Of Chickens Eggs and LEDs

We have kept chickens for years.  Mostly for the eggs but I must admit we just like having them around.  Chickens are programmed to lay eggs in the summer and stop in the winter.  They will lay in the summer for a number of years if kept healthy.   The control for this is length of the day.  If you want eggs year-round, you just need to use a little trickery.   Just control the light in their environment to maintain a ‘day’ of 12-14 hours.  This is easily done with a light and timer.   Keep the daylight to 12-14 hours with the light and they think it’s still summer.  Simple right?

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My History with Microsoft Visual Basic

I encountered Microsoft’s Basic in 1998. It was familiar to me because of my use of BASIC on GE Timesharing as far back as 1967 (see the ‘About Nick Cottrell‘ tab). I began using VB Script to do various things. At one point, I completed a 900+ line logon script to convert a Novell user profile to Active Directory user profile and swore I would never write a script that large again. I began using VB6 to do things I could not do easily in a script. Not only based on scale and debugging ability but because I also found … Read more

Controlling the Distribution Group managedBy Attribute or Who Wants All These Emails?

Most of you probably know the ‘owner’ of a distribution group displayed in Outlook, Outlook Web App, and Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) is the managedBy attribute. What you may not know is that the managedBy attribute is a singled valued attribute. A Distribution Group can have multiple owners so where are the rest? The additional owners are in the multi-valued attribute msExchCoManagedByLink. Except for the exposure of the managedBy attribute in the GUI, they are all the same. So, who cares? Well, the person exposed as the ‘owner’ is the lucky one who gets all the inquiries about … Read more