Mega-ZBlog

I have received several e-mails lately from advertisers interested in getting their links onto my blog.

I am unsure if they are e-mails specifically targeting me or some sort of mass-e-mail to all blogs… I’m leaning toward the latter, since I never got anything like this before I moved my blog from its sub-domain to the main site.

I have not and will not ever put advertisements on my site.  My web host is happy when I put a small text link to his site in my site footer (actually I should put that back in now) but otherwise here are some conveniently numbered things I believe strongly in and will not change.

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Someone close my browser before I dehydrate

Well I messed around a bit and came up with a rather nice solution. This emulates a feature of Linux’s gnome-terminal where you can set the titlebar to always reflect the terminal’s current directory.
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I’ve decided to add content to my blog, and I will be drawing on my experience with all different types of software to recommend ones I like particularly.

In this case, I see lots of people using trial versions of WinZip or WinRAR. Why? It doesn’t make sense, not when there are good, free products out there that don’t have nag screens or trial periods.

My archive tool of choice is 7-Zip. It has a GUI tool, a command line interface, and a shell extension, so you can right click archives to extract them, or right click a bunch of files to archive them. All these are musts for me, and 7-Zip does a good job in all of them. It can also create self-extracting archives which is a plus if you want to compress in .7z format but aren’t sure if your friend has a tool that can open them.

The most interesting feature 7-Zip brings to the table is the 7-Zip file format. It boasts higher compression rates than ZIP. AFAIK, ZIP was originally intended for use with text files, so you get best compression rates with them. I don’t know much about .7z but it was probably designed for modern uses that ZIP is currently used for. At any rate, except for very small files or text files, .7z has always won out for compression ratio in my little tests.

It also supports extracting a number of archives. Unfortunately it can only create a small subset of these, including .7z, ZIP, .tar, .gz, and .bz2, which is still a useful enough assortment.

The only thing it really can’t do is generate RAR files, but fortunately there really is no reason to have to make them anymore… I’m not sure why you still see some around. I can only assume they get better compression ratios in some places than ZIP. However I haven’t needed to make any RAR files for as long as I’ve been using 7-Zip. Considering 7-Zip is a free tool and IIRC RAR creation support requires a paid license I can understand why there is no support.

I would recommend 7-Zip to anyone who is looking for a good desktop tool for extracting or creating archive files, or a good command line tool for the same.

I have found that the latest movie has more than a passing resemblance to a classic PC game which unfortunately is a bit hard to get working on modern PCs. Somehow it magically started working again on my PC (not sure what I did) so I’ve been playing through it again.

While talking on IRC yesterday I decided to make a list of the major points of similarity. I’ll leave off the obvious things such as Indy making sure he doesn’t lose his hat and such.

Obviously this will be chock-full of spoilers for BOTH the movie and the game so be warned. [Read more →]

First, I should mention that Remote Desktop Server is intended by
Microsoft to only be used as a part of the more expensive XP Pro and it
is not intended to be used in XP Home. Despite this, all the files
required to use it seem to be included in Home. The downloadable termserv.dll mentioned below is normally installed by the SP2 beta on both Home and Pro machines, as well.

In addition the linked guide has you take actions which Microsoft believes violate your EULA. (See point 1 below.)

Now that I’ve got that out of the way: This sounds pretty cool. Some things to be aware of:

1. Changing your XP Home to XP Pro is a violation of your Windows EULA, or at least MS thinks so. Normally there are safeguards in place to prevent you from doing this which attempt to scare the user into not trying to change the registry setting that controls it. Using Last Known Configuration like in the article circumvents the safeguard by tricking Windows itself into changing the value. Note that this hack doesn’t appear to affect Windows Update or Windows Genuine Validation.
2. The XP Home -> Pro hack itself only changes your Windows’ reported version… you will be still missing some XP Pro components such as Group Policy Editor since those aren’t included in Home.
3. According to some comments the special termserv.dll apparently isn’t needed. It’s only needed if you want to allow remote and local connections at once, and is only useful if you have multiple user accounts (the local account will still lock workstation if you sign in remotely with the current active account. It only works if you use different accounts, which makes sense).
4. The blog post as-is will not work, and he claims the termserv.dll is a fix for a problem which the termserv.dll has no effect on. About halfway down the page is a comment by Mike about devcon which DOES fix the problem by installing the RDP driver. You can try using Add New Hardware wizard and selecting the machine.inf and installing the driver that way, but who knows if it’ll work like that. devcon.exe is probably the best way to do it.
5. It was written for SP2 but it works on SP3.
6. System Restore should cover all the things that you change by following the blog instructions, so set a restore point in case things break. You should be able to restore it later. Even still…
7. The guide has you make changes to your system which affect the OS, drivers, and of course the Terminal Services service. Be careful to follow the directions. If you are unsure what some of the modifications do you may want to go learn before trying or just skip it altogether.
8. One of the patches seems to enable autologon. After getting everything working, you can adjust autologon settings by doing Start > Run and typing “control userpasswords2”. The checkbox at the top controls autologon, if you uncheck it click OK and you’ll be prompted for autologon settings. You can check it to restore default Windows behavior.
9. Don’t try this on Vista. Just… don’t. I can’t say for sure with 100% certainty it won’t work, but given the way Vista is distributed compared to XP and the different setup and license processes, it probably won’t work. Terminal Services itself has received updates to support Aero Glass etc over Remote Desktop.

This tricked me, I couldn’t see how it could be anything other than 50/50 until I read up on it. I think I get it now. Ugh.

I just finished up the newest version of my screenshot tool. Give it a try here. I’m getting good feedback about it. The changelog is here.

I made a bunch of changes that will allow it to be easily incorporated into my newest tool, which is a plugin-oriented system tray tool. Basically the idea is you can mix and match the modules you want to have easy access to through a system tray icon. Right now all I have is a processes menu for killing and process priority and a services menu for stopping, starting, etc. I plan to add a more complex plugin that will allow for you to group processes and services together into tasks… and you can start/stop them at whim. I would use it to start/stop the firewall, anti-virus, Apache + MySQL, UnrealIRCd + Anope, etc with a click for each “task”. I had a similar tool but it used a dialog and it had all the “tasks” hardcoded into the app. I think doing it again as a system tray icon would make it easier to use and more likely I’d use it.

Much better.

That is all.

So I’ve been messing with Ubuntu on and off for some time now and the new version 8.04 came up yesterday. I upgraded but I experienced some problems along the way I think others should know about:

• Free Space: Depending on how many extra packages you’ve installed since installing Ubuntu originally, you may need 1.5gb free as I did for downloading. But the unpacking phase ended up taking 1gb more… and left me with as little as 70mb free at one point! I’ll need to expand my partition I guess and shrink my Windows’ partitions. But just be sure you have enough free space.
• Drive mounting: You will probably have to edit your /etc/fstab to fix drive /dev addresses. All /dev/hd* have been changed to /dev/sd*, bumping existing /dev/sd* up and out of the way. Also disc drives are now /dev/scd0, scd1, etc.
• If you use Truecrypt and you can’t mount drives after upgrading, do an apt-get remove truecrypt and then go to the official site and follow the download instructions. Extract the .deb file and do a dpkg -i on it to install it, and truecrypt should work again.
• Upgrading may destroy custom mouse and monitor configurations in xorg.conf. You did make a backup of all your important changes there, didn’t you? This is only a concern if you use multiple monitors (it doesn’t set them up right when upgrading) or if you have a mouse with more than three buttons, since both cases usually require a little surgery on this file to get working right.
• Compiz settings will revert. Use ccsm and set them back manually. ccsm is a bit easier to work with after the upgrade.
• Emerald themes won’t apply to compiz anymore unless you specifically use emerald as your window manager instead of compiz. Weird. Also emerald might hang when you run it… delete ~/.beryl and ~/.emerald/settings.ini, go back into Emerald Theme Manager and reapply your settings, then it should run fine. You probably want to put “emerald –replace” in your startup items under the “Sessions” Administrative thingy so your theme will work on startup.
• There doesn’t seem to be a Wine 0.9.60 build for Ubuntu yet. 🙁 Maybe in a couple days.