Hard to hide from the minds of SysInternals

Interesting blog from SysInternals about Rootkits:
http://www.sysinternals.com/.../sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html

His tool for RootKits:
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/rootkitrevealer.html

Always enjoy reading his blog and his endepth knowledge of the workings of Windows.

It's new, it's improved, it's not quite here

Probably the best CD / DVD buring application around is Nero and with the soon to be released version 7 things get a little better.

Nero burns but does so much more. Audio and video editing is what attracts me to this all-in-one application.

Blu-Ray is bigger and better (25G / 50G)

Blu-Ray:
"Blu-ray, also known as Blu-ray Disc (BD) is the name of a next-generation optical disc format.

While current optical disc technologies such as DVD, DVD±R, DVD±RW, and DVD-RAM use a red laser to read and write data, the new format uses a blue-violet laser instead, hence the name Blu-ray. Despite the different type of lasers used, Blu-ray products can easily be made backwards compatible through the use of a BD/DVD/CD compatible optical pickup and allow playback of CDs and DVDs. The benefit of using a blue-violet laser (405nm) is that it has a shorter wavelength than a red laser (650nm), which makes it possible to focus the laser spot with even greater precision. This allows data to be packed more tightly and stored in less space, so it's possible to fit more data on the disc even though it's the same size as a CD/DVD. This together with the change of numerical aperture to 0.85 is what enables Blu-ray Discs to hold 25GB/50GB."

PC Starter Kit (or essential tools for everyone)

PC Stater kit on Download.com offers some of the best essential tools that everyone should have or at least have knowledge of.

Replacements:
ZoneAlarm replaced with Sygate Personal Firewall (free)

Security:
Must add the new AntiSpyware from Microsoft

There are lots more I would recommend but really didn't want to take away from the article written on Download.com.

Some very useful online web / network / internet tools

Thought I would share some of the website, internet, and network tools that I use.

Whois: Perform a lookup of the domain owner. Alot of tools do this but this one offers two things that can be useful: 1) The number of websites hosted on the same server as the domain looked up and 2) A reverse IP tool to find out the domain names hosted on the server

What's the server: With the tool at NetCraft you can determine what type of server a domain is using. They also give a history of the server and additional information beyond just the server type.

Bulk Google page rank and links: Find out the page rank and links for several sites at the same time.

Open relay tester: Check if you email has an open relay and making you at risk to be put on a blacklist.

IP address locator: Find out the geographical location of an IP address.

Test your connection speed: See where your connection speed stands up against where you could be.

Check if your website is actually down: Test the availability of your website from various servers around the world.

Find my hosting: Get information on a webhost before you signup and find out the hard way.

Those are a few of the tools I use. Would love to hear what others have found - post your best website / internet tool.

New Google flight search

Google now has the ability to search for flights by searching on the two airport codes:
http://news.com.com/.../2100-1038_3-5917821.html

World Wind

World Wind:
"World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there."

That's alota pi

Π

When music goes retro

WOXY is a cool site which offers streaming vintage radio.

Increase the exposure of your blog

Could it be any easier than using the form at Feed Shark?

Add some usefullness to your desktop image

The image you place on your desktop doesn't just have to be a image that looks back at you all day. Make it something usefull.

Ideas

• Desktop Calendar: We are always looking for a calendar and now you can have one easily on your desktop.
• Add guidelines to any image to show different resolutions. This is what my desktop looks like. I have my resolution set to 1280 x 1024 and have an image on my desktop with guidelines for 640 x 480, 800 x 600, and 1024 x 768. What this does is let me see how much of a screen an applications window will fill.
• System Information: Place some critical system information right where you can see it.

Tell me what you have, outside of the normal image, on your desktop.

Create your own swag

There are two sites which provide some of the best options to create swag for you or your company.

1) Spreadshirt: Great quailty of shirts to choose from to ad your designs

2) Cafepress: One of the first and still the best for creating a variety of swag. From shirts to mugs to audio CD's

There is no out-of-pocket expense. I have used this to provide swag for Veign.

Web developers handbook

Wow! Very impressive collection of web development websites and links:
http://www.alvit.de/handbook/

Shut down Windows through a shortcut

There are many ways you can create a shortcut on your desktop (or the desktop of a remote system) to shutdown or restart Windows.

Below are a few of the ways I have come across.

1. Shutdown.exe:

Shutdown:
%windor%\System32\Shutdown.exe -s -t 05
(where 05 is the seconds before shutdown starts)

Restart:
%windor%\System32\Shutdown.exe -r -t 0


2. Windows API:

"Restart" shortcut (warm reboot - Windows restart only) :
C:\WINDOWS\RUNDLL.EXE user.exe,exitwindowsExec

"Reboot" shortcut (cold reboot - restart complete) :
C:\WINDOWS\RUNDLL32.EXE shell32,SHExitWindowsEx 2

"Shutdown" shortcut :
C:\WINDOWS\RUNDLL.EXE user.exe,exitwindows


3. Windows Scripting:

(new ActiveXObject("Shell.Application")).ShutdownWindows();[Note]

Create a file remoteshutdown.js and just add the above line into it. Just double-click to run it and bring up the standard shutdown dialog.


Know any others? Post a comment...

Search engine results with thumbnails

Exalead provides some features not found in Google or Yahoo.

• Thumbnails provided for search results (actually you can control the type of results: text only, text with thumbnails, or thumbnails only) - I like the idea of seeing a little preview of a website before visiting
• Ability to add shortcuts (with preview) to the homepage - Very simple, basic little feature but when you use a search engine as your homepage this helps
• Results provides Related Categories and Related Terms to locate additional results

Not sure I can get away from Google just yet. Since Googles last published count of indexed pages was around 8 Billion and Exalead is around 2 Billion its juts not there yet.

What search engine do you use?

Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots

Top 100 Toys from the past:
http://tv.cream.org/extras/toys/

Brings back a lot of memories of toys that I used to play with - amazed at how many I have played with and some even embarrassed to mention...

#81
#31
#28
#7

Latest shots of Windows Vista

See the latest screenshots from the most current build of Windows Vista.

Windows Calendar - interesting..

I like it!

Pretty cool CD cataloging tool:
http://www.anova.org/.../boozets-visual-cd-is-great-catalog.html

Also check out WinCatalog and see which works best for you.

And the race is on

Firefox reaches 100 millionth download

Watch out IE!

A free software download from Google.

Picasa:
"Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC"

Center a page with CSS and NO tables

Just a quick example of how to use CSS to center a webpage without the need for tables.

Now, wasn't that easy...

Store your passwords safely and securely

KeePass is a great application for storing all of your passwords. It does a great job with organization and useability...

The only gripe is that alot of sites require an email address and it would be nice if the application included a field specific to email address attached to the account.

Oh, and its Open Source (free).

Windows Vista to include antispyware

Microsoft Bakes Windows AntiSpyware into Vista:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1872253,00.asp

Seems like this would cause major anti-trust issues.

Word has everything now!

Now you can even Blog from within Microsoft Word.

Not sure how well its works but feel free to share your comments...

Drop JavaScript and use CSS for menus

This is one of the best sites I have come across showing the power of CSS when it comes to menus. Some other cool stuff, just have to look around.

Link:
http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/index.html

HTML Tidy does what you can't

And what is that, well, write clean HTML code. Check out HTML Tidy for a great tool to cleanup the mess you call a webpage (at least from a coding standpoint)

Link to an easy to use version:
http://dev.int64.org/htmltrim.html

Tools for you Firefox users:
HTML Validator (includes Tidy)

Big Kahuna or 2nd to Google?

Microsoft's Web Mail Gets Overhaul:
"The Hotmail millions (Microsoft reports 200 million users) know and perhaps love could be replaced. For the last seven months, Microsoft has been beta testing a radically different Web mail client, one that makes Hotmail's largely standard HTML interface look like yesterday's news. Kahuna supports drag and drop, right-clicking, multi-select and, in general, a much more Outlook-like look and feel"

Everyone should use an Antivirus software

There is no reason to not use an Anti-virus software when there is a great, free solution with AVG. This software comes highly recommended by lots of power users.

Selectors in CSS is where the cool stuff is

Came across a great website to learn about CSS Selectors. To fully harness the power of CSS it is critical to understand about selectors.

Link:
http://css.maxdesign.com.au/selectutorial/

Take me back

Every so often I like to go back and see what the history of a website looked like. Thanx to a tool called Internet Wayback Machine I can see how a site progressed over time.

Veign's History in case your curious.

Top 10 IT mistakes

The top 20 IT mistakes to avoid:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/19/47FEtop20_1.html

Interesting .Net applications and code

Just some useful .Net things:
http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/

Stop IE from re-creating the Favorites 'Links' folder

Check out the new registry hack on the Veign website which will prevent IE from re-creating the 'Links' folder in your favorites. Just apply the registry hack, manually remove the folder, and re-start IE.

The same affect could be accomplished by locating the folder in Windows Explorer and setting the attribute of the folder to 'hidden'. Personally I think the registry hack is easier.

First Page 2006 might be too slow

I recently started playing around with the beta version of First Page 2006 as the previous versions had been an excellent code-based web creation tool. I must say so far I am a bit disappointed in the IDE.

There is this annoying flickering going on when you type any code or move the mouse around the document being edited. This is so annoying that I couldn't work in it for very long. Hopefully this is a beta only issue and will be worked out before the final release.

Will wait for the next beta release before doing any really extensive testing.

(should note that the new version does contain some very promising and what seems to be powerful features so check it out for yourself)

Google Reader shows its face (beta)

Google released an RSS aggregator today in beta:
http://reader.google.com/

Did your Blog make the top 100 list

CNET's Top 100 Blog List:
http://news.com.com/2310-10784_3-0.html

The search for the perfect image

I get involved in quote a bit of website design and one thing that comes up often is the need for a good, high quality image to use in the design.

Today for instance, I'm spending a couple hours searching for the right image at Dreamtime, iStockPhoto, and other stock image sites. Find the right image feels like searching for the needle in the hay stack. The slightest thing off from what I visualize in the design can make all the difference in the world.

(leave commenst on your favorite stock photo website)

Evrsoft's webpage creator software finally in beta

Many years ago Evrsoft created one of the top free webpage creator applications. After alot of broken promises and many years of waiting for a new version they have released a beta of Evrsoft First Page 2006.

I will be checking out this application over the next few days and see how it compares to the previous version. I won't be testing the WYSIWYG part of the application as I like developing websites in a text editor...

(not sure if this version will be free)

Change the way you access the internet

Tor: An anonymous Internet communication system:
"Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet."

Time for a break with Chasm

Once and a while I stumble across a Flash that I actually have some fun playing for longer than 5min, Chasm is one of them.

Chasm is a needed break from a day of coding. Well designed and a pretty good game play.

Enjoy!

Dump the whole Google index

It seems that doing a search on Google for **** (will also work with ** **) will dump the entire Google web index or at least a fairly large chunk of it.

Yields 11,770,000,000 results.

Can you find a search string to yield more results? I have tried several others and this is the largest I could come up with - that's an hour of my life I will never get back.

MyComputer - Part III: While it's running

Part III in the MyComputer series of posts.

refer to Part I: The audit, Part II: What's Running

In Part I talked quickly about auditing your system to know what you have and in Part II I talked about monitoring your system to know what applications / processes are running.

I was going to post something that told about some applications I use, a brief descriptions, and a link on where to download but I noticed all my applications for monitoring applications as they run come from SysInternals.

So, basically just visit SysInternals and look around. From monitoring registry, file system, TCP/IP to watching processes and tasks, they got it all.

What will run at startup

While looking through the massively helpful site of SysInternals I came across a tool I have not tried before: Autoruns.

This is probably one of the most comprehensive tools I have found for knowing what will be happening when your computer starts.

Coding language for kids

KPL is a Kids Programming Language geared towards kids looking to get into development. Check it out..

KPL:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/coolapplications/KPL/default.aspx

Change the registry and change the system

Its amazing how many settings are stored in the Registry. By modifying keys in the registry you can do some pretty cool things.

I have compiled some of the registry hacks that I have incorporated into my system. Just thought others would get some use out of it.

Registry Hacks (bottom):
http://www.veign.com/download_main.asp

Slimming down Windows XP

A guide to slimming down WinXP:
http://www.bold-fortune.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=229

(although I would not recommend everything in the guide it does give some good information)

Office 12 will support PDF natively

Native PDF support in Office "12":
http://blogs.msdn.com/.../476067.aspx