Geek Stuff

Trackback spammers on the loose, killing blogs

Eric G. Harrison — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 08:44:00 GMT

It has happened to others, and now to me. Spammers overran my blog with Trackback postings. This morning, between two blogs on our server, I deleted over 500 fake entries.

At this point, when I resume blogging, I'm very inclined to move it to another service so I can stop fighting these fights myself. Who needs it?

Having trouble keeping your machines straight?

Eric G. Harrison — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 12:37:00 GMT

If you use a KVM switch, you may find that it is not always immediately obvious what the specs are of the machine you're working on.

Sysinternals has a great tool called BGInfo, which will “stamp” various pieces of information about the system you're running it on onto the background image.

This is very handy, and free.

Adaptec USB 2.0 Hard Drive Enclosure Kit

Eric G. Harrison — Sat, 07 May 2005 15:22:00 GMT

Recently I had to move my 'drawer of junk' from a file cabinet to a small box in the closet. While transferring the goodies, I found a 250 gig hard drive that I had purchased a month or two ago with the intention of putting into my HP Media Center PC for more capacity. Unfortunately, when I went to install it, I found that there were no spare drive bays in the machine (cheap HP!).

In any case, while at Best Buy a few days ago, I saw the Adaptec USB 2.0 Hard Drive Enclosure Kit, which takes a standard 3.5” hard drive and make it an external USB 2.0 drive. The price of the kit was about $50, but with the reward zone 'rebates' that I had, it cost me about $20.

When unpacking the kit, I found a CD enclosed, which struck me as strange, and had me a bit worried. After all, this thing shouldn't require drivers, right? Well, much to my relief, the CD apparently contains installation instructions, since none are in the box. I have no desire to actually put the CD in a drive since I'm sure that 90% of the contents are advertising, otherwise it would have been cheaper to slip in a single sheet of installation instructions instead of a CD!

Being the geek that I am, I naturally decided to forgo the instructions and figure out how to get the drive installed.

Turns out it was even easier than I thought. Just unscrew two screws on the back of the case, and the whole internal mechanism slides right out the front. Attach the IDE and power supply cable to the drive, gently lower it into place, making sure to 'fold' the IDE cable in a hump behind the drive, and screw the drive into place. Close it back up and you're all done. The whole process takes about 2 minutes, and that's allowing time to find a small phillips head screwdriver.

I attached the drive to my Windows XP system, and it recognized the drive right away, and then I had to go into Computer Management to format the drive, which is still happening as I write this. Cake.

There are two things that I want to comment on about this product:

1) Unlike my ultra portable and tiny SmartDisk FireLite 40 gig drive, this unit requires an external power supply. Not a surprise, but not ideal either if you're moving the drive between machines.

2) No rubber feet are included with the kit! So if I were to put this thing on top of my Antec Sonata case, it would scratch the heck out of it. Either I need to put some rubber footies on the thing, or keep it in the stand that it includes, which at least is plastic and shouldn't scratch things with quite as much enthusiasm as the aluminum chassis of the kit.

A Sourcegear Vault upgrade note...

Eric G. Harrison — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 09:44:00 GMT

About a month ago I decided it was time to upgrade our copy of SourceGear Vault from 2.x to 3.x. At the same time, we were moving the database and service to a different server. I wasn't clear on the exact steps to go through, and submitted a support email to SourceGear. As usual, the response came back quite quickly, and in this case, it was directly from Eric Sink.

The proper way to do the upgrade was to move the database to the 'new' server, and then when installing Vault 3, point it to the database. It automatically upgraded it from a 2.x version to a 3.x version. In retrospect it's quite simple, but at the time, I was worried about stranding our source code in some sort of web service purgatory.

Don't forget, for single user use, Vault is free. If you are doing personal development at home, make sure you use a source code repository, and given that Vault is free for your use, and VSS sucks, go with Vault. You won't regret it. And if you do, well, I promise I won't get upset with you for disappointing me.

Thanks to SourceGear for making such a nice product, and to Eric for taking care of his customers so well!

Mono Links

Eric G. Harrison — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 10:15:00 GMT

No, not *that* kind of mono! Mono as in the .Net Framework on Linux.

For a while, I have ignored Mono, figuring that in my line of business (Windows client programming mostly), I didn't have much use for console based applications. Well, it appears that it has progressed well beyond simple console apps and now supports WinForms.

Now if only they would support VB.Net and not just C#. Oh well, been meaning to learn that...

To be honest, I haven't messed around with it yet, but I'm going to start maintaining a 'personal' list of links that are of interest. This is that list.

Main Mono project

Mono Develop - a free .Net development environment.

If anyone out there has good links, send me a note, or dump them into a comment below and I'll migrate them into the body of this entry.

National Security impacts Google Maps...

Eric G. Harrison — Tue, 05 Apr 2005 05:57:00 GMT

Google has released a new feature that allows you to see satellite imagery from their Google Maps system. This is very, very cool. After looking for my condo (turns out it was nothing but a dirt field when the sat image was taken), I looked for my dads house (couldn't find it), and my old house in Minnesota (found it!). Then, for fun, I decided to look for the White House in Washington, DC. Google did a great job of zooming into the White House, but it hit me that something seemed a bit weird. Take a close look at the images for the White House and the two buildings to the East and West of it. The roofs don't look quite right now do they...

I totally understand why they did it, but it does jar the senses a bit...

Having problem with how your IIS based sites render on Mozilla based browsers?

Eric G. Harrison — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 14:40:00 GMT

Go get a new BrowserCaps file from here. According to Brian Scott, this fixed a bunch of problems he was having with his web control inside of Firefox.

MS Group Policy live webcasts (and not so live ones too).

Eric G. Harrison — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 14:18:00 GMT

I've been learning about Group Policy through the use of webcasts located on this part of Microsoft's web site. If you want to learn about how they work, and what they can be used for, these training sessions are not a bad way to get an introduction to them.

Right now there is a live webcast scheduled for April 11th, but I've been watching all the 'old' ones that are already recorded.

The only problem is that the way the site is structured, you have to register to 'attend' the event, even though all you're really doing is watching a stored webcast. It's a slight pain but mainly it's irritating because it's badly designed. Once they have this stuff once, I shouldn't have to jump through hoops (after I've signed in with my “Passport”). Oh well, it's free.

Hope this helps!

Got a "dead" fan in your PC? Here's a simple fix to try...

Eric G. Harrison — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 07:44:00 GMT

This morning I was working on one of a client's PCs. I noticed while I was inside dinking around, that the main exhaust fan on the back of the case wasn't moving. “Dead fan” was my first thought, but then when I tried to turn it by hand I found that it was very resistant to turning (a dead fan would turn freely by hand, but just not work). So my next thought was “gunked up fan”. I dug up a bottle of air in a can and blasted the fan from the outside of the case blowing in, and immediately the fan started up and took off. Note that I had tried 'kick starting' the fan by hand and it didn't take, so the blast of air must have cleared out the gunk allowing it to start spinning.

So, if you have a dead fan, try blowing the gunk out of it with a blast of air. Might fix you right up!

A busy day for Microsoft vulnerabilities

Eric G. Harrison — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 20:06:00 GMT

Holy cow. For those of you who don't have an IT department to take care of your systems, get ready to apply a bunch of patches. Today, Microsoft announced fixes for 8 critical, 3 important and 1 moderate threats to Windows, IE, ASP.NET, Messenger, Media Player, and probably Notepad.

All of us should go visit the list and see what we need to update.

I appreciate that MS is getting these things fixed, most of which apparently were not known to be in the 'wild', but there are two thoughts:
1) Don't write such buggy code in the first place (I know, it's a huge product - I wouldn't do any better, that's for sure!)
and
2) If all this junk wasn't bundled into Windows, the fix list would either be a lot shorter, or at least many of us could patch just the bits we've chosen to install...

eWeek has a blurb that's worth reading...

Some of the sites out there are talking about the next Sasser or Blaster coming through because now all the vulnerabilities are known to the script kiddies. Patch up friends!

For those of you who are in the Chicago Dot Net drinking, er, discussion, group, I'm planning on being down there on the 28th, but everytime I RSVP on the site, I miss the meeting. This way, only those of you who actually read what I write will suspect that I'm going to show up. :)