I am duty bound to tell you that if you are doing much of anything involving code, you need to be using some sort of Version Control, however I am not going to ram Subversion or Tortoise SVN down your throat. I understand why programmers use them, and I have used them myself in the past. Since I try to live the whole “Least Amount Of Administrative Effort” thing, I just really don’t like them. Let me explain.

Ok, setting up full on Version Control makes sense if any of the following are true:

• You spend a large portion of your day writing code (like your job title is “programmer” or something similar)
• You spend more time fixing things you break while writing code, than writing code
• Anyone else is going to suffer consequences if you totally wreck some code
• Someone else is going to maintain and administer the Version Control System
• You work on files that multiple other people also edit

However it does not make sense if any of the following is true:

• You write code for your own use only
• You could care less if it gets broken or accidentally deleted
• You don’t have time to administer or maintain a Version Control System

Even if all of the last bit are true for you, it is still a good idea to use Version Control. Wait, what?

Version Control is a process, and if done correctly it works very well. If done poorly it gives you a false sense of security. Version Control is not necessarily a software package or commercial system.

If working with end users for all these years has taught me anything it is this; if a system is easy to use (especially if you don’t have to actually do anything) it will get used, if it is complicated (or time consuming) it will not get used. This also holds true (even more so in most cases) for the IT professionals I know.

Since don’t write enough code to make Visual Studio a wise investment, I use Notepad++, and unlike Visual Studio, I can take my IDE with me on a USB drive (Notepad++ Portable!). In the same vein, I don’t really write enough code to really justify setting up and maintaining a Version Control System, so I do it with Notepad++. Least Amount Of Administrative Effort.

So here is my solution:

I use the Backup settings built into Notepad++ to take care of my Version Control. To set this up:

1. Install notepad++
2. Open Notepad++
3. Select Settings > Preferences
4. On the Backup/Auto-completion tab, change the backup setting from None to Verbose

If you change nothing else there, now when you save your file, Notepad++ will automatically create a copy of the file without the changes since the last time you saved it. The copy will also be saved in a subfolder (named nppBackup) in the same folder where the document is saved. The copy will be named FileName.Extension.Date_Timestamp.bak by default. So a file named “test.vbs”, saved today would have a name similar to “test.vbs.2009-06-29_151927.bak”.

Cumbersome to be sure, but I am guaranteed to use it every time I work with a document.

Please don’t mistake this for something it is not. This is not a Version Control System. You do not check files in or out, and it doesn’t differentiate who made what changes, all it does is save every iteration of your document. It is Version Control in the truest sense of the term.

Hey there loyal AtA readers! I know the posts title caught your interest and now you are reading more to find out how you can win yourself one of these innovative new systems that you can see pictured above. I have been going back and forth with HP trying to figure out the best way to open up this contest to our readers. And here is the proposed contest:

I have two of my best clients that are on the lookout for custom TouchSmart applications. By creating an application for one of these two companies which we will detail below you can be chosen to win one of these TouchSmart’s for yourself. And after all isn’t that all we want… Nice shinny uber cool gadgets? Oh is that only me??

To participate in the contest you will create an application for the TouchSmart. It can either match one of our two scenarios or you can submit your own ideas for the application. Once we finalize the ideas that you guys will be creating we will start accepting applications.

We will then demo them and show them to the company they relate to. Once we select the winning application we will send you your very own dx9000 TouchSmart.

• The first company is a high end clothing manufacturer in New York City that wants an application to show off their beautiful completed garments as well as concept designs.
• The second company is a Computer repair shop that wants to allow customers to use the TouchSmart to enter their information when dropping off their computer for repairs.

There are already a bunch of apps for the TouchSmart that people have developed—TIME and Adobe made one for the TIME 100 which is free to download—and a few businesses that already used custom-built apps, which we’ll talk more about when there’s a dx9000 here for me to play with!

So do you want to know more about this contest? Maybe you want to know more about the TouchSmart platform or even how to create applications for the TouchSmart… Then drop us a line at info at askTheAdmin dot com or leave a comment. We will be posting more details as they become available to us and as always we are open to your tips, ideas or death threats…

The dx9000 TouchSmart starts at around $1400 usd so if you think you can come up with the winning application…

THEN GO GET STARTED!  You can also read the full press release after the break…

A nifty little demo of the TouchSmart can be found here and

Check out the TouchSmart developer guidelines for some good how-to info!

–Press Release–

PALO ALTO, Calif., June 29 – HP today announced leading industry blogs including Ask the Admin, AbsoluteWindows and Hardware Geeks are conducting promotions to uncover business touch applications for the HP dx9000 TouchSmart PC. These sites will select entries and present the HP dx9000 TouchSmart PC* to the most innovative business application developer.

"At airports, stadiums, hotels and retailers, HP TouchSmart PCs are helping companies large and small engage their customers with a fun and interactive touch experience," said Alan Reed, vice president and general manager, Business Desktops, Personal Systems Group, HP. “Users can scroll, zoom, and browse with the touch of a finger, bringing multimedia content to life and immersing the user in custom software applications."
At the TouchSmart Community, software developers can access HP TouchSmart guidelines to easily modify existing applications to work on a touch interface, or create new applications.

_TheContestLovingAdmiN_

The new “Disk I/O” chart allows you to monitor which applications utilize most of your disk at the moment:

Features:

* Displays disk input/output activity with information about related applications
* Displays network port activity with IP addresses of external computers
* Displays information about applications that utilized most of the CPU or memory at any time presented on the charts
* Displays all files locked by a select process.
* Finds all processes locking a specified file.
* Includes “Summary” tab for quickly assessing the overall state of the Windows system
* Allows freezing individual Windows processes
* Offer various visual and functional improvements over the standard Windows Task Manager

http://www.extensoft.com/?p=free_task_manager

[Molly via EeeUserForums]

We just couldn’t have that now, could we?

Oh, how well we know you.

Wayne from Florida wants AtA’s help to create a script that will batch rename his purty pictures. Instead we are going to point him to some FREE software our friend Daniel at HackYourDay blogged about.

The software is called Batch File Renamer (clever eh?) from Cerebral Synergy.

Daniel says:

Here’s one software that productivity nuts will love. If you’ve ever needed to catalog files, change extensions, add something to a filename in large batches you know the suffering that is “right click, select, type, enter” done over and over and over again. If you need a tool that can simply edit filenames, rename extensions and so on in a very powerful, customizable way, read on!…

I set out to find some sort of tool because I need to catalog files in batches of 100 about every two days. I get a batch of stuff in txt format and I need to do the following operations.

• I need the files to be in the following format [ID - Number.txt]
• I also need them in this format [ID - Number.html]

Practically this means that I need “032 - 001.txt”, “032 - 002.txt” and so on (all the way to 100), also in .html format and I need to be able to customize all of this because for the next batch I will need “033? at the beginning.

Doing a Google search and trying a lot of free software that popped up I finally found Batch File Renamer. Not a fancy name, not a fancy program, but it gets the job done better than I’ve seen with other apps. First, head over to the Cerebral Synergy download page, scroll down and download Batch File Renamer.

He was able to change file extensions, mass change file names and it comes with all sorts of other free geeky options! Check out Daniel’s article at HackYourDay here and the Free Cerebral Synergy download is here.

_TheRenameThisAdmiN_

See that picture? When it happens to you, it may not look quite that bad (or be quite that obvious), but data loss sucks. And it does happen. I’ve been working with computers for 10+ years, and I’ve had it happen a couple times myself. Did I mention how much it sucks?

I’m not going to spend a couple pages telling you why you should backup, I’m just going to be straight about it, unless you really couldn’t care less if that happened to your computer, you are flat out stupid if you are not backing up your data on a regular basis.

Instead of telling you why to backup, I’m going to tell you how to ensure that you are not going to get your data back, even if you think you are backing it up.

Method 1: I’ll just back the data up to CD/DVD.

Well sure, this will work for a bit, but:

1. Ever try to save 20GB to CD? Or 250GB to DVD? Ugh.
2. How long do you think that optical desk is going to be readable?

Going this route, you can quickly end up trapped behind a small mountain of plastic. Or lets say you manage to somehow keep the optical disks to a manageable quantity, will the marker you labeled it with make the disk unreadable in a year, or is the dye layer unstable, rendering your disk unreadable in six months, or will the glue on the label you made for the disk make it worthless in a year or two? These are just a couple of examples of why optical media should not be considered an archive grade solution.

Method 2: ok then, I’ll just copy the data to a USB hard drive.

Sure it’s better than nothing, but single HDD solutions are not going to keep your data safe. Hard drives fail. In fact it will happen to every single hard disk you will ever come across. The only question is; when? It’s not a matter of if, or of MTBF (mean time between failure), it is more a matter of “you never know, it could fail in ten years, or in ten seconds”.

Don’t get me wrong, if this is the only way you can back the data up, then it is your only choice, and it’s better than nothing. Just be aware, as soon as you copy the data to that USB HDD, the “Clock of Death” is ticking.

Much better would be to copy the data over to a machine with a RAID storage system (preferably RAID5).

Method 3: I bought actual Backup Software (or use a vetted Open Source solution), and run Incremental Backups (to tape!) every single day!

Ok, so you spent some money on a tape backup solution, spent hours reading the manual and configuring your backup. Congratulations, I bet you think your data is safe! Until you find out how Incremental Backups really work (this usually happens after a disaster, and the tapes is all you have left of your pr0n, illegal mp3’s downloaded movies warez mission critical data).

Let’s pretend for a minute that your backup tapes look something like this:

Full_backup_tape (tape 1 – doesn’t matter what you tell it to be, the first backup is always and without exception, a full backup)

Incremental_backup_1 (tape 2)

Incremental_backup_2 (tape 3)

Incremental_backup_3 (tape 4)

Incremental_backup_4 (tape 5)

Incremental_backup_5 (tape 6)

And then you have a catastrophic failure. So you’re sitting there at 2am merrily running the restore, and you hit a snag: tape 2 won’t read. Doesn’t matter why, the tape could be bad, maybe you left it out of the tape safe overnight, and the radio station next door managed to erase it with the magnetic waves they transmit (this actually happened), the data is gone. So is all data after it. See Incremental backups require that all tapes since the last full backup be present and working. So tapes 3-6 may as well be empty, because you are never getting the data off of them. Ever.

If you can’t run full backups every day, use Differential backups instead of Incrementals. Let’s say that in the scenario the user had been running differentials rather than incrementals. They could then restore to current using just the original full backup, and the last differential.

Method 4: Now I’m running differential backups to tape every single day!

But you fail to check the backup logs every day, and the backup job you though had been running for the last year actually failed 273 days ago, and has been requesting the “correct” tape since then. I’ve seen this one a lot (in fact, I think this would be the most popular reason for data loss if you have backup software running).

You’ve got to check your backup logs. It sucks, and it’s boring, but it’s one of those things you just have to do.

Method 5: Alright, I’m running differentials to tape, and have been checking my logs for the last 2 years every single day!

But you’ve never run a test restore. If you haven’t restored data from the tape successfully, there is no data on the tape. The tape was bad, the backup software failed (silently of course), the gremlins ate it.

Method 6: Ok, now I spend two hours reading the log and then randomly restoring files from my backups (before putting the tapes in the tape safe) every single day!

And then your server room catches fire. All machines, and the safe holding the backup tapes are destroyed. You never took any offsite, because you have a tape safe. It happens. It’s unfortunate.

Method 7: Enough, I give up on tape! Now I run a full backup to a RAID5 NAS every single day!

But you ordered your NAS with the drives form the manufacturer, and they used 4 HDD’s from the same batch, and two failed. This is the one that always gets them! The strength of RAID5 is that more than one drive has to fail before the RAID is unrecoverable. The weakness is that hard drives from the same batch tend to fail at the same time (or thereabouts).

To strengthen your RAID system, always make sure that you have drives from different batches, if not from different manufacturers (this is not always the best idea, but that is an argument for another time). For instance: to take care of my backup needs at home, I bought a Buffalo Terastation. Unfortunately, Buffalo sent me a Terastation with 4 drives from the same batch (you can usually tell if they all have the same date on them, sometimes there will be a batch code on the drive). I bought 3 more of the same model drive from 3 different manufacturers, and now have the most healthy RAID I can.

These are not the only ways to lose data, but they are by far the most common. How would I know? I was the Worldwide Manager of Technical Support for a backup software company for several years. And I always got to be the one to explain to the customers why their data is gone.

So what do I do?

There are as many answers to that question as there are IT shops with backup systems. Here is how I protect data at my office:

I backup all data every day (full backup) to a NAS configured in RAID5, with a hot spare. I check the health of the RAID every day (it takes about two minutes). Once a week I backup the entire RAID to LTO3 tape, and take the tapes offsite (currently I am taking them home, where they go into a DATA rated fire safe (there is a difference, do your homework), and then into my large safe where I keep all my other valuables. My ideal would be to have them delivered to a bank safety deposit box, but that costs money.

At home, I back up all my data to the aforementioned Terastation. Once per month, I copy all the data off to a USB HDD (actually two of them), and take one to work where it goes into the tape safe.

Is it perfect? No. Does it stand a much better chance of keeping that data alive through a catastrophic event? Absolutely. You don’t have to go to these lengths to protect your data, but you should be aware of the risks.

Fortunately, windows has an option that allows you to get one step closer to avoiding those very annoying lockups.  This isn’t a cure-all, but can be helpful.  This only requires a simple tweak to your registry. Here’s how….  (note: I always make a backup of my registry before making changes, so I recommend you do this first but not required).

1) Go To Regedit: Start -> Run ->  Type: Regedit

2) Find the correct directory: HKey_Current_User -> Control Panel -> Desktop

3) Find the correct file: Look on the right side and scroll down to find WaitToKillAppTimeout.  You’ll notice that this likely says 20000 today.  That’s the time in miliseconds that it waits before it stops an application that has locked up.  That’s 20 seconds!  But we’ll change that…..

4)  Modify the File: Double click on WaitToKillAppTimeout.  You’ll then get a new window that allows you to edit the “Value Data”.  I changed mine to 1000 (1 second).  Then click “OK” to complete the modification.

5) Close out of the registry. Click the big x on the top upper right.

6) You’re done….

One step closer to a finely tuned machine.

Kerry enjoys writing about a variety of topics.  Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com which is a reverse phone directory website that allows you to lookup and report unwanted phone calls.  You can also read her blog which discusses phone number privacy issues.

Then there are the times where I find myself five minutes into the conversation going “uhhhh, yeah that’s not good, I wonder what could cause that?” (believe it or not, us IT people don’t in fact know immediately exactly what is wrong with your computer, and we’re even wrong once in a third Tuesday of the week).

When I need to get a crystal clear picture of what is happening on a system, I turn to Process Explorer from Sysinternals (now brought to you by Microsoft!). Process Explorer is everything that Windows’ Task Manager wishes it was:

Overview

Process Explorer is an advanced process management utility that picks up where Task Manager leaves off. It will show you detailed information about a process including its icon, command-line, full image path, memory statistics, user account, security attributes, and more. When you zoom in on a particular process you can list the DLLs it has loaded or the operating system resource handles it has open. A search capability enables you to track down a process that has a resource opened, such as a file, directory or Registry key, or to view the list of processes that have a DLL loaded.

The Process Explorer display consists of two sub-windows. The top always shows a list of the currently active processes, including the names of their owning accounts, whereas the information displayed in the bottom window, which you can close, depends on the mode that Process Explorer is in: if it is in handle mode you will see the handles that the process selected in the top window has opened; if Process Explorer is in DLL mode you will see the DLLs and memory-mapped files that the process has loaded.

Process Explorer also has a powerful search capability that will quickly show you which processes have particular handles opened or DLLs loaded. The unique capabilities of Process Explorer make it useful for tracking down DLL-version problems or handle leaks, and provide insight into the way Windows and applications work.

You can obtain equivalent command-line tools, Handle and ListDLLs, at the Sysinternals Web site.

Process Explorer does not require administrative privileges to run and works on Windows 9x/Me, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and on the x64 version of 64-bit Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008.

So, why use this rather than any of the dozens of other Task Manager replacements you can find on the internet? Well for starters, Process Explorer was written by Mark Russinovich. Mr. Russinovich is acknowledged as one of the foremost experts on Microsoft Windows in general, and the NTFS  file system in particular. The man is incredibly knowledgeable about the internal workings of Microsoft Operating Systems, and has authored several books on Microsoft Technologies.

Beyond that, the sheer depth of functionality in this product makes it a hands down winner in my book. Oh and did I mention that you can run it from a USB drive?

You can get more information on Process Explorer (and download it) here.

Initially I had some trepidation about doing an AA on Evernote, because as of v3, it is web centric, and some of the great features of the old v2.2 have been removed. But man is it useful!

ok, so what is Evernote? It’s difficult to explain correctly. Basically it is a note taking application on the order of Microsoft’s OneNote (which I like, but can’t justify buying a copy of for every system I work on, so it’s kind of limited in its use for me), but taken to a whole different level, oh, and it’s free (sort of).

Here is the description from the Evernote site:

Remember everything.

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere. Did we mention that it’s free?

Yeah, that’s about accurate. Currently there is a free Evernote app for Windows, and Mac OS X (Leopard), a bookmarklet that will work on just about any browser, a Firefox extension, and apps for the iPhone, Palm Pre, Windows mobile phones, and limited Blackberry models .

It requires Blackberry OS4.6 or above so at the moment it is limited to the Bold (and since I just got one, this is a good thing), Curve (the new one), and Storm, however I have no doubt that RIM will update all others to 4.6 soon.

The thing that makes this a killer app for me is that Evernote can make text in images searchable. So if I take a picture with my Blackberry of say, a BSoD error message, and save it to Evernote, I can then access it on my desktop (or another machine connected to the internet), and figure out what that error message is telling me.

All in all, the ability to clip portions of websites, entire web pages, text from documents, and email from Outlook (yeah it integrates with Outlook), makes this a really really handy tool for IT work (not to mention blogging).

The free accounts are limited to 40MB of Monthly upload data (text, images, audio, and .pdf files only), whereas the premium version gets you 500MB per moth, removes the small advertising window in the desktop app, and can sync any kind of file.

While 40MB may not seem like much, it is roughly 20,000 text notes, or 400 mobile snapshots, or 270 web clips, or 40 audio notes, or 11 high resolution photos. 500MB is roughly 12.5 times that amount of data.

The cost of the premium account is $5/mo. or $45/year.

If you’d like to try Evernote out, you can sign up and download it here: http://www.evernote.com/

Ever buy a used Hard Drive on Ebay or Craigslist? Ever look to see if there was any data on it? I have, and let me tell you, it is downright scary what people will leave on HDD’s when they sell them as used. I recently purchased 12 used 250 GB SATA HDD’s from Ebay for a NAS project I was working on, and of those 12, 9 of them had not been so much as formatted.

Of those 9, all but one had data that would have been usable for identity theft: files with credit card information, copies of bills, saved email that had account information, not to mention the astounding number of ummm, not safe for work pictures taken by (or of) the former owners. In all cases I could have contacted the former owner, as on all 9 drives I found current addresses and phone numbers for the former owners.

This is 2009, I would have thought that by now better than 25% of people selling used hard drives would know better.

As an IT Professional, I get used computers all the time (for some reason everyone I work with thinks I need every used machine I can get my hands on, especially if it has a “Designed for Windows 95!” sticker on it!). The ratio of these HDD’s that I get with data still on them is more like 95%. It’s easy to format a HDD, until you get one that just won’t format. Mostly the ones I’ve seen this on were disks that I installed an obscure linux distro on, and then for whatever reason decided to install Windows on. The Microsoft format tools are not always capable of handling partitions like this, which is where DBAN comes in.

Darik’s Boot And Nuke (or DBAN) is a self-contained boot disk that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction.

One of the really great things about DBAN is that it can run from a floppy, or be burned to a bootable CD, which means it can be used on almost any computer. Better than that, DBAN has many options for how it wipes the disk, ranging from the single pass “autonuke”, to the 35 pass random data Gutmann method, and of course DBAN also offers users a method for definable number of passes.

In short, DBAN excels at destroying all data on a Hard Disk. You can find more information on DBAN here.

LMFAO!

_TheAddictedAdmiN_

I decided to start my investigation by running WinDirStat and looking for any oddly large files. The largest portion of the System disk is consumed by the Program Files directory (no big surprise there), and aside from a couple slightly disturbing large files from my backup software there is only one group of large files on the drive - hovering in at about 12GB for the 8 or so files. And they all have the same path and are similarly named: C:\System Volume Information\{914b4760-84b2-11dd-bca9-000e0cb2b564}{3808876b-c176-4e28-b7ae-04046e6cc752}

Hmmm, interesting. A quick Google search turns up some results linking this directory (more specifically files with CSLID names in this directory) to two things: System Restore points, and virus files.

Well I’m pretty sure it’s not virus files (no other odd behavior or weird network activity), and if I’m not mistaken to enable System Restore on WS2003 you have to manually copy over some files from an XP CD (which is a pretty cool hack, but not something I’ve done on any corporate network I’ve ever worked on).

At this point I start hearing dramatic music in the back of my mind, I’ve got a bonafied mystery! Or at least initial facts would indicate so.

Well a bit more in depth investigation turns up what some of you already knew at this point, the culprit is VSS. But I never configured VSS! (queue swelling of dramatic music in the background)

Ok so this is something of a mystery after all. So I go digging around in the event logs for the last 3 years looking for the initial VSS snapshot message. It sounds like a lot of work, but Microsoft Log Parser actually makes things like this pretty trivial.

Turns out that the VSS snapshots started on the same day that I installed our current Backup software (Yosemite Backup 8.5 sp2) which cooincidentally has the ability to make use of VSS snapshots!

Now this is not a huge issue, as VSS will delete old snapshots when space is needed, however I tend to take exception to software doing things like this without my permission.

Well luckily for me, I used to be a manager at the company that makes our backup software, so I fire up my trusty IM client, and start poking at the engineering department.

Twenty minutes later I have my trusty pipe and smoking jacket firmly in place, as I am feeling quite like Sherlock Holmes. It seems that in fact it was the backup software which enabled VSS for all volumes on my server, and (because it uses the defaults when enabling VSS) had set VSS to not limit the space consumed by snapshots!

A simple trip into Disk Management, and a quick change to the drive’s Property page, and VSS is now limited to 4GB for the system partition (which is far more than I’ll ever need). Interestingly enough had I disabled the VSS service on this machine before installing the backup software, it would not have enabled VSS. I’ve asked that they include a note about VSS being automatically configured to the Yosemite Backup installer (it may exist now, I’m not sure as I haven’t actually read any of the installer screens in years), but who knows when that will make it into the software.

As a side note, I’ve spoken to the Tech Support Manager at Yosemite Technologies (they make Yosemite Backup), and they are currently writing a knowledge base article about this, and how to change the VSS settings from the defaults that Yosemite Backup enables.

I posted a little while back about how I recently upgraded my entire home network to a Windows 2008 domain, which includes Windows Vista Clients.

Well, my wife got to playing with her desktop for the first time last week, and one of the things she noticed was that when she went to view her photos in her pictures directory, that there weren’t any thumbnails for her to preview the images. Me being her free tech support (I think that is why she still puts up with me) she asked me to fix it.

There are two ways to get the thumbnails back. The first way, you do the following within the folder you meant to view thumbnails in:

1. Click on Organize > Folder and Search Options
2. Click the View Tab
3. Uncheck the “Always show icons, never thumbnails” option
4. Click Apply, then OK.

The other option is to:

1. Click Start > Contol Panel
2. In classic view, click on Folder Options
3. Click the View Tab
4. Uncheck the “Always show icons, never thumbnails” option
5. Click Apply, then OK.

You guessed it, the second option is basically the same as the first. To turn the thumbnails off, you just check the box instead of uncheck it. Do you have any other cool, quick Vista tips you want to share? Hit me up in the comments.

Originally posted on Bauer-Power.

Hit F7 and you will get a complete list of commands that you executed. Use the arrow keys to highlight the command you want to run again or just hit the number key corresponding to the command that you want to execute.

History keys

Use F1 to paste the previous command one character at a time, F2 (followed by a number) to paste the previous command up to the said number and F3 to paste the previous command.

Run multiple commands

You can run multiple command by separating them with &&. Note that this doesn’t run the commands simultaneously. Instead, the command towards the left is run first and if it completes successfully then the second command will run. If the first command fails, then the second command will not run

Check out these and other great Command Line Tips from Varun over at MakeUseOf.com here:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-windows-command-line-tips-tricks-you-should-definitely-check-out/

_TheRunningOutOfTimeAdmiN_

I hit Window-R and typed CMD. I pasted the first line of my batch file into the command prompt like so:

xcopy e:\users\* x:\server32\\users /D /E /C /F /H /Y

I got back Insufficient Memory and 0 files copied. This box has 4gb of memory and less than 1gb in use. I hit up Google who had be try disabling my Antivirus to no avail.

I then found a XCOPY replacement called XXCopy (found here). It says that it should help me with this exact error. It also says XXcopy is faster than Xcopy and can deal with file names longer than 256 character. So instead of counting the paths and filenames characters I downloaded and installed it. I replaced the XCOPY with XXCopy in my scripts and they took off like a bullet. I haven’t gotten into it yet but it does all of XCOPY’s switches and then some as you can see below.

_TheXXAdmiN_

I am quite positive that there are as many solutions (both paid and unpaid) for handling Win32 Syslogs as there are SysAdmins out there. On my *NIX machines syslogs are a simple thing, configure Syslog-ng and move on. My Windows Syslogs are a whole different story.

First off, shame on you Microsoft for not providing built in syslogd integration capabilities. With the volume of BSD code in Windows there is just no acceptable reason for this.

But that doesn’t help me. The long term goal is of course to get a central Syslog server set up that will handle and archive log entries from all of my machines (*NIX and Win32), but that is going to take two things:

1. Time I don’t have.
2. Money I don’t have.

I need a solution for archiving my Windows event logs right now, in a central location, until I can get the central Syslog server set up. As I mentioned, most of the solutions for doing this on Windows machines (the ones I feel comfortable entrusting my event logs to anyway) cost somewhere in the neighborhood of an arm, a leg, and most of an ear, so those are not viable options. Now what do you do?

Well if you’re me, you roll your own solution. I’ve got several WS2003 servers that I need to log the event data from, because, well to be quite honest, because this network was built by someone that is more of a *NIX SysAdmin, and didn’t set up the Windows side correctly, so there are quite a few odd bugs in this network that will take quite a while to work out.

Now I could go through and manually export the event logs to a file once a month, but that is way too much work. I decided to script the solution to this problem using VBScript (as it is available on all of the Servers I need event log info from).

I give you logArchive.vbs:

If you are having issues copy & pasting this script from Fire Fox you can grab it from here.

'#==============================================================================
'#==============================================================================
'#  SCRIPT.........:  logArchive.vbs
'#  AUTHOR.........:  Joe Glessner
'#  EMAIL..........:  jglessner@gmail.com
'#  VERSION........:  1.0
'#  DATE...........:  30JUL07
'#  COPYRIGHT......:  2008, Joe-IT.com
'#  LICENSE........:  Freeware
'#  REQUIREMENTS...:
'#
'#  DESCRIPTION....:  This script backs up all of the event logs on the
'#                    designated computer, to the specified file server.
'#                    Optionally this script can also clear the event logs once
'#                    they are archived.
'#
'#  NOTES..........:
'#
'#  CUSTOMIZE......:
'#==============================================================================
'#  REVISED BY.....:
'#  EMAIL..........:
'#  REVISION DATE..:
'#  REVISION NOTES.:
'#
'#==============================================================================
'#==============================================================================
'**Start Encode**

'#==============================================================================
'#  START OF SCRIPT
'#==============================================================================
'Option Explicit
'On Error Resume Next

    '#--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    '#  SCRIPT CONFIGURATION SECTION
    '#--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    '#  OPTIONS:
    '#              strComputer = The name of the computer that generated the
    '#                            event logs (e.g. fs01 - use "." for the local
    '#                            machine.
    '#              objDir2 =      The destination directory on the file server.
    '#              clearEVTLogs   "No" does not clear the event logs. "Yes"
    '#                             will clear the event logs once the current
    '#                             logs are archived.
    '#--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    DIM strComputer, objDir2
    strComputer = "dc1"
    objDir2 = "\\SyslogServer\EventLogs$\" & strComputer
    clearEVTLogs = "Yes"

    '#--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    '#  Declare Remaining Variables
    '#--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Dim current: current = Now
    Dim strDateStamp: strDateStamp = dateStamp(current)
    DIM objDir1: objDir1 = "\\" & strComputer & "\c$\EVT"

    '#--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    '#  Ensure that the Scratch directory exists on the source computer.
    '#--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Set filesys=CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
    If Not filesys.FolderExists(objDir1) Then
        createDir(objDir1)
    End If

    '#--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    '#  Ensure that the destination directory exists on the file server.
    '#--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    If Not filesys.FolderExists(objDir2) Then
        createDir(objDir2)
    End If

    '#--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    '#  Make create backups of the event logs to the Scratch directory.
    '#--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    strPath = objDir2 & "\"
    Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
        & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate, (Backup, Security)}!\\" _
            & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
    Set colLogFiles = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
        ("Select * from Win32_NTEventLogFile")
    For Each objLogfile in colLogFiles
        strCopyFile = strDateStamp & "_" & strComputer & "_" _
        & objLogFile.LogFileName & ".evt&"
        strBackupFile = "c:\EVT\" & strDateStamp & "_" _
            & strComputer & "_" & objLogFile.LogFileName & ".evt"
        strBackupLog = objLogFile.BackupEventLog _
            (strBackupFile)
        'WScript.Echo objLogFile.LogFileName & " backed up to " _
        '    & strBackupFile

        '#----------------------------------------------------------------------
        '#  Copy the event logs to the file server.
        '#----------------------------------------------------------------------
        call copyAFile(objDir1, strPath, strCopyFile)

        '#----------------------------------------------------------------------
        '#  Clear the event logs, or not.
        '#----------------------------------------------------------------------
        If clearEVTLogs = "Yes" then
            objLogFile.ClearEventLog()
        End If
    Next

'#==============================================================================
'#  SUBROUTINES/FUNCTIONS/CLASSES
'#==============================================================================
    '#--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    '#  FUNCTION.........:  dateStamp(ByVal dt)
    '#  PURPOSE..........:  Generate an 8-character date stamp from the current
    '#                      VBScript date.
    '#  ARGUMENTS........:  dt = The date stamp to convert.
    '#  EXAMPLE..........:  Dim current: current = Now
    '#                      WScript.Echo dateStamp(current)
    '#  REQUIREMENTS.....:
    '#  NOTES............:  The above example will produce output of 20080730 if
    '#                      run on 07/30/08.
    '#--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Function dateStamp(ByVal dt)
        Dim y, m, d
        y = Year(dt)
        m = Month(dt)
        If Len(m) = 1 Then m = "0" & m
        d = Day(dt)
        If Len(d) = 1 Then d = "0" & d
        dateStamp = y & m & d
    End Function

    '#--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    '#  FUNCTION........:  copyAFile()
    '#  ARGUMENTS.......:  strScourceFolder = The folder containing the files to
    '#                                        be copied.
    '#                     strTargetFolder = The Destination Folder
    '#                     strFileName = The name and file extension of the file
    '#                                   to be copied.
    '#  PURPOSE.........:  General purpose file copying function.
    '#  EXAMPLE.........:  Wscript.Echo copyAFile("C:\", "\\Server\Share", _
    '#                     & "fileName.txt")
    '#  NOTES...........:  strSourceFolder folder must exist
    '#                     strTargetFolder folder must exist
    '#                     strFileName file must exist in strSourceFolder folder
    '#--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Function copyAFile( Byval strSourceFolder, Byval strTargetFolder, _
        Byval strFileName)
        Dim objFSO, booOverWrite, strResult
        Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
        If objFSO.FileExists( strSourceFolder & "\" & strFileName) _
            And UCase( strSourceFolder)  UCase( strTargetFolder) Then
            If objFSO.FolderExists( strTargetFolder) Then
                Else
                strResult = "The destination folder does not exist!"
                'copyAFile = strResult
                Exit Function
            End If
            If objFSO.FileExists( strTargetFolder & "\" & strFileName) Then
                strResult = "The file exists, overwritten"
                booOverWrite = vbTrue
            Else
                strResult = "The file does not exist, created"
                booOverWrite = vbFalse
            End If
            objFSO.CopyFile strSourceFolder & "\" _
                & strFileName, strTargetFolder & "\", booOverWrite
        Else
            strResult = "The source file does not exist, or " _
                & "identical Source and Target folders!"
        End If
        'copyAFile = strResult
    End Function

    '#--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    '#  FUNCTION.......:  createDir(strDir)
    '#  ARGUMENTS......:  strDir = UNC path of the directory to create.
    '#  PURPOSE........:  Creates directories.
    '#  EXAMPLE........:  createDir("c:\WSH_TEST\")
    '#                    createDir("c:\WSH_TEST\" & "Files\")
    '#  NOTES..........:  If creating a subdirectory of a directory that does
    '#                    not exist, the parent directory must be created
    '#                    first, as shown in the example.
    '#--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Function createDir(strDir)
        set filesys=CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
        Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
        If Not filesys.FolderExists(strDir) Then
            Set objFolder = objFSO.CreateFolder(strDir)
        End If
    End Function

'#==============================================================================
'#  END OF FILE
'#==============================================================================

So, What does it do? This script will copy the event logs (well technically it creates a backup it doesn’t actually copy the data per se) from the target system to a directory defined by the user, and optionally clear the logs.

You can then use the built in Windows Event Log viewer to open the resulting file and search the event logs for the time period in the file.

How I use this:

I have several copies of this script set up in Windows’ Task Scheduler to run on the first of every month at exactly midnight, with the option to clear the event logs turned on. This allows me to create a Monthly archive of event logs for each Server that it is run against, and when I get a cryptic event log message like “Windows has previously logged the source of this error”, I can go back and search for the referenced previous entry.

Like I said before, this is a temporary system designed to do one thing: archive all of the Event logs from all of my Windows servers to a central location until I can get a proper central Syslog server in place. It works flawlessly for the task it was designed to do.

In recent months we have seen the emergence of the almighty Netbook. We’ve also been lucky enough to see the inevitable forces of Moore’s Law take their hold on the Netbook world and gave us some prices that are awesomely affordable. However, at Ask The Admin, we have access to some Moore’s Law action that is still pretty unreachable to most people. Moore’s Law states that as time goes by, computers, and their respective components, get stronger, faster and cheaper. We’ve taken it upon ourselves to make it our mission to take advantage of this trending and bring the savings straight to you.

Enter the Pearl White Asus EEE 900 Netbook PC. This ultra-portable little bad-boy touts a 8.9″ 1024×600 display, a 16GB SSD solid state drive, 1GB of RAM, a built-in 1.3MP web camera, and Windows XP Home pre-installed. It has everything you need to make all the connections you need to make while on the go. And it’s ultra-light, thin profile will make it a cinch to carry around. Best of all this exclusive, ATA only deal gets you FREE Shipping and $150 off the sticker price of $349 = you only pay $199! Click here to get in on this EXCLUSIVE Buy.com offer brought to you by AskTheAdmin.com.

Commodore 64 - The one you used to play Bruce Lee on ,8,1

Michele from Spiceworks just gave me a shout that the new version is officially in Beta. We wanted you to be one of the first to know that Spiceworks version 4.0 Beta has just been released – which you can download now & play with here: 4.0 Beta Group

You can check out the new bells and whistles in this video here: http://spiceworks.com/tv/?cat=previews&video=40-Preview-1 

SOME COOL NEW 4.0 HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE:

• Network Map – Allows you to see and graphically navigate the details of your network as well as determine the connections that exist between your devices.
• Events Collaboration – You can now see the most common events, collaborate with others and find out the best way to troubleshoot the issue (all decided by Spiceworks users – yet another way that Spiceworks is making IT ’social’)
• New Customizable End User Portal – Now you can have a custom intranet up and running in no time! Create the “face” of your IT organization by adding new pages and content areas, changing color schemes, even re-arrange the page layouts. Learn More
• Updated UI – Our fresh new UI helps you speed through your day! In addition to faster load times, the inventory "icon view" now shows more items (plus has a new handy drop down menu of common useful actions) and the tabs on the left-side navigation panel have been moved to the top for better accessibility. Read More
• Help Desk Now Supports Collaboration - One of the most requested help desk features! Collaboration allows you to cc: your boss or someone else on a ticket….and keep them informed as you work on the ticket. Learn More
• Tickets Anywhere – Now, you can work your tickets from any email client simply by including special commands in the body of the email. You can create, work, assign, and even close a ticket from anywhere! Learn How

For more details on the new 4.0 features visit the 4.0 Beta Group

And of course we want to support the awesome free software from Spiceworks so here is a little link love for them…

Free Network Monitoring Software for Network Management

If you download and try it out let us know how it goes for you!

_TheSpiceyAdmiN_

If you haven’t already I suggest taking the hour and 20 minutes to watch this. And we would love to hear your comments on it!

Thanks SlothMan for sending this on over!

_TheDoTheWaveAdmiN_

Check out http://www.instanthousecall.com and install their free Remote Support tool. It really is awesome and saved my ass yesterday when I needed to connect to a remote Vista machine on the fly and my Single Click Vnc just wasn’t doing it! What do you guys use for remote support? We would love to hear your favorites in the comments.

_TheRemoteAdmiN_

We at AskTheAdmin.com LOVE cutting edge technology! And when we first got to play with Microsoft’s surface I fell in love! Then I saw the outrageous price tag and put it out of my head. Now HP is working on some realistic and amazing technology. We are going to be checking out and reviewing their dx9000 in the near future along with having a contest to give one of these guys away.

The Marriott Airport Hotel in Nashville recently installed two HP dx9000 TouchSmart systems at their concierge station in the lobby. The software application they’ll be using was developed by HP partner, Nashville-based technology company Uniguest, and offers travelers and hotel guests a revolutionary, custom-branded user interface with advanced security that allows users to access real time flight arrival/departure information and also print their boarding passes.

The whole concept behind using these in the business world is customizable applications that are developed and power the machine. That means these devices can do anything you want them to and really anything you can imagine. Check out this video below and let’s hear your thoughts on them!

_TheTouchMeAdmiN_

I found out I could view the log file by going to Help – About Windows Live Writer – and View Log.

Once there I found this log:

WindowsLiveWriter,2944,None,00021,01-Jun-2009 12:48:15.973,"Exception parsing XML-RPC response:

WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.XmlRpcClientInvalidResponseException: Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server —> System.Xml.XmlException: There are multiple root elements. Line 2, position 2.
   at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.Throw(Exception e)
   at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.Throw(String res, String arg)
   at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.Throw(Int32 pos, String res)
   at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.ParseDocumentContent()
   at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.Read()
   at System.Xml.XmlLoader.LoadNode(Boolean skipOverWhitespace)
   at System.Xml.XmlLoader.LoadDocSequence(XmlDocument parentDoc)
   at System.Xml.XmlLoader.Load(XmlDocument doc, XmlReader reader, Boolean preserveWhitespace)
   at System.Xml.XmlDocument.Load(XmlReader reader)
   at System.Xml.XmlDocument.LoadXml(String xml)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.XmlRpcMethodResponse..ctor(String responseText)
   — End of inner exception stack trace —
   at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.XmlRpcMethodResponse..ctor(String responseText)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.XmlRpcClient.CallMethod(String methodName, XmlRpcValue[] parameters)

<br />
<b>Fatal error</b>:  Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 886081 bytes) in <b>/usr/www/users/esengul/makeuseof.com/wp-includes/class-IXR.php</b> on line <b>207</b><br />
",""
WindowsLiveWriter,2944,Fail,00022,01-Jun-2009 12:48:16.004,"WindowsLive.Writer.Extensibility.BlogClient.BlogClientInvalidServerResponseException: Invalid Server Response - The response to the metaWeblog.newMediaObject method received from the blog server was invalid:

Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server
   at WindowsLive.Writer.BlogClient.Clients.XmlRpcBlogClient.CallMethod(String methodName, XmlRpcValue[] parameters)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.BlogClient.Clients.MetaweblogClient.DoBeforePublishUploadWork(IFileUploadContext uploadContext)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.WeblogBlogFileUploader.DoUploadWorkBeforePublish(IFileUploadContext uploadContext)","   at System.Environment.GetStackTrace(Exception e, Boolean needFileInfo)
   at System.Environment.get_StackTrace()
   at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.Diagnostics.LogFileTraceListener.Fail(String message)
   at System.Diagnostics.TraceInternal.Fail(String message)
   at System.Diagnostics.Trace.Fail(String message)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.WeblogBlogFileUploader.DoUploadWorkBeforePublish(IFileUploadContext uploadContext)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.BlogPostReferenceFixer.FileUploadWorker.DoUploadWork(String fileReference, BlogFileUploader fileUploader, Boolean isWindowsLiveLightboxCloneEnabled)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.BlogPostReferenceFixer.LocalFileTransformer.Transform(BeginTag tag, String reference)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.HTML.HtmlReferenceFixer.LocalFileReferenceFixupFilter.FixReferences(BeginTag tag, String reference)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.HTML.HtmlReferenceFixer.OnBeginTag(BeginTag tag)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.LightWeightHTMLDocumentIterator.Parse()
   at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.HTML.HtmlReferenceFixer.FixLocalFileReferences(String html, ReferenceFixer fixer)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.UpdateWeblogAsyncOperation.LocalSupportingFileUploader.UploadFilesBeforePublish()
   at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.UpdateWeblogAsyncOperation.DoWork()
   at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.AsyncOperation.InternalStart()
   at System.Threading.ThreadHelper.ThreadStart_Context(Object state)
   at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.Run(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state)
   at System.Threading.ThreadHelper.ThreadStart()"

Out of Memory? Fatal error? What’s going on here why would my post need 33554432 bytes + another 886081  bytes? That is for you non-cis or math majors 32.8450 megabytes!

I checked it out and Jing was saving my screenshots as HUGE files! Each of my images were several Megabytes! I corrected my images – re-uploaded and BAM! We were straight.

_TheReUploadingAdmiN_

Think about it… How would you like the ability to dynamically find the items you need with a saved search? So the boss called and said - I need all the purchase orders less than a months old and tagged Smith?

How about Power Point Presentations created by your partner in the past two weeks?

All of those with the letter z in the title?

Just the ones with the word NEW in the file name? We see your creating crazy searches and we know you hate to have to recreate em’ each time. Do you want to make it a little easier on your self?? Save them searches!

You can do it easily! Just follow these steps:

1. Browse as normal to Start Search.
2. Type any characters in the search box (a star works great because, as a wildcard, it won’t restrict the search once you save it)
3. then click Advanced Search. Modify the fields however you want and when you are satisified,
4. click Save Search.

From Microsoft’s Website:

Depending upon how often you search for a certain group of files, you might want to take advantage of Windows Vista’s new Search Folders, too. These are searches that run instantly when you click them—you don’t even need to insert a search term after the first time you run a search and save it.

You can use the preconfigured searches that Windows Vista offers, such as Recent Documents (which shows you all recently used documents on your computer), or you can set up your own searches.

To set up your own Search Folders, click Start and click your personal folder. In your personal folder navigation pane, click Searches to bring up the program “searches.” Click the program and the Search Folders window will appear.

Next, type in the information that you want to search for in the search box at the top right of the Searches window. In the example shown here, I typed in Microsoft. Then I clicked Save Search to save the search. Now, the next time I’m looking for information related to Microsoft, I just click my personal folder and select the Microsoft search from my Search Folders.

And you now have a custom search saved for you! You can set up several of them for your most popular search terms. Anyone else using this out there in Admin land?

_theSearchForMeAdmiN_

Do you guys go off the grid or is your mobile surgically implanted nowadays?

We would love to hear from you in the comments!

The Admin is on his way to the woods! Speak to you on Monday!

_TheOutbackAdmiN_

“Why isn’t Group Policy Working on this client?”
“Did You Check the DNS Configuration of the Client?”

One of the most frequently encountered problems with Windows 2000 and above is that things just ’stop working’ when DNS gets out of whack. Specifically, if you’re not seeing Group Policy apply to your client machines, make sure their DNS client is pointing to a Domain Controller or other authoritative source for the domain. If it’s pointing to the wrong place or not pointing anywhere, Group Policy will simply not be downloaded.

As a colleague of mine likes to say, ‘Healthy DNS equals a healthy Active Directory.’

Moreover, in the age of Windows 2003/2008 with its multiple forests with cross-forest trusts, Group Policy could be applying from just about anywhere and everywhere. It’s more important than ever to verify that all DNS server pointers are designed properly and working as they should. For instance, if clients cannot access their ‘home’ Domain Controllers while leveraging a cross-forest trust, they won’t get Group Policy.

Finally, to put a fine point on it, DNS leverages only the fully qualified name. It’s not enough to verify that you can resolve a computer named xppro1 as opposed to xppro1.corp.com. The first is actually the NetBIOS name and not the fully qualified domain name. The second is the fully qualified domain name. If you find yourself in a DNS resolution situation where resolving the NetBIOS name will work, but the fully qualified name will not work, then you have a DNS problem that needs to be addressed.

Another Awesome GP Post by Jeremy from GPAnswers.com

[via XKCD]

If you’re like me, you use your Windows-based computer almost every day.  The startup and shutdown sounds have just gotten a little boring to be honest.  Here are some simple steps to use your favorite voice, music excerpt, or sound for your computer’s start-up and shutdown sequence.  You’ll need two soundbites.

Step 1. Choose the soundbites: Choose the track which you want to play at start-up and shutdown jingles.  Key to note:

1. It must be in the .WAV format.
2. The soundbite shouldn’t be too long otherwise you could be waiting for the bite to end before you begin computing.

Your preferred file is likely an mp3, but regardless, if its not in .WAV format, you can easily convert it using  any converter.  My preference is audacity, which is an open source music editor <– it allows you to actually select a “soundbite” from any song.

Step 2.   Rename the new files. Rename these files as “Windows XP Startup.WAV” and “Windows XP Shutdown.WAV” respectively.

Step 3. Rename the old files.

1. Goto “C:\WINDOWS\MEDIA”
2. Find the files “Windows XP Startup.WAV” and “Windows XP Shutdown.WAV”, and rename them to Windows XP Startup_old.WAV and  Windows XP Shutdown_old.WAV respectively. This step is required for the case if you need to revert back to these sounds, otherwise you can ignore this step and just delete them (not recommended).

Step 4. Save your new files. Just copy your files from step 2 into the directory “C:\WINDOWS\MEDIA”

You now have new startup and shutdown tunes.

Kerry enjoys writing about a variety of topics.  Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com which is a reverse phone directory website.  You can also read her blog which discusses phone number privacy issues.

Upon running the application a window will come up. Don’t be alarmed that it says No devices found…. Check for administrative privileges first. This is normal as it starts querying your machine. You can see at the bottom of the window it is already searching and getting to know your system’s devices.

You can select which items you want to backup or select everything and do a full backup. After clicking the Start Backup button you will see this screen.

Hit the browse button to select your path to backup to. For this instance I am putting it on my external second hard drive. I choose Make New Folder and continued.

I hit OK and then Start Backup…

And then it was done… Almost instantly!

I hit OK and then attempted to restore my drivers…

I hit restore from the main menu and got this window:

I opened the file and hit blamo all my drivers were listed. And restoring was as easy as clicking Restore!

Do you have a tool you use or another method of backing up your drivers? If you do – please share them with us in the comments!

Commodore64 back again to bring you the best deals we’ve found by tirelessly scouring the web for the best savings around. Father’s Day is around the corner, and time is running out to get dad that perfect gift. It’s no surprise that we get the best deals around because we have access to some of the best coupons and savings links around. We’ve picked the best of the best, and rounded them up for you right here. Check them out:

 
 

This little monster in a box packs quite a punch! It sports an Intel Dual Core T2400 @ 1.83Ghz. On top of that there’s plenty of Hard Drive space with it’s 60Gb 7200 rpm internal drive. And the graphics are brilliant with it’s 14.1 inch display which rocks a Radeon X1400 128Mb Graphics Array. You can grab this awesome little machine for 50% OFF the retail price of $1000. That’s right, just $499 for this awesome machine.
Click here to grab it while it’s still available!

 
 
 



 
 
 
This awesome little memory keychain hold a whopping 4GB in its new, low-profile Generation 2 design. Originally costing $65, we get the best deals here at AskTheAdmin, so now you can grab it for 34% off the retail price for just $41.95! Click here to grab it!

 
 
 
 
 



 
 
This gorgeous, Piano Black Plasma TV is a whopping 42″ Wide Screen and supports up to 720p HDTV. The awesome technology built into this puppy allows for a 100,000:1 Dynamic Contrast Ratio! This Beautiful flat screen TV retails for $1000, but we would never let our readers pay retail… Click this link to get over $300 off and grab this TV for $698 + FREE Budget Shipping! That’s insane!

 
These are some awesome deals that are just too good not to share with our lucky readers. Enjoy!

 
Commodore64 (The one you used to play Bruce Lee on ,8,1)

 
 
 
 

Guess who is going to save the day? It’s AskTheAdmin! Well actually it’s Google but the answer is brought to you by AskTheAdmin!

Google now has Activesync support on m.google.com meaning they can create a new gmail account and both sync to it! Let

s check out how it works:

To set up Google Sync on your Windows Mobile device, please follow the steps below.
Important Note: Make sure that you have backed up any Contacts and Calendars from your phone to your computer before proceeding.

Getting Started

1. Open the Active Sync application on your device’s home screen.
2. Click the link Set up your device to sync with it.
3. Enter m.google.com as the server address.
4. Ensure that the SSL option is checked.

Sign In to Google Account

5. Click Next.
6. Enter your full Google Account email address as the User name.
7. Enter your Google Account password as the Password.
8. Leave the Domain field empty. If your device requires you to enter a domain name, enter google.
9. Click Next.
10. Check only Contacts and Calendar.
11. Click Finish.

12. Press the Sync softkey on the left to synchronize.

You’ve now set up Google Sync for your Windows Mobile device.
Tip: If your business, school, or organization uses Google Apps, your administrator will first need to enable ActiveSync before you can take advantage of this feature.

Thanks Commodore for the early morning chuckle!

_TheNgrmadAdmiN_

Let’s check it out:

Grab your super secret .rar file, copy it to the same directory as your not so super secret jpg image. Let’s use c:\test for our example.

Open up a command prompt by clicking Start/Run and typing “cmd” and click ok.
In the DOS window, type “cd c:\test” to navigate to our folder
Type “copy /b input.jpg + input.rar ouput.jpg
(input jpg is the picture that will show when it is opened, input.rar is the secret file you want to hide and output.jpg will be the name of the new combined file)

It is as simple as that!

You can double click the new file and it will show it as a picture, BUT… if you open it with winrar, you will see the files contained.

1. sudo apt-get update
2. sudo apt-get install likewise-open
3. sudo domainjoin-cli join fqdn.of.your.domain Administrator
4. sudo update-rc.d likewise-open defaults
5. sudo /etc/init.d/likewise-open start

After that is done, you can log out, then log back in with your domain\username account (You have to add the domain\ first). Here is the beautiful screen shot of my Ubuntu machine in Active directory:


Pretty cool right? I bet you never knew it could be that easy to do. Try it yourself. Let me know how it goes in the comments.

I didn’t write this. I got it from a site, who got it from a site that no longer exists. Although the tone is a bit whiny, it is essentially true.

1. If you ask me technical questions please don’t argue with me because you don’t like my answer. If you think you know more about the topic, why ask? And if I’m arguing with you…it’s because I am positive that I am correct, otherwise I’d just say “I don’t know” or give you some tips on where to look it up, I don’t have the time to just argue for the sake of it.
2. Starting a conversation by insulting yourself (i.e. “I’m such an idiot”) will not make me laugh, or feel sorry for you;  all it will do is remind me that yes, you are an idiot and that I am going to hate having to talk to you. Trust me;  you don’t want to start a call that way.
3. I am OK with you making mistakes, fixing them is my job. I am not OK with you lying to me about a mistake you made. It makes it much harder to resolve and thus makes my job more difficult. Be honest and we can get the problem resolved and continue on with our business.
4. There is no magic “Fix it” button. Everything takes some amount of work to fix, and not everything is worth fixing or even possible to fix. If I say that you just need to re-do a document that you accidentally deleted 2 months ago, please don’t get mad at me.  I’m not ignoring your problem, and it’s not that I don’t like you, I just can’t always fix everything.
5. Not everything you ask me to do is “urgent”. In fact, by marking things as “urgent” every time, you almost ensure that I treat none of it as a priority.
6. You are not the only one who needs help, and you usually don’t have the most urgent issue. Give me some time to get to your problem, it will get fixed.
7. Emailing me several times about the same issue in the same day is not only unnecessary, it’s highly annoying. Emails will stay until I delete them. I won’t delete them until I’m done with them. I will typically respond as soon as I have a useful update. If it is an urgent issue, let me know (see number 5).
8. Yes, I prefer email over telephone calls. It has nothing to do with being friendly, it’s about efficiency. It is much faster and easier for me to list out a set of questions that I need you to answer than it is for me to call and ask you them one by one. You can find the answers at your leisure and while I’m waiting I can work on other problems.
9. Yes, I seem blunt and rude. It’s not that I mean to, I just don’t have the time to sugar coat things for you. I assume we are both adults and can handle the reality of a problem. If you did something wrong, I will tell you. I don’t care that it was a mistake, because it really makes no difference to me. Don’t take it personal, I just don’t want it to happen again.
10. And finally, yes, I can read your email, I can see what web pages you look at while you are at work, yes, I can access every file on your work computer, and I can tell if you are chatting with people on an instant messenger or chat room (and can also read what you are typing). But no, I don’t do it. It’s unethical, I’m busy, and in all reality you aren’t all that interesting. So unless I am instructed to specifically monitor or investigate your actions, I don’t. There really are much more interesting things on the internet than you.

The point of that article is one that everyone wants to make, whether they are in IT, or are testers, consultants, or engineers. The point is we are all trying to do our jobs the best that we can and it’s easiest to do that if we all work together, stop pointing fingers and give other people the space that we would like to get as well. If we can do that more often than not, things will go well and work out.

_TheWatchingYouAdmiN_

If you want to have the contacts sorted by last name instead by using the following method:

1. Open Microsoft Outlook.
2. From the Tools menu, click Account Settings.
3. On the Address Books tab, click Outlook Address Book.
4. Click Change.
5. Under the list of Outlook Address Books, select the one you want to change the sort order for.
6. Click File As (Smith, John).
7. Click Close.
8. Click Close again.

Exit Outlook to have your changes applied. Once you re-open Outlook, you can verify that the sort order has been changed to last name. From the Tools menu, click Options. From the Preferences tab, click the Contact Options button. Verify that Last, First is listed as the Default “File As” order.

[Via LockerGnome]

And no TheAdmiN was not featured… Thanks for looking out Kevin!

Enjoy!

_TheGeekedOutAdmiN_

For the past two months something has been going on with our firewall at the office.

I use JFFNMS to monitor my network and I began receiving notifications that certain services and ports on the firewall were randomly closing and opening. I tried to see what was going on, but nothing turned up in the event logs. It would happen once or twice a day, but none of the users ever mentioned the services not being available or having trouble accessing the Internet, so I didn’t make much of it.

Beginning about two weeks ago it started happening more and more often, and this time the firewall was crashing every 3-4 days. When the server would crash everyone would lose external email and Internet access, so this clearly was not an acceptable situation. I tried some suggested fixes, including updating the NIC drivers but nothing worked. The machine would run out of resources, eventually lock up and need to be hard booted. I had decided it was probably time to call Microsoft to find out what was going on.

Before I laid out the $270 for a support call I needed to do some research into when this problem really started (and MS was probably going to ask me for that information anyway.) I looked back through my email archive to see when I started receiving the failure notifications. I had been focusing only on the past two weeks when the machine started crashing and not remembering that the problem actually started much earlier.

Now comes the important part. I used that information to look through the log I keep of server and network changes and maintenance. It turns out that two months ago I made a change to the firewall rules, and the problem started the very next day. It was hard to see how this particular change would cause the machine to crash, but it was too coincidental, so I disabled that rule and restarted the firewall service. There have been no warnings, problems or crashes since.

I hope you can see the value of good record keeping. If you are making changes to your network without keeping a detailed record of what you are doing and when you’re doing it, it is going to be extremely difficult to diagnose problems later.

You can keep the log any way that works for you, just be sure you are keeping something. I used to keep it manually in an actual notebook, but I later switched to using a blog. That just made it easier to have everything logged by date. Then I categorize the posts so it’s easy to find all the entries about my Exchange server or firewall. If you keep the log electronically, you would be wise to keep it someplace other than on a file server on your network. If you can’t get into the network or server because of a problem, you don’t want

to also be kept from accessing the change log which might help you fix it.

Geeky details: What I think was really happening was that the rule I changed blocked access to some domains I didn’t want people accessing. These domains were still sending us email, or more accurately; spam, but the return emails/NDRs were being blocked. The firewall rule also was set to create a log entry when the rule fired. As the volume of incoming emails increased, the system couldn’t keep up with the logging of the return failed emails and the firewall was configured to shut down the firewall service if logging failed too many times in a row. So once I turned off logging for that rule, everything went back to normal.

So let that be a lesson to you too. Unless you’re running a real high-security system, don’t let a logging failure bring down the server. Logs are important, but not usually not more important than uptime.

I get a lot of questions about how to “lock down” workstations.

So, in the next series of tips, I’m going to give you some little strategic “base hits” for doing that.

Indeed, there’s s not a “magic bullet” toward true desktop lockdown. And, well, I also know SOME people tend to go “overboard” once they start tasting the sweet, sweet taste of “users not bothering them anymore.”

But, let’s (collectively) try not to go bananas as we implement some of these strategies. (What? People dealing with ‘Policy Control’ can sometimes go bananas once they start locking things down? Never!)

The Tip: Replacing your shell

So, in this first tip, I want to share a neat secret. Did you know you can “replace the shell” ? It’s true. You don’t NEED to use Explorer as your shell. How about “Calc” ? Yep.. Login, and… Calc. Or Solitaire. Or, DogFoodMaker. That’s it. The only app running. Nothing else.

It’s possible.

Step 1: Choosing your shell

The policy is found under:

User | Policies | Administrative Templates | System | Custom User Interface

Enter in “c:\windows\system32\calc.exe” to try.

(I’m using hard coded paths, but you might want to use variables.)

Step 1A: A more useful shell

A more useful thing to do would be Internet Explorer, say, for cafeteria, library machines, and others.

Try entering in this (using quotes)
“C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe”

Step 2: Locking down your desktop a little bit

We want to make it so users cannot use task manager, or lock out the machine. Thankfully those options are located under:

User | Policies | Administrative Templates | System | CTL+ALT+DEL Options

You might also want to Turn off Windows hotkeys:

User | Administrative Templates | Windows Comp | Windows Explorer | ?Turn off Windows+X hotkeys?

Step 3: Lock down IE to your liking

There are a zillion options here. But some of my top favorites are

User | Administrative Templates | Windows Components | Internet Exp. | Browser Menus |

“File Menu: Disable open menu option”

and

“File menu: Disable closing the browser and Explorer windows”

Other areas to explore and control are the: Toolbars and Internet Control Panel sections.

Now, you’ve quickly taken a machine, and made it “IE only” and “pretty well locked down.”

It’s not perfect. Users could still get to, say, the command prompt by typing in
“c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe” into the browser window.

But you’re almost home now, and that’s a pretty good start. Do you have group policy tips, tricks and how to’s to share? Well then hit up the comments and make yourself heard!

Written by Jeremy Moskowitz of GPanswers.com

Unless there is an need for it, being an administrator I’d rather block it! they bring all  kind of viruses to my children (the servers). Besides, it would make information leeks more easier (in my workplace only the managers get an external E-mail accounts+ internet access, while slaves get a foot print on their butts).

Now, How we can block memory sticks without stopping other USB devices (Keyboard, mouse, printer…etc.)

FOR FREE?

Plain and Simple:

Windows Registry, All you have to do is run (regedit) then browse to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\UsbStor

Disable usb storge: set the key (Start) to 4

Enable usb storge: set the key (Start) to 3

Too geeky for you? there are some free cool tool with GUI interface that can share your burden called

USB Drive Disabler :
http://www.intelliadmin.com/Downloads.htm

Also to enable/disable remotely USB Remote Drive Disabler (You need Admin privilage of course)

There are also similar ones to enable/disable CD and floppy.

Ohhh and one more thing: if you want to enable USB storage but only for reading (said to be working on WinXP SP2 only) then browse to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies

then Right click > new > DWORD Value name it WriteProtect and give it a value of 1 for read only, 0 for Read/Write.

Thanks Mohamed Alreafi for the awesome email! What do you guys do to block or lock down USB devices?

The Olympus FE-3010 is a sleek little camera. This sexy little beast is easy on the eye, easy on the pocket and best of all, easy for mom to use. The FE-310 is the easy choice for everyone looking for an eye-catching, high-performance camera at an exceedingly attractive price for mom. Incorporating a 5x zoom, 8.0 Megapixels and plenty of other advanced features, it has all bases covered. For a limited time get over 25% off the list price of $199 plus FREE SHIPPING using our special AskTheAdmin link below.
Click here to get this Metallic Magenta camera and over 25% off

The Kodak Easyshare P820 Digital Photo Frame is the best bang for the buck due solely to our special AskTheAdmin deals. This sleek digital picture frame features an 8″ HQ LCD screen, 2 SD slots, and comes complete with 2 decorative mattes that will help your Easyshare Photo Frame complement any decor, which mom is sure to love. And now, thanks to our Admin connection, we can get you a 49% off discount off the regular retail price of $149 plus FREE SHIPPING. And the only way you can get this deal is to follow this link:
click to get 49% off the Kodak P820 Easyshare Frame courtesy of AskTheAdmin.
 

This whopping 14.1-Inch Digital Picture Frame is a brilliant way for mom to display her favorite pics. Bluetooth function allows wireless photo downloads from her phone or computer. 512MB included memory can be expanded to 1GB. Built in speakers, a bright huge screen and a bunch of more features make this photo frame a great value. But as usual, AskTheAdmin doesn’t let our users pay retail (blech). So now, you get 48% off the regular retail price! Just in time to grab for mom.
Click here to get our special discount of 48% off the regular retail price of $279!
Grab it here for $144.99
 

Introducing the Flip Video Mino which puts the power of video in your pocket. The super-portable, super-simple Mino makes it easy for mom to capture and share high-quality video anywhere and everywhere. At 40% smaller than its already pocket-sized brother the Flip Ultra, the Flip Mino barely makes a dent in even the tightest of jeans. Mom will love this perfect little gift, and AskTheAdmin loves bringing you tech deals so a $21 discount plus free shipping on this handy little cam will make you AND mom happy. Click here to get this awesome deal.
 

You can leave your thanks in the comments…
Commodore64 (The one you used to play Bruce Lee on ,8,1)
 

It is actually pretty easy and involves NO registry editing like you might have expected. Simply open up my computer choose Folder Options and then File Types

And then click the advanced button and then the New button to associate an Action with this file type. For this example I am associating JPG files with editing in Adobe CS2. In the action line I type what I want to show up on the right click menu and the application used to perform action is the command line for the magic behind the shortcut.

I advise you to use the Browse button to browse on over to the EXE associated with the application you want to open. Here I browsed over to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Photoshop.exe . It puts this in quotes leave them there and put a space after the last quote and add another quote followed by %L and another quote. This passes the selected file name to the application. Without this it will just open Photoshop and what good it that?

But after you are finished and click ok on all the open windows you can go check out your handy work by right clicking on a JPG…

And what do you know? It actually works! Ah what a great way to start the day shaving valuable seconds off of my work flow. It might give me an extra 15 minutes over the course of the day to play with FireNes!

_TheRightClickThisAdmiN_

This has been a rough month for me at my day job. We are in the midst of rolling our existing company over to an ESOP (basically employee owned, buying out the current owners over a period of years), which has basically doubled my workload in getting the back end ready for the change over.

In addition to this we had a senior accounting executive fired, which led me to discover that our entire AR system is being handled by a series of highly customized Excel spreadsheets. When I say highly customized I mean that not only will they only work on one computer, but they will only work under one single user’s profile (which happens to be the previously mentioned, and recently departed, senior accounting executive).

This in turn led me (with the help of the accounting department) to the inevitable conclusion that our entire ERP product needs to be completely replaced. Why? Because it  is not capable of handling the volume of of a specific AR transaction we have on a daily basis without quickly locking up the server (which is how the current “Franken-Excel” system came to be in the first place).

Ok great! I’ve never liked the ERP solution we use, and have already done the research on what I would like to replace it with. After getting the current owner to sign off on it, I’ve now effectively quadrupled my workload. Oh did I mention the go live date for the new ERP system can be no later than October 1st?

Which led me to the conversation with one of the executives in our company about the fact that I need more IT staff. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind working the occasional 14-18 hour day, but when it becomes 10-12 hours every day (and at least a couple hours over the weekend) there comes a point where I would rather just not come in.

More to the point it’s a bad situation for the company. At this point my IT staff is worn kind of thin, and we are basically paralyzed. We can continue what we are doing, but doing anything more (like when the main printer goes down because you accidentally tried to print the entire Internet, or when the pr0n fiend on the third floor infests the network with spyware, and the servers start to lag because of it) is going to force one of us to stop doing something else.

In theory this is a undesirable situation, but in reality what happens is this; we have a bunch of unhappy users, and the IT staff is making decisions about what to get done based on what is least likely to get them fired if it doesn’t get done.

So keeping that in mind, the question I am asked by this executive is; what is the ideal ratio of IT Staff to Users?

Wait, what? It just doesn’t work like that (though I sincerely and truly do wish it were that easy).

Unfortunately IT is not a commodity like so many executives seem to think it is. IT work is not like filing, or data entry, unfortunately it is just not something that your average person can do (if it were I would not have a job).

And beyond that, it can’t be quantified as simple man hours either. An issue that may be a trivial five minute fix for me, may take another admin two hours to fix (or vice versa).

Which led me to the real question, how do I quantify the number of IT staff that is required for this company? Because when you cut right to the source of the issue, each and every company is going to have a different level of IT requirements based on a multitude of factors:

1. What does the company do? (a software company is going to require more IT involvement than say a restaurant)
2. How screwed up is the current IT system?
3. How screwed up are the company’s business processes?
4. What level of technical competence do the users have?

These are by no means the only factors, but they are the ones that have the biggest impact on what any given company’s ideal “IT staff to Users ratio” should be.

So what’s the answer? If I knew that I would be making Millions telling everyone how to get it right. All I can offer is this: the people making staffing decisions need to listen when their IT people tell them they need help, because the unfortunate fact of life is this; in the modern workplace (and perhaps more than any other business unit) when IT fails, the business fails.

I could list a plethora of statistics to back that up, but I just don’t have the time.

How can you create a good, well written, and secure password that you can remember — yet avoids the situation above?  Here’s a simple, cool password trick.

1) Find a password you like, for example my dog’s name Barkie

2) Replace one or two letters with a number or character. In this case Barkie becomes B@rk1e <– here’s your primary password.  I used the replacement characters @=a and 1=i, but you can do any other combination.

3) Make your custom password. Any time you visit a new website where you need to register and create a password, use the website’s name as a prefix to your password.  My preference is the first 5 characters of the website name is its easy to remember, but you can use any number of characters.  For example, if I register at AskTheAdmin.com, I would use as a password askth_B@rk1e.

And so you have it, a custom password for every website.

Kerry enjoys writing about a variety of topics.  Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com which is a reverse phone directory website.  You can also read her blog which discusses personal privacy issues.

Starting to use Windows Live Writer more and more it becomes apparent that it would be really nice to take it with me between computers. If you have more than one blog it is tedious to set everything up every time you need to install again. You have all your blog settings, ping server settings and FTP settings to redo.

Over on PortableApps.com a lot of work has been done to get apps such as Firefox, Thunderbird even Open Office to run in a portable environment. So I figured WLW was a natural for this environment. It takes a bit to figure it out but once you do it works really well.

This is my first portable app! I’ve posted my Windows Live Writer Portable launcher here: WindowsLiveWriterPortable.zip

The zip file does NOT contain everything you need to run Windows Live Writer. This is simply a launcher which will run Windows Live Writer in a self contained environment so you can take everything with you between computers via your USB memory stick or other portable device.

To get this portable app to work you need to follow these steps closely:

1. Unzip this file to your USB or other portable drive
2. Download Windows Live Writer from: http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com
3. Install Windows Live Write as usual. You don’t even have to run it, just so long as it is installed.
4. Copy ALL of the files FROM c:\program files\windows live writer TO the new structure on your USB drive that looks like the graphic below \WindowsLiveWriterPortable\App\WindowsLiveWriter

5. You can now uninstall Windows Live Writer if you want

To use Windows Live Writer from your USB drive simply double click on WindowsLiveWriterPortable.exe and it will take care of the necessary registry settings and document paths. If you have used WLW on your computer before, the launcher will copy all your settings and files to the USB drive.

This is my first portable app so hopefully it will work well. So for so good for me in limited testing.

[Via TechLifeWeb]

The PSTools suite is comprised of the following utilities:

• PsExec - execute processes remotely
• PsFile - shows files opened remotely
• PsGetSid - display the SID of a computer or a user
• PsInfo - list information about a system
• PsKill - kill processes by name or process ID
• PsList - list detailed information about processes
• PsLoggedOn - see who’s logged on locally and via resource sharing (full source is included)
• PsLogList - dump event log records
• PsPasswd - changes account passwords
• PsService - view and control services
• PsShutdown - shuts down and optionally reboots a computer
• PsSuspend - suspends processes
• PsUptime - shows you how long a system has been running since its last reboot (PsUptime’s functionality has been incorporated into PsInfo)

While these tools work locally (and in most cases work better than the native Windows utilities, or provide functionality that is not available natively), they really shine when it comes to working with remote machines. If I had nothing else but a fresh (default) Windows install, I could probably continue to administer my network using the PSTools.

Notice I said nothing but a default windows install. Microsoft has done something rather unique with the PSTools suite (in fact with the entire Sysinternals utilities collection), and made them usable from a “live” website (to get an overview of what is available, just type live.sysinternals.com\tools into your browser’s address bar).

Now all these tools are stand alone executables (no need to install), so they can be run from a USB drive (SWEET!!!), however being able to run them without even having the executables on the machine is just awesome!

I am talking about full on algebra, Trigonometry and Calculus.

Well I went a’ Googling and came up with http://www.MathWay.com . MathWay is a simple website that can prove to be invaluable. When you get to the site  you will see this:

By pulling down the Select Subject menu you will see the following subjects:

Let’s start with some long basic math and see how it does. And let’s try not to jump down my throat telling me how easy this problem is. Yes it can be easily solved in your head on paper with your trusty calculator but, we have to start somewhere, right?

I put in Basic Math and then typed in 100+21-12+10000009*6 and hit the answer button

It returned this:

If you are checking it out on your calculator to make sure it is correct – trust me I already did! The correct answer is 6000163 just as MathWay states. If you hit the Get Step-by-Step Solutions it will take you to page advertising a paid program.

Now we don’t want that now do we?

Let’s try something a little harder – anyone remember the distributive property? How about this example:

4x^2a(x^2-11) can you bat that one out in your head? Let’s see what MathWay can do with it:

There is so much geeky math goodness contained in MathWay – if you are a math buff you might just explode. Check out the main headings of what is covered.

Do you have a go to site for your complex math issues? We would love to hear about it in the comments!

Now, the nitty gritty.

Holy %^it things are moving fast. We’ve got DHTML, Javascript and CSS already throwing us curveballs on a daily basis.
As if things werent moving fast enough, we have the advent of Google Chrome, Safari for PC (wtf?) and the resurrection in popularity of Opera. Lest we forget all the other OS’es running Konqueror and other lesser known browsers.

It’s sheerly mind-boggling the amount of keeping-up a front end dev must do. My belief is that tabular information and the basic premise behind query languages will always stay the same as long as the data stays 2 dimensional. However the demands on today’s user interfaces grow every day some schmuck makes a widget with a slider that moves ever so more fluidly than its predecessor.

Enter AJAX - Asynchronous Javascript And XML - This was the next stepping stone for many interactive user experiences which relied on the native, built in browser libraries and started to finally move us away from the annoying Flash platform and it’s keyframe-style programming model, and into a new era of highly visual programming with limitless animation possibilities. So, we spent time learning that. Greaaaat.

Then Adobe bought Macromedia. How annoying. But still, Flash has always been Flash.
But not anymore… now it’s called FLEX, and like AJAX it also abandons the concept of keyframes in favor of object oriented animation and programming. But once again, its something new to learn.
If it’s not a browser, its a new OS. If its’s not a new OS, it’s a new version of HTML or CSS ala W3C. If it’s none of those things then it’s a new language/platform altogether.

The art of keeping up with the plethora of versions and platforms and languages (OH MY!) is truly an artful balancing act. Something of a circus I would say. I’ve played Civilization type games where the team who upgrades faster wins. This is totally the case for front-end devs. Because the expectations of the end user are so directly tied to front end design, it becomes almost impossible to achieve that ‘WOW’ factor that used to happen in a simple tween of a vector back in the day. Simply put, people have probably seen it all, or at least feel that way. Now people expect slick sliders and even checkboxes that fade on and off. On the more advanced side people are now expecting that same drag and drop desktop functionality in websites and reporting features ala Crystal Reports, but REAL TIME.

I always saw this coming - the day web browsing and data perusing can ultimately shed it’s refresh button forever. Advances in OS interfaces (ala OSX) have given people more of a feeling for what they’re touching with their mouse. People today feel somehow more connected to the website they are viewing. No longer are people just hapless viewers. Upon entrance to a website (onLoad), users are already drawn into the experience with a multitude of switches and buttons and ads being flown at them in what seems to be 3d.

This burder is being taken on by the front end web dev today. In today’s market companies are looking for all around guys, like myself, who can dive into a simple SQL statement as quickly as formatting a complex wireframe based on CSS principles, and just as quickly repair a content [div] that has broken out of its bounds for some strange reason, and only in one browser and not the other.

This would be a top level folder that shows up on your Windows desktop and in My Computer. Didn’t think you could do that? Well read on…

The folder we will be creating can not be removed - just like My Computer or My Documents. Easy accessibility for your most used folder.

You can assign the folder to be anywhere you have access to and use your own icon file for it. It will be the first view you see in any Open File box.

We found the step by step from PcTools talking about windows 2000. With a few slight mods we got it working on XP and it should work on Vista as well.

Now you can create your own custom system folder, like “My Documents”, that can not be deleted or renamed and place it on the desktop and My Computer. All you need to do is add a handful of registry entries. The last two steps add the shortcut to My Computer and The Desktop. You can do one or the other.

Editing the registry can be dangerous so be careful and make a backup before you begin!

1. Create the following series of keys and values in the registry at [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID] or [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID]. The GUID, globally unique identifier, can be a random number, in this example “FD4DF9E0-E3DE-11CE-BFCF-ABCD1DE12345″ is used. See this article for more GUID examples.
2. Create a new key called [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{FD4DF9E0-E3DE-11CE-BFCF-ABCD1DE12345}] and set (Default) to equal the name of the folder e.g. “My Folder”.
3. Create a new sub-key under the main key called “DefaultIcon” (i.e. [HKEY_CLASSES...ABCD1DE12345}\DefaultIcon]) and set (Default) to equal the filename for the icon you want to display e.g. “c:\windows\myicon.ico”.
4. Create a new sub-key under the main key called “InProcServer32″ (i.e. [HKEY_CLASSES...ABCD1DE12345}\InProcServer32]) and set (Default) to equal “shell32.dll”, also create a new String value called “ThreadingModel” and set it to “Apartment”.
5. Create a set of sub-keys starting at the main key “Shell\Open My Menu\Command” (i.e. [HKEY_CLASSES...ABCD1DE12345}\Shell\Open My Folder\Command]) and set (Default) to equal the command to execute when clicked, in this case explorer, e.g. “explorer /root,c:\MyFolder”.
6. Create a set of sub-keys starting at the main key “ShellEx\PropertySheetHandlers\{FD4DF9E0-E3DE-11CE-BFCF-ABCD1DE12345}”
   (i.e. [HKEY_CLASSES...ABCD1DE12345}\ShellEx\PropertySheetHandlers
   \{FD4DF9E0-E3DE-11CE-BFCF-ABCD1DE12345}])
7. Create a new sub-key under the main key called “ShellFolder” (i.e. [HKEY_CLASSES...ABCD1DE12345}\ShellFolder]) and create a new Binary value called “Attributes” and set it to “00 00 00 00″.
8. (Optional) To place the folder on the desktop add the following key:
   [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\
   Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace\{FD4DF9E0-E3DE-11CE-BFCF-ABCD1DE12345}]
9. (Optional) To place the folder in My Computer add the following key:
   [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\
   Explorer\MyComputer\NameSpace\{FD4DF9E0-E3DE-11CE-BFCF-ABCD1DE12345}]

Now the folder cannot be deleted from the desktop or My Computer, nor can it be renamed other than removing the CLSID and the entries under NAME SPACE.

If you flucked shit up Are Banging your head against you desk messed up on any typing a blank icon will appear on your desktop or in My Computer - go back and check for any erroneous characters!

_TheMyShortcutsBetterThanYoursAdmiN_

The interesting thing is that I never installed or use Outlook Express.

How did this happen??

Well, apparently this is caused by Windows XP SP3 and Windows Desktop Search (which I also installed)…ugh.  here’s quite a lively forum chat over at Microsoft on this subject also.

(One note of caution.  Be very careful when modifying your registry.  If you do not feel comfortable doing it, please don’t do it.  Any inadvertent changes or mistakes could cause disastrous effects..)

Here’s how to stop it from occurring:

1. Close all programs.

2. Create a Restore Point

3.  Find this key in the registry:  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Identities\{GUID}\Software\Microsoft\Outlook Express\5.0

4.  Double click the Compact Check Count

5.  Select the Base option for Decimal and change the value to 0

6.  Close the Registry

Kerry enjoys writing about a variety of topics.  Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com which is a reverse phone directory website.  You can also read her blog which discusses personal privacy issues.

It is no secret that I love to use my keyboard – no matter if it is typing out console commands, browsing in dos or command line ftp. It might be the inner geek in me but I still love it.

That is where Keyboardr comes in. You simply browse to their site and start typing.

Let’s take a look at it:

I searched for Conficker the April Fool’s Worm that was supposed to ramp up its carnage yesterday. As soon as I started typing, results are displayed below. You select what you want by hitting the arrow keys. If you continue typing, your results will filter all without hitting your mouse or enter yet.

I added "AskTheAdmin" to my query and was returned with the following items. I want the first selection so I hit the enter key on my keyboard.

It opens a new tab in Firefox and I can hit Control + Tab to cycle through my tabs. Keyboardr also separates your search results into normal Google results in the center. Google Images and YouTube on the right and Google Blog results below.

The above images and YouTube videos came up with the AskTheAdmin query. I simply hit my right arrow key and it moved over to that part of the screen and upon hitting enter that item will open up in a new tab.

The author talks about Keyboardr on his blog, this little quote struck me so I thought I would share it with you:

In the first place keyboardr is a meta-search. You get Google, Wikipedia, Youtube altogether. The instant search and the keyboard navigation are replacing the feeling of "searching" with the feeling of "launching".

he goes on to give us a few tips and tricks

• Pressing ESC resets the search, takes you back to the clock instantly !
• One thing only a few know is, google is a all-in-one search. Try searching for "imdb Matrix". Or "lastfm james brown". Or "php str_replace".
• A feature often missed by the users eye, is the "All results" links to get the full version of each search engine. E.g. you need to calculate "5+5", "define:word" or check "weather cologne" then you just open "All results" from Google, right above the results, to get your answers from Google.

Do you use any sort of non-traditional search engines? How is that working out for ya? Please share them with us in the comments!

Running in a mixed Windows/Mac environment I find it annoying to deal with all the little artifacts the great OS’s leave behind. All of our mixed shares and network drives are full of these frickin ‘Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files.

Each folder with initiated thumbnail views (that is where they have displayed a Thumbnails or Filmstrip view in Windows Explorer) will have a Thumbs.db file.

They do nothing for me. I look at them like litter on the ground. I looked up what they do and started deleting them. But they came back…

Some times I get caught up in doing something after in enrages me enough. So I was now determined to get rid of these files from my shares here on out. I did some research on how to get rid of them permanently and how to prevent them from coming back!

Here is how you prevent Windows and OS X from creating these annoying files.

Prevent the creation of Thumbs.db in Windows:

Now this doesn’t help you deleting the files that already may exist.

To accomplish that you may be interested in BlueHarvest to scrub your network of .DS_Store files and you can do a simple find and replace on Windows.

Find and Replace:

To delete all the existing Thumbs.db files on your computer you just:

For those of you who are scared to delete system files, the Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files are strictly cosmetic on network volumes and will have almost no impact on pretty much anything! Do you use them for something? Let us know in the comments.

_TheOCAdmiN_