The Occasional Tech

Adding the HTML 5 Facebook Like Button to Blogger

2012-01-24T14:19:00.001+11:00

Facebook Like buttons are a cool feature to add to your blog. They really do work to drive more engaged traffic to your precious posts.

The reason is they are not just a static AddThis/ShareThis type of button. Those things never really worked very well. Facebook's buttons, by contrast, add social proof (or lack thereof) to your posts. They do this by:

showing how many people already like the page
showing photos of these people

They also provide a very easy way for people to quickly share content with their friends. Since 50% of Facebook's 800 million users log in every day, the chances of someone browsing your blog being already logged in to Facebook is pretty high. If they are logged in, when they see the Like button, they literally need to press it and your blog's title, URL, description, and image is instantly posted to their wall. Within seconds others will see it, and may comment, or click through to your site.

So the bottom line is: leverage the astoundingly lively Facebook ecosystem to get more clicks to your site. More importantly, these clicks are coming with a pre-recommendation from their Facebook friend.

Rules of thumb for Facebook buttons:

Make sure the Like/Share/Send is referencing the actual post URL, not the blog's home URL.
Include them at the end of the post - just after the content - so when people have finished reading, it's the next logical step.
Make them prominent and try to nicely integrate them into your page layout.
Customise:

Choose the word Like/Recommend depending on the context. Like is suitable for most sites, but Recommend might be better for product reviews, music, movies, etc..
Use the light/dark colour theme to best match your site's look.

Use Open Graph tags to maximise the impact of your integration - more about that later.

How to Integrate the HTML 5 Facebook Like Button Into Blogger

In a blogging platform like Wordpress, just use a plugin to insert the Like Button - it's the easiest way. But on Blogger, it's not so simple. Having said that, if you want total control, you can use the instructions below to include the Like Button right in your Wordpress Theme's post.php, category.php, or any other relevant file.

I suggest using the HTML 5 code because it's the most simple to integrate. Most browsers should be able to handle it, and this is increasing each day. In addition, the mobile world is heavily investing in HTML 5 so it helps ensure the button will work on mobile browsers too.

If you really can't use HTML 5, you can use the XFBML option with one extra step, or the Iframe version. Keep in mind the Iframe will be blocked by some user's configurations, and does not support the Send button.

Go to https://developers.facebook.com/apps
Set up an Application for your site. If you are only interested in the Like Button, you really just need the App ID, so don't worry too much about what you enter here unless you actually want to create a proper App related to your site.
Then go to: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/
Configure the button
Put anything in the url, e.g. http://test.com - we will change this later
Click Get Code
The code will pop up - make sure you are looking at the HTML 5 tab.
At the top, select the Facebook App you just created.
Select everything in the first box and copy it to the clipboard.
Now go into your Blogger Dashboard
In the blog you want to modify, go to Template, then click Edit HTML (I am using the latest Blogger Dashboard, if you can't find this, let me know in the Comments.), then click Proceed.
Click 'Expand Widget Templates'
Add the Javascript Facebook SDK code:

Scroll all the way to the bottom of the HTML window, and paste the Facebook code just above the </html> tag.
Then make a blank line after the <script> tag and before the </script> tag.
After the <script> tag, add: //<![CDATA[
Before the <script> tag, add: //]]>
This makes sure the javascript remains intact.
By the way, Blogger will move this code higher up in the template when you save it. I found that it's easy to add it here, then let Blogger do its thing.

Add the Facebook Like button code:

Go back to the Facebook Like Button Developer page and copy the code from the second box.
Search for "<div class='post-footer'>"
Just after this line, paste the Facebook code.
Now we need to edit the URL.
In the code you just pasted, change the data-href attribute to: expr:data-href="data:post.url". The entire line of code should look something like this: <div class="fb-like" expr:data-href="data:post.url" data-send="true" data-width="450" data-show-faces="true"></div>
Copy the line you just edited.
Search again for "<div class='post-footer'>" to find the mobile section of the template, and paste the line in again, after the line with "<div class='post-footer'>".

Click Preview and check how it all looks.
When you are happy with it, click Save Template.
That's it! You may like to change the built in Blogger widgets to remove the Facebook button, as now it's redundant.

Here are some screenshots to help you:

Facebook SDK code at bottom of template

The code for adding the button to the post

That's all you need to do to integrate the button, but we can do a bit more by adding the Open Graph information to the template's meta tags.

Adding Open Graph Information to your Blogger Blog

I don't know much about Open Graph, but I assume it will become more and more used by Facebook. They releases a new version last year, so this shows that they are committed to it.

In relation to the Like Button, it allows you to better control what actually gets posted to the user's wall.

You basically need to add six meta tags. You can generate these on this page and then modify them slightly for blogger. Again these instructions can be pretty easily adapted for use with Wordpress Themes.

Read about how Open Graph works.

On the Facebook page:

Leave Title blank - we will modify this later
Under Type, select Article, or something else if it makes more sense.
URL: leave blank
Image: leave blank unless you have a URL to a logo you want included. If so, paste in the full URL to the image. In Blogger, I don't know of a way to dynamically insert image URLs from a given post, but this is pretty easy in Wordpress.

I have noticed that if you leave this tag out of your template, Facebook will automatically grab the first image from the post when someone posts it to their wall. So you can just leave it out unless you want to post a specific image.
Site name: leave blank
Admin: leave with the ID already included.
Click Get Tags and copy the output.

Now to your Blogger template:

Again go to Edit Template in Blogger.
Expand Widget Templates
At the top of the HTML box, find the line with the text: <meta expr:content='data:blog.metaDescription' name='description'/>
Paste the tags you copied under this line.
Now we need to edit them like so:

<meta property="og:title" expr:content="data:blog.pageTitle" />

<meta property="og:type" content="article" />

<meta property="og:url" expr:content="data:blog.url" />

<meta property="og:image" expr:content="http://test.com/image.png" />

<meta property="og:site_name" expr:content="data:blog.title" />

<meta property="fb:admins" content="your user id, e.g. 123456789" />

It's also recommended to add the following tag:

<meta property="og:description" expr:content="data:blog.metaDescription" />

If the tag content is blank, you should not leave them in your template, as it will cause an error.

Now save your template and test your Like Buttons!!

Any questions - please fire away in the comments.

Check out TFS files directly from SQL Server Management Studio

2011-12-13T16:49:00.001+11:00

The other day I explained how to configure the external tools feature of Edit Pad Pro to allow direct checking out of files from TFS.

Today I did the same thing in SQL Server Management Studio.

Here's pictorial instructions:

There is a small annoyance: SSMS will try to save the file before running the external tool. In this case, if we've modified the file then it will try and save over a Read-only file, causing it to try and Save As to a new file name.

I believe this is a bug in SSMS, or a well-intentioned, yet obstructive feature. Just press Escape to avoid this - the external tool will then run.

Let me know in the comments if you need any more information!

How to automate TFS checkouts from EditPad Pro

2011-12-05T11:43:00.000+11:00

I am a long time user of the great EditPad Pro from JGsoft. I use it for text file manipulation and basic programming. I starting using it when it was at version 3 or 4; purchased it at version 5, and even upgraded my licence to 6 and 7!

You may find Text Editors boring - understandable! They are one of those types of software that is not particularly exciting, but for certain people, they are an essential tool. And if they perform slowly or lack intricate features, they will be quickly superseded by something better.

Developers need a powerful text editor. End of story.

As a developer you have to deal with a multitude of file types - config files, data import/export files, source code, database queries, and so on. Often you need to quickly search files, or change their contents and produce a new file.

EditPad Pro is an awesome tool for getting in there and quickly doing what you need. As I mentioned, I've used it for many years

It's an indispensable tool for me. This is due to features such as:

Customisable syntax highlighting for a very wide range of file types, e.g. sql, vbs, sh, XML
Powerful regular expression search and replace (actually I also bought RegexBuddy from JGsoft to make constructing these easier)
Stable handling of very large text files
Fast operation - fast to load, never laggy
External tool support - which is the point of this post!

Integrating TFS checkout into EditPad Pro

In my current job, we use Team Foundation Server for source control. Visual Studio 2010 has great integration, in that it automatically checks out files when you try to edit them.

However, we also store various other file types in TFS, which we do not edit in Visual Studio. Personally, I use EditPad Pro (EPP) to edit these. I have been manually checking out the files when I need to edit them using the Shell Integration provided by the TFS Power Tools. This works fine, but becomes tedious.

Then I remembered that I could integrate the TFS command line application into EPP!

The screenshots below will show you how to do it, but in brief:

Open a file from your TFS working copy, that is currently checked in (Read Only)
Click on the Tools menu, then Configure Tools...
Configure the command line and add a keyboard shortcut. If you want it in the toolbar, you can check 'Show caption on toolbar'
Close the Tools dialogue and press your keyboard shortcut.
Your file is now checked out!

Now a bit more detail...

Tool Definition

This is where you set up the command line to run, and add the placeholders which pass the information from EPP to the command line tool.

In this case it is very simple:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\TF.exe" checkout "%FILE%"

Your path to TF.exe may differ - just search your C drive.

The important part to note is you need the "" around the %FILE% placeholder to ensure that if you have spaces in the path to the file, this will be handled correctly.

TF.exe does not require the working folder to be set.

Tool Definition - set up the command line here

Files dialog

You don't really need to set anything up here, but if you like, you can check 'Reload the current file'. This ensures the latest version checked out from TFS will be displayed. EPP should automatically reload the file anyway though, so it's not strictly required. (You can set this behaviour in the main Preferences dialogue, under Open Files: check 'Automatically reload the active file if it was modified on disk.')

This section may be more useful to you if you want to do something like save your local copy in another temp file before you check out. You could tick the second option to do this.

If you are setting up a TFS check-in task, then you would check the first option to make sure the file is saved before checking in.

Tool file actions - optional

Standard I/O Dialogue

This is useful in case we get any errors. In this case, I set up the standard error to redirect to the message panel. This means you will see any errors if they occur (e.g. TFS down)

You can also set this to save the standard output to the message panel or to a new file. We don't need it in this case, because the standard output just tells us the file was checked out!

These settings are most used for tools which take your file's contents, change them, and produce modified output. With these tools, it's ideal to set the standard output to capture to a new tab. I have done this when using perl scripts to format files, etc.

Standard I/O - where to send the command line output

So there you go - look how easy it is to integrate an external tool into your text editor - and save yourself a lot of tedious clicks AND time!

If you are interested in trying out EditPad Pro - it's your lucky day! You can get a 30 day trial of EPP right here. Once the trial ends, it just switches to the Lite version, so you can keep using it forever.

VPS.NET cloud hosting review

2011-11-01T11:25:00.004+11:00

This post is a first hand review of the VPS hosting services offered by VPS.NET, known as VPS Cloud Server. I'll keep it brief and focus on the benefits and disadvantages of their service.

My background as a web consultant and developer means that I've had experience with a wide range of web servers and hosting plans: shared, virtual server, dedicated, and internally managed corporate servers. I currently have accounts with four other hosting providers for various purposes.

The timing of this review is funny in a way. I've had an account with VPS.NET since November 2009, and until recently have had hardly any technical issues.

What's good about VPS.NET:

The node concept - you buy nodes and arrange them into VPS's. A node = 376MB RAM, 600 MHz CPU, 10GB SAN storage. They get cheaper as you buy more (currently they are $8 each!)
Control - they use a custom control panel (which is based on OnApp) which is breath of fresh air from CPanel. It's easy to scale your VPS, add another VPS, manage backups, get your invoices, submit support requests, and so on. This panel is great. It may even be better than Dreamhost's custom panel, of which I am also a fan.
DNS management - easy and simple. You can use softlayer.com or vps.net servers.
Large amount of operating systems to deploy - including Windows 2008, Debian, Ubuntu, CloudLinux, JumpBox and more. They also include a LOT of preconfigured templates for common applications, such as Asterisk, Magento, Wordpress, Bugzilla, Nagios, etc. This saves a lot of time.
Flexible offerings - I like how they have somewhat commoditised hosting and created a system by which you can add various add-ons to your account. I outline some of the add-ons below. In short, the modularisation of the service is a very good thing, and something they've done really well.
Lots of locations: 3 cities in the USA, 2 in Europe, 1 in Asia (Japan) - and some have multiple zones (which I think means data centres)
Support: I've found them to be quick to respond any time of the day, and straight to the point. This includes Tech and Billing. I only have good things to say about vps.net Support. They also just added phone support, which is a plus.

Some of the add-ons that I make use of:

Server Density monitoring - quick to set up and allows you to monitor load and other things of your system, Apache, MySQL, and much more. VPS.NET have brokered a cheaper licence from SD. Integration and setup is quite easy. The only problem with this type of licence is that it does not allow you to use the community contributed plugins from SD. This is a shame because I really wanted to add php-fpm monitoring, among other things. To use this, you need to sign up directly with SD, which voids the need for the VPS.NET add-on.
Rsync backups - basically they provide offsite storage to the same capacity of your VPS and simple instructions to set up secure rsync over ssh. You then set up your own rsync (ask me in the comments if you want help setting up rsync backups.) script and stick it on cron.
Snapshot backups - for $5/mth per VPS this gives you a daily, weekly, and monthly snapshot backup, as well as one manual backup you can use to create templates for future VPS deployments.
Managed support - for $99/mth/VPS you can have pro support to help you with upgrades, security hardening, and a lot of other stuff.

So all of the above is a winning recipe, but unfortunately there's one major issue that erodes a lot of the benefit. That is hardware stability.

Originally I signed up with a VPS on the Chicago-C cloud. For over a year I found this to be great. Fast performance and very little downtime. All hosts experience downtime, and I have come to expect a few hours here and there.

In September VPS.NET asked everyone on CHI-C to move their VPS's to CHI-A, with their help. I ended up moving to CHI-D so I could use a Debian 6 template for the new VPS. The whole point of this move was to retire CHI-C, which apparently had been victim to ongoing problems and power outages. To be honest, I had been really happy with the stability of CHI-C!

As I said above, I recently began to experience system instability. This is related to the fact that all VPS storage resides on SAN storage. This is all good in theory, but based on my personal experience with SANs - they are great when they work but they seem to provide a single point of failure. And one which affects a lot of stuff.

I am not an expert but this seems to be because the failover mechanism of a SAN is to synchronise everything to the failover partner. This takes a very long time when you are syncing the data for hundreds of VPS's. I have seen similar SAN failures in large enterprises, with similar delayed restoration scenarios.

Just look at the running totals here for the data centre my VPS is on: http://status.vps.net/2011/10/chi-d-cloud/ You can see the synchronisation takes a LONG time to complete.

In fact if you search status.vps.net for SAN you will see many errors, affecting every zone.

SAN vs local is a big discussion, which I could not possibly cover here, but in general I believe:

SAN's provide an elastic storage solution, fault tolerance, and other benefits, but in my opinion they are not the ideal solution for a web server. The average web site does not require that much storage space, and the files stored generally need to be accessed often, and quickly. A local RAID storage solution makes more sense to me, in most cases. This provides better isolation both in terms of performance and faults. Yes, if a drive fails in with local storage, this may require downtime. But often, with hot-swap RAID solutions, it will not. And if there is downtime, it will be less, simply because there is less data to copy/rebuild.

Enough about storage...

This post is about VPS.NET but I think it'll help to compare to another VPS provider I've got a lot of history with: Dreamhost.

I've had a Dreamhost VPS for well over 2 years and have never had hardware-related downtime. With Dreamhost, I have only experienced downtime due to network connectivity and from overloading the box with too much traffic! Dreamhost told me that their VPS's run with local storage. While there are obvious benefits to SANs, from a stability point of view, just based on what I've personally seen, I'd rather have local storage for a web server.

As an aside, you may be wondering, why I have VPS with two companies?

Well, I had the Dreamhost one for quite a while, and added many sites over time. Mostly Wordpress sites, which routinely use a tonne of RAM! I kept hitting the limit of the VPS, and had to increase the resources. My choice was to keep spending more with Dreamhost or move a few sites to another host. Dreamhost VPS's give you a kind sudo root access, which means you can install pretty much whatever you want, but it's not as straight forward as having actual root access. They also do not give a choice of Linux distro. At the time I was keen to play with alternate web servers like lighttpd, and PHP extensions like apc and php-fpm. This was not easily possible with Dreamhost, so I chose to try vps.net, who provide full root access.

Before I forget, a few other things that VPS.NET could improve on IMHO:

Central SMTP server for customers would be a big help. I understand why they don't do it though (I'm looking at you spammers.)
Add-on pro-rating (is that a word?) - their billing system does a good job of pro-rating services when you add them, e.g. if I add backups 75% through the month, they will debit $1.25 from my account. However, if I then remove it two days later - no refund. I don't care about a few bucks, but I've heard that Linode actually do this. It'd be nice from a completeness point of view. Please correct me if I'm wrong. For larger amounts, where I have dropped nodes, I've asked billing to credit me and they have quickly and graciously done so.
Scaling - some VPS providers allow you to almost instantly increase your RAM and CPU share, without a reboot. To do so with VPS.NET means adding 1 or more nodes, and then rebooting your VPS. This also provisions additional storage to your VPS. I think I saw somewhere that they were working on instant scaling. This would be a great benefit.
CPUs - for some reason on my VPS I have access to 3 Xen vCPUs. Most other providers I've seen offer 4.

So at the moment I'm shopping around for a new host for my, and my client's websites because I need maximum stability. It's a shame because moving a whole heap of sites is time consuming. But explaining downtime is not something I want to spend time on, and losing advertising revenue from other sites I run is also clearly a bad outcome!

My final thoughts on VPS.NET: they have most of the ingredients in place for a winning service. They are relatively communicative, and seem to genuinely want to create a service that is a cut above the rest. They have implemented some very creative features, and innovate regularly. They just really need to spend some time on their infrastructure and consider some ways to remove the dependence from the SANs, or improve their reliability. I have heard rumblings from management that they are in the process of improving the VPS infrastructure. This review is based on the current state of affairs, which, of course, I hope improves.

Their redundant geo-hosting service looks like a step in the right direction, but it's still in beta, so we'll see how it pans out.

Once I find alternate hosting for the clients I have on vps.net, I'll probably reduce my nodes with them and continue to use the VPS for less important sites. But even if I leave completely, I'm sure I'll be back when the dust settles.

Based on their affordability, flexibility and creativity, I absolutely recommend them for non-mission critical purposes. However, if you set up redundancy with another provider (e.g. with MySQL replication, rsync, etc) then VPS.net could be a fantastically affordable part of that solution. I am certainly considering this as an alternative option to finding yet another host: if I am going to set things up all over again, I may as well leave a redundant copy on vps.net, perhaps with a reduced set of nodes.

As a general comment I'll say that VPS is an excellent solution if you have unusual requirements. The powerful control panel and modular nature of features allows you to mix and match different technologies, and quickly add VPS's for testing. In that respect I feel they are a great component as part of your whole web infrastructure - just not [yet] necessarily the primary component.

Check out all the VPS.NET plans here.

Note to future readers: Remember this review was written in November 2011, so if you are reading this in 2012, I am pretty sure that the VPS.NET storage issues have improved.

If you'd like to try Dreamhost VPS - sign up here for a two week free trial, and use the promo code RANDOMVPS to save $50 if you decide to stay!

Windows Live Essentials 2011 Web Installer from Behind a Proxy

2011-08-29T09:50:00.000+10:00

If you are behind an HTTP proxy that you don't have control over (say at work), which is not configured to be completely transparent, then the Windows Live Web installer will not work.

It won't know how to connect to Microsoft's download server to get the packages for installation.

To my knowledge there is no standalone 'full' installer available, so we need to help it to use a proxy connection.

On Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008, you need to do this:

Open a command prompt

Type: netsh winhttp

You should then see:

netsh winhttp>_

then type:

set proxy yourproxyserver.example.com:port ""

OR, if you want to exclude some other domains:

set proxy yourproxyserver.example.com:port ";*.domain1.com;*.domain2.com"

(port should be 8080 or 3128 usually)

Then restart the WL installer.

After it has installed, you can go back to the netsh prompt and clear your changes with:

reset proxy

Having trouble? Let us know in the comments!

How to force Internet Explorer to prompt for Basic Authentication credentials

2011-03-31T10:19:00.000+11:00

1. Browse to the site you want to specify credentials for

2. Internet Options -> Security

3. The current zone will be selected. Click on "Custom level..."

4. Scroll to the bottom, and under "User Authentication -> Logon", click "Prompt for user name and password".

5. Click OK and close browser.

6. Reopen and go to your site.

A couple of useful tools for managing stored credentials in Windows Vista/7

2011-03-31T10:17:00.001+11:00

While messing around with a problem with cached IE credntials today, I came across these Windows user management tools.

(put the commands into the "Run" box in the start menu)

Stored usernames and passwords:

Command: rundll32.exe keymgr.dll, KRShowKeyMgr

- in this tool you can see commonly stored credentials for websites, servers and programs. Some interesting things in here. TBH, not entirely sure what these are used for!
- this is also useful if you want to transfer all your credentials over to another computer.

User Accounts

Command: control userpasswords2
- this is a simplified version of the usual user manager
- under Advanced -> Passwords, you can get to the stored usernames tool mentioned above

Regular user manager
Command: lusrmgr

Latest Intel Drivers Tool

2011-03-07T19:09:00.001+11:00

Not having the latest chipset drivers for your motherboard, storage controllers, graphics card, and even audio chips can significantly affect the performance of your computer.

Intel have quite a useful tool I used today which automatically detects which drivers need to be updated and gives you links to the required downloads.

There are actual multiple tools for all types, or each type of driver:

(requires Java – if you haven’t already, you might need to install the Java browser plugins and restart your browser. If the tool hangs on “Installing…” just refresh the page, and click the Check button again)

Get Good at Javascript

2011-03-07T09:13:00.000+11:00

Years ago when I first started doing web development, I hated Javascript. It was extremely problematic across multiple browsers, due to bugs and incompatibilities. We generally avoided it.

Fast forward to now and things have radically changed.

Javascript is now essential
Frameworks like jQuery have removed much of the pain from JavaScript programming, and have arguably made it FUN! This has resulted in a an explosion in the popularity of JavaScript.
All web developers need to be proficient at JavaScript now.

So, if you are like me, you may know a bit about JavaScript - "enough to be dangerous," as they say - but you want to become properly proficient. After all, there's no point pasting bits of code from samples and hoping they'll work.

It's much safer for your clients, and more satisfying for you, if you understand the real intention behind Javascript, and the best ways to use it.

In such a fast-evolving area, the best thing to do is to follow the pace-setters. So here are a few recommended resources for helping you program JavaScript (and jQuery) in the best practice and modern way:

JavaScript:

Start here: http://javascript.crockford.com/
Book: JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
Many fantastic videos here (including videos to match the above book): Javascript videos @ Yahoo
Big list of JavaScript tools

jQuery:

25 tips to improve your jQuery
10 things I learned from the jQuery Source by Paul Irish

(More links to come - subscribe to the RSS feed to get them)

Slow right-click Windows context menus got you down?

2011-03-03T10:08:00.002+11:00

Here's what to do:

Use the free application ShellExView from Nirsoft to find unnecessary context menu items and disable them. This can actually have a big effect on the noticeable performance of your menus. Psychologically, this can result in a much more enjoyable computer use experience.

1. Download the program
2. Start it up.
3. Sort by Type and scroll down to Context Menu
4. Look for the items in red first - they are non-Microsoft applications.
5. For each item you want to disable, press F7 or right-click and select Disable. This happens instantly so you can right click on a file or folder in Windows explorer and see the result. You can also disable MS items.

This tool works on any version of Windows from 98 up to Windows 7 64 bit.
Thanks to this blog post for the tip!

Don't forget to donate to NirSoft if you feel like it helped you.

If you need help, just ask in the comments!

Download Adobe Reader without using Adobe DLM

2011-02-22T00:19:00.003+11:00

When you go to Adobe's site to download Adobe Reader in Firefox or IE, they force you to install their 'download manager' add-on. Why? Not really sure. Perhaps they are using it for statistics, or something else.

(In IE, they also try and bundle the Google Toolbar - the nerve!!)

Most of us have enough garbage on our PC's and don't need yet another useless (well, single-use) addon!

So here's a direct link to the latest version of Adobe Reader for Windows: http://ardownload.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/win/10.x/10.0.1/en_US/AdbeRdr1001_en_US.exe

Update: If you are using Chrome, the DLM download is not triggered. Go here to get Adobe Reader.

Should be fairly easy to guess the path as they release new versions.

Homework for mac users: figure out the corresponding URL!

The Microsoft Store

2011-02-19T09:36:00.000+11:00

I only recently became aware of the Microsoft Store. It seems they are trying hard to improve the experience people get when they buy a Windows PC.

I actually heard about it on Windows Weekly, when they had a representative from that division on. He was talking about the 'Signature' program, which actually sounds pretty cool. The basic idea is to strip away all the garbage that you usually get on a new PC, as well as pre-configuring Windows and other common software with recommended settings.

The end goal? A PC you can boot up and be using to do actual productive work within a minute. The alternative has traditionally been to spend an evening configuring things, removing trial-ware, and getting it how you like it. Check out the whole Signature thing at the Microsoft store.

Update!
Over President's Day weekend, there's a special deal: $150 off a new PC from the Windows Store - click here for details!

Laptop Upgrade: Faster Hard Drive

2011-02-17T11:18:00.004+11:00

Last month, in an incident involving a wriggling baby, my reliable Dell Studio 1537 was dropped on a tiled floor. It made some strange noises (coming from the hard drive), valiantly tried to boot Windows, but then ended up freezing on the BIOS screen.

I don't trust laptops as the primary source of important data, so this was not a data recovery issue. I was more interested in preserving the laptop or at least the drive for general use. Considering I've been looking at buying a new laptop, I wasn't so keen on replacing parts on this one.

Being a longtime fan of Steve Gibson, and listener of Security Now, I bought SpinRite 6 and fired it up.

After leaving SpinRite running on level 2 overnight, the hard drive appeared extremely sick. SpinRite reported 90 days to get through the entire 500GB drive, which meant drive access was VERY slow.

At that point, I switched it off. I had two options:

New laptop ~ $800+
New hard drive ~ $50-700

A fairly minor fall such as this one, was unlikely to damage anything but the hard drive (or the screen, which was fine.) So it was a safe bet that a new hard drive would get the laptop up and running again.

Now 3 more options, regarding the replacement drive:

similar 5400RPM cheap drive
7200RPM performance drive
SSD for ultimate performance

Being a computer geek, I could NEVER bring myself to simply replace the drive with another crappy one. That's far too practical. SSD would be fantastic, but a good one, with enough space (128GB+) is almost the same price as a new laptop. Keep in mind, this laptop is almost 2 years old, meaning in another year or so I'd probably retire it to media centre or home automation duties.

The mid-level performance drive was the way to go.

Ah, but here's what I didn't mention before - there was a fourth option - option 2.5, if you will: a hybrid SATA/SSD drive! These are an awesome balance between price and performance. The main thing to know is that overall performance of these drives is between a 10,000 RPM and an SSD drive - for a great price.

If you read hybrid drive reviews, you'll immediately see that (at the time of writing) the Seagate Momentus XT is the drive to get. Even though they make a 500GB model, I chose a 320GB model to save a bit of cash - I definitely wasn't even close to using the 500GB drive.

The Seagate Momentus XT is the clear choice because they get fantastic reviews and are very fast. The regular SATA drive is 7200RPM and has 32MB of cache.

Just quickly, if you're wondering how these drives make things faster, a very basic explanation is that the 4GB SSD is used as a cache for frequently accessed files. This means if you are using Photoshop, then all the files that Photoshop is using will be loaded in the SSD, thus giving you SSD-like performance for that application. It's more complicated than that (since the operating system's files are also partially loaded in the SSD) but the drive's technology makes an effort to prioritise files that are used more often than others, over time.

Anyway, it's faster!

And to give you an idea of performance increase, here are the typical performance improvements quoted when comparing Hybrid to 7200rpm SATA drives:

Boot time: 40% quicker
ITunes: 40%
Adobe Photoshop: 20%

Did I notice the speed difference?

In a word, YES!

My laptop is now noticeably more responsive. Windows resumes from sleep much faster, and also boots noticeably faster. I also find Firefox is much more responsive, being the performance hog that it it.

I am going to get one for my desktop too - as I feel the normal SATA drive is really holding back my Core i7 processor in some types of operations.

OK, I want one too! Where do I get it?

In Australia, it's best to buy parts like this from small-mid online computer retailers since we don't really have PC Parts megastores.

But in the USA or Canada you should check out the hard drives sections here for the best prices and easy shipping/returns etc.. :

[By the way: I just noticed Amazon USA is doing a deal on this drive at the moment - $100 with free shipping anywhere in the US - check it out here!]

The silver lining?
The cool thing about this incident, was that the original hard drive was a fairly slow 5400RPM Samsung. The new Seagate has an average read time of about 3 times faster - now programs load noticeably quicker in Windows!

If you are underwhelmed by the speed of your laptop, I highly recommend upgrading the hard drive, since it's a pretty cheap easy upgrade overall. If you have less than 4GB of RAM, then you should definitely update your RAM now - another cheap and even easier upgrade.

If you have the money, then consider buying a full blown SSD drive. They are not cheap

If your laptop is still under warranty, then perhaps consider buying an official upgrade - but if not, then do it yourself! It's easy, fun, and rewarding when are using a machine, whose improvement you are responsible for!

Good luck and please post all questions in the comments here - I'll be happy to help you out.

For those of you considering a new laptop

2011-02-07T13:28:00.000+11:00

... then you're probably looking at getting an Intel Sandy Bridge powered device. The new platform offers great performance and much improved battery life. Great, right?

Yes, in theory - but it has a big fat FLAW in it. A design flaw in the chipset can cause your SATA performance to be severely impacted. Intel are working a fix but replacement devices are due in April at the earliest.

Anyway, this site has a lot of useful information about Sandy Bridge laptops.

In particular, there's a post from today which explains how you can get a Sandy Bridge device returned, depending on the manufacturer.

Check it out - but unfortunately you will need to wait until end of March to put in your orders! Oh well.

Editing document properties in Microsoft Word 2007

2011-01-19T12:14:00.001+11:00

Nothing new here, but a lot of people have trouble finding this in Microsoft Word.
1. Click on the Office icon in the top left:
2. Click on Prepare -> Properties
3. There is a menu in the top left of the panel that has just appeared. Click where it says Document Properties, then click Advanced Properties.
4. Click on the Custom tab, and there you have it.

Bonus Tip!

Once you've updated your fields and clicked OK, you need the updates to reflect in the document. To do this:

Press Ctrl-A
Press F9

Happy Wordsmithing!

LinqDataSource FormView Update error "Could not find a row that matches the given keys in the original values stored in ViewState"

2010-12-08T15:02:00.003+11:00

The Microsoft Linq's LinqDataSource is a great control for saving time when binding data to a web user interface.

But there are a few gotchas you may need help with. Here's one:

OK, when Googling the above error, you'll find a bunch of people saying - just add the DataKeyNames property to your formview! Well that doesn't always fix this problem!

Yes, there is a more insidious cause for this error... mismatching case in the spelling of the id field.

You see, the LINQ designer capitalises all instances of the string "id" which occur at the end of a name to "ID". This causes issues because you, the developer, merrily put the name of the database ID column into the DataKeyNames property as you wrote it in the database definition.

For example:

<asp:formview datakeynames="RecordId" datasourceid="MyDataSource" id="FormView1" onitemupdating="FormView1_Updating" runat="server">
</asp:formview>

, not realising that the LINQ designer has named your primary key field "RecordId" as "RecordID"

Yes! It's as simple as that.

So next time you get the "Could not find a row that matches the given keys in the original values stored in ViewState" error, open up your DBML file and double-check the name of your primary key field.

By the way, this applies to insert and delete operations too.

How To Drop All Foreign Keys in a MS SQL Server Database

2010-11-25T17:58:00.000+11:00

Today I needed to remove all foreign keys in a database. This was necessary because I was building a script to build a database from an initial import, plus a bunch of new tables, and alter statements.
So I needed a clean slate before running the initial import (DROP + CREATE) script.

The script below completely blows away ALL foreign keys in your DB.

Enjoy!

SET NOCOUNT ON
GO

DECLARE Fkeys CURSOR FOR
SELECT 'ALTER TABLE ' + TABLE_SCHEMA + '.[' + TABLE_NAME + '] DROP CONSTRAINT [' + CONSTRAINT_NAME + ']'
FROM information_schema.table_constraints
WHERE CONSTRAINT_TYPE = 'FOREIGN KEY'

OPEN Fkeys

DECLARE @Statement NVARCHAR(500)

FETCH NEXT FROM Fkeys INTO @statement
WHILE (@@FETCH_STATUS = 0)
BEGIN
   PRINT N'RUNNING ' + @statement
   EXEC sp_executesql @statement
   PRINT CHAR(13) + CHAR(13)
   FETCH NEXT FROM Fkeys INTO @statement
END

CLOSE Fkeys
DEALLOCATE Fkeys
GO
SET NOCOUNT OFF
GO

Excluding files or directories while deleting in Linux

2010-08-15T07:57:00.001+10:00

When you use a graphical UI, removing a selected group of files or directories is easy! You just click a few, then delete.

On the command line (in Linux, for example), this isn't so easy.

Today I needed to clear out all Wordpress themes in a blog, except for the one currently in use.

How did I do it?



cd /var/www/mywordpresssite/wp-content/themes/

rm -rf `ls | grep -v themetokeep/ | grep -vF \.`

The above command removes all files and directories EXCEPT themetokeep, and those with dots in them. The latter is VERY important. If you include '..' in the rm-rf command, it will attempt to delete everything up one directory as well. In this case, that would have been the wp-content/ directory - yep, not a good idea!

Let's break that command down a bit:

ls

- the simplest way to list files. It just lists the names (no file size, dates, etc) of all files and directories in the current directory. Some systems are configured to hide the . and .. directories when ls is used with no parameters. However, some are not - which is why we need to be careful by adding that last grep.

|

- the pipe directs the output from one command to the input of another. In this case, we are sending the output of the ls command to the grep command, instead of printing the ls command's output to the shell.

grep -v themetokeep/

- grep - a great program that applies regular expressions to any input you give it, and outputs the result. It is essentially a filter.
- We are using the -v parameter to invert the match. This means we want to output all files and directories that do NOT have the name themetokeep/
If we didn't include -v and simply types grep themetokeep/ then we'd get an output list which only includes that directory.

grep -vF \.

- So now we have the output of the ls command, filtered to exclude the directory themetokeep/, and now we are filtering it one more time to remove the . and .. directories.

This is really important because we don't want to delete the current directory (wp-content/themes/) and we DEFINITELY don't want to delete the parent directory (..) - as this would remove all our plugins, cache, uploads, etc.. Please don't make that mistake as I once did! :)

- The -F parameter - to be honest, I am not exactly sure why we need this, except that if we don't use it, we won't be able to match the directories with dots in them. So use it.

- We put the slash before the . so that it is treated as a literal dot, and not the regular expression match character, which means 'any character'

rm -rf `...`

- rm - the delete command. We need -r to allow us to delete directories (and all their subdirectories). We need -f to suppress the 'Are you sure?' prompts. In other words, we're telling rm to delete everything we tell it - no questions asked.
- We put the filtered file list within the backticks ``, so that the file list becomes the instruction to rm.

Hope that helps you - any questions - leave them in the comments!

Encrypting ASP.Net Configuration Files

2010-08-09T23:27:00.007+10:00

Required Tools

%WinDir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\<versionNumber>\aspnet_regiis.exe
IIS 7 (Instructions vary slightly for Windows 2000 and 2003) – see link in last section.

(Please excuse the formatting - haven't had time to make it pretty)

Overview

The purpose of this document is to explain how to encrypt sections of ASP.Net configuration files. This is necessary to add security around things like database and email account passwords.

While the config files are protected from public web users, in the event that a server was hacked, the config file contents could be accessed. Encrypted sensitive data in config files means that this data will remain safer than if it was stored in plain text.

We want to be able to:

Easily work with config files locally
Easily encrypt them on Production servers
Be able to do the encryption as part of the deployment

There are two approaches to encrypting configuration files:

Using the supplied tools to encrypt the files on each server, using the server's own private key.
Using a common private key on all servers, and encrypting the config files locally before deploying.

We will go with approach 2) because it reduces the server management overhead, and speeds up deployment.

Step 1: Generating the Private Keys

This only needs to be done once.

1. On any Windows machine (preferably a Server version), open a Command Prompt window with Admin privileges (in the Start menu, hold down Ctrl and Shift, and click on Accessories->Command Prompt)

Ideally, we need to use a Server operating system because this tool does not work 100% on Workstation OS’s such as Vista. You can still try this on XP or Vista though, as long as you have IIS - it will probably still work.

2. First, we create an RSA key container.

In the command prompt, type:

%SYSTEMROOT%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis.exe -pc RandomtechKeyContainer –exp

The name “RandomtechKeyContainer” may be substituted for anything however, this name will be used in the configuration later – so make it something that makes sense.

The –exp parameter means that the keys will be exportable.

Output:
Creating RSA Key container...
Succeeded!

3. Second, we create the private and public key and save them to a file.

Type:

%SYSTEMROOT%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis -px RandomtechKeyContainer thekeys.xml –pri

The –pri switch means the public AND private keys are exported.

Output:

Exporting RSA Keys to file...
Succeeded!

4. Now we have the private and public keys saved in a file. Download this file to your PC and save it somewhere. The contents of the file should look something like:

(Keys mangled for my safety!)

Step 2: Setting up Your Development PC for Use with Keys

Now we have created the keys, we need to import them into our PC’s key container store so we can easily use them to encrypt configuration files.

1. Open a command prompt (the easiest one to use is the Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt, found in the Start Menu) and type:

     

%SYSTEMROOT%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis -pi RandomtechKeyContainer YOUR_PCs_PATH_TO\thekeys.xml

(change YOUR_PCs_PATH_TO to where you saved the keys)

Output:

Importing RSA Keys from file..
Succeeded!

Step 3: Encrypting the Config Files

Now we can use the above key to encrypt our files.

1. Add the following section to your application’s web.config file:

<configProtectedData>
<providers>
<add name="RandomtechCustomEncryptionProvider"
type="System.Configuration.RsaProtectedConfigurationProvider, System.Configuration, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"
keyContainerName="RandomtechKeyContainer"
useMachineContainer="true" />
</providers>
</configProtectedData>

This can be added anywhere in the configuration file, directly within the configuration element (so not within system.web, etc.)

Make sure the keyContainerName is exactly the same as the key container name you used above, while generating keys.

Setting useMachineContainer to true means that the application will search for the decryption keys in the machine key store. This is important for use on the web server, otherwise it will search for the key in a specific user’s Application Data directory. Using this approach, means the key will be retrieved from the “All Users” directory.

2. Now we are ready to actually encrypt some configuration file sections. We’ll do the ConnectionStrings first, but it’s also recommended to encrypt your AppSettings, and any other section with sensitive data.
In a command prompt with Admin privileges, type:

     

%SYSTEMROOT%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis -pef “connectionStrings” "FILE_PATH_TO_YOUR_WEB_APP" –prov “RandomtechCustomEncryptionProvider”

The string after –prov must match the provider name we used above in the config section declaration.

The above command will look for all configuration files in the location FILE_PATH_TO_YOUR_WEB_APP. This location is a physical directory location on your PC. For example, c:\dev\project2

Note: the path MUST NOT END WITH A SLASH, otherwise the command will fail.

3. If you would like to specify a path to a web application on your local IIS server, then you need to drop the “f” from –pef, and supply a virtual path with the –app parameter. The command will look like this:

aspnet_regiis -pe “connectionStrings” –app “IIS_VIRTUAL_PATH” –prov “RandomtechCustomEncryptionProvider”

e.g.

     

aspnet_regiis -pe “connectionStrings” –app “/MyWebApp” –prov “RandomtechCustomEncryptionProvider”

Note: if you are using the Visual Studio Web Server, use the –pef version of the command above.

4. Your connectionStrings will have been transformed into the encrypted version. It looks like this:

<connectionStrings configProtectionProvider="RandomtechCustomEncryptionProvider">
<EncryptedData Type="http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#Element"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#">
<EncryptionMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#tripledes-cbc" />
<KeyInfo xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#">
<EncryptedKey xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#">
<EncryptionMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#rsa-1_5" />
<KeyInfo xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#">
<KeyName>Rsa Key</KeyName>
</KeyInfo>
<CipherData>
<CipherValue>kjytgleldK+…</CipherValue>
</CipherData>
</EncryptedKey>
</KeyInfo>
<CipherData>
<CipherValue>cdznrkA11o1uatlHtmxFwQ2HXWEE/…</CipherValue>
</CipherData>
</EncryptedData>
</connectionStrings>
(Encrypted data removed of course! But you get the idea…)

5. Now test that decryption works:

e.g.
aspnet_regiis -pdf “connectionStrings” “c:\dev\project2”
OR
aspnet_regiis -pd “connectionStrings” –app “/MyWebApp”

Step 4: Incorporating Encrypted Configuration Into Deployment

We’ve done everything we need to do to encrypt/decrypt keys on our local machines. Now we need to automate it so we don’t even have to think about it. The following example uses NAnt for automation.
You can include the following NAnt snippet in your build files. Note we use NAnt argument elements for each of the exec/program parameter so we can use double quotes in the command line.

<property name="dotnet" value="c:/windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v2.0.50727" overwrite="true" />

<property name="build.target" value="..\..\DeployOutput\webapp.deploy" overwrite="false" />

<exec basedir="."
program="${dotnet}/aspnet_compiler.exe"
commandline="-nologo -u -d -c -v ${build.webappname} ${build.target} "
workingdir="."
failonerror="true" />


<exec program="${dotnet}/aspnet_regiis.exe"
basedir="${build.target}"
verbose="true"
failonerror="true">
<arg value="-pef" />
<arg value='"connectionStrings"' />
<arg value="${path::get-full-path(build.target)}" />
<arg value='-prov "RandomtechCustomEncryptionProvider"' />
</exec>

If you need help with NAnt, get in touch via the comments.

Step 5: Distributing Keys to Web Servers

In order for our web servers to be able to decrypt the encrypted configuration, they need the private key.
To install it on each web server, the same method is followed as above for the local PC.

1. Upload the key to the server

2. Create the container and import the keys, type:

aspnet_regiis -pi RandomtechKeyContainer mykeys.xml

Output:

Importing RSA Keys from file..
Succeeded!

3. The last step is to grant access to the key container to the user your web application runs as. In IIS 7, it is the Application Pool identity, type:

     

%SYSTEMROOT%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis -pa "RandomtechKeyContainer" "IIS APPPOOL\AppName"

Output:

Adding ACL for access to the RSA Key container...
Succeeded!

AppName is your application pool’s name.

4. Bonus Tip!

To find out the user your application pool runs as, add an ASPX file to your web root, with the following contents:

<%@ Page Language="VB" %>
<%
Response.Write(System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name)
%>

Open the file and copy this name into the command line above.
You will need to do this for each application pool that needs access to the key container.

5. Now delete the key file from the server. It is no longer needed, and for security reasons, it should not be left on the server.

6. The server is now ready to decrypt your configuration. Deploy your application and test an operation where the encrypted configuration section is needed. The application should function as normal!

Useful Points and References

Sometimes the aspnet_regiis command will fail and just print out the usage instructions. If this happens, try surrounding every parameter with double quotes “”. It seems to require them sometimes, even when the parameter has no spaces in it.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998283.aspx
For info on Windows 2000/2003: http://jtoee.com/2008/02/encrypting-webconfig/
In Windows, RSA keys are stored here: \Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys

Proxy Settings in Vista, Win7 onward (where's proxycfg.exe?)

2010-04-20T10:23:00.002+10:00

Sometimes in Windows life you come across apps that are not smart enough to figure out how to connect to the web via a proxy. Yes most people don't use proxies, but for us developers who have to work within a Corporate firewall, proxy frustration is a frequent occurence.

This is often a problem with Microsoft Installers for Service Packs and such. They mindlessly try and connect to the web and do not give you any explicit way of setting proxies. I always found this strange, considering Microsoft should understand corporate IT networking arrangements. Anyway - luckily there is a solution!

Prior to Vista, the way to get around this was to us the ProxyCfg.exe application (part of WinHTTP) to force all HTTP traffic on the computer to go through the proxy you specified.

This application was removed in Vista (and Windows 7) and replaced by netsh.

In short, you can mess with the proxy settings by doing this:

1. Open Command Prompt (Run->cmd)
2. To see current settings, type: netsh winhttp show proxy
3. To change the proxy: netsh winhttp set proxy proxy-server="PROXY.COM:8080" bypass-list="SERVER.COM"

Two good blog posts with more information on netsh:

Leave your questions/issues in the comments!

p.s. Remove your antivirus and PC firewall from the mix before trying the above. Sometimes programs like McAffee and Sophos silently block downloads. Kill them in the Task Manager and try your installer again.

Minimize Tabs in Firefox

2010-04-01T09:33:00.006+11:00

How to take back your Tab real estate in Firefox

If you're like me, sometimes you use Youtube as a jukebox (there are some killer djs releasing weekly shows on youtube!!)

But, here's the problem: you have this big ugly tab open for Youtube. A tab that you only need to return to every hour or so (or less if you have a playlist cranking.)

Or, you use Gmail on the web (as opposed to via POP3/IMAP) or Yahoo or Hotmail. You KNOW what that icon looks like. You don't need to see a page title 'Inbox' all the time. Do you? Yes, I know Gmail shows you if you have new mail, but a productive person checks their mail when THEY want to, not as soon as a new message arrives - but that's a topic for another post.

These tabs are just sitting there with their overly familiar favicon, distracting you from your work tabs. Wouldn't it be great to minimize it and drag it over to the left so it's out of your field of vision?

Well, Firefox doesn't support the minimization of tabs, but there is a Firefox AddOn which does! It's called FaviconizeTab and it does exactly this.

Once you install it, open up its options and select your preferred trigger for minimizing tabs. I chose Double Click. Save the options and return to your tabs.

Now, just double click on the tabs you want smallened (made up a word!) and you're in business.

Just like this:

Looks nice, eh!?

I use this all the time for youtube, last.fm, bandcamp.com, soundcloud.com, etc - so there is one more feature that FaviconizeTab offers to make this better.

Back in the Add On Options, click on Enable auto faviconize - and enter the domains you want auto minimized.

Your list should look like this:

(Here it is in text if you need it:

http://*youtube.com/*
http://*last.fm/*
http://*bandcamp.com/*
http://*soundcloud.com/*

)

Hint: the * at the start makes sure any subdomain of the site will be minimized, so if youtube loads au.youtube.com it will still be minimized.

While you're at it install Tab Mix Plus for all your tab mangling needs. In particular, the feature under Tab Mix Plus Options->Display->Tab->Tab width fits to tab title will save you even more space in your tab bar.

Now go install these and enjoy your new found Firefox tab space!

Channels - one way to optimize your wireless network speed

2010-03-15T08:05:00.003+11:00

802.11x wireless networks work by transmitting data on one of 13 channels.

If your neighbour's network is broadcasting on the same channel as yours you may experience significant performance problems.

The quickest way to make sure you're not affected by this is to use a wifi network detection/discovery tool. I used to use Netstumbler, but it doesn't work properly on Windows 7. So I found that the easiest way is through the Windows command line.

You do this on a computer connected to your wireless network.

1. Open a command line
2. Type: netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid
3. Look for your own network name and find the channel number.
4. Then make sure it is not the same as any other network in the list.

(Look at this great wifi network info site to see many other similar tools)

Want to download youtube playlists?

2010-03-05T11:11:00.003+11:00

Sometimes you will want to download every video in a youtube playlist.

Here's an example playlist page for an amazing Qigong course

It's very easy to do, and here are 3 solutions you can use:

1. For Linux, or any platform that support Python: rg3 youtube-dl.

For Windows users, I recommend downloading ActivePython.

2. For Windows, FREE: Free Studio

3. For Windows, only the PAID version does playlists: TubeSucker (great name, lol)

Remember, don't download copyrighted videos, kids!

Enjoy!

How to set up RSS feeds in the Windows 7 Feed Gadget

2010-01-29T21:52:00.002+11:00

I have a bunch of web servers, for which I receive monitoring alerts by email. I discovered I can get these as RSS, so I thought, "Perfect! I'll watch these from my Windows 7 desktop. I know there's a feed widget."

Not so fast!!

When you first add the Feeds Gadget to Windows 7, it may appear as if Microsoft only wanted you to be able to view THEIR feeds in the gadget. Clicking on Options just allows you to choose All or a particular MS feed to view (as well as how many items to display.) There is no mention of how to add new feeds, so at first I gave up.

The next day I Googled it. Turns out the wonderful Paul Thurrott had my answer (btw his Podcast on Twit.tv is awesome.) The Feeds Gadget 'feeds' off the RSS subscriptions you've set up in Internet Explorer. So all you do is:

1. Open the feed address in IE
2. IE will bring up a subscription box in yellow at the top of the page.
3. Click subscribe.
4. Now go back to the Feeds gadget and right-click, then on Options.
5. You will see your feed. Choose it!

So there you go - now I can see my servers go down right from my desktop!

Nice tip on extracting downloaded Youtube videos from your Firefox cache

2010-01-06T15:06:00.001+11:00

This guy says it all - http://xp-rience.blogspot.com/2008/01/copy-flv-file-from-firefox-cache.html

Basically you monitor your Firefox cache directory and look for the file being created. Then simply rename the file as an .flv