Windows Vista SP1 RC1 Issues

One of my computer is locking up almost every day. I leave it alone at night, when I come back in the morning I see it BlueScreened. I googled "Stop 0x00000077" or "KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR" and tried to find something that would explain my BSOD with Vista to no avail... and decided to try Vista SP1 RC1.

I downloaded the stand-alone version and tried to install it. It bluescreened half way there after half an hour or so (well, it said SP1 update can take hours in the screen so half an hour is great).

I tried on my other Vista machine and it even did not get that far. Then, Microsoft refreshed RC1 and I decided to try it again as my Vista keeps on locking up.

So, I browsed to Windows Vista Service Pack 1 page, and downloaded Windows Vista SP1 RC Refresh (Build 17128) – released 01/11/08. When unpacked it has 3 files in it. I ran the cmd, which entered a registry key that enabled me to see an Update for Vista SP1 Control Panel > Windows Update > "Check for Updates".

Update actually installed 3 files, rebooted. Then I went back to Windows Update and clicked "Check for Updates" but it did not find anything. I waited and tried a couple of mins later. This time it finally found SP1 RC1. I clicked install and it froze on me after a few mins.

I tried a couple more times suspecting that whatever issue was causing my lock-up , it was preventing update from finishing. And Windows Update was able to finish the download but it failed to install it. Error code: 80070005. Unfortunately Vista help did not list this error code.

After some search, I realized that many other has seen the same issue and the only solution I saw was Aaron Stebner's blog entry. Apparently, MS messed up permissioning and Windows Update does not have enough permissions to write some reg keys/files.

I followed the instructions mentioned. I do not know if this will work for me yet. I will post a follow up later.

[Update - 01/21/2008]
I ran the script from Aaron's page. It did a lot of things but failed to reset permissions on 7 keys. I rebooted and tried again, it kept on failing. I also tried running SP1 update but it too failed...

I looked into the error Kernel_Data_InPage_Error, I was getting. I had the following error codes: 0000007A (0xC020BF84, 0xC00009C, 02a266860, 0x82FE130D)
ntfs.sys - Address 82FE130D base at 82EF8000 Datestamp 47214597

So, there are 4 block of error codes:
1st set is about Lock Type (0xC020BF84)
2nd set is the I/O status (0xC00009C)
3rd set tells us about Current Process when BSOD occured(02a266860)
and 4th set mentions the memory code where error occured.

As per this article at MSDN, my issue was 0xC000009C, or STATUS_DEVICE_DATA_ERROR, is typically due to bad blocks (sectors) on the hard disk.

As my Page File was in C drive, probably there was some bad blocks in the C drive. Unfortunately, chkdisk did not help. So, I moved the page file to my other drive.

No lockups since then. And to my surprise, Vista SP1 RC1 installed successfully today!

Bill Gates last day at Microsoft from CES 2008

Earlier this evening Bill Gates gave his final Microsoft keynote at the 2008 CES show in Las Vegas. Throughout the keynote he made many references to what he will do with his free time once he retires from day to day operations at Microsoft. It turns out, Bill has big plans in addition to his foundation after all.

read more | digg story

Disposable Web Accounts

So, we are in 2008 now. After taking the final two weeks of 2007 off, I am back to work and catching up with e-mails & diggs. As I was looking at the most popular technology content in the last month, I noticed the subject above.

5 “DISPOSABLE” Web Accounts to Keep Your Identity Safe is the actual title of a wonderful post from makeuseof.com.

BugMeNot was already one of my favorite firefox addons. I especially liked "file.io" service...

Path Maximum Transmission Unit (PMTU) Black Hole Routers

Windows XP SP3 promises detection of Black Hole Routers, which is supposed to improve over all networking experience especially for laptops. While investigating the subject, I came across a good, comprehensive article about PMTU (Path Maximum Transmission Unit) at Microsoft site.

By default PMTU Black Hole Discovery for TCP/IP is disabled on Windows XP machines. It can be enabled though:

Setting: EnablePMTUBHDetect
Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters
Value Type: REG_DWORD Value: 1

"Changes in PMTU black hole router detection in Windows Server 2003 and in Windows Vista" is a good follow up article.

Enabling of PMTU Black Hole detection and changes are all result of Microsoft's "Next Generation TCP/IP Stack".

The Cable Guy from Microsoft has an article on enhancements that "Next Generation TCP/IP Stack" (terrible name IMHO) offers.

Vista BSOD

My vista install started to crash when there is a lot of disk activity. It would crash every other day at first. Then, at some point it started to go down shortly after I initiate PowerUsenet downloads.

I looked at MS documentation for 0x0000007B and concluded that it had something to do with Sata controller. Article suggested to replace cables as it could be caused by a faulty cable but doing so did not help.

Then, I bought a HighPoint Tech TocketRaid 1742 PCI card. Documentation suggested to simply install the card and point to the driver location once Vista detected it. Unfortunately, Vista kept on blue screening once card was installed and I could not reach the logon page.

I installed the card on an empty PCI slot and connected back my Promise SATA controller. After the Vista came up I installed drivers, shutdown pc and removed the promise controller. Then, I reconnected my SATA HDs to the new controller and succesfully booted.

I hope this will end my BSOD issues....Time will show.

Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) Test Drive

Ubuntu 7.10 was released yesterday. Below is my first hand impression of new release. The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, if you will...

Getting the image:
I tried all North America mirrors to find a fast image download site but I guess because of first day rush, all were slow, download speeds around 50 KB/s. After a couple of hours, I was able to access Georgia Tech mirror which let me download at speeds of 2MB/s, so I got the image in a matter of mins.

I usually use Lauchpad.net to order my free copies of Ubuntu, which is an awesome feature of Ubuntu Distro.

Because of firewall rules, I could not use torrents in my environment. Not sure how that would change my experience.

One thing I noticed was that Europe/Asia had a lot more mirrors and when I tried them I got almost the same download speeds: ~50KB/s. I hope more 'fast' mirrors are added for North America soon.

Installation:
Ubuntu installs were always good but not without hickups... When I was reading reviews, I had read something like 'Installation was even easier than Vista'. I attest to that now.

I decided to wipe out earlier version and install it on my IBM T40. I popped in the CD, live-cd install completed in a few mins. Then I clicked install shortcut on the desktop and installation started.

In all installs up to this version, time would always be incorrect, this worked fine. Install time was short and I had to click 'next' a couple of times to confirm keyboard, regions etc and enter username/pwd.

Devices:
When I say devices, I should confess that I don't really have a lot of devices to check the functionality. What has always been painful for me was Wireless Access. I have a netgear wireless card, which was automatically recognized, drivers were installed and was ready for me to use after reboot.

The only thing I noticed was, it was not available during install and at some point Ubuntu install warned me that I did not have internet connectivity, so Security Repositories/Updates would not be available at the time. No biggie.

Post-Install:
One of the exciting things I saw in 10 rocking features in 10 days series of articles was about Tight integration of Firefox with Ubuntu. So when I browsed to blogger site, firefox popped up a message for "missing plugin".

Unfortunately, things did not work as advertised after that. Flash Plugin was supposed to be installed seemlessly. Instead I got an error when I tried to install it.

In fact, once I clicked "close", it told me that plugin was installed and I needed to restart firefox. Of course, that was not true...

I also tried Firefox > Tool > Addons to install some plugins like GreaseMonkey but no luck there either. It kept on complaining about source not being available. If you look carefully, you will notice a type in "available".

I know some may think I am just being picky now, but I hate to see such typos as it gives you the impression of sloppiness. Ubuntu is a 'high-quality' distro, such small stuff does therefore matter (at least to me).

I am not sure if this is a bug or if there is some back-end issues here though. Because I also got a "Service Outage" page when I was trying to get some more explanation on what's going on.

Anyway, I am sure I can still download and install these stuff manually as I used to.

Screen Resolution: It always bothered me with Ubuntu/linux installs not to be able to easily increase screen resolution from current setting. Ok, "easily" is a relative term. Because normally, you would edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and then logout / log back in to see changes. That's a "no no".

In fact, in Ubuntu preview, Lifehacker touched upon this point: "It might not seem like a revolutionary feature, but users can now change their screen resolutions and refresh rates without having to log out or hack around in terminal."

I think it should be like in Windows, where all resolutions are listed and when users chooses one, it's tested and user is asked to confirm if it was OK. This is still missing from "easy-to-use" Ubuntu and require a bit more tech skills.

OK, I guess I will post more when I have more time in my hands to play with it. This is it for the time being. Oh, before I forget, I loved the fact that Compiz is the default window manager in Ubuntu now:)

Edit 10/22/2007: I am having an issue with Ubuntu start up. It does not start properly and a black screen is displayed. I play with the mouse and touch a few keys, I see HD activity in the meantime and after a minute or so logon screen shows up. I have an ATI card on this IBM T40 laptop, not sure what exactly is causing this but no update has resolved the issue yet.

Enable / Disable Outlook 2007 Rules

As a Blackberry user, one of my pain-points is with the pst files. Here is how it goes. Let's say Outlook is open and I get an e-mail, my rules process it and move it to one of the pst folders. Problem is that I don't get it in my BlackBerry.

Of course, if outlook was closed, or if the rules were not processed, that message would end up in my BlackBerry. As I want to keep outlook open, I have to disable the rules. There is no manual way of quickly doing this. If you look at Outlook Rules > Run Rules, you can not, for example, select all with Ctrl+a. You have to click and select each one of them. Painful!

So, I decided to create a macro, that would automatically disable the rules, or enable & run them. Idea is that in the morning, I will keep the rules disabled so that I will get them in my BB, and time to time I will run enable script to move them to psts.

Below is the code. In Outlook, you can
* press Alt+F11
* Expand Project1 (VbaProject.OTM)
* Expand Microsoft Office Outlook Objects
* double click ThisOutlookSession
and paste the code in there.

Then you can simply Press Alt+F8 and chose the action...


Sub DisableAllRules()
Dim colRules As Outlook.Rules
Dim oRule As Outlook.Rule
Dim count As Integer
Dim ruleList As String
'On Error Resume Next

'Get Rules from Session.DefaultStore object
Set colRules = Application.Session.DefaultStore.GetRules

' iterate all the rules
For Each oRule In colRules
oRule.Enabled = False
count = count + 1
ruleList = ruleList & vbCrLf & count & ". " & oRule.Name
Next

colRules.Save

' tell the user what you did
ruleList = "These rules were enabled: " & vbCrLf & ruleList
MsgBox ruleList, vbInformation, "Macro: DisableAllRules"

Set colRules = Nothing
Set oRule = Nothing
End Sub

Sub Enable_Run_AllRules()
Dim colRules As Outlook.Rules
Dim oRule As Outlook.Rule
Dim count As Integer
Dim ruleList As String
'On Error Resume Next

'Get Rules from Session.DefaultStore object
Set colRules = Application.Session.DefaultStore.GetRules

' iterate all the rules
For Each oRule In colRules
oRule.Enabled = True
oRule.Execute ShowProgress:=True
count = count + 1
ruleList = ruleList & vbCrLf & count & ". " & oRule.Name
Next

colRules.Save

' tell the user what you did
ruleList = "These rules were enabled: " & vbCrLf & ruleList
MsgBox ruleList, vbInformation, "Macro: EnableAllRules"

Set colRules = Nothing
Set oRule = Nothing
End Sub

Rounded Corners with CSS

I was looking for a way to create rounded corners without using images. I came across "Nifty Corners Cube" which does exactly that and more.

Digg - The Pictures Section!

I check Technology Section of Digg.com at least a couple of times daily. I am not sure exactly what purpose the new picture site will serve but it's another way of 'sharing', which is a good thing.

[UPDATE]
Heh, this site turned out to be a 'rogue' one :) Still... I like the idea.

read more | digg story

Install Ubuntu On Windows - WUBI

I saw an article about installing Ubuntu on Windows at Ubuntu-Unleashed Blog. It talks about an open source project called "WUBI".

Premise is very simple: You install an application called Wubi on Windows XP/Vista which uses an "alternate" (text based) Ubuntu ISO file to install Ubuntu in the windows partition in a 'single file' and give you an option to boot into it.

What does that mean? You do not need to have separate partitions to install linux/windows. It installs necessary drivers to access NTFS share, and does pretty cool stuff like importing your favorites/booksmarks.

When I was testing the application, which you can download via this link, it could not connect to a download site for ubuntu alternate image. So, I checked c:\wubi\install\ubuntu-7.04-alternate-i386.iso.metalink and used one of the US sites to download it.

I copied both the alternate image and wubi executable to the same directory and then ran the executable. GUI part is quick, actual installation takes sometime. It's advised to defrag your machine prior to installing it.

This is a cool idea and I hope it gets official acceptance from Ubuntu! Check out Wubi Forums if you are interested.

Lifehacker's Top 10 Gnome Desktop Tweaks

The default desktop environment for Linux users, Gnome, is fast, organized and very easy to learn. But Gnome is also very powerful and highly customizable. Today's top 10 lists the various ways you can tweak Nautilus and the Gnome desktop to turn Linux into a productivity powerhouse.

read more | digg story

Who owns what

Above picture, which lists some of the companies bought a few Media conglamorate, was put together by Amy Webb and is getting circulated a lot these days. It gives an idea about how much of Internet these few companies own.

Online Storage finally taking shape

Just want to note this article about Online Storage and what big 3 (Google, Microsoft, Apple) are doing about it. I think online storage makes perfect sense now that we have faster internet connection.

I only tried Microsoft's Windows Live SkyDrive and it looks pretty good but of course 500MB is 'nothing' if you seriously want to keep your files online. It maybe enough if you only want to keep 'some' files

A (much needed) update for Vista

Today, when I saw MS KB938194 titled "An update is available that improves the compatibility and reliability of Windows Vista" and look at the issues it resolved, it reminded me of my experience with an ATI card when I moved to Vista:

A couple of months ago I bought a nice (=expensive) ATI all in wonder X800 video card and it worked perfectly fine under Windows XP when I was playing World of Warcraft (WoW). Then, I installed Vista. All seemed fine for a week or so and then hell broke loose...

At first, I would not be able to play more WoW than 5 minutes. It would freeze and I had to reboot. Then it got worse so that I could not even play 30 secs. I gave up and started to use my other PC to play the game.

It got even worse when Vista started to freeze even when I am not playing a game but just playing any video file. At some point, my pc was totally unusable as animations were too much to display.

One of these days, I saw a sign that CompUSA shop near my house was getting closing and there was a close-out sale. I bought ATI X1600 Pro & retired the problematic one but promised myself to test it out on my Windows XP box to see if the problem would present itself there too...

Read this article for more on Windows Vista issues and possible fixes coming out...

Vista UAC is just trouble

I am sorry to say this but Vista UAC is broken! I understand the concept, and I understand where Microsoft is coming from. In fact, I felt quite comfortable the way Ubuntu has implemented basically the same idea. But it is just painful in Vista.

I tried to work with it but got fed up soon. So, I disabled it using Local Group Policy. And then, my problems started. I did not realize it until today but UAC was the reason behind a couple of mysterious issues I was having. A few recent examples...

* NTFS permissions are all screwed up. Although my user account is in Administrators/backup operators groups, I sometimes can not access my personal folders. Then, I have actually blogged this here, so I wont go into details...

* My backup process got broken. I loved rsync in unix world and the closest thing I have in Vista is of course good old Robocopy. I already had some backup scripts that would take daily back ups between my various disks and PCs. Time to time, I would get mysterious errors like "ERROR 5 (0x00000005) Changing File Attributes"...

* Windows update would never install 'any' update. It kept on downloading the files and then reported errors but never offered any explanation why.

Finally, I suspected that UAC was not fully disabled. I saw a nicely written article and used msconfig method (Run msconfig > Tools > Disable UAC).

And guess what? Suddenly all looks good now :)

Vista fails to boot

My vista ultimate crushed today for no apparent reason. As if that's not bad enough, Vista could not be loaded. Instead, I was stuck at the screen.

*******************************
WINDOWS BOOT MANAGER
Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause. To Fix the problem:

1. Insert your Windows installation disc and restart your computer
2. Choose your language settings, and then click "Next"
3. Click "Repair your computer"

If you do not have this disc, contact your system administrator or computer manufacturer for assistance.

File: \Windows\system32\winload.exe

Status: 0x000000e

Info: The selected entry could not be loaded because the application is missing or corrupt
*******************************

Resolution: Simple, I simply unplugged the exterior Sony DVD burner. A funny fact was that simple reboot did not fix the issue but I shutdown the PC completely and then powered it on.

NYC Subway Map

Just blogging this link of a site that has overlayed NYC subway and NJ Path information on Google maps.

A good feature is that, you can view all the trains passing thru a station when you move the mouse over the nodes.

Not a new idea, but good implementation.

Outlook hangs due to Search Issue

I love to keep all my e-mails. So, I have huge outlook .pst files dedicated to some some active lists that I subscribed more than 10 years ago. Recently, I noticed that instant search in Outlook 2007 was not functioning properly. It would never find anything.

I checked the instant search index status (Tools > Instant Search > Indexing Status). It said something like
"Outlook is currently indexing your items." 1 item remaining in Inbox 150000 items remaining across all open mailboxes

It was clear that instant search was not working properly. So I checked "Windows Search" service by typing "Start > Run > services.msc"
Services was up and running...

Then I checked "Control Panel > Indexing Options". I decided to rebuild the index. So, I clicked "Indexing Options > Advanced > Rebuild" and changed Index location to a folder in a different drive that I usually use for backups.

Things went totally haywire after that :( Whenever I tried to check Indexing Options, it gave me messages like "Retrieving windows Search status" or "Windows search is performing maintenance". Restarting service did not help.

To add to my troubles, Outlook 2007 stopped working. I was able to start it in Safe Mode but it would not start in regular mode and just freeze during startup.

I started Outlook in safe mode and then ran Office diagnostics (Outlook > Help > Office Diagnostics), which found no issues. Google searches did not result in anything useful. Finally, I used Office 2007 CD to "repair" to no avail.

At this point I was not sure why Outlook was not working but because all this stuff did not happen the same day, at first I did not suspect them to be related. In fact, after an unexpected power outage, some Vista permissions were screwed up and I was thinking that issue could be related to .pst folder permissions.

Then it downed on me! I disabled/stopped Windows Search and then started Outlook. Puff! It launched without any issues. Basically, Outlook 2007 was detecting that Windows Search was not available,and disabling Instant Search.

I did a little bit more search on how to build index and found this MSDN thread:

"Set the registry value HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Search\SetupCompletedSuccessfully to 0 and try restarting the Windows Search service."

I did and it worked. Windows Search started indexing items properly and Outlook 2007 launched without a hitch. Problem solved.

For reference, below is what I saw in the Event viewer when index was corrupted and restarting service would not help:

Log Name: Application
Source: Microsoft-Windows-Search
Date: 7/14/2007 4:28:59 PM
Event ID: 3026
Task Category: Gatherer
Level: Error
Description:
Advise Status Change failed. The system is probably low on resources. Free up resources and restart the service.

Context: Windows Application, SystemIndex Catalog

Details:
The content index server cannot update or access information because of a database error. Stop and restart the search service. If the problem persists, reset and recrawl the content index. In some cases it may be necessary to delete and recreate the content index. (0x8004117f)

Vista snipping tool error

I had an interesting issue with my Vista build today. Well, I have to disclose that this is basically a preview build that our engineering team is testing in the company. I was trying to launch Snipping Tool and received an error:

The Snipping Tool is not working on your computer right now. Restart your computer, and then try again. If the problem persists, contact your system administrator.

Sure enough, rebooting the machine did not help. I checked the event viewer and noticed that a warning gets logged everytime I try to start it:

Log Name: Application
Source: Microsoft-Windows-SoftwareRestrictionPolicies
Date: 7/12/2007 3:15:25 PM
Event ID: 866
Description:
Access to C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\WISPTIS.EXE has been restricted by your Administrator by location with policy rule {F8509577-AE57-4057-B256-2929FCC0931A} placed on path *WISPTIS.exe.

So, what's this Wisptis? "Windows Ink Services Platform Tablet Input Subsystem".
I ran rsop.msc to confirm that it was listed under

"Computer Configuration" > "Windows Settings" > "Security Settings" > "Software Restriction Policies" > "Additional Rules"

Why would snipping tool need Wisptis.exe is beyond me.

[Edit: 04/04/2008]
I've scraped the preview build long time ago and I use ultimate version for sometime. However, I get comment from people who still see the issue I mentioned above. I got two comments from people who confirmed that running "Office Diagnostics", however irrelevant it seems, fixed the issue for them.

It makes me very happy to see comments from people who reach this blog and either find or suggest solutions to problems. Thank you all!

Running PowerShell Scripts

When I read "Running windows PowerShell Scripts" on Microsoft technet, I wanted blog it. It's a long article. I am kinda disillusioned with PSH at this point :(

Some excerpts:

To summarize, here’s how you run from scripts from within Windows PowerShell:
• Make sure you’ve changed your execution policy. By default, PowerShell won’t run scripts at all, no matter how you specify the path.
• To run a script, specify the entire file path, or either: 1) use the .\ notation to run a script in the current directory or 2) put the folder where the script resides in your Windows path.
• If your file path includes blank spaces, enclose the path in double quote marks and preface the path with an ampersand.
And, yes, that all takes some getting used to. However, you will get used to it. (To make life easier for you, we recommend that you keep all your scripts in one folder, such as C:\Scripts, and add that folder to your Windows path.)

We realize that it’s been awhile, but way back at the start of this article we tried running a Windows PowerShell script by double-clicking a .PS1 file. That didn’t go quite the way we had hoped: instead of running the script all we managed to do was open the script file in Notepad. Interestingly enough, that’s the way it’s supposed to work: as a security measure you can’t start a PowerShell script by double-clicking a .PS1 file. So apparently that means that you do have to start PowerShell before you can run a PowerShell script.

In a somewhat roundabout way, that’s technically true. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t start a PowerShell script from a shortcut or from the Run dialog box; likewise you can run a PowerShell script as a scheduled task.

The secret? Instead of calling the script you need to call the PowerShell executable file, and then pass the script path as an argument to PowerShell.exe. For example, in the Run dialog box you might type a command like powershell.exe –noexit c:\scripts\test.

Technet Webcast: Windows Hang and Crash Dump Analysis by Mark Russinovich

This is a great presentation from Mark Russinovich on BSODs.

Learn to analyze Microsoft Windows crash dumps, diagnose the cause, pinpoint a solution, and resolve the problem. Intended for system administrators, this webcast explains how system crashes occur and what happens when you reboot a crashed system. We lead you through the crash dump analysis process step by step, introducing the latest tools from Microsoft and handy tricks for isolating the cause of a crash.

Presenter: Mark Russinovich, Chief Software Architect and Cofounder, Winternals Software

Mark Russinovich is chief software architect and cofounder of Winternals Software, a company that specializes in advanced systems software for Microsoft Windows. He is coauthor of Windows Internals, 4th Edition (Microsoft Press, 2004), a Microsoft MVP, and he contributes to the Sysinternals tools at www.sysinternals.com, including Process Explorer, Filemon, and Regmon. Mark has a PhD in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and is a senior contributing editor for Windows IT Pro Magazine.

To avoid possible problems, we suggest you temporarily disable pop-up blocker software before viewing the webcast.

Now that Tech-Ed is over, there are a lot of webcasts available. You can view Other sessions from Tech·Ed 2006 Webcasts: Power to the Pros.


View other sessions from Tech·Ed 2006 Webcasts: Power to the Pros.

25 Most Popular Blogs June 2007 (Ranked By 5 Traffic Data Sources)

A complete list of the top 25 most popular blogs ranked by a combination of Inbound Links (Yahoo Site Explorer), RSS Subscribers (Feedburner), Alexa Rank and Compete and Quantcast traffic data. The data gives you a real insight into these blogs success which will allow you to judge the relative success of your own blog.



read more | digg story

Hack Your Router

Umm, well this is 'old news' that I only became aware of thanks to a colleague. There is a LifeHacker article about boosting router signal as well as adding tons of features to it for some make/model but especially Linksys WRT54GL Wireless router

Here is the link to the article.

Microsoft Surface

The launch of Microsoft Surface marks the beginning of a new technology category and a user-interface revolution. Surface, Microsoft’s first surface computer, provides effortless interaction with digital content through natural hand gestures, touch and physical objects. Surface computing breaks down traditional barriers between people and technology.

read more digg story

Google Maps StreetView

Google Maps have a new feature and may be the best one I've seen: Street view. It's available in limited content now but you can click a street and look at a 360 degrees picture of the street! That's an awesome feature and can be extremely useful!

You can have an idea what the street looks like. You can use the arrows to go in all directions. I can't wait to see coverage getting wider. Check out the Demo.

The Ultimate Linux Reference Guide for Newbies

Very nice and complete linux commands reference: http://blog.lxpages.com/ultimate_linux.html



read more | digg story

Google 2.0 Unleashed Today: Universal Search, Invisible Tabs, and More

Google is undertaking the most radical change to its search results ever, introducing a "Universal Search" system that will blend listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages.



read more | digg story

Ubuntu Unleashed (Free eBook)

Incorporating an advanced approach to presenting information about Ubuntu, Ubuntu Unleashed aims to provide the best and latest information that intermediate to advanced Linux users need to know about installation, configuration, system administration, server operations, and security.



read more | digg story

Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) has officially been released!

The beta and the wait is over. Ubuntu 7.04 has been released and is available for immediate download.

Release notes for Ubuntu 7.04

read more digg story

Free MMORPG List

All free games with screenshots...

read more digg story

Ubuntu feisty fawn (7.04) finally available on shipit for free

Canonical started to send free cd-s of ubuntu 7.04 feisty fawn. simply go to https://shipit.ubuntu.com/ and login with your Launchpad (http://launchpad.net) id to request the CDs



read more | digg story

IIS Permission Denied Error

I had some asp pages that worked fine on IIS5/w2K but gave me an error like below on IIS6/W2K3.

Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a0046'
Permission denied
/SelfService/e360.asp, line 69

I searched thru MS site but could not come up with anything. I found my answer on ASP emporium site.

Line 69 has an OpenTextFile command with option 8 to modify and IUSR_ did not have rights to write into that file/folder. To fix it,

- Created a local user acc
- IIS Manager > Browse to Web sites > Default Web Site >> Properties > Directory Security > Edit > Set User name:MachineName\, Password: password
- Give Write Permission to on C:\Inetpub\wwwroot

Google Browser Sync for Firefox

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions. For more info, please visit our FAQ.

It's pretty easy to set up.

Vista Auto Logon

According to: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=829701&SiteID=1 If you have a single user without password, then he gets logged on automatically after restart.
Not recommended! Of course, anyone with sufficient access to read your registry, can read your password in plain text if you set it up this way…

Here’s the procedure:
Open Regedit,

• Drill down to HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion/Winlogon,
• Find the “AutoAdminLogon” value, and change it to 1. Enter the following items as new string values: “DefaultUserName”, and “DefaultPassword”.
• Set the value of DefaultUserName to be the username that you want to autologin, and set the value of DefaultPassword to be that user’s password.

Cool javascript trick

Go to any web site, preferably with lots of pics. copy/paste the following to the address bar and hit enter.

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);

Here is the original Digg article.

Ms. Dewey: Search with a twist

Microsoft live search has been live for a while. Have you heard about the ad campaign for it. I mean the viral search campaign: No? Welcome to Ms. Dewey then :)

Utility: Process Tamer

Windows only: Freeware system tray app ProcessTamer is a lightweight CPU usage monitoring tool that watches your computer for CPU hogs and "tames" them before they freeze up your computer.

Read full article here.

Vista Documentation & Tools

Microsoft has a lot of good reading material for IT Professional on their site about Vista. They have also released a few useful tools:

SyncToy v1.4

SyncToy helps you copy, move, rename, and delete files between folders and computers quickly and easily.

Group Policy Log View

This page provides the Group Policy Log view tool for Windows Vista

Windows User State Migration Tool (USMT) version 3.0

Microsoft® Windows® User State Migration Tool (USMT) version 3.0 migrates user files and settings during deployments of Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Vista™. USMT captures files and settings from the source computer and then migrates them to a new Windows installation.

Windows AIK

The Windows Automated Installation Kit (Windows AIK) helps you to install, customize, and deploy the Microsoft Windows Vista™ family of operating systems.

Remote Desktop Connection (Terminal Services Client 6.0) for Windows XP (KB925876)

Remote Desktop Connection (Terminal Services Client 6.0) provides a way to use any new Terminal Services features introduced in Microsoft Windows Vista and Microsoft Windows Server Code Name “Longhorn” from a computer running Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Microsoft Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1.

Consolas Font Pack

The Microsoft Consolas Font Family is a set of highly legible fonts designed for ClearType. It is intended for use in programming environments and other circumstances where a monospaced
font is specified. This installation package will set the default font for Visual Studio to Consolas.

and even more documentation on Security:

Windows Vista Security Guide

The Windows Vista Security Guide provides recommendations and tools to further harden Windows Vista. Use the GPOAccelerator tool in this Solution Accelerator to efficiently establish the Enterprise Client (EC) environment or the Specialized Security – Limited Functionality (SSLF) environment.

What about Users? Well, they can take a look at this:

Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines

Download a preliminary draft of the Windows Vista™ User Experience Guidelines (UX Guide).

and Best Practices?

Power Management for Windows Vista Best Practices

Use computer power plans to reduce consumption with Windows Vista.

Everyday Work with Windows Vista Best Practices

Work smarter with new features in Windows Vista.

Enjoy!

PowerDVD Issue with Vista Aero

I use Cyberlink PowerDVD 7.0. Everytime I started it up, Vista would pop up an message saying that PowerDVD would not support Aero and therefore Aero features (transparency etc. ) would be DISABLED. I see screen flickering and then PowerDVD starts. As soon as I shutdown PowerDVD, I see screen flickering again and Aero is back!

Well, good news is that Cyberlink has an updated build (#2211) for PowerDVD that you can download for free & it resolves this issue.

Vista Aero at last!

When I installed Vista, I was disappointed to see that my Windows Experience Index was 1.0 I was disappointed because I have a pretty decent machine:

• HP XW6000 Workstation
• 2 x 2.8 GHz P4 processor
• 1 GB DDR 266Mhz RAM
• 2 x 750GB SATA drives
• nVidia 980XGL video card with 128 MB ram & dual DVI output
  

So, what was wrong in this picture? Why was I getting such a bad score? Well, apparently, Windows Experience Index base score is determined by the lowest number. And what was that? Yep, you probably guesses it right. It was my video card.

It looks like I fell behind times in video cards department and I felt that this was a good time to catch up. So, I did some research. As always, Tom's Hardware Guide on graphic cards was pretty useful.

I ended up ordering an AGP 8x, ATI Radeon GDDR3 X800 XT with 256 MB ram from TigerDirect.com for $168 (I checked again now and they are not selling it anymore, maybe I got the last one :). It's all-in-one card, although I am not currently planning to use its TV capture capabilities.

I received in just two days. When I installed it though, my machine did not boot, all I was hearing was 2 long beeps. I put back the old card and got on internet to talk to HP. They simply told me that
- "ATI Radeon X800 XT card is not tested on xw6000 and is not supported".

In fact, HP guy told me that there was a problem between it and the motherboard but I kept on asking questions and he confessed that he was not sure of that and suggested I try the *newest* BIOS which was 2 years old and I was already running that.

I started tinkering with BIOS settings and one setting got my eye "AGP Aperture Size". It was set to 64MB. I did not know what it was for but when I saw someone mentioning it to fix a video card issue (not ATI), I realized that I had to change it to 256MB = what my new card had & voila!

To my surprise, Vista detected the card and installed the driver for it. Then, I checked my Windows Experience Index again: 4.3

This time, it was my 1Gig memory that was taking me down but hey, I have all the bells and whistles of Aero now :) I am quite disappointed with Doom 3 though, it looks better but not way better...

BTW, to see your Windows Experience index, do the followings:
Start > Run
control.exe system

Lastly, I wrote about BlackBerry on Vista yesterday. I checked the device in the morning and as expected it was fully charged.

Blackberry & Vista

when I connected my Blackberry 8700 to Vista to charge it, it immediately popped up a message telling me that "a blackberry device was found". It did not however had the software for it

I checked the device manager and sure enough BlackBerry was listed with a yellow icon on it meaning that it was missing the driver.

I went to RIM's homepage to see if they had any Vista drivers but could not locate one.

As my experience with Vista so far showed me that XP drivers usually worked fine, I wanted to give it a try by downloading and installing the latest BlackBerry Desktop Software (4.2 as of this moment).

So I downloaded the software and installed it. Installation went just fine no issues. I have selected Enterprise features as mine is in fact belongs to my company.

As I only wanted to charge the battery and I selected not to launch the application at start up. I will probably not be able to use it anyway. Still, when I launched it, it came up just fine.



Then, I went back to Device manager to see what happened and noticed that it was now showing under Universal Serial Bus Controller. Right now, it looks like it is charging. I will check back in the morning to see if it 'really' charged.

Vista - Change Explorer Start up Directory

In Vista, Windows Explorer is located under All Programs > Accessories. It's actually a shortcut to%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe

When you open it, by default it will open your "Username"\"Documents" Folder:

I do not want that! Instead, I want it to show me the root of my D: drive. Well, it's not difficult to change. Here is how:

• Create a shortcut to Windows Explorer:

1. Go to All programs > Accessories.
2. Right click "Windows Explorer"
3. From menu choose "Send to" > Desktop (Create Shortcut)

• Then right click on the new shortcut and from the menu choose properties
• Modify "target" by adding /root,D:
• It should now appear like this: %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /root,D:

That's it. From now on, when you open Windows Explorer using that shortcut, it will go to the root of D: drive. This is actually and old trick and works well with Windows XP too.

[Update - 12/03/2006]

I made a mistake above. If you want do NOT want to see other drives when you start up and just D drive, then instructions stand. Otherwise, just modify target like this:

• %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe D:

Vista: Corrupted Recycle Bin

One of the issues I see everyday with Vista is about the recycle bin. It keeps on getting corrupted. I suspect that this is because of my dual-boot configuration with XP and may be permissions. It does not matter how many times I click "YES", it keeps on popping up. I am not sure how to fix it yet and the weird thing is that there is nothing in the eventlogs!

Vista ReadyBoost & ReadyDrive

Jim Allchin, has an informative article on a new feature in Vista: ReadyBoost. Below is an excerpt from this article.

... With Windows ReadyBoost, if you have a flash drive (like a USB thumb drive or an SD card) you can just use this to make your computer run better with Windows Vista. You simply plug in a flash drive and Windows Vista will use Windows ReadyBoost to utilize the flash memory to improve performance.

I should be clear that while flash drives do contain memory, Windows ReadyBoost isn’t really using that memory to increase the main system RAM in your computer. Instead, ReadyBoost uses the flash drive to store information that is being used by the memory manager. If you are running a lot of applications on a system that has limited memory, Windows ReadyBoost will use the flash drive to create a copy of virtual memory that is not quite as fast as RAM, but a whole lot faster than going to the hard disk. What is very cool here is that there is nothing stored on this flash disk that isn’t also on the hard disk, so if you remove the flash drive, the memory manager sees the change and automatically goes to the hard disk...

Unfortunately for me, my Corsair USB 2 drive did not qualify :( This is a bit surprising. I am not sure what qualification is considered adequate by Vista...


There are some articles on microsoft site that talk about ReadyBoost but they do not mention specifics.

As USB drives are very common these days, I think Microsoft had the right idea. Vista also supports Hybrid drives (HHD = regular HD + integrated NVRAM) via a technology called ReadyDrive.

These are welcome changes. What I understand from Allchin's message though is that Vista does not perform considerably better compared XP if you do not have a high-end system, which is a bit disappointing. Would not it be nice to see a lightning fast OS after so many years of development.

[Update - 12/05/2006]
On the comment section, somebody left me a message with a link to Tom Archer's blog. The link was not working but I was able to read the article when I hit the home page of the blog.

I am not sure what is the problem with my USB stick even after reading some of the requirements as it they did not mention a tool to measure the specs of usb stick but a few people suggested that they got their usb stick working when they formatted it with ntfs.

There was a link to another useful article at DvNation. Check it out.

Lisp, Perl, Python

I learned programming in Perl 2 yrs ago when I started supporting an in-house-developed Java/Unix based application. I have seen Python gaining ground since then and got interested in it.

Today, I came across a bunch of very interesting and absorbing articles about several programming languages but mostly focused on lisp, perl and python.

It all started with Paul Graham's "Revenge of the Nerds" article. He is a Lisp expert and to be honest I did not know much about lisp until I read his article. It was a provocative one and he got a lot of responses which he responded with "Re: Revenge of the Nerds".

After you read these two, you would probably want to keep on reading how Python Lovers responded:
Paul Prescod has written a rebuttal to Revenge of the Nerds, On the Relationship between Python and Lisp. Peter Norvig (Google's Director of Research) has also written about this topic in Python for Lisp Programmers.

• Paul Graham (Wiki , Web Site. Essays)
• Paul Prescod (Web Site)
• Peter Norvig (Wiki, Web Site)

New blog

I am playing with a new blog http://AdilHindistan.blogspot.com. It's using Blogger Beta. If I like it, I may consider moving this blog over there...

Vista permission inheritance issues

As I mentioned before, I have installed Vista next to XP and I am dual-booting. I had permission denied errors when I had tried to access files and folders that were created by XP.

Anyway, today I realized that permissions I set on the top level were not really inherited at all levels. I noticed it because I use Google Picasa to organize my pictures I realized that I was missing some pictures in Picasa database. What's more, when I browse to these folders via explorer, thumbnails were not showing up.

To make sure that all files and folders inherit permissions from the top level, on the root of the drive I issued the following command:

ICACLS name /reset /T /C /L /Q
Successfully processed 261133 files; Failed processing 0 files

This is supposed to reset the permissions so that they get inherited from the levels above. This worked and I noticed that Google Picasa was discovering new pictures it was not able to read before. Thumbnails were showing up properly too.

What I am worried is that if I go back to XP, they will get lost again. I will check and see...

Live PC & VMWare

Have you heard of Moka5.com or Live PCs. Well, it's a VMWare based technology and well-worth checking out. The only downside is, it does not yet work with Vista and requires XP SP2.

BTW, if you would like to download VMWare images and run them on your PC, you download free VMWare Player software from VMWare. VMWare Server is another free product you can download.

Below is description from their web site:

What are LivePCs?

LivePCs™ are virtual PCs that you can create and share just as you can share the rest of your digital life (photos, music, videos, etc..) A LivePC contains everything needed to run a virtual computer — an operating system and a bunch of applications. You can create and share your own LivePCs, or use the public LivePCs created by others in our BetaGarage™. You can use LivePCs on your desktop, or you can take them with you everywhere on a portable USB drive.

With LivePCs, a family can maintain separate computer personalities (work, home, kids) on a single PC. Software developers can make it easy for users to try out their latest suite of applications. Professionals can go on vacation and take their LivePCs with them on a USB stick to use "just in case".

Dual Boot XP & Vista, Partition Magic Blues

I have a Fujitsu Lifebook that already has XP on it. I wanted to install Vista on it today. As the current XP installation was occupying the whole partition, I used Partition Magic 8 to resize the current partition, creating enough space for Vista.

It was not a trouble-free resizing though... I launched Partition Magic 8, selected the current drive and clicked resize and reduced current size of the partition from 60GB to 30GB. Change required a reboot.

I rebooted and partition magic kicked in but after a few seconds it gave me an error & quit:

Error 1530: Zero reference count

I looked it up on Symantec site which suggested that I use "chkdsk /f" on my drive and explained the error:

A file's record has a zero reference count, but the file appears in at least one directory.

Anyway, ran check disk and resized the partition again. After reboot, Partition Magic kicked in and looked like doing its job but after a while it gave me another error & quit.

Error 983: "Too many errors found, process halted"

Once again, Symantec documentation suggested I run "chkdsk /f". I did not run it again because once I logged into XP, I noticed that partition was already resized. Vista did not complain either and installed properly.

So, if you are going to use Partition Magic, save yourself sometime, check & repair your disks by running "chkdsk /f"...

Vista: COM Surrogate keeps on crashing

Time to time I keep on getting a message as shown in the screenshot. I did not see any harm when this happens and it usually happens when I open a folder which has a lot of files...

I am not sure what COM Surrogate is supposed to do but it is probably a bug in Vista. EventViewer logs an application error (Event ID 1000) which reads something like this:

Faulting application DllHost.exe, version 6.0.6000.16386, time stamp 0x4549b14e, faulting module unknown, version 0.0.0.0, time stamp 0x00000000, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x00bbb5ed, process id 0x594, application start time 0x01c70c6a663ae8c3.

So I guess, something is just taking more time than it is supposed to...

It actually created a report for it (probably to send back to Microsoft) under
C:\Users\Adil\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportArchive\Report0f070a8c. I looked at it using notepad and below is what I see:

Version=1
EventType=APPCRASH
EventTime=128084765660881040
ReportType=2
Consent=1
UploadTime=128084765692168100
Response.BucketId=346129346
Response.BucketTable=1
Response.type=4
Sig[0].Name=Application Name
Sig[0].Value=DllHost.exe
Sig[1].Name=Application Version
Sig[1].Value=6.0.6000.16386
Sig[2].Name=Application Timestamp
Sig[2].Value=4549b14e
Sig[3].Name=Fault Module Name
Sig[3].Value=StackHash_1703
Sig[4].Name=Fault Module Version
Sig[4].Value=0.0.0.0
Sig[5].Name=Fault Module Timestamp
Sig[5].Value=00000000
Sig[6].Name=Exception Code
Sig[6].Value=c0000005
Sig[7].Name=Exception Offset
Sig[7].Value=00bbb5ed
DynamicSig[1].Name=OS Version
DynamicSig[1].Value=6.0.6000.2.0.0.256.4
DynamicSig[2].Name=Locale ID
DynamicSig[2].Value=1033
DynamicSig[22].Name=Additional Information 1
DynamicSig[22].Value=1703
DynamicSig[23].Name=Additional Information 2
DynamicSig[23].Value=2264db07e74365624c50317d7b856ae9
DynamicSig[24].Name=Additional Information 3
DynamicSig[24].Value=1344
DynamicSig[25].Name=Additional Information 4
DynamicSig[25].Value=875fa2ef9d2bdca96466e8af55d1ae6e
UI[2]=C:\Windows\system32\DllHost.exe
UI[3]=COM Surrogate has stopped working
UI[4]=Windows can check online for a solution to the problem.
UI[5]=Check online for a solution and close the program
UI[6]=Check online for a solution later and close the program
UI[7]=Close the program
State[0].Key=Transport.DoneStage1
State[0].Value=1
FriendlyEventName=Stopped working
ConsentKey=APPCRASH
AppName=COM Surrogate
AppPath=C:\Windows\system32\DllHost.exe

Well, not useful for me... I used EventViewe to report it back to Microsoft but although EventViewer recorded the event id as 1000, the web page that came up was talking about 1001:

There is no content available for Event 1001, for this version of the Windows operating system:

The following content is this event's explanations and user actions for earlier versions of the Windows operating system. Although this content is not specifically applicable to the version of the operating system that you are running on your computer, you might find the information of value.

Results for: Microsoft product: Windows Operating System; ID: 1001; Event Source: Windows Error Reporting;

No results were found for your query. Please see Search Help for suggestions.

[2006-11-28]
Update
Well, today I found some more information on this. Apparently Nero is my problem ( I do not have DivX codec installed on Vista but I do have Nero Burner)! Following solutions were suggested:

You can use FFDShow instead of Divx and for Nero you can rename NeVideo.ax
in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Ahead\DSFilter\

Unfortunately, renaming did not fix the issue for me but at least I know what's going on!

Vista - First Impressions

Finally! Vista is out and I have my hands all over it. I installed it on two machines and started testing it. Problems started during the installation, it failed to find any drives.

Problem: Both of these machines had promise IDE/SATA controller cards (Ultra 133 & TX2300) and Vista failed to recognize both.

Solution: Use Windows XP drivers! I am surprised but it worked. It's really cool that during the Vista set up, you can plug in a usb device and it will immediately recognize it and let you install drivers from there. So, I downloaded the XP drivers for both cards and Vista happily accepted them and showed me my hard disks.

Problem: After the installation, I had no internet access because it did recognize my Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit network card but failed to find a suitable driver for it.

Solution: Yep, XP drivers work just fine. Once I had internet connectivity, I was able to download the beta drivers for my Creative Sound Blaster Live 24! I still seem to have a problem with the microphone but did not look deeper.

Problem: I installed Office 2007 and tried add my .pst files. I got access denied. When I checked, I realized that all the files in all the drives except the one I installed Vista were read-only. Even though permissions seemed OK as I was in the administrators group, and administrators group had Full access to all files and folders in all drives.

Solution: I created a new group and added my account and my wife's account in it. Then, I made this new group the owner of all files and folders by taking ownership. I then added this new group to the drive security on the top level and then replaced the permissions throughout my system. After logging off and logging back in, I was able to access all files and write to them. I went back to XP to see if anything was broken but other than "Recycle bin is corrupted, empty it?" message all was fine.

So far all the application I was running XP are working on Vista except McAfee Antivirus Plus Suite... It is not compatible with Vista and when I installed it anyway, it crashed explorer and everything else. I had an unusable system, so I had to reboot and log back in safe mode to uninstall it.

Windows Vista comes with a firewall like XP (but more advanced) yet because Enterprises would not let them, they would block all inbound traffic except allowed but no outgoing traffic, which is not acceptable to me as this means leakage! I am yet to find a firewall that would work seemlessly with Vista.

Vista Disable/Enable User Access Control

I was going thru System Configuration in Vista (Start>run, type "control.exe system") and noticed two options:

To disable User Access Control:
C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /k %windir%\System32\reg.exe ADD HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v EnableLUA /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

To enable it:
C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /k %windir%\System32\reg.exe ADD HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v EnableLUA /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

Both of these require a reboot. If you would like to disable Admin approval for the built-in administrator account to get rid of UAC, you can use Local Security Policy (LSA):

• Start > Run, Type: secpol.msc
• Scroll down to Local Policies > Security Options
• Double click "User Account Control: Admins Approval Mode for the Built-in Administrator Account" and select "Disabled"

User Account Control is similar to Ubuntu's root access. In Ubuntu, you run everything as a normal user. When you need to be super user (root) you use sudo in the command line. In GUI, it asks you for your password. Vista can imitate the same behaviour. By default, instead of asking you for your password, it merely tells you that the action you are taking requires elevated privilage (administrator context) and asks you to confirm it.

The purpose is that if an application is trying to do something without you knowing it, it would be stopped. So, if you are changing these settings, you may not be doing yourself a favor.

How To Crack A Combination Lock

A great way to figure out the combination to a lock that you had forgotten what it was. This is intended for information purposes only.

read more | digg story

Ilya Hevnikov’s Blog » Blog Archive » How To Triple Boot (XP, Vista, Ubuntu) With Single Boot Screen

Ilya Hevnikov's blog has a very nice guide to how to trible boot, Ubuntu, Windows XP and Windows Vista. As I use the first two and intend to install the third one as soon as it becomes available at MSDN Subscriber Downloads, I think this may prove to be useful (so blogging it).

The challange I have right now is to find Promise SATAII-TX4 controller drivers for Vista. Promise web site (www.promise.com) does not seem to offer the drivers. I sent them an e-mail asking for an ETA but who knows, maybe I can use one of these beta drivers that are available at Internet...

Office 2007 now available at MSDN

Office 2007 now available from MSDN Subscriber Downloads!

Office 2007 is now live and available to all MSDN Premium subscribers from MSDN Subscriber Downloads at http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions. The following software editions and languages are now available:

• Office Professional 2007 (English, German, Japanese)
• Office Project Professional 2007 (English, Japanese)
• Office Visio Professional 2007 (English, Japanese)
• Office Groove 2007 (English, Japanese)
• Office InfoPath (English, Japanese)
• Office InterConnect 2007 (Japanese)
• Office OneNote 2007 (English, German, Japanese)

Additional products and language versions will be made available soon. In addition, we look forward to adding Windows Vista to our slate of offerings beginning November 17.

Get it First! from MSDN Subscriber Downloads.

Best regards,

Seth Adams

Program Manager, MSDN Subscriptions

Boot Windows XP from a USB flash drive

This article talks about installing a bootable copy of Windows XP onto a flash drive and then boot a PC off of the flash drive. Digg comments are pretty insteresting too. Somebody mentioned that you can write to the flash drives for a limited number (although a high one) and if you have an OS installed, paging, swapping can kill it pretty quickly...

read more | digg story

Sysinternals Utilities at their new home

"The Sysinternals web site was created in 1996 by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell to host their advanced system utilities and technical information and Microsoft acquired Sysinternals in July, 2006. Whether you’re an IT Pro or a developer, you’ll find Sysinternals utilities to help you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications. If you have a question about a tool or how to use it, please visit the Sysinternals Forum for answers and help from other users and our moderators." goes the new home page of SysInternals under Microsoft Technet umbrella.

They also have a new blog. Check it out!

Best Firefox Extensions and Customizing Tips

I had a post on "Less known Firefox Addons" sometime ago. Scott Finnie has a "live" document for "Best Firefox Extensions and Customizing Tips". It's a good document and I found the mentioned addons quite useful.

The one, I should mention is BugMeNot by Eric Hamiter. Once installed, you can right click on a login box, on several sites which requires you to log on before displaying the content (eg. The New York Times), and choose "Log me in with BugMeNot"! Go ahead & check out BugMeNot.com for this great service!

And I also love DiggThumbs, which will show the thumbnail images of the web site that hosts the digg story. You can see a screenshot at the right side...

[UPDATE - 11/18/2006]
I installed Windows Vista a few days ago and going thru installing all my apps. again. I'm writing down a few I felt I should install immediately to make FireFox 2.0 *usable* for me:

• Install Always Remember Password 0.6: Good for sites like Yahoo, hotmail, who offers "remember password" but does not actually remember it.
• Google Notebook: Indispensable as I take lots of note on the web
• Download Status Bar: A nice small status bar at the bottom for files being downloaded
• Greasemonkey: Holy grail of web customization
• Duplicate Tab: Right click on a tab and create a duplicate of it. I love it!
  

Microsoft to support SuSe Linux

This is BIIIIIG News! Many CIOs were pushing MS to work with Linux. MS Office is the hands down killer app suite and running it on Linux is a win-win situation!

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. are entering into a partnership that could help Novells Linux operating system, according to a media report Thursday. Under the agreement, which isnt final, Microsoft will offer sales support to Novells Suse Linux, the Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site.

For MS Announcement & Webcast:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/nov06/11-02NewsConferenceMA.mspx

read more | digg story

Linux keyboard shortcuts you should know about

Summary of most useful keyboard shortcuts. Take a printout for handy quick reference.

read more | digg story

HOWTO: Five steps to a more secure SSH

If you are running Linux, chances are you are running SSH. Here are five easy things you can do to lock down your server and make SSH more secure. Includes disabling root logins, using keys to login, automatically blocking hosts who are attempting dictionary attacks, and more.

read more | digg story

Data visualization tools for Linux

Applications for graphical visualization of data on Linux
® are varied, from simple 2-D plots to 3-D surfaces, scientific graphics programming, and graphical simulation.There are many open source possibilities, including gnuplot, GNU Octave, Scilab, MayaVi, Maxima, and others.

read more | digg story

Ubuntu Linux 6.10 - Edgy Eft Released

Ubuntu Linux 6.10 - Edgy Eft Released:

The desktop version introduces a host of new features, an improved interface and a wide variety of new applications and desktop tools making Ubuntu 6.10 flexible and user-friendly. Enhancements include:

• Tomboy, an easy-to-use and efficient note-taking tool

• F-Spot, a photo management tool that enables tagging, photo editing and automatic uploading to on-line web management sites such as Flickr

• GNOME 2.16, which in addition to new features such as enhanced power management, makes the GNOME desktop more secure, faster and more stable

• Upstart, a replacement start-up manager offering a cleaner design, eye-catching effects and a substantially faster boot time

• The latest Firefox web browser, which offers inline spell check support in web forms, easy recovery of crashed sessions, built-in phishing detectors, enhanced search engine management with built in OpenSearch support, and better support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds

• Proactive security features, preventing many common security vulnerabilities even before they are discovered

• Evolution 2.8.0, which brings new features such as vertical message panes

Download here...

Throw away your TV

I recently came across this site called "Throw away your TV". It has tons of funny videos as well as educational ones.

One feature I liked was, when I am watching something, if I go to a different browser tab, it actually detects it and stops playing the video, only to continue after I go back to it.

Have Your Lost USB Drive Ask For Help

It's like a digital luggage tag for your USB drive that pops up a message [via autorun] to notify the user that it's a lost drive.

read more | digg story

AutoIt Automation Tool

In the previous article about lost USB devices, author talks about AutoIt. I checked it out and it seems like a nice automation tool for Windows that can . There is also an informative Wikipedia article about it.

Below is from their home page:

AutoIt v3 is a freeware BASIC-like scripting language designed for automating the Windows GUI and general scripting. It uses a combination of simulated keystrokes, mouse movement and window/control manipulation in order to automate tasks in a way not possible or reliable with other languages (e.g. VBScript and SendKeys).

AutoIt is also very small, self-contained and will run on 95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000, XP, 2003 out of the box with no annoying "runtimes" required! You can even make compiled executable scripts that can run without AutoIt being installed!

Imperial History of Middle East

Who has controlled the Middle East over the course of history? Pretty much everyone. Egyptians, Turks, Jews, Romans, Arabs, Greeks, Persians, Europeans...the list goes on. Who will control the Middle East today? That is a much bigger question.

See 5000 years of history in 90 seconds flash animation at http://www.mapsofwar.com/ind/imperial-history.html.

Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 7 Final

The official download on Microsoft's own page and not on some blogs or Yahoo. Some improvements over IE6 includes: New Interface, RSS Feeds, Phishing Filter, Protected Mode, Tabbed Browsing, and PNG support among many others.
Get IE7 here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/default.mspx

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Colbert Roasts President Bush - 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner

An excerpt from the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner. Comedian Stephen Colbert (one of my favorites) made humorous remarks about various current events and the relationship between the press and the White House. He also presented a video of a mock press conference which ended in a chase scene featuring long-time correspondent Helen Thomas.

Top Five Wired Nations

IBM has a short list of countries hat are leaders in the wired revolution. The U.S. makes the list, barely.

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Its confirmed. Google buys youtube for $1.6 billion

Google Inc. said Monday it's buying No. 1 Internet video sharing Web site YouTube Inc. for $1.65 billion in stock. The deal is regarded as a largely defensive one that leapfrogs Google into a leading role in a burgeoning Internet marketplace

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Kick Ass Classical - Classical Music's Top 100 Greatest Hits

Kick Ass Classical - Classical Music's Top 100 Greatest Hits You can listen to them for a few seconds on the side. And believe me, a few secons is all you need to remember the tunes anyway

Windows Vista RC2 available

Microsoft Windows Vista RC2 is now available for download

Dive Into Python: Free eBook

Dive Into Python is a Python book for experienced programmers. You can buy a printed copy, read it online, or download it in a variety of formats. It is also available in multiple languages. Recommended eBook for anyone who wants to seriously learn Python. The main site also provides some good Python related websites.

From comments, there is a link to 17 Free Python Books:
http://freecomputerbooks.com/langPythonBooksIndex.html
Include this one (Dive Into Python)

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Accessing Ubuntu from Windows with FreeNX

[ORIGINAL POST - 06/02/2006]
My coworker, Andy Mei mentioned FreeNX to me. I checked out the Ubuntu Forums on FreeNX and FreeNX Wiki page. It's a two-part (client/server) software...

To install FreeNX on my ubuntu dapper,

First I added the following line to my /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://free.linux.hp.com/~brett/seveas/freenx dapper-seveas freenx
you can try other repositories.

If you do not want to get gpg errors, import them:

• sudo gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys 1135D466
• sudo gpg --export --armor 1135D466 | sudo apt-key add -

Then I,

• fired up Snaptic Package Manager,
• clicked reload to get updared package list from the newly added repository
• then searched for freenx
• marked it and clicked apply

To make installation simple, I did not enable ssh. Then, I went to NoMachine's website & downloaded NX Windows Client.

Result is a very fast & easy connection from Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux (see screenshot above).

Ahh, don't try to be smart and install it from cmd line `sudo apt-get install freenx`. I know people who did and suffered ;-)

[UPDATE - 09/29/2006]
OK, I take that back! I now have a beta version of Ubuntu Edgy Eft (Knot 3) running on my linux box and I installed it from command line:

sudo apt-get install freenx

I chose No machine keys during the set up and it works just fine!

[UPDATE - 10/02/2006]
I downloaded the new NxClient (2.1.0-6) from NoMachine.com. It failed to connect to my Ubuntu

NX> 704 Session cache: unix-gnome
NX> 707 SSL tunneling: 0
/usr/lib/nx/nxserver: line 891: 27507 Terminated              
( sleep $AGENT_STARTUP_TIMEOUT; exit 1 )
NX> 105 NX> 504 Session startup failed.
NX> 1004 Error: nxagent failed to start with: Unrecognized option: 1
NX> 1001 Bye.

Apparently, it needs a compatible client/server installation...

Useful Free Windows Programs Under 2MB

Over 20 free windows applications under 2mb, courteously of revision3 forum member, lordfoul. Definately a list to look into. Applications range from miscellaneous software, command utilities, system performance tools, and more.

I also liked the followings not yet in the list but mentioned in the comments:
- Taskbar Shuffle (left-click and drag the programs/buttons on your Windows taskbar to rearrange them)

- Power Menu (adds "Always On Top", "Minimize To Tray", "Priority" and "Transparency" sub menus to all top level system menus)

Also check out www.tinyapps.org!

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