DaVe’s Musings

So, I’ve now discovered that blogs quickly get out of date. I’ve posted some tech articles, but I just realized I haven’t updated my main page in over a year! Maybe I just don’t have anything that interesting to say… nah, that can’t be it.

Well, one site that I did discover recently is Finetune. It’s a great site that allows you to build custom playlists, stream music, listen to other’s playlists, etc. Take a listen to the playlist I put together of some of my favorite artists and tracks:

Ok, so that’s all I’ve really got for now. Check back later (hopefully, not a year later).

Like many others, I have not been very happy with my Microsoft Vista upgrade. Vista is just not ready for prime time yet. I have frequent crashes, programs that do not work, devices that do not work, etc. In fact I just ordered a new home PC from Dell (with Vista) and my first plan is to rebuild it with Windows XP. I don’t think I can take having Vista at home as well as at work.

MS Office 2007 has been a completely different experience altogether. I love it! While it takes some getting used to, the new features and layout are great. Outlook has a number of new features which make life easier, including: auto-detecting Exchange server settings, better multiple email account management, the ability to have sent items for IMAP accounts stored in a separate folder, and auto-preview so that you can view attachments in Outlook without opening another program. So, this works great for images and MS Office programs, but it doesn’t have a PDF previewer installed. Luckily, Tim Heuer and Foxit software have developed one that you can download from his blog.

Oh yeah, make sure you download the Save as PDF add-in for Microsoft Office too. It lets you save files as PDF without needing to have Adobe Acrobat installed.

Having that annoying problem with IE automatically opening zip files instead of saving them?  Follow these steps to correct this behavior:

Open Windows Explorer.
Go to Tools | Folder Options | File Types.
Scroll down to ZIP and select it.
Click Restore to restore the default settings.
This sets the file type zip back to “Confirm open after download” which you can find in the advanced settings.

Ever need to check the status code that your server is returning for a certain web page?  Check out this link then:

 http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp

 

Here is a quick list of URLs to whitelist your permission based email lists:

• Yahoo: http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/mail/cgi_bulkmail
• AOL: http://postmaster.aol.com/

More soon…

Here is a great site to check if your web server is sending pages in compressed format:

http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php

This is definitely something you want to have turned on as it saves on bandwidth and download times.

CNET has an interesting article about Hyperic going open source. The Hyperic HQ software monitors what’s happening on company networks and reports events to administrators. This is the type of software that no one who is managing servers should be without, and now the solution is completely open source. Hyperic HQ allows you to:

• Auto-Discover all your software and hardware inventory
• Monitor every layer of your infrastructure
• Control servers and services remotely
• Track configuration, log, and security events
• Optimize your operations with a web-based multi-user portal
• Improve alerts through policy-driven definitions and automatic recovery

Other competing open source solutions include:

• OpenNMS
• Nagios
• Big Brother

Hyperic looks like the most advanced of these solutions, but I’ll be checking them out and updating this review with my findings.

Are the latest four Microsoft security patches not installing for you?  Is KB917537 one of the fixes? Well, it seems that this patch will not install unless you shut down the IIS Admin service and its dependent services manually (thanks Microsoft!).  My suggestion is to uncheck this patch from the list of four new security fixes and install the other three first.  Reboot if necessary after they have installed. Stop the IIS Admin Service and all its dependent services. Install KB917537 and reboot.  Now you’re all set!

Microsoft just released a neat little utility called Private Folder 1.0. It’s unsupported and will only run on “genuine” Windows XP.  What it does is give you a new folder called “My Private Folder” that is password protected to prevent anyone who may be sharing your computer from accessing the files in that folder.  From their web site:

Microsoft Private Folder 1.0 is a useful tool for you to protect your private data when your friends, colleagues, kids or other people share your PC or account. With this tool, you will get one password protected folder called ‘My Private Folder’ in your account to save your personal files. Download and have your private folder today!

No word on what encryption it uses or what happens if you forget the password.  Download it today and give it a try!

Here’s the code to add a timestamp to your vBulletin message board for ad code such as DoubleClick: