MS .NET 3.5 users: beware fix pack 1

I don't use the .NET 3.5 framework myself, I'd rather stick pins in my eyes, but for those who do: watch out for fix pack 1 - it'll open up a security hole. The vigilant will probably notice that you have a new add-on in Firefox that can't be uninstalled without some registry diddling. I'm sure it'll be patched some time, perhaps next month.

Of course, if you're one to install the .NET framework in the first place, you're probably not the type to check these things.

Here's a particularly inflammatory post about it.

Related articles

• Microsoft .NET Framework: Making Firefox Just as Vulnerable as IE (blippitt.com)
• Do You Trust Microsoft? (q-ontech.blogspot.com)
• Microsoft cannot be trusted! (dvorak.org)
• MS Issued a Fix For Its Unwanted FireFox Extension (yro.slashdot.org)
• Did Microsoft Install A Firefox Extension On Your System? (lockergnome.com)
• Think Firefox is Safer than IE? Microsoft Doesn't Want It That Way (lockergnome.com)

Bitnami in the Clouds

A couple of months back, I posted this about Bitnami. They provide applications such as Drupal, Wordpress or phpBB to be installed natively on a PC, Mac or Solaris box with no existing web application infrastructure stack in place - all in one convenient installation file, providing the complete package: a full-stack infrastructure with the application of choice as the cherry on top.

This makes the whole process of getting a blog, CMS, bulletin board or portal set up as easy as possible. All you need is a modest box to serve it to the company, or to the world at large.

Of course, if you don't have a modest box (a server, in other words), you're stuck. Hosting a public application can be a headache, and there's a cost involved, which can grow as your application scales.

Why not take one of these Bitnami stacks and put it in the cloud? There are lots of cloud providers out there, that will provide you with a scalable site with an application, configure it, manage it, load-balance it and monitor it for you.


Enter Bitnami and RightScale, linked with Amazon's cloud offering. RightScale will give you 10 hours free cloud computing with Amazon EC2, after which further costs are linked to your EC2 account.

I'm not the biggest fan of cloud computing, yet, but if you have a business that needs a public facing site, and you want to put the responsibility of running it firmly in the hands of people that know what they're doing, then I can see how this could be a great solution.

Can anyone stop Oracle?

A few weeks back, when IBM turned down Sun's offer to acquire them, I thought they were crazy. You would think they would at least try to block their main competitor, right? Wrong. Oracle have been busy doing some buying of their own of the last few years, gradually building up momentum, looking for a big name acquisition.

Image via CrunchBase

Then, they got one.

Weeks have passed, and it's still hard to say what the future will hold for Sun, and for Oracle. While in the past they have been pretty much steamrollering the smaller companies they've got their hands on, a company of the stature of Sun - who gave us Java and Solaris - requires different treatment. This should be an alliance, a meeting of minds.

However, what makes this approach even more interesting, is that Sun only recently acquired Oracle's greatest open source competitor, MySQL.

Image via CrunchBase

Now it's personal. Reading around on TheRegister and Slashdot, amongst other places, I'm getting a bit worried. I actually care about MySQL. I've been using it since I started to work with databases and especially since I started to develop web applications. It's default beep, sounding every time I type something stupid into it's command line, is music to my ears.

Where will things go from here? Who'll be next?

Bitnami Newsletter, May 2009

Sony post massive €1.4bn loss

For those who have been waiting for Sony's strategy of flogging over-hyped, overpriced products for years to catch up with them, this is very, very good news. For the 16,000 unfortunates who will be losing their jobs over the next year, this won't be such a welcome development.
Samsung make better TVs, Apple make better personal music players, Nokia make better phones, Nintendo make better games... Shall I go on? Sony nowadays are the definitive jack-of-all-trades, master of absolutely nothing. Good to see them pay the high price their foolish customers usually do :P

European Commission Knock Intel Off Their Perch

Intel face a fine of €1bn for their anti-competitive practices over the last fifteen years, thanks to an EU Commission ruling announced today.

This spells good news for AMD, their chief competitor during this period, and their only remaining serious competitor at the moment, who haven't exactly been doing well over the last couple of years themselves.

The EU Commissions findings were that Intel paid the likes of Dell and HP, who have been the biggest PC manufacturers over the last fifteen years, secret subsidies in exchange for their agreement to almost exclusively ship Intel processors in their systems.

Thinking about the number of Dell PCs that offer AMD processors should give you an idea as to how successful Intel were. HP have always offered a few options, certainly more so in recent years, but the vast majority were running on Intel CPUs.

I for one am extremely pleased to see this ruling go through. I'd been despairing at the decline of AMD, especially in the laptop market, only to see signs of improvement this year with the Turion 64 X2s and duo core mobile Athlons that look like being good choices for value at the moment.

This fine will wipe out most, if not all of Intel's profits year-to-date, and has to be paid within three months. They can and will appeal, but a Supreme Court investigation is to follow and AMD are expected to file their own law suit in the coming weeks.

Further reading:

• Intel pledges to fight €1bn EU fine
• Intel fined record $1.45 billion in AMD antitrust case
• Intel Core 2 Duo Vs. AMD X2 AM2--Top to Bottom
• AMD-Intel dispute over patent licensing heats up
• Intel rated leading chip manufacturer again, AMD slips out of top ten

Beware of the latest Webroot Spysweeper definitions

Generally, I'm a great believer in using many security applications, since there are many good ones out there, but no single app will provide your PC with full protection. You can only have one resident anti-virus program and having more than one firewall running can be too much of a headache to be worth it, but there are no limits to the number of on-demand anti-trojan scanners you can have on your system.

There are quite a number of excellent anti-trojan progs out there, and here are some that you should probably get if you don't have them already:

• Spysweeper S&D (free and thorough)
• MalwareBytes (very deep clean)
• Xoftspy SE (fast and deep cleansing - not free)
• Spysweeper (slow, but very comprehensive - not free)

There are some anti-trojan programs that do more harm than good. Webroot's Spysweeper would never have fallen into that category for me in the past, but yesterday afternoon... Well, unfortunately for me, it did. Most emphatically.

I'd been getting tired with the gradual slowdown on my old workhorse of a laptop, despite all the maintenance I'd been carrying out:
Diskeeper was set to defragment on the fly; disk space was freed up as often as possible; AV scans were run weekly in addition to the real-time protection; all startup entries were viewed with suspicion and regularly checked to remove unnecessary ones from the list; Spysweeper and Xoftspy SE were run at least once a week each to keep a look out for any new parasites that might be sapping system resources.

Not having run Spysweeper for quite some time (a few months, in fact), I thought it was time to fire it up, update it and see if the latest definitions would detect anything.
It wasn't too surprising to see the results of the scan showing up some trojans and malwares, since I had a few keygens on my system (don't ask me why ;-), so I selected these for quarantine, in addition to the usual tracker cookies. I was alarmed by one or two of the other entries:

• C:\WINDOWS\System32\skypecomm.dll (part of adware-bho.gen.x)
  
• C:\WINDOWS\msnsrv.exe (worm.gen.x)

The first in the list stood out, considering that I don't have Skype installed - and this one turned out to be a known nasty, a backdoor trojan that opens a port on your system. I wasn't too worried, because I never startup IE, and since this was a BHO (browser helper object), it would need IE to be running for it to be active.
The second one is a bit of a mystery. Nobody seems to know what it actually does, but it's still considered to be about a 70% threat on most security sites. I was happy to quarantine it, anyway.

So, after creating a System Restore point, I confirmed that Spysweeper could proceed with quarantining the files and corresponding run registry entries and rebooted the laptop.

I logged in. Windows was particularly slow loading the desktop, and when it did, that's all it did and for quite a while, too. I hovered over where the taskbar would usually be, but nothing. And then, suddenly, Windows started to log off, displaying the "logging off" message followed by "saving your settings". I found myself back a the Welcome screen, a little bit puzzled.
I tried again. Same thing happened. I tried for another user, thinking that maybe my user settings had become corrupted, but no luck, same result. It was the same for Administrator too.
"Time for safe mode", I thought. So, I rebooted and tapped the F8 key to bring up the boot menu. Last known good configuration didn't help, and unfortunately, neither did safe mode. Under no circumstances could I log in completely, even though Windows seemed to get past the "loading your personal settings" stage.

I had made a system restore point, but I had no way of getting to it. Recovery Console with an XP disk didn't work, because it got me no further than the login screen before exiting.

So, I went upstairs to my PC to download and burn the latest versions of UBCD4Win and Hiren's BootCD, thinking that I could at least get my latest data (that I didn't have a backup of, which amounted to about 4 weeks worth) off the laptop and onto a USB stick or my external HDD.

However, while grabbing the latest ones by torrent or direct download I had a few minutes to kill, so I went searching for my issue on Google and found quite a few hits, and this one at http://forums.techarena.in/windows-xp-support/1140791.htm was the most useful.
It seems that there is a trojan that can set wsaupdater.exe as the program pointed to in the Userinit registry subkey entry for:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

Normally this Winlogon key will have the subkey:
Userinit
With the value:
C:\Windows\System32\Userinit.exe,
(yes, the comma is intentional ;-)

Apparently some anti-trojan apps will delete the wsaupdate.exe file, but will not fix the registry key, leaving you with no means of logging in to your PC.

Sure enough, when I built my UBCD4Win boot disk and booted it up on my laptop I was able to browse the registry hives and see that there was indeed a problem with the Winlogon key and Userinit subkey. However, the problem was that this subkey wasn't there!
Obviously, Spysweeper had identified it as a threat, I hadn't spotted this and had quarantined it.

After manually adding the subkey Userinit with the value:
C:\Windows\System32\Userinit.exe,
I was able to reboot and finally log in to my account.

After looking through the Spysweeper quarantine, I found that it had identified:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\ || Userinit
and
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\ || Shell
as threats. Since I was curious if they had been set to something dodgy, I decided to recover them from the quarantine and much to my surprise, they turned out to be perfectly valid values:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\ || Userinit was:
C:\Windows\System32\Userinit.exe,
While HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\ || Shell was:
explorer.exe
Which are the correct values. So, why did Spysweeper identify them as a threat?

Either it is
a) a problem of false positives introduced in the latest definitions, or
b) a problem where both userinit.exe and explorer.exe are non-default or trojan/virus files that have replaced the normal system files. They work perfectly well, doing everything userinit and explorer do, but secretly perform some other malicious task, unbeknownst to the unsuspecting user (that would be me).

Having done a file comparison (md5 hash check included) using Beyond Compare 3 to the files in my recovery directory, C:\I386, I can see no difference. I also can't see any difference to the ones on my XP Pro SP2 machine (this laptop is SP3, but I don't think there were any changes here). So, I think that scenario a) is the more likely.

If you believe this is the case, then you might want to be extra careful to what you agree to quarantine in Spysweeper now and in the future. But I think that it would be better to be extra careful in all cases (as I normally am - just not yesterday :P ) when you run these tools and scrutinize every result, google it and judge if it's real or just a false positive. Most of the time, deleting or quarantining one of these false positives isn't going to cause you as much trouble as I ran into yesterday, but it's still worth remembering not to get too trusting just because an application has never been short of excellent in the past.

Good News For Irish Web Shoppers

After a three-year hiatus, Amazon.co.uk are shipping electronic goods to Ireland again*. Heard it on Newstalk106, confirmed it on http://www.askaboutmoney.com and http://www.boards.ie.
Can't believe nobody told me, least of all Amazon themselves...

Now all I need is some money.

Oh yeah, right... It's a worldwide recession and I'm broke. Anyone out there willing to foot the bill for my wishlist?

*And that's amazon.co.uk only, not the marketplace vendors the appear on the site

Improving Firefox Performance

You may or may not have noticed, but since the heady days of late FF2, Firefox has apparently gotten slower on some websites with deeply nested links. I don't know why this is, but it just seems to hang for (sometimes) several seconds on such sites. Friends and work colleagues have complained of exactly the same thing, on exactly the same sites.

This bugs me. There's not much I can do about it (except wait) and I've moved to FF3 now, like most people, so I'm not too enamoured with downgrading. IE7 and 8 are simply awful, Chrome is... I'm not really sure yet, and SeaMonkey, Flock and the rest are not at all bad, but not great.

I suppose what I'm saying is that I'm an add-on junky, and I'm not going to go cold turkey no matter how slow it gets.

FF3 is also woefully slow to start up. So what to do about it?

For the slow startup:

• Add /Prefetch:1 to your the end of your FF3 shortcut target, e.g. right click on the shortcut, click properties, add /Prefetch:1 after the target (put a space between them)

For the general slowness:

Open a new tab, type about:config in the address bar. You can either change the following values (if they exist) or change them:

• Enable pipelining to get pages to load faster - it might not work well for you, so if changing away from the default settings, be sure to take note of them so you can revert to them later if needed:

1. network.http.pipelining : true
2. network.http.proxy.pipelining : true
3. network.http.pipelining.maxrequests : 8

• Change the initial paint delay to get the page to render faster:

1. nglayout.initialpaint.delay : 0

Now, if any of these parameters don't exist, you'll have to create them. Simply right click and select the relevant parameter type, e.g. 'boolean' for a parameter that can have a true or false value, and 'integer' for a parameter that takes a numerical value. Much less common is 'string'.

Finally, I recommend this add-on:

Tweak Network

You'll see FasterFox in the search results too, but I don't really recommend it, since with the manual tweaks and Tweak Network you have it covered, and I thought it messed with FF3 a bit too much, seemingly making things worse on some occasions. Tweak Network also gives you some extra benefits when a page doesn't load, bringing up some diagnostic tools on the offending page. Try it out, it's pretty smart.

Metaplace

Metaplace promises to be different to the other Web 2.0 virtual worlds in that it offers an RPG development platform and can even be hosted outside of metaplace.com, on your own webspace.
Looking like the isometric RPGs we used to play in the 80s and 90s, it's not exactly innovative in that sense, but combining this with features like being able to add your own links and content, which you can place in certain locations in your virtual world, does seem to set it apart from the competition.

It's beta (like everything these days), ad you'll have to get an invite, either at metaplace.com itself, where you'll have to wait in line (can take a few weeks, apparently), or from sites that are probably giving out invites.

Now, this is not new - metaplace has been going for a while now, but the pace of development and publicity has ramped up since they got a big cash injection last December.

When my invite finally arrives, I'll give it a whirl. I tried Second Life and found it unbearably boring. I'm hoping this will be different. Being able to build your own world á la Sim City sounds appealing, rather than having to always wander around a world that somebody else built and building your own mini-game themes and plots, while hosting content and links - this sounds like it might be a bit more worthwhile. Whether it will be successful, and survive despite all the competition is another thing - only time will tell.

Here's a nine-minute demo:

BitNami - Full Stack Infrastructure and Applications

Installing Drupal or Joomla, Wordpress, phpBB or Moodle is not such a big task. However, first you need to have an environment set up on which to install it. Windows or Linux, Apache, MySQL (or PostGre) and PHP (or Ruby or the JDK/JRE). Each one installed one-by-one, each one taking a little bit more of your time to install and configure. Environment variables, hostnames to be set, configuration files to be edited - it might take you a few hours, or even a few working days.

You can speed things up by installing WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP), LAMP (Linux, etc.) or even MAMP or SAMP (Mac, Solaris), as dictated by your OS. XAMPP is another option. This will give you a full stack infrastructure that you can install applications on and will really save you time. But why not download a full stack infrastructure with an application install of your choice thrown in?



Cue http://bitnami.org/, who will give you just that. A slipstreamed installer for an ever increasing number of apps, and the infrastructure of your choice on which to host them.

I was looking for the latest version of Drupal, and BitNami had version 6.9-0, which is pretty impressive, since the latest is 6.10, so it's pretty close. But there's Joomla (which I installed on my painstakingly built stack just 2 weeks ago - before I stumbled upon BitNami), Moodle (eLearning), Wordpress (blogging), JasperServer (portal app), MediaWiki and phpBB (the premiere bulletin board app) all there for you to install and use as you see fit.

Develop, host, and build a production site if you want. You can even install Drupal, Subversion and, say, phpBB on the same native server. Keep the installed app(s) running, and each subsequent application installer checks for ports in use and prompts you to select a free port to listen on. They really have thought of everything.


So you have no excuse. It's easier than ever and you can even install them on Vista. You can even install several on VMware images if you want to spare your native OS. Best of all, it doesn't cost a penny and will cost you very little of your precious time.

Yet another bootdisk...

... Only this one is actually brilliant:

Hiren's BootCD

What is Hiren's BootCD ? It's a all in one Dos Bootable CD which has all these utilities:
—————————————————————————-
Partition Tools
—————————————————————————-
Partition Magic Pro 8.05
Best software to partition hard drive

Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.0.554
Popular disk management functions in a single suite

Paragon Partition Manager 7.0.1274
Universal tool for partitions

Partition Commander 9.01
The safe way to partition your hard drive,with undo feature

Ranish Partition Manager 2.44
a boot manager and hard disk partitioner.

The Partition Resizer 1.3.4
move and resize your partitions in one step and more.

Smart Fdisk 2.05
a simple harddisk partition manager

SPecial Fdisk 2000.03t
SPFDISK a partition tool.

eXtended Fdisk 0.9.3
XFDISK allows easy partition creation and edition

GDisk 1.1.1
Complete replacement for the DOS FDISK utility and more.

Super Fdisk 1.0
Create, delete, format partitions drives without destroying data

Partition Table Editor 8.0
Partition Table and Boot Record Editor
—————————————————————————-
Disk Clone Tools
—————————————————————————-
ImageCenter 5.6 (Drive Image 2002)
Best software to clone hard drive

Norton Ghost 11.5
Similar to Drive Image (with usb/scsi support)

Acronis True Image 8.1.945
Create an exact disk image for complete system backup and disk cloning.

Partition Saving 3.60
A tool to backup/restore partitions. (SavePart.exe)

COPYR.DMA Build013
A Tool for making copies of hard disks with bad sectors
—————————————————————————-
Antivirus Tools
—————————————————————————-
McAfee Antivirus 4.4.50 (3012)
a virus scanner (with ntfs support and easy to use menu)
—————————————————————————-
Recovery Tools
—————————————————————————-
Active Partition Recovery 3.0
To Recover a Deleted partition.

Active Uneraser 3.0
To recover deleted files and folders on FAT and NTFS systems.

Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro 6.10
To Recover data that has been deleted/virus attack

Winternals Disk Commander 1.1
more than just a standard deleted-file recovery utility

TestDisk 6.10
Tool to check and undelete partition.

Lost & Found 1.06
a good old data recovery software.

DiyDataRecovery Diskpatch 2.1.100
An excellent data recovery software.

Prosoft Media Tools 5.0 1.1.2.64
Another excellent data recovery software with many other options.

PhotoRec 6.10
File and pictures recovery Tool.
—————————————————————————-
Testing Tools
—————————————————————————-
System Speed Test 4.78
it tests CPU, harddrive, ect.

PC-Check 6.5
Easy to use hardware tests

Ontrack Data Advisor 5.0
Powerful diagnostic tool for assessing the condition of your computer

The Troubleshooter 7.02
all kind of hardware testing tool

PC Doctor 2004
a benchmarking and information tool

CPU/Video/Disk Performance Test 5.7
a tool to test cpu, video, and disk

Test Hard Disk Drive 1.0
a tool to test Hard Disk Drive
—————————————————————————-
RAM (Memory) Testing Tools
—————————————————————————-
GoldMemory 5.07
RAM Test utility

Memtest86+ 2.11
PC Memory Test
—————————————————————————-
Hard Disk Tools
—————————————————————————-
Hard Disk Diagnostic Utilities
Seagate Seatools Desktop Edition 3.02
Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools
Western Digital Diagnostics (DLGDIAG) 5.04f
Maxtor PowerMax 4.23
Maxtor amset utility 4.0
Maxtor(or any Hdd) Low Level Formatter 1.1
Fujitsu HDD Diagnostic Tool 7.00
Fujitsu IDE Low Level Format 1.0
Samsung HDD Utility(HUTIL) 2.10
Samsung Disk Diagnose (SHDIAG) 1.28
IBM/Hitachi Drive Fitness Test 4.11
IBM/Hitachi Feature Tool 2.11
Gateway GwScan 5.12
ExcelStor's ESTest 4.50
MHDD 4.6
WDClear 1.30
Toshiba Hard Disk Diagnostic 2.00b
SeaTools for Dos 1.10

HDD Regenerator 1.51
to recover a bad hard drive

Ontrack Disk Manager 9.57
Disk Test/Format/Maintenance tool.

Norton Disk Doctor 2002
a tool to repair a damaged disk, or to diagnose your hard drive.

Norton Disk Editor 2002
a powerful disk editing, manual data recovery tool.

Hard Disk Sentinel 0.02
Hard Disk health, performance and temperature monitoring tool.

Active Kill Disk 4.1
Securely overwrites and destroys all data on physical drive.

HDAT2 4.53
main function is testing and repair (regenerates) bad sectors for detected devices

SmartUDM 2.00
Hard Disk Drive S.M.A.R.T. Viewer.

Victoria 3.33e and 3.52rus
a freeware program for low-level HDD diagnostics

HDD Erase 4.0
Secure erase using a special feature built into most newer hard drives
—————————————————————————-
System Information Tools
—————————————————————————-
Aida16 2.14
a system information tool, extracts details of all components of the PC

PCI and AGP info Tool (3012)
The PCI System information & Exploration tool.

System Analyser 5.3u
View extensive information about your hardware

Navratil Software System Information 0.60.32
High-end professional system information tool

Astra 5.41
Advanced System info Tool and Reporting Assistant

HWiNFO 5.2.5
a powerful system information utility

PC-Config 9.33
Complete hardware detection of your computer

SysChk 2.46
Find out exactly what is under the hood of your PC

CPU Identification utility 1.15
Detailed information on CPU (CHKCPU.EXE)

CTIA CPU Information 2.7
another CPU information tool
—————————————————————————-
MBR (Master Boot Record) Tools
—————————————————————————-
MBRWork 1.07b
a utility to perform some common and uncommon MBR functions

MBR Tool 2.2.100
backup, verify, restore, edit, refresh, remove, display, re-write…

DiskMan4
all in one tool for cmos, bios, bootrecord and more

BootFix Utility
Run this utility if you get 'Invalid system disk'

MBR SAVE / RESTORE 2.1
BootSave and BootRest tools to save / restore MBR

Boot Partition 2.60
add Partition in the Windows NT/2000/XP Multi-boot loader

Partition Table Doctor 3.5
a tool to repair/modify mbr, bootsector, partition table

Smart Boot Manager 3.7.1
a multi boot manager

Bootmagic 8.0
This tool is for multi boot operating systems

MBRWizard 2.0b
Directly update and modify the MBR (Master Boot Record)
—————————————————————————-
BIOS / CMOS Tools
—————————————————————————-
CMOS 0.93
CMOS Save / Restore Tool

BIOS Cracker 4.8
BIOS password remover (cmospwd)

BIOS Cracker 1.4
BIOS password remover (cmospwc)

BIOS Utility 1.35.0
BIOS Informations, password, beep codes and more.

!BIOS 3.20
a powerfull utility for bios and cmos

DISKMAN4
a powerful all in one utility

UniFlash 1.40
bios flash utility

Kill CMOS
a tiny utility to wipe cmos

Award DMI Configuration Utility 2.43
DMI Configuration utility for modifying/viewing the MIDF contents.
—————————————————————————-
MultiMedia Tools
—————————————————————————-
Picture Viewer 1.94
Picture viewer for dos, supports more then 40 filetypes.

QuickView Pro 2.58
movie viewer for dos, supports many format including divx.

MpxPlay 1.56
a small Music Player for dos
—————————————————————————-
Password Tools
—————————————————————————-
Active Password Changer 3.0.420
To Reset User Password on windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista (FAT/NTFS)

Offline NT/2K/XP Password Changer
utility to reset windows nt/2000/xp administrator/user password.

Registry Viewer 4.2
Registry Viewer/Editor for Win9x/Me/NT/2K/XP

Registry Reanimator 1.02
check and restore structure of the damaged registry files of NT/2K/XP

NTPWD
utility to reset windows nt/2000/xp administrator/user password.

ATAPWD 1.2
Hard Disk Password Utility
—————————————————————————-
NTFS Ext2FS, Ext3FS (FileSystems) Tools
—————————————————————————-
NTFS Dos Pro 5.0
To access ntfs partitions from Dos

NTFS 4 Dos 1.9
To access ntfs partitions from Dos

Paragon Mount Everything 3.0
To access NTFS, Ext2FS, Ext3FS partitions from dos

NTFS Dos 3.02
To access ntfs partitions from Dos

EditBINI 1.01
to Edit boot.ini on NTFS Partition
—————————————————————————-
Dos File Managers
—————————————————————————-
Volkov Commander 4.99
Dos File Manager with LongFileName/ntfs support
(Similar to Norton Commander)

Dos Command Center 5.1
Classic dos-based file manager.

File Wizard 1.35
a file manager - colored files, drag and drop copy, move, delete etc.

File Maven 3.5
an advanced Dos file manager with high speed PC-to-PC file
transfers via serial or parallel cable

FastLynx 2.0
Dos file manager with Pc to Pc file transfer capability

LapLink 5.0
the smart way to transfer files and directories between PCs.

Dos Navigator 6.4.0
Dos File Manager, Norton Commander clone but has much more features

Mini Windows 98
Can run from Ram Drive, with ntfs support,
Added 7-Zip which supports .7z .zip .cab .rar .arj .gzip,
.bzip2 .z .tar .cpio .rpm and .deb
Disk Defragmenter, Notepad / RichText Editor,
Image Viewer, .avi .mpg .divx .xvid Movie Player, etc…
—————————————————————————-
Other Tools
—————————————————————————-
Ghost Walker 11.5
utility that changes the security ID (SID) for Windows NT, 2000 and XP

DosCDroast beta 2
Dos CD Burning Tools

Universal TCP/IP Network 6.2
MSDOS Network Client to connect via TCP/IP to a Microsoft based
network. The network can either be a peer-to-peer or a server based
network, it contains 91 different network card drivers
—————————————————————————-
Dos Tools
—————————————————————————-
USB CD-Rom Driver 1
Standard usb_cd.sys driver for cd drive

Universal USB Driver 2
Panasonic v2.20 ASPI Manager for USB mass storage

SCSI Support
SCSI Drivers for Dos

SATA Support
SATA Driver (gcdrom.sys) and JMicron JMB361 (xcdrom.sys) for Dos

1394 Firewire Support
1394 Firewire Drivers for Dos

Interlnk support at COM1
To access another computer from COM port

Interlnk support at LPT1
To access another computer from LPT port
—————————————————————————-
and too many great dos tools
very good collection of dos utilities
—————————————————————————-
extract.exe pkzip.exe pkunzip.exe unrar.exe rar.exe
ace.exe lha.exe gzip.exe uharcd.exe mouse.com
attrib.com deltree.exe xcopy.exe diskcopy.com imgExtrc.exe
undelete.com edit.com fdisk.exe fdisk2.exe fdisk3.exe
lf.exe delpart.exe wipe.com zap.com format.com
move.exe more.com find.exe hex.exe debug.exe
split.exe mem.exe mi.com sys.com smartdrv.exe
xmsdsk.exe killer.exe share.exe scandisk.exe scanreg.exe
guest.exe doskey.exe duse.exe biosdtct.exe setver.exe
intersvr.exe interlnk.exe loadlin.exe lfndos.exe doslfn.com
—————————————————————————-
Windows Tools
—————————————————————————-
SpaceMonger 1.4
keeping track of the free space on your computer

WinDirStat 1.1.2.80
a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Windows.

Drive Temperature 1.0
Hard Disk Drive temperature meter

Disk Speed 1.0
Hard Disk Drive Speed Testing Tool

MemTest 1.0
a Memory Testing Tool

S&M Stress Test 1.9.1
cpu/hdd/memory benchmarking and information tool, including temperatures/fan speeds/voltages

PageDfrg 2.32
System file Defragmenter For NT/2k/XP

WhitSoft File Splitter 4.5a
a Small File Split-Join Tool

7-Zip 4.62
File Manager/Archiver Supports 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, MSI, WIM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS formats<

Off By One Browser 3.5d
an independent web browser that runs completely self- contained

Ghost Image Explorer 11.5
to add/remove/extract files from Ghost image file

DriveImage Explorer 5.0
to add/remove/extract files from Drive image file

Drive SnapShot 1.39
creates an exact Disk Image of your system into a file while windows is running.

Active Undelete 5.5
a tool to recover deleted files

Restoration 3.2.13
a tool to recover deleted files

GetDataBack for FAT 2.31
Data recovery software for FAT file systems

GetDataBack for NTFS 2.31
Data recovery software for NTFS file systems

Recuva 1.22.384
Restore deleted files from Hard Drive, Digital Camera Memory Card, usb mp3 player…

Partition Find and Mount 2.3.1
Partition Find and Mount software is designed to find lost or deleted partitions

Unstoppable Copier 3.56
Allows you to copy files from disks with problems such as bad sectors,
scratches or that just give errors when reading data.

HDD Scan 3.1
This is a Low-level HDD diagnostic tool, it scans surface find bad sectors etc.

HDTune 2.55
Hard disk benchmarking and information tool.

Express Burn 4.16
CD/DVD Burner Program to create and record CDs/DVDs, also create/burn .iso and .nrg images

Data Shredder 1.0
A tool to Erase disk and files (also wipe free space) securely

Startup Control Panel 2.8
a tool to edit startup programs

NT Registry Optimizer 1.1j
Registry Optimization for Windows NT/2000/2003/XP/Vista

Registry Editor PE 0.9c
Easy editing of remote registry hives and user profiles

DefragNT 1.9
This tool presents the user with many options for disk defragmenting

JkDefrag 3.36
Free disk defragment and optimize utility for Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista

Startup Monitor 1.02
it notifies you when any program registers itself to run at system startup

IB Process Manager 1.04
a little process manager for 9x/2k, shows dll info etc.

Process Explorer 11.31
shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded

Pocket KillBox 2.0.0.978
can be used to get rid of files that stubbornly refuse to allow you to delete them

Unlocker 1.8.7
This tool can delete file/folder when you get this message - Cannot delete file:
Access is denied, The file is in use by another program etc.

HijackThis 2.0.2
a general homepage hijackers detector and remover and more

RootkitRevealer 1.7.1
Rootkit Revealer is an advanced patent-pending root kit detection utility.

Silent Runners Revision 59
A free script that helps detect spyware, malware and adware in the startup process

Autoruns 9.37
Displays All the entries from startup folder, Run, RunOnce, and other Registry keys,
Explorer shell extensions,toolbars, browser helper objects, Winlogon notifications,
auto-start services, Scheduled Tasks, Winsock, LSA Providers, Remove Drivers
and much more which helps to remove nasty spyware/adware and viruses.

Dial a Fix 0.60.0.24
Fix errors and problems with COM/ActiveX object errors and missing registry entries,
Automatic Updates, SSL, HTTPS, and Cryptography service (signing/verification)
issues, Reinstall internet explorer etc. comes with the policy scanner

CurrPorts 1.55
displays the list of all currently opened TCP and UDP ports on your computer

Unknown Devices 1.2 (3012)
helps you find what those unknown devices in Device Manager really are

PCI 32 Sniffer 1.1 (3012)
device information tool (similar to unknown devices)

NewSID 4.10
utility that changes the security ID (SID) for Windows NT, 2000 and XP

Smart Driver Backup 2.12
Easy backup of your Windows device drivers (also works from PE)

Double Driver 1.0
Driver Backup and Restore tool

DriverBackup! 1.0.3
Another handy tool to backup drivers

CPU-Z 1.49
It gathers information on some of the main devices of your system

CWShredder 2.19
Popular CoolWebSearch Trojan Remover tool

SmitFraudFix 2.387
This removes Some of the popular Desktop Hijack malware

Winsock 2 Fix for 9x
to fix corrupted Winsock2 information by poorly written Internet programs

XP TCP/IP Repair 1.0
Repair your Windows XP Winsock and TCP/IP registry errors

CCleaner 2.15.815
Crap Cleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool

EzPcFix 1.0.0.16
Helpful tool when trying to remove viruses, spyware, and malware

Content Advisor Password Remover 1.0
It Removes Content Advisor Password from Internet Explorer

Password Renew 1.1
Utility to (re)set windows passwords

WindowsGate 1.1
Enables/Disables Windows logon password validation

WinKeyFinder 1.73
Allows you to View and Change Windows XP/2003 Product Keys, backup and restore
activation related files, backup Microsoft Office 97, 2000 SP2, XP/2003 keys etc.

ProduKey 1.35
Recovers lost the product key of your Windows/Office

Wireless Key View 1.20
Recovers all wireless network keys (WEP/WPA) stored in your computer by WZC

Monitor Tester 1.0
Allows you to test CRT/LCD/TFT screens for dead pixels and diffective screens

Shell Extensions Manager (ShellExView) 1.35
An excellent tool to View and Manage all installed Context-menu/Shell extensions

Ultimate Windows Tweaker 1.0
A TweakUI Utility for tweaking and optimizing Windows Vista

TweakUI 2.10
This PowerToy gives you access to system settings that are not exposed in the Windows Xp

Xp-AntiSpy 3.97
it tweaks some Windows XP functions, and disables some unneeded Windows services quickly

PC Wizard 2008.1.871
Powerful system information/benchmark utility designed especially for detection of hardware.

SIW 2008-12-16
Gathers detailed information about your system properties and settings.

Spybot - Search & Destroy 1.6 (3012)
Application to scan for spyware, adware, hijackers and other malicious software.

SpywareBlaster 4.1 (3012)
Prevent the installation of spyware and other potentially unwanted software.

Ad-Aware SE Personal 1.06 (3012)
find and remove spyware, adware, dialers etc. (a must have tool)

—————————————-
Changes from Hiren's BootCD 9.6 > 9.7
—————————————-
+Mini Windows Xp
+Password Renew 1.1
+WindowsGate 1.1
+Registry Editor PE 0.9c
+Smart Driver Backup 2.12
+Ultimate Windows Tweaker 1.0
+Off By One Browser 3.5
-DocMem
Ghost 11.5.0.2141
Ghost Walker 11.5.0.2141
Ghost Image Explorer 11.5.0.2141
IBM/Hitachi Drive Fitness Test 4.11
Memtest86+ 2.11
ExcelStor's ESTest 4.50
Astra 5.41
HWiNFO 5.2.5
CPU Identification utility 1.15
7-Zip 4.62
Recuva 1.22.384
Partition Find and Mount 2.31
Express Burn 4.16
Process Explorer 11.31
RootkitRevealer 1.71
Silent Runners Revision 59
Autoruns 9.37
CurrPorts 1.55
CPU-Z 1.49
SmitFraudFix 2.387
CCleaner 2.15.815
ProduKey 1.35
Wireless Key View 1.20
ShellExView 1.35
Xp-AntiSpy 3.97
PC Wizard 2008.1.871
SIW 2008-12-16
Spybot - Search & Destroy 1.6 (3012)
SpywareBlaster 4.1(3012)
PCI 32 Sniffer 1.4 (3012)
McAfee Antivirus 4.4.50 (3012)
Ad-Aware SE Personal 1.06 (3012)
PCI and AGP info Tool (3012)
Unknown Devices 1.2 (3012)

Visit the producer's site to see the latest tools / changes.

Build your very own Cloud OS

We put all our mail, calendaring & scheduling, documents and many other web services in the hands of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon and eBay and don't bat an eyelid. It's alright for us, we're just consumers and individual users, but it's always been a worry for small businesses to put the same trust in these "free" services (or even the pay services) offered by the big corporations.
A couple of years back, a free alternative would have been unthinkable, but eyeOS are offering all this with no charge. You don't even need a server farm to run it.

---

Web 2.0 ... The Machine Is Us/ing Us

Web 2.0 ... The Machine Is Us/ing Us - video powered by Metacafe

Web Designers Make Buttons

The money has gone out of the web design business these days. Save yourselves the trouble ;-)
http://www.buttonator.com/
http://www.cleancss.com/
http://www.fonttester.com/

Or, if you have the time:
http://www.crestock.com/blog/design/top-50-blog-posts-on-usability-web-design-development-resources-cheat-sheets-of-2008-164.aspx

Discover Your Network with NScan

There are plenty of portscanners out there, but not so many great ones designed exclusively for Windows. Of course, you can (and probably do) use the likes of Winpcap, Wireshark and Aircrack to sniff and read packets and crack wired and wireless networks, but I think even taking those great tools into account, NScan still has something to offer. I especially like the way you can put it on the network and let it crawl, discovering hosts and ports and presenting what it finds in a simple way. It even includes subtly improved tools - traceroute, whois and DIG (which was a new one on me).

IFPI Gets Its Own Way With Eircom

So it finally came to pass last week - Eircom, Ireland's largest ISP (and provider to all of Ireland's broadband resellers) has capitulated to the IFPI, IRMA (the Irish Recorded Music Association) and the big labels including EMI and Sony. They hardly stood much of a chance, and at least they tried. In fact, they didn't give in to every demand, namely the requirement to hand over details of customers found guilty of downloading copyrighted material to the record company legal eagles (boo). Instead, they will deal with the matter themselves, and apply a three-strikes rule: email warnings will be sent to those observed to be downloading such material and after a third and final warning their service will be terminated.

This sets something of a precedent* in Ireland, and it probably won't be long before the other ISPs follow (mostly because they all resell Eircom based services anyway). There are a few that may well slip under the radar, such as Digiweb, but the main targets will probably be UPC and Smart, especially since many heavy downloaders will now be scared away from Eircom and its ilk to one of these two ISPs. Especially since they offer higher speeds for lower costs (and greater caps, or in Smart's case, unlimited downloads).

Questions lie as to how copyrighted material will be traced through torrent sites - since by its very nature, distributed BitTorrent traffic is notoriously difficult to trace. It's decentralized, deregulated and buried deep underground. Demonoid were famously squeezed for a while, but they bounced back once they managed to find themselves a new home. The P2P file sharers are much easier to trace - and up to now most prosecutions have been made in this area. The talk of being able to trace the "fingerprint" of a file is interesting. If an mp3 comes from a CD rip - as most do - then how can it have a traceable "fingerprint" (in practical terms)? If I rip a track from a CD, I may use any one of three or four programs for this purpose that I have to hand, and I may use any bit rate I feel like. I might even use a less standard frequency. The point is that filenames can be changed. Filesizes will vary in any case, and hence so will MD5 hashes - the standard means of taking the "fingerprints" of any file. The only way I can see the likes of Sony tracing this traffic is to seed the files themselves - which is essentially entrapment - and hope that the flies like the sound of their flypaper.

Perhaps someone out there can suggest some other means by which this "fingerprinting" may be achieved. One that's practical and workable. No science fiction please :)

*The reason I suggested that it's something of a precedent is because UTV Clicksilver broadband operated a "fair usage" policy right from the start, and they've been offering broadband in Ireland for years now. This policy stated that torrent, file sharing and P2P traffic would be monitored and that heavy users would have their bandwidth squeezed, so that other light to moderate users did not suffer. Repeat offenders would be warned, and once a third and final warning was ignored, their accounts would be suspended. There were reports of users having their accounts suspended for the rest of the month, just as if they had exceeded their download cap, and those that were reckless enough to offend again once their accounts were resumed were banned. There was no blacklisting as far as I am aware, I would think that it would have been in breach of the privacy laws to go that far.
The point is that this has been tried before in this country by an ISP - they weren't under pressure from the music industry, but were just trying to be fair to all their users and try to manage contention. Nice in theory. I was with them for nearly 3 years, and never once received a warning - obviously because I never leeched or seeded torrents on a regular basis ;-)

References:
http://torrentfreak.com/isp-capitulates-to-ifpi-agrees-to-disconnect-pirates-090128/
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/16833.cfm
http://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/2009/01/28/eircom-and-irish-record-labels-settle-action/
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/15522.cfm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7854494.stm

See the latest on the Browser Wars

Google Chrome is not doing so well, but it's steadily growing and has overtaken Opera. Interesting to see that some people still use Netscape too. One mystifying thing is the absence of Seamonkey and Flock - unless they are counting them under the umbrella of Mozilla. It's also interesting to see that Safari still has 7%, which, by today's standards makes it a major player (?).

Are there signs that Google is slipping off its perch?

It would have been unthinkable just a year ago. With search, webmail and online docs completely sewn up, and with its fine blogging engine and good calendaring and scheduling Google seemed to be unassailable. As 2008 rolled in, all people could talk about was what Google was going to do next (and they meant do brilliantly).

As 2009 starts to get old (face it, we're bored already ;-), things don't look so hot. Last year was somewhat tinged with failure for Google. There were the first signs of bloat, overloaded services and loss of focus. We even saw some bad acquisitions (are they trying to copy IBM?).

It's still a great, great company - no doubt about that - but there are signs that they might have peaked, or at least that they are heading for a slump. Hopefully, this will only be temporary. Let's face it - if Google never did another thing they'd still be guaranteed their place in the IT Hall of Fame, but I sincerely hope we haven't seen the best of them yet.

Auto selection of channel on Thomson Speedtouch 585 v7 causes connectivity issues

This morning I switched on the laptop and couldn't connect to the internet. After rebooting the laptop, rebooting the router and checking if my PC could connect (it couldn't) I tried to bring up my router's web interface on http://{ip_of_default_gateway}, but I couldn't get to that either. My wireless connection icon in the system tray was showing a speed of just 1Mbps.

I grabbed a network cable and headed downstairs to see what was wrong, hooking up the laptop to it directly. After having a quick poke around the configuration menus, it was pretty apparent what had happened.

The Speedtouch 585 v7 is administration menu is a fairly simple affair. There's not much you can do here really, most of the really interesting stuff has to be done through telnet commands. Without many options to choose from, you really can't go too far wrong.

First, I went to Home Network > Interfaces > WLAN: Thomson. The quick way there is shown in the screenshot below.

Next, I entered the configuration menu by clicking the 'Configure' hyperlink in the top right of the screen:
In the configuration menu I could see that the router was set to automatically select the wireless channel, and that it was currently using channel 6:

Finally, I expanded the combo-box for 'Channel Selection' and selected 'Automatic', this unlocked the 'Channel', and I selected channel 11, which is a more commonly used wireless channel and one I didn't expect to give me problems:

Once I clicked 'Apply' that was it - the router required a restart to apply the new settings and once it came back up I was in e-business. It's been connected at 54 Mbps ever since.

Poirates Ahoy!

Learn about hacking, cracking, javascript, cryptology,PHP and password security at HackQuest

AV Performance put to the test

AV-Comparatives.org have been busy testing the performance hit your system takes by running a resident AV.
Some people will use this report as an excuse not to run a real-time scanner, and just get by with one full scan a week, but these people are stupid. Stupid I tell you!

One interesting thing is Symantec's position in this test. If these results are to be believed, then not only is it catching almost all threats, but it is also extremely light on resources too, even on higher security settings.

Meanwhile, in other news, the number of empty brown envelopes found out the back of the AV-Comparatives office went up by 2342% last month.


Read the last few reports on av-comparatives.org

Read the full performance report

A BSOD with a difference :)

If your PC dies with a BSOD specifying the error:

*** Hardware Malfunction
Call your hardware vendor for support
*** The system has halted ***

NMI: Channel Check / IOCHK

Visit http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315223 and download Windows Memory Diagnostic tool from here:
http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

When I got this error the first time, I simply restarted  the PC and it was fine for a week. This morning it came back with a vengeance - rebooting wasn't an option as I was getting a string of BIOS beeps (indicating a memory problem).
I had to reseat each and every memory module, one-by-one until the BIOS beeps stopped and the PC could be started. Next step will be to burn this memory diagnostic tool onto a disk and do a check. Another day's work :)

Cringeley's "Triumph of the Nerds" Part 3 of 3

Note: This is part 3 of 3

Part 1 of 3
Part 2 of 3

Cringeley's "Triumph of the Nerds" Part 2 of 3

Note: This is part 2 of 3

Part 1 of 3
Part 3 of 3

Cringeley's "Triumph of the Nerds"

12 years is a loooong time in the world of computing, but this is still one of the finest programmes on computing ever to grace the television screen:



Note: This is part 1 of 3

Part 2 of 3
Part 3 of 3

Plastic Logic answer the call

Finally, an A4-sized, flexible eReader that doesn't look like a big lump of nasty plastic, despite what the company who makes it calls itself.
Perhaps this could provide a convenient alternative to carrying around a load of paper. I'll only know when I get one in my own hands and try it out - but it looks promising.

Smart broadband... first day verdict

My brand new Thompson Speedtouch 585 v7 ADSL2+ Wireless router arrived yesterday - had it hooked up and set up on the UTV Clicksilver connection in about a minute... maybe two.
That sounds like an exaggeration, but it's actually pre-configured for Irish ADSL networks (preset to PPPoE, VPI.VCI 8.35), so it's really just a case of putting in your broadband account username and password and you're ready to go. The basic menus are there, but for advanced stuff you have to use the Command Line Interface, which is just Thompson's way of protecting overconfident fools from themselves (while annoying the rest of us ;-). There's very little missing, although I much prefer the comprehensive feature set and take-no-prisoners interface of my BT Voyager 2110 - if only I could get into the web interface after that bad flash...
That said, the Thompson is solid, very pretty to look at and pretty stable. I got faster speeds out of it on my UTV connection than I could from the BT (by 5-10%). I clocked a DL speed of 4521kbps yesterday (407kbps UL) on the local Westnet server.

When I got home this evening I realised (after a period of wondering what the feck was wrong with my connection) that I'd been "seamlessly" been switched over to Smart.
After entering my Smart username and password where the old UTV one had been in the router's Internet services menu I did a quick speed test (Westnet server):
DL: 5871kbps
UL:403kbps
A few more tests seem to clock me around the 6Mbps mark - which, based on the line attenuation is probably as good as I can expect, given how far I am from the exchange...
One of the things that has really improved is the ping - from ~150ms to ~100ms. I'll take that as a consolation, even though I seem to have lower upload speeds :(

Time will tell if this is as solid a service as UTV gave me over the last two and a half years (it was terrible for about a two week period over the last 6 months, before that it was perfect). I'll let you know if the speeds vary a lot.

In the meantime, have a look in the advanced menus of your router for the line attenuation (on download) and check it out using kitz's speed calc. This will give you an idea of what service you should go for - 3, 4, 6, 8, 10 or whatever. You'll get an estimate of how far you are from your local exchange, but remember that Smart's servers might well be elsewhere, so they might not prove to be a great option. Wiser people than me have tried the basic 4Mbps service first and then upgraded once they saw how they were going. If I'd done this I'd probably be choosing a 6Mbps connection now, saving myself €5 per month.

Ah well... sod it - I've got it now. I'm hoping I won't be regretting it.

World Clock

Microsoft Surface - has touchscreen technology finally grown wings?

Microsoft Surface Demo @ CES 2008



I'd love to know what the unit cost is of these things. Are they punitively expensive? Could MS turn a profit on them?

Tried Google Chrome yet?

Google has revolutionized search, and made the email client seem rather unwieldy and unnecessary, but there they have been wide of the mark on a few things.

Google Desktop wasn't very good in the early days. It started out seeming a bit slow and a bit intrusive, both in terms of system resource usage and privacy.

However, I downloaded the latest enterprise version at my workplace, with a private encrypted index and support for Lotus Notes search and I was very impressed. Admittedly, the index got corrupted once and had to be rebuilt, but it has made things easy to find. This is very important when you have one hand on the phone and only one on the keyboard ;-)



So, I approached Google Chrome with some interest. I say some, because I'm not really in the market for a new browser. I love both Firefox and Opera and I can't see how much improvement can be made in this area. However, Google claimed that their browser would have a small memory footprint and wouldn't leak memory either. This sounded tempting because Firefox 3 has only improved on Firefox's tendency to hemorrhage tens of megabytes of lovely memory by a small amount. Opera leaks too, but less so. In addition to this, Google claimed that their new browser was going to be optimized for web applications, especially for gmail. This sounded good, so I decided to give it a whirl.

I was whelmed.

It's not all that special from what I've seen so far. It doesn't suck, but it doesn't blow me away, either. I've used gmail in it - it's OK I suppose, but it hardly seems all that "optimized". What's the difference between it's layout in web application mode than just hitting F11 in FF, Opera or IE? It loads quickly, sure, but then so does FF3 with no plugins. So does IE7 for that matter, but that's a steaming puddle of horse pish. The history search is nice, as you'd expect from Google, but searching your bookmarks and history in FF works well enough for me.

Remember Seamonkey? I still use it quite a bit, mainly because it reminds me of classic Mozilla - my second browser love, after Netscape. Flock has a Photobucket edition, but that's no big deal. Most people have never used Flock or Seamonkey, and never will. Chrome will have to really stand out to have any chance of making a dent in the established browser user base* - the trouble is, I'm still just not sure what makes Chrome so special.

Does anyone else have any ideas?

Read this superb review at InfoQ

* I saw a BBC News report this week that stated that IE still holds 80% of the browser market

Looking for iTunes alternatives

Found one alternative - aTunes - available for Linux and Windows, but would like to know about more:
http://www.linuxalt.com/linux-software/aTunes.html

The main requirement would be full podcast support, and should be opensource (free for corporate use, at least).
Why not use iTunes? Well, I just don't like it. There's Quicktime Alternative - that solves one problem.
As far as I could find tell, the podcast plugin for Winamp doesn't work.

If you know of any other alternatives, please comment.

Forgot what a valuable resource this site is

Just had cause to visit:
http://dougknox.com/

For those who haven't been here yet, it's a collection of VB Script files that will perform tweaks for Windows systems. Just have a look through the left hand menu and try something out. Back up first, etc.

Just goes to show how many problems boil down to the PSU

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://discussions.hardwarecentral.com/showthread.php?t=180313

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

CMS News

http://cmsreport.com/taxonomy/term/381

http://cmsreport.com/node/1717

http://cmsreport.com/node/1665

http://cmsreport.com/node/1554

http://cmsreport.com/node/1089

http://cmsreport.com/node/731

Coding Resources

http://www.investintech.com/articles/coderesources/

Is Autocheck.exe playing up on your PC?

Problem: Spybot-SD Resident scanner pop-up requires confirmation every time Windows starts. Clicking "Remember this decision" won't help...

The pop-up is to alert you that the Session manager registry key in the CurrentControlSet is being changed.

Cause: Autocheck.exe is corrupt.

Solution: Run checkdisk on the next boot by clicking Start > run and typing chkdsk /r. You'll see a message saying the volume is currently in use and would you like checkdisk to run on the next reboot - type Y. Reboot at your leisure and make yourself a cup of tea, because this is going to take a while.

It should fix the problem, however, so that's alright then.

pchelptech

Could this spell the end of the sticky post?

That is, if Knol - Google's latest offering to the world of web authoring - has anything to do with it.

Make long links short with shortlinks.js

I got sick of looking at links I posted with long URLs that spilled off the page, making things look untidy.
After looking around for a way to neatly wrap links without breaking them, I found this.

Now I can post links as long as I like, and this little piece of JavaScript will truncate the link text and preserve the URL. All you need is a little script in the head of your page:

<head>

<script type="text/javascript" src="shortlinks.js"> </script>

</head>

Onload, the script will execute and rewrite the link as specified in shortlink.js:

// the maximum length of the links<br /> var mustlength=30;
... rewriting the link using the following function:
var newt=t.substr(0,mustlength/2)
+connector+
t.substr(t.length-mustlength/2-connector.length,t.length);

There are a load of other useful tools on both onlinetools.org and the author's site.

QA Testers needed, job satisfaction guaranteed

http://dilbert.com/fast/1996-07-01/

Do you hate the new Dilbert site too?

There have been many solutions posed for this one.

One of the more elaborate ones involves downloading a greasemonkey script that strips away the horrible flash from around the daily strip you want to read.

This is a classic case of over-engineering that Dlbert himself would be proud of.

However, it's only unnecessary if you subscribe to daily feeds and are therefore stuck with the flash version.

All the time, http://dilbert.com/fast was sitting there, waiting for someone to find it.

Generic JVM Argument -Xnoclassgc must not be used with the IBM 1.4.2 SDK... EVER

...especially if any classes in your application use serialization or refection.

Does your Java application appear to suffer from memory leaking? If it does, check to see if you have the parameter -Xnoclassgc enabled.
In fact, you should check even if you haven't noticed any memory leaking, and disable it anyway :P

http://www.performancewiki.com/was-tuning.html

http://java.ittoolbox.com/groups/technical-functional/java-l/memory-leak-issue-1458060?cv=expanded#

http://www.flester.com/blog/2008/03/24/javas-xnoclassgc-considered-harmful

and finally, one from the horse's mouth:
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=180&uid=swg1PK63384

It's hard to believe that people bother arguing over this one - it's been common knowledge for over 2 years now.

Set up LAMP on the Hardy Heron

No, it's not a clue from a cryptic crossword, but rather Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP - all ready to go as one of the install options on Ubuntu 8.04.

It's worth doing, because by doing it this way, you'll save time on setting them up separately and trying to get them to work together. Read more here.

DVDVideoSoft News

New software coming soon… Posted: 04 Jul 2008 10:06 AM CDT Dear All, I’d like to inform you that we are working hard at new programs and this month you should expect several new titles from DVDVideoSoft. These are: - Free Audio Converter; - Free Video to DVD Converter; - Free Disc Burner; - Free DVD Video Burner; - Free Audio CD Burner. Also we will update our existing ones. For example Free Video to Flash Converter will offer new advanced player skins with more controls, like the BIG play button on the video, rewind and fast forward buttons, volume control, auto load enable/disable and full screen mode preview. Keep up watching our news!

Special thanks and some more interesting free software Posted: 04 Jul 2008 10:05 AM CDT Recently we had a problem with html coding on our forum. And John Conners the author of the John’s Adventures blog suggested us a smart solution. Visiting his blog I found that he is a professional developer and I was amazed to find several free programs he had written. I’d like to recommend you to try John's Background Switcher and John's Image Converter. The first program sits in your system tray and periodically changes the wallpaper on your computer. It can take photos from your computer or even from the WEB (Flickr, Picasa web albums, Facebook, Yahoo…). The second program is a small and easy-to-use image converter. It will help you to make your photos smaller before sending via email or putting them to the WEB. It will save your time! I hope you will like these programs too.

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DO NOT download Tor Button

Here's an amusing post on Privoxy and Tor

But seriously, I've just discovered that the tiny Tor Button add-on stops Google Talk Gadget from loading in the sidebar... Bizarro!

The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny (of power tools)

Nod profusely as you read through Scott Hanselman's 2007 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows.

You'll see Notepad2, many offerings from SysInternals and the most powerful Firefox add-on ever, Firebug. If you've ever used them, even just a little, you'd have expected to see them in his list, but I was pleased to see a few things I've never tried, such as FolderShare, WinSnap and Ultramon.

Can't wait to get 'round to sampling them all.

Also, SysInternals have created a live share space for their utilities, so you don't have to have them downloaded in advance before you run them - handy if you're on the road, with a customer and you've forgotten your pen drive. From the readme.txt in the root directory:

What is this?

This is a file share allowing access to all Sysinternals utilities. We have developed this to test an alternate distribution mechanism for our utilities. This will allow you to run these tools from any computer connected to the Internet without having to navigate to a webpage, download and extract the zip file.

Blogger trouble

This is what I see when I try to access my last few posts via Firefox live bookmarks (or even pasting in the same url directly into the address bar).

We're sorry...

... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application

This has happened before, but usually stops after a few minutes - but this time I've been getting this message all afternoon.

Getting this kind of message, and the dreaded internal Blogger error "bX-vjhbsj", pictured below, is the very thing that has driven many bloggers into the attractive, user-friendly and stable bosom of Wordpress (and will continue to do so).




Sort it out Google... I mean Blogger, or Bloogle or whatever. Blogtards.
:-P

DVDVideoSoft News

DVDVideoSoft moved to new server and prepares new software Posted: 03 Jun 2008 04:52 PM CDT We would like to inform you that in May DVDVideoSoft moved to the new server! Now the Internet connection comes to Gigabit (1000 Mbps), that is much more faster than it was (100 Mbps). Such an improvement allows to increase the downloading speed of our free software and speeds up the work of our forum. And in the view of the fact that we are preparing next new huge update of free software, this Gigabit connection is for the good of both us and you. Now our server network usage is only about 10%. Let's boost it up, when the new versions of our free tools are available. Keep watching our news! We also thank those users who have sent us their translations of our programs and their comments and corrections. We will try to include all of them in our new versions. If you want to be famous on our web site, you are welcome to inform us about it and send us you websites and blogs addresses. Get in touch with us at support@dvdvideosoft.com. We will write about you in our blog. P.S. Now you can leave comments on our blog immediately and without any registration.

Add free YouTube download service to your site or blog Posted: 03 Jun 2008 04:52 PM CDT We are glad to offer you our new service called free online YouTube video download script for your site or blog! From now on any owner of a website or a blog may add there a YouTube and Google videos downloading service. This service allows visitors of a site to download videos from YouTube and Google right away to their PC without any other site, software or service. The only thing you should do is just to copy a small script from our website to your web page. Here there is a detailed and comprehensive instruction of how to do it.

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