Recent Posts

1876

General Software Discussion / Re: In search of ... several diagnostic tools

« Last post by Shades on February 19, 2012, 12:38 PM »

Till now I encountered a lot of issues with Windows 7 and 2008 R2 when using a web interface to connect to services running on those machines. Lately I found out that it really makes a lot of difference if you start extra services like MySQL, Apache etc. with a user-name that is associated with the service.

When installing MySQL, Apache etc. you notice that extra Windows user groups are created (at least that is the case with Oracle software (which MySQL is now a part of)). Associate your user-name with that group and grant your user-name the 'Log on as service' right.

Initiate/restart the MySQL and/or Apache services with your user-name and suddenly your networking issues disappear.

Really, for anyone who is dabbling with Oracle software (on windows 2008 or higher), use the above method...it will save a lot of time, hair and other kinds of frustration.

1877

General Software Discussion / Re: Zentimo/USB Safely Remove - Are they needed anymore?

« Last post by Shades on February 12, 2012, 07:27 AM »

I'm with Carol on this one. Hardly useful on Windows 7, but on Windows XP it does help. At least it does on my XP PC which entered its 7th year of practically continuous usage (which is quite a feat as it uses nVidea chipset).

A lot of times Windows won't allow me to shutdown/eject the device for whatever (unclear) reason, but after installing the latest Zentimo Give-away-of-the-day version, I do not have that problem anymore at all. In addition, ejecting appears to be a tad faster.

1878

Living Room / Re: Looking for password "scheme" suggestions

« Last post by Shades on January 27, 2012, 05:10 PM »

@40hz:
It could be me, but I have the impression that most of the kids from today only know when "internet doesn't work" and that they (gladly) look to the previous generation to fix the problem they experience.

Besides that, I overheard some conversations between CS students (at a LAN party) how they solve networking issues and I was amazed about the bullcrap that came out of their (Microsoft-orientated) mouths. How they could come to their interpretation of the study material baffles me. Actually one of them is responsible for the IT in his fathers (fancy lawyer) office and already makes more than me. But he asked me to help out setting up the LAN for his LAN party, because he was not able to set it up properly.

It is really 'who you know, not what you know' that gets you ahead over here in these parts of the world.
[/off-topic]

[on-topic]
Personally I use a set of difficult passwords and mix-and-match them how I see fit, adding a random number and/or symbol. No-one that knows me is able to guess or deduce what the (complete) base set of my passwords is and adding mix-and-match....well, good luck! The numbers and/or symbols are there to comply with security definitions.

Not the best of schemes (by far!) but it is one I have no trouble remembering, makes for quite "messy" passwords and soothes my paranoia sufficiently.

And I agree wholeheartedly with the earlier statement which says where your password is stored is just as important as its difficulty.

Hence I trust my mind and ability to not communicate passwords best as those are under my control, while storage on servers isn't.
Besides, there is not much to keep secret and being (happily) without credit card I don't have an on-line access point to my money anyway.

1879

General Software Discussion / Re: Retrieving the name of a nice process killer

« Last post by Shades on January 26, 2012, 03:46 PM »

Process Explorer - freeware from SysInternals and nowadays part of Microsoft
Process Hacker  - open source Process Explorer-like tool which supports more brutal termination of processes
 
Both are portable and as such a welcome addition to a computer tech's software arsenal.

1880

General Software Discussion / Re: Waterfox has now been accepted as a Mozilla project

« Last post by Shades on January 23, 2012, 06:44 AM »

Fond memories indeed...and a titbit of info I didn't know about her.  

1881

General Software Discussion / Re: "Of course you know, this means WAR Gentlemen!" Microsoft makes its move.

« Last post by Shades on January 21, 2012, 01:04 PM »

@40hz:
While reading your posts I could not help but read that you want Microsoft to change its name into Mordorsoft...   

1882

Living Room / Re: Sorry, This Post Has Been Censored

« Last post by Shades on January 14, 2012, 12:22 PM »

Maybe some heads should roll again while chanting 'Vive la revolucion!'. (in a good old fashioned French tradition...)

1883

General Software Discussion / Re: Nasty NTFS issue ?

« Last post by Shades on January 14, 2012, 11:25 AM »

Recently (after a power failure) I got a hard disk acting up. Not always, but after a random write action it would notify me that the SATA controller was acting up and preventing me from writing anything anymore while the complete system would grind to a halt (extremely slow).

So I use MHDD on the hard disk (2TB) I suspected to be the troublemaker and it found one error. After deducing that this error was located in one partition, I do not write to that particular partition anymore and the HD did not act up anymore.

As that partition contains data which I cannot move (with the current HD prices), I did the next best thing...splitting up that particular partition, so the part with the error is not accessible. Happy sailing ever since.

With the story above I just want to say that error messages and error causes are not always as closely related as you might expect. Re-attaching SATA cables (on both ends!) is the first thing I do when experiencing errors which could be (remotely) related to hard disk I/O. You would not believe how much computer problems are related to less than optimal connections.

1884

General Software Discussion / Re: Nasty NTFS issue ?

« Last post by Shades on January 14, 2012, 05:53 AM »

Get MHDD, burn it to CD/DVD and boot from it. After boot, select the correct hard disk, hit F4 a few times to start a very thorough check on the state of the selected disc.

It is not a nice tool to look at (DOS look) and the information shown might even be too daunting, but it is very powerful. Depending on the size it can take its time, but you will have a very clear picture on the state of the HD (amount of good sectors, amount of slow sectors, amount of too slow sectors and (types of) error(s)).

The software offers options to fix slow sectors and remap bad ones (but not both at the same time). And these options will destroy all content that is on the disk, so make a backup of the complete system first, if you are inclined to use these options.

1885

Living Room / Re: Sorry, This Post Has Been Censored

« Last post by Shades on January 13, 2012, 03:52 PM »

Time to run my own DNS services...

1886

Living Room / Re: Kopimism - a newly-formalised religion

« Last post by Shades on January 08, 2012, 04:08 PM »

Although I don't see any use or excuse for religions, I don't think that these are (in itself) not so bad.

The problems with religions start with the ego of the people that are a (few) step(s) higher in the religious "food chain". Suddenly everybody needs to be convinced that their idea(s) are the only truth(s) and act according to their wishes.

However, truth is a vague concept at best and in my experience only (quantifiable) facts can be used to form truth that anyone can agree upon. To be honest, I truly don't care about your (mis-)conceptions of me needing to have an afterlife and serving whatever deity for eternity.

Sounds all like a dictatorship to me and I can have all that right now in this lifetime by moving to North Korea where a former deity recently passed away but granted NK time with his heir (according to their own state television).

1887

Living Room / Re: The Christmas arms race

« Last post by Shades on January 08, 2012, 03:44 PM »

They tricked me with that one, the food appeared on the table, disguised as a schnitzel.

From the first bite I sensed something wrong, halfway through (I didn't want to disappoint the hostess/cook) I left the table nearly vomiting. At this time the rest of the family at the table had a pretty good idea of what I was eating and started to laugh at my expense.

So whatever happens, make really sure to let nobody prepare a dish called 'Mondongo' for you. Not for any occasion...never!

And yes. I wished I had liters of ketchup at that meal. 

1888

Living Room / Re: The Christmas arms race

« Last post by Shades on January 08, 2012, 12:06 PM »

@40Hz:
Try the local Paraguayan dish, called 'Mondongo'. After one bite you will see the truth in the way of your grandfather and his ketchup...you will use liters! 
Man, that is disgusting...in a similar way like the Scottish 'Haggis'.

1889

Living Room / Re: Upgrading RAM amount; please help me choose.

« Last post by Shades on January 08, 2012, 11:52 AM »

@superboyac:
She's doing the rounds here in South America, I believe. Heard at least a new song from her on the local radio station.

1890

Living Room / Re: Can U Say Crap-O-Riffic??

« Last post by Shades on January 08, 2012, 10:27 AM »

Ha! I have here a software RAID (combination of 5, 6 and 10) on Linux. Since (almost) two years now it runs on Ubuntu 10.4 Server, which made it rock-solid. When it was still on CentOS it failed whenever it pleased and/or after a power failure, which tends to happen quite often here in Paraguay. It took literally 2 to 5 days to rebuild the RAID setup, all the time hoping no new power failure would come...so I do know about ambient stress.

After the quite easy transition of this software RAID to Ubuntu and subsequent rock-solidness, you will hear a lot of praises for me for Ubuntu. Just turn on that PC and it works exactly as I expect it too. Guess Ubuntu is safer than street-racing 

1891

Living Room / Re: Upgrading RAM amount; please help me choose.

« Last post by Shades on January 04, 2012, 12:29 PM »

@Ath:
At the risk of taking this thread too off-topic...that is the first time I hear of that, to be honest.

The system that contains this setup is my most stable PC (running Ubuntu 10.04 Server) to date. Actually, the drive rack from the server case in which the drive is mounted is oriented vertically by design (right above a cooling fan). There are 8 horizontal slots for a RAID setup (of which 4 are in use) in the adjacent section from this server case.

Anyway, I thought the setup to be smart with the design of the server case as it is. Server case is from a company called Meridian and was bought from a yearly auction held by the US embassy here in Paraguay. Paid about 10 USD for it at the time. Although the case was used for several years I thought it to be a good deal, because it is still running great after 5 years.   


Trying to go to the topic at hand:
Only the word Itunes already causes an allergic reaction with my person. I also believe that each time you start the application your I.Q. drops with 1 point. Permanently!

So it is not so hard to imagine that the damage it does on your PC will be devastating!

If I was allowed to compare It.n.s with a disease, it would be ebola!

 

1892

Living Room / Re: Upgrading RAM amount; please help me choose.

« Last post by Shades on January 04, 2012, 08:51 AM »

I also just noticed that when I rebooted and the part which shows all the hard drives coming up...that is usually very quick, this time it had to wait several seconds to detect the each drive.  Made me think I have a motherboard problem.

-superboyac (January 03, 2012, 07:12 PM)

Have you tried disconnecting your SATA cables (both ends!) and reconnecting them? Thermal creep is a real issue with any kind of connection and as SATA connectors are flimsy by default...

Lets just say that I fixed a lot of PC's here (in Paraguay where in summertime it hits 40 degrees Celsius at 10:00 in the morning) just by re-attaching connectors. The only disk where I never gave done this fix is one that is mounted vertically with the power and SATA connectors on top. Whatever thermal creep is able to do...it is fixed by plain old gravity.

And yes, even the deluxe SATA connectors that click onto their connector are not safe from thermal creep. Maybe in the cold north this is different, but over here these are not as stable as you would expect.

1893

Living Room / Re: What books are you reading?

« Last post by Shades on January 02, 2012, 12:30 PM »

@IainB:
The song from Iron Maiden is great too   

1894

Living Room / Re: HAPPY NEW YEAR 2012!

« Last post by Shades on January 02, 2012, 12:27 PM »

@SJ:
It will not make you any pourer...

1895

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Ethervane Echo

« Last post by Shades on December 31, 2011, 07:03 AM »

From the same site(addictivetips.com)...check number 44! 

1896

Best E-mail Client / Re: E-mail client recommendations

« Last post by Shades on December 29, 2011, 05:04 AM »

Outlook (2010) is a reasonable client...until you hook it up to Exchange.

If you use Outlook for automatizing email with encryption while connected to Exchange...welcome to a world of hurt! Completely unnecessary, overly complicated and poorly (read: contradicting) documented hurt...

Speed? Never impressed me much (with or without Exchange "life line").
Functionality? Sure, now Microsoft has to follow some KISS-principles and it might be better than reasonable (without Exchange).

My Exchange 2010 setup is an i7 with SATAII discs and 8GByte RAM...and it matches the speed of my old Exchange 2000 server on a Pentium 2 350MHz, 256MByte RAM, IDE disc. Both use default settings, but the overhead has increased dramatically for functionality that is better implemented in other 3rd party software.

The only reason that I use Outlook is because it is the only client that supports extended MAPI (and therefore CAPI).

Lets just say that I will never be or become an Outllook fan, especially after all these years and incarnations that archaic PST/OST structure (including its artificial limits) is still in use today.
[/end rant]

1897

Finished Programs / Re: Taking Screenshot (via PrtScn) & MS Paint

« Last post by Shades on December 27, 2011, 09:12 AM »

+1 with ScreenshotCaptor from Mouser. Besides that it does by default almost exactly what you ask by default, you can also set it up to name and store each screenshot without any further interaction at all.

Although MSPaint is not opened by default, a different but more functional editor is. This piece of software is really the "icing on the cake" and can stand against any commercially available solution that is available out there.  

1898

General Software Discussion / Re: Favorite ZIP/RAR application?

« Last post by Shades on December 18, 2011, 05:18 AM »

@y2kusuma:
From what I read I get the impression you first have to install WinRAR 4.01, use the license to register that specific version and then freely download/install updates.

1899

General Software Discussion / Re: Best free SSL certificate?

« Last post by Shades on December 18, 2011, 05:07 AM »

See this DC thread for a free (limited) certificate.

You could also do (full enabled) self-signed PKCS12 certificates, which is okay as well (if the group you share these with is yourself and a few others in your "inner circle", but not commercially).
Self-signed certificates are slightly more problematic, as browsers do not recognize them the first time these are used. However, the browser screen that shows up has a button to view the certificate and when you do, select through the tabs from the new screen and you will find a button to install the certificate. After doing so the problem goes away.

Creating (full enabled) self-signed certificates is not difficult at all. MS TechNet, MS Downloadcenter, Easy-RSA (part of OpenVPN, comes with a straight forward manual), Java.

1900

Living Room / Re: LHC Finds HBP? Or at least...they think they did...Awesome if confirmed!

« Last post by Shades on December 16, 2011, 08:24 AM »

@zridling:
You forget about the Mormons. According to them their president is a prophet...and those have a direct connection with the almighty one, is it not? ;-)

Guess they could not invent a better title for the top position (their church is part of a corporation after all, hehehe).