tag: " & objitem.serialnumber
Next
'
----------COPY EVERYTHING ABOVE THIS LINE----------

PLEASE MAKE SURE NO WORD WRAPPING IS HAPPENING IN YOUR NOTEPAD!!!

Save the file as bath_DellServiceTag.vbs

Now open a new Notepad and follow this format:

C:\path\to\my\scripts\> cscript servicetag.vbs pc1 >> service_tag.txt
C:\path\to\my\scripts\> cscript servicetag.vbs pc2 >> service_tag.txt
C:\path\to\my\scripts\> cscript servicetag.vbs pc3 >> service_tag.txt
C:\path\to\my\scripts\> cscript servicetag.vbs pc4 >> service_tag.txt

Replace pc1, pc2, pc3 with your actual computer names.

save the file as dell_service_tag.bat.

Double click on the dell_service_tag.bat file and you will be left with service_tag.txt with all of your PC's Dell Service tags inside

This information was found on http://www.rokus.net/.

This information is provided "AS IS" with no warranties expressed or implied.

At work when we raise calls to our 2nd Line team we require to provide the Asset Number and Model of the PC which can be a pain to get after you are off the line with a user. Our Asset tag (and workstation name) is either a combination of undefined numbers or service tags so the above should work to retrieve the service tag from a remote PC from the workstation name which can be used with this to get the Model of the PC.

Sweet!

Jon.

Recognize Anyone?