I'm really loving Live Mesh.  Until yesterday, everything just worked^TM.  Unfortunately that all came to a screeching halt when Mesh on my MacBook told me I had to update because it wouldn't connect to the network anymore.  A quick download, and then install (of course that requires a log in as an Admin user for me) and it seemed ok, for 30 seconds or so.  Now it's continuously crashing.

It seems that several others are having the same issue since the update.  I've already submitted feedback using Microsoft Connect, so hopefully they will figure something out quick.

I read that a Windows update is also coming soon.

I finally got Live Mesh working on my Mac, my phone, and my fileserver.  I'm waiting on a new laptop for work, so I haven't installed there yet.

I have to say  this is very cool.  At the very basic, it does file sync.  This is what most users will see at first.  I've used several different sync applications, and within a couple of days, I've been quite satisfied with this solution.  One thing to note is that the Windows Mobile client actually does scheduled sync with your Live Mesh desktop in the cloud!

The Windows Mobile and Mac client sync with the cloud.  The Windows client has the ability to sync with the cloud, and to sync peer to peer with other Windows clients.

The interesting thing is that you can sync with other people's Mesh objects, if they invite you.  I can see this replacing Groove and FolderShare when it is release (it's a Technology Preview right now.)

More to come as I play with it.  BTW, there's a SDK as well.

With the new availability of the Mac client, I'm going to try Live Mesh again.  I was able to get logged in to my account, and download the Mac client.  I'm getting an error trying to log in, but I suspect the service is getting hammered right now.

Update: Looks like I'm not the only one getting this error.

On10.net has a good video on Live Mesh, and the Mac client.  If you're interested, it's worth the 10 minutes.

Like all good geeks, I installed Google Chrome the other day.  I like the idea of Chrome (i.e. another major browser to encourage innovation) and I also like some of the major features they have announced.  Having one tab which crashes not take down the browser is a good thing.

Even though the UI is sleek, I find the color scheme to look bizarre with my dark theme.  Maybe we'll be able to modify it with some javascript or css.

I created an application shortcut for Google Reader, just to see what it would do.  It's very interesting.  Basically, it gets its own window, without a tab bar, location bar, or menu bar.  The menu is completely embedded in the control box (the little icon at the top left of the window.)  In this mode, that icon, and the icon in the windows task bar are both the Google Reader icon.  Nice touches.  It does have interesting behavior when clicking links.  These launch a new browser window, but as Carl points out, those tabs live inside the same process as Google Reader.  Any links followed from that tab (in a new tab, window, or incognito window) all live in the same process.  Even if you manually navigate in those tabs, by typing in a URL, they still live in the same process.  This is definitely not what I was expecting.

One other thing I found to be very bizarre is the install location.  Just like Live Mesh, Chrome installed inside my user profile.  I installed it on my work dev machine where I have local Admin privs. so its not a huge deal, but I find the choice to be very strange.

I will continue to play with it, but there are a few things obviously missing which will keep it from being my default browser: Delicious, Ad Block Plus, spell checker, etc.

I finally installed Sugarsync, and it is mostly working as described.  I installed it on the MacBook and our Windows Server 2003 fileserver.  I still need to install it on my work laptop.  The Pocket PC client is next to useless (it only has access to the photo galleries, which it insists on creating, but I have absolutely no use for.)  The Mac client claims to be in beta, and it does feel that way.  None of the options which are supposed to interact with the website work (i.e. Versions and View in Online File Manager).  I've also got a problem where a bunch of files have refused to upload (314 to be exact.)  I'm still playing with it, but am undecided as to whether I will pay when the 45 day trial is over.

While at my parent's this weekend, my mother asked me about setting the font to Bold in Word 2008 for Mac.  She claims to have turned on the Formatting toolbar, but wasn't seeing the ability to Bold her fonts.  Not being a Word expert, and being in a hurry, I pointed out that she should buy a book (which I've told her to do before) or visit the Genius Bar.

This morning, I decided to take a look and see what the options are, in comparison to what you would see on Windows.  Actually, it is quite similar.

Microsoft Word 2000 on Windows XP

Microsoft Word 2008 on Mac OSX Leopard

As you can see, the selection method and resultant toolbars are surprisingly similar.  Honestly, I'm not sure what my mother was doing wrong in turning on the toolbar.

Office 2007's ribbon is quite different, however, I don't believe she has any experience in that area.

Word 2008 does have a Mac specific formatting feature, the Formatting Palette.

The Formatting Palette is a little floating window which contains a number of formatting controls.  It seems to be quite powerful.

Given the two methods for performing the same task in the Mac version, it appears that Microsoft has done a fairly good job of keeping their switchers and Mac-faithful happy.

I've been using FolderShare for quite a while to keep things in sync between my machines.  With the recent addition of the MacBook, I was quite happy to have FolderShare also supported there.  In the Windows world, I've actually been running it on Windows Server 2003, because I rarely log into my desktop, and all of the backups run from the server.  A couple of weeks ago, FolderShare stopped connecting on the server complaining that the version was too old (although we know they haven't really changed the back-end since the ancient Mac version still connects.)  This morning I attempted to update FolderShare on the server and was greeted with this:

Come on Microsoft.  I guess I'll be trying all those other sync apps I've been linking to.

Along with my MacBook, I bought a copy of VMWare Fusion, knowing that someday I'd have a reason to run a Windows app, and today is the day.  Once again, its the lousy Entourage which is failing to meet my needs.  What Ineed to do is forward a complicated HTML message.  Entourage fails miserably.  OWA on either of the browsers on my Mac also fail (although not quite as badly as Entourage.)  Even IE7 on Windows fails to forward it correctly (the images don't come through.)  Now obviously I have access to Windows boxes, and can use them, but I'm using this excuse to set up an XP VM with Office 2003.

A beta invite to Dropbox showed up in my email this morning.  This is another cross-platform file sync utility.  The big difference I see with this one is that it has a specific area where your sync'd files have to live.

I'll check it out.

I've just had one of my FolderShare libraries totally freak out.  It basically deleted every file in the library.  I know that the files were there last night, and I think even earlier today.  Of course there's backups, but it's still a total pain in the behind.

I only wish the FolderShare trash was a little more intelligent (similar to the Windows Recycle Bin.)

One of my favorite browsing techniques is to highlight a selection, right-click and choose Search Google for...  (in Firefox.)  Google Reader appears to have broken this functionality.  On a normal page, after I highlight a given set of text, and right-click, the selection remains selected.  When viewing the Google Reader page, when I right-click, the selection becomes unselected.  I'm awfully certain that this worked a week or so ago.  I haven't yet been able to try it on the Mac.  On windows, I'm using 2.0.0.13.

I now have a very unique set of requirements for a password wallet.  I realistically need something that is file based (as opposed to database based) and runs on Windows, Windows Mobile, and Mac OS X.

It needs to be file based, so I can use FolderShare to keep it in sync between our fileserver, my work PC, and the Mac.

The platforms are obvious.  I still have a Windows based desktop in my home office, and a Windows based laptop for work.  I won't be switching phone platforms for quite a while.

I've been using Ilium Software's eWallet for ages.  It meets all of my requirements, almost.  I actually have it working on the Mac under Darwine, however there are some issues.  Occasionally, the clipboard between X11 and the Mac has stopped working (i.e. things copied in eWallet can't be pasted into a normal Mac app and vise versa.)  It also has this totally bizarre problem where in the card view, all the text is in some bizarre symbol based font.

I went on a big hunt for a cross platform password wallet.  SplashID looked perfect, until reading the fine print.  The only way to move from a desktop platform to a handheld platform is via it's appropriate sync manager.  I don't actually ActiveSync my phone with anything except the Exchange server.  They do have this awful export/import work around, which would mean clear-text versions of my wallet available every time I needed to update it.  It's also not clear if the Mac and Windows versions are file compatible.

The last one that I checked was the open source project Password Safe.  Their tact for cross platform seems to be to go the Java route.  There's an ancient Pocket Pc version (from 2003) but that seems to be dead.  I guess I could attempt to port it to Windows Mobile and Mac OS X, but given my lame coding skills, and lack of time, this seems like a very poor choice.

I've just now seen KeePass which is another open source option, this time with active Windows, Windows Mobile, and OS X versions.  I think I know what I need to test next.  Migrating my data is going to be a bitch.

[update 03-14-2008]
Marc Tassin from Ilium Software sent me an email pointing to their official blog, and their iPhone announcement.  This quote definitely gives me something to think about:
"4. Will you make a Mac version?
I’m not allowed to give you a definite answer on that one yet, but as some technical types might already know, the iPhone and the Mac run very similar software. I’ll leave it at that for now."

I've been using FolderShare for quite a while to keep a select subset of my personal files synchronized between my work laptop and my home environment.  I've blogged about it a few times in the past.  Now that I've added the MacBook, I'm using it there as well to keep an even larger selection of my documents synced from the Windows server to the MacBook.  Microsoft recently announced an update to Foldershare, changing the backend from PHP to ASP.NET.  Unfortunately, there's not a new Mac client, so we're stuck in Rosetta-land. 

Enter Dropbox.  DropBox appears to be similar to FolderShare with a twist, it also syncs to the cloud, S3 to be precise.  Plus it does file revisions.  The DropBox client is written in Python, and runs on Windows and Mac OS X.  One interesting difference between the two is that DropBox is a special folder on your machine, where FolderShare is able to monitor and sync any local folder(s).

I've requested a beta invite for the new DropBox service.

Apparently, H&R Block's programmers don't know about least priviledge.  Yes, their app has an auto-update feature, but so does Firefox, and it runs as a non-administrator just fine.

Here's my work around to run TaxCut as my user account (so the files can be in my My Documents) but still be an Adminstrator:

@echo off

setlocal
set _Admin_=%COMPUTERNAME%\Administrator
set _Group_=Administrators
set _Prog_="C:\Progra~1\TaxCut07\Program\TaxCut.exe /N version.taxcut.com"
set _User_=%USERDOMAIN%\%USERNAME%

if "%1"=="" (
    runas /u:%_Admin_% "%~s0 %_User_%"
    if ERRORLEVEL 1 echo. && pause
) else (
    echo Adding user %1 to group %_Group_%...
    net localgroup %_Group_% %1 /ADD
    if ERRORLEVEL 1 echo. && pause
    echo.
    echo Starting program in new logon session...
    runas /u:%1 %_Prog_%
    if ERRORLEVEL 1 echo. && pause
    echo.
    echo Removing user %1 from group %_Group_%...
    net localgroup %_Group_% %1 /DELETE
    if ERRORLEVEL 1 echo. && pause
)
endlocal

The open-source disk encryption leader, TrueCrypt, has shipped their latest version, and is now supporting encryption of a complete Windows system (similar to what PGP does.)  I happily used PGP's full disk encryption on my work laptop for a while, until a policy came out about not using any non-approved encryption on company machines.  I've happily used TrueCrypt for creating encrypted containers, and love it.

The other interesting new feature is a Mac version of the software (without system encryption support.)

Microsoft has posted the RELEASE CANDIDATE of Windows XP SP3 for general download.  If you're dying for some SP3 action, or you just have a death wish, hop on over.  Or wait until next year with the rest of us.

 

Why is Dell's wireless LAN tray utility using 92MB of RAM?  I'm thinking that's a bit excessive.

349,992 K in use for a virus scanner?  I think that's a little much.

My employer is very into the C:/D: partitioning scheme on our laptops (its a side effect of their policy to reimage a machine if it takes IT longer than 30 minutes to fix a problem.)  Yesterday, I went to defrag my drives, and found out that my C: drive had 3% free space.  Oops.

So I started to search for a way to move Outlook's cached copy of my mailbox to my D: drive.  There's a knowledge base article Q896591, which describes a ForcePSTPath and ForceOSTPath, which controls where Outlook creates those files.  I guess I will find out how well they work.

UPDATE: this only seems to take effect for new profiles.  I tried renaming the OST file for an old profile, and it just recreated the file in the same location.  I created a new profile, and it created the file where I specified in the registry entry.

One of my colleagues showed me the Google Photo Screensaver, and I thought it was quite nice, so I wanted to install it.  The unfortunate thing is it is part of the Google Pack, and requires you to install it through the Google Updater, which for some reason isn't Run as friendly.  Oh well.  There are a collection of site pointing to a Google stripped version of it, but I'm a little nervous about that one.

So I got it installed, and the screensaver is pretty good.  The fact that the first four images are the Google logo (on my dual-screen system) is a little annoying, but I can live with it.  I like the fact that you can add multiple sources for the images (that's much better than the XP default one.)  I stuck a bunch of photos from My Pictures, as well as the share on our server where we store our digital photos.  It seems to handle it ok, except it doesn't do such a good job of randomizing.  It seems to select a few subdirectories, and randomizes from within those.

Lifehacker pointed to a Win32 port of Evolution (the Linux Outlook substitute.)  Unfortunately, I can't get it to connect to our Exchange server, which is secured with SSL.  Bummer.  It seems I'm not the only one having problems.

I've had it on my todo list to set up another external way to get to my personal email (via IMAPS/SMTPS) for quite a while.  This morning I had some time to spend on it.  And what a frustrating mess it has been.  I got IMAP working with no issues.  SMTP, however, seems to be broken.

 

If I enable SSL on the SMTP Virtual Server, I receive this message from Outlook Express:

Your server has unexpectedly terminated the connection. Possible causes for this include server problems, network problems, or a long period of inactivity. Account: 'account name', Server: 'fqdn', Protocol: SMTP, Port: 465, Secure(SSL): Yes, Error Number: 0x800CCC0F

A bit of blogging shows quite a few hits for this error, but most seem to be trying to debug the client part of it.  I did however find one posting in TechNet forums of one guy with the same problem I'm having, unfortunately, no one has responded.

What a pain.

Craig Pringle shows us how you can use one of the higher SKUs of Windows Vista and a Wacom digitizer to have a true ink experience, including TIP, flicks, and ink in One Note.  Maybe I should put Vista on my desktop, just for this...

Microsoft/Sysinternals has migrated most (all?) of their utilities onto a MS.com site.  Interstinngly enough, for all the Microsoft look that it has, it still has a Sysinternal feel.  They've updatted several tools, as well as combining a few of my favorites (RegMon and FileMon).  Take a look.  I've already downloaded Process Monitor.

I have Linux box that sits in front of our Exchange server, and does spam and virus scanning on our incoming mail.  Before now, I've just been having it pass all mail through, and then having our Exchange server reject mail for recipients who aren't really in our domain.  This caused our BadMail directory to have tens of thousands of files in there, so I decided to do a little searching to find out if Postfix could check an LDAP directory for its list of valid recipients.  I didn't find that, but I did find an nifty perl script that queries active directory and pulls all the smtp addresses for the domain.   It seems to be working well, so far.  My only issue with the script is that it only works for one OU in Active Directory.  I have two, one for real people, and one for other types of accounts.  I'll have to figure out a good way to modify the script so it pulls from both OUs.

Today the disks on our mail server were full.  After digging in to it, I found that the full online backup of Exchange (the one that would have cleared out the log files) was failing.  I do two other backups (exmerge to generate pst files of the mailboxes and cold backups of the databases), so I wasn't really in any danger of the machine going down, but with 40 GB of old log files, it was quite a mess.  The backup failing was completely my fault.  I wasn't checking the backup logs.  I was (occassionally) checking to see that the backup was getting written, but what I wasn't paying attention to was that the backup was going to a FAT32 volume, and the backup had grown to over 4 GB.  Guess what?  You can't have a file greater that 4GB on a FAT32 volume.

I also had never cleared out the BadMail directory.

This home SysAdmin thing can be a pain in the ass.

This morning I've been having trouble connecting to a wireless hotspot.  I'm able to connect, and I get an IP address (192.168.1.189.)  I get DNS servers (outside the NAT space), but I don't get a default gateway.  I check with another guy who is clearly online, and he had no troubles.  I 'repair' the connection several times.  I reboot.  I ipconfig /release /renew.  I finally noticed that VMWare had created one of its virtual adapters in the 192.168.1.0/24 also.  I start disabling VMWare services.  Still doesn't help.  I finally figured out that you can disable the actual VMWare adapters, and voila, it starts working.

Something to watch out for.

Holy hand grenades, Batman.  Check out this list of indispensable tools that Scott Hanselman has put together.  I'm going to be rebuilding my work machine next month.  I need to do this list for myself, so I'll plan on posting it here.  (by the way. my list is way shorter.)

My work machine's Windows install is in that spiral of death all Windows machines seem to get into, so I'm in the early planning stages of a rebuild.  One of the things I intend to do this time around is to completely encrypt my D: (data) drive.  (I had been thinking about it even before the idea that I might actually have to check my laptop, but now it seems even more prudent.)  Unfortunately, I have 16 GB of applications on my D: drive, that I definitely don't intend to run off an encrypted disk (my company has a standard image, and the C: drive is only 12 GB.  Enter Gnome Partition Editor.  I knew that Knoppix had been able to resize NTFS partitions, but you have to do it at the command line, and isn't necessarily for the faint of heart.  gparted is a LiveCD or LiveUSB Linux image who's only purpose in life is to resize partitions.  Because of this goal, its only a 30 MB download, and its a GUI.  I'll definitely be checking this one out.

Omar Shahine is solving one of my Windows Live Writer gripes for me.  He's adding support for uploading of images from the Writer without FTP to dasBlog for version 1.9.  Come on version 1.9.  Looks like he's also adding a couple of cool plugins.

After writing a few posts with Windows Live Writer, I have a couple of suggestions:

• I should be able to press tab at the end of the Subject line, and have it pop down to the body.
• It needs a way to ping a trackback.  Maybe this needs some support from dasBlog? (I just found the Post Properties button.)
• I want a Publish and New button.  I find the options for what happens after you Publish to be lacking.  It can close, which closes the application window, or it can not close, which publishes, but keeps the post in the editor window.  I want an option to Publish, and give me a new blank editor window.
• I still want something besides FTP upload of images.

BTW, I figured out it does have support for setting the date/time of a post, but it doesn't work for me.  Here's the error:

even after clearing the check box for Date/Time, it won't publish, continuing to give the same error.

I downloaded a copy of Windows Live Writer, and I'd have to say its pretty slick.  It looks pretty, and has a Drafts and Recent Posts support that looks really nice.  dasBlog doesn't support uploading images from it, so if someone is reading, that would be a nice feature.  Otherwise, I can always use the web interface for loading images.  The other thing it doesn't support which would be nice is post dating (that doesn't even seem to be a feature of the app, at least not yet.  It is beta.)

 

I think I'll play around with this a bit.

BTW, this is being posted with it.

Aaron Margosis has posted an early version of a tool (LUA Buglight) that he's working on to help users identify LUA bugs.  I've been using Filemon and Regmon to find LUA bugs on my system.  I've downloaded his tool, and will check it out the next time I need to get a new app to run.  Thanks, Aaron.

In Q4, when IE7 is ready to ship, its going to be put on the Automatic Update site as a High-Priority update, according to the official IE blog.  I haven't yet tried IE7, except when I've had Vista on my desktop at home (which now has XP again.)  I figured Office 2007 Beta was enough beta software for my Tablet.  Plus I love Firefox, and am not sure that IE will be able to take its place.  That said, I am happy that MS is going to push the update to people.  A lot of people won't load Firefox, or don't know how, and the current version of IE is extrememly scary security wise.

Good move.

In an apparent move to combat lost sales due to VMWare Player being free, Microsoft has decided to give away Virtual PC 2004 SP1 for free.  It also says that versio 2007 will be free come next year.  I think I'll stick with VMWare, but this is cool anyway.

I've been creating a bunch of new Outlook contacts lately, and its been really frustrating.  If I didn't put a + in front of the country code, Outlook was assuming that the phone numbers were for New Zealand.  I checked every setting I could think of in Outlook, and there was nothing obvious.  I finally decided to ask in the Outlook 2007 beta newsgroups, and you'll never guess where Outlook gets that default from - Windows phone settings.  I almost never use the modem, except when I'm traveling, and so Windows was still set to use a New Zealand dialing location.  I reselected the one for my house, and Outlook once again defaulted to US as the location.

We have an Exchange server that manages our mail.  We use Outlook to access it.  Mail first enters our network via a Linux gateway which runs MailScanner and spamassassin.  One of the things I've been working on is a method to automatically add things that the end user believes are spam to spamassassin as spam.  I've developed the below macro which bundles up all the selected mail items in Outlook, and attaches them to an outgoing message that is then sent to a spam mailbox.  cron and sa-learn do the rest.

I opened my Tablet this morning (at the office) to find that most of My Documents are missing.  A quick check via Remote Desktop shows me that the files are still on our server back home, but for some reason are no longer on my tablet.  One Note has all of its info, because of the new cache in ON12.  Luckily I don't have to do any real work on my tablet today, or I'd be hooped.

Lifehacker points to a cool download: Desktop Earth 2.0. 


I'm not sure if its cool enough to give up my girls, but its still cool.

One of the trickiest bits of the Windows on Apple story is that Apple decided not to use a BIOS, instead opting for a new Intel technology called EFI.  Its basically a much smarter BIOS, and while it is possible to build an EFI machine with BIOS backward comparibility, Apple chose to leave those bits out.  According to BetaNews, Microsoft has said that Vista will only support EFI on x64 chips, leaving Apple hardware out in the cold, they are 32-bit CoreDuo and CoreSingle chips.

Which really leaves us back in the hurry up VMWare camp. 

One of my questions about the Oragami devices has been somewhat (ok, not so satisfactorily) answered by Chris Pratley.  He doesn't really adress the ink question very well.  We'll see if he responds to the comment I posted.

It seems that the Oragami secret has been so closely held that not even the Office Program Managers knew that it was coming until a few weeks ago.  Which is pretty crappy, because Scoble had apparently seen a wood mock-up of one a year ago. 

I tried downloading some tools from the great Sysinternals site, unfortunately, McAfee detects two of the utilities as viruses.  Very odd.

I use MS Money to track all our financial information.  I recently upgraded to the 2006 version, but it didn't go well.  The Activesync component wouldn't install correctly, so I've been unable to sync with my Jam (I use MS Money on my phone as basically an electronic check register - i.e. just for data capture.)  Last night I decided to try to get it all to work.  I uninstalled MS Money, the PPC component and ActiveSync.  Unfortunately, uninstalling MS Money didn't actually do a very good job of uninstalling.  If left a whole swack of stuff in Program Files, and in the registry.  I cleaned all that out manually, and attempted a reinstall.  Unfortunately, now MS Money won't install at all.  Crap.

My machine has needed a rebuild for a while anyway.  It won't recognize our video camera anymore, making archiving our videos a little tough.

Now I'm wondering if I shouldn't split my environments, and run all my general productivity stuff (Office, Money, etc.) in a virtual machine.  Two issues, can I move a virtual machine from an AMD machine to an Intel machine (I think the answer is no.)  This may not be a big deal since XP Pro has Remote Desktop.  The bigger question is whether I can get ActiveSync to work through VMWare with a Linux host.  VMWare's site seems to indicate that PDA syncing should work, but it may take a bit of tweaking.

I've been using FolderShare for a while now, and except for my problem where it decides to freak out when mobsync runs, its worked quite well.  Today when logging in to their site to make some configuration changes I was greeted with this in the page header:

Its been discussed for quite a while that this was obviously going to be part of the Windows Live offering.  I've even heard that the FolderShare technology is in the new Windows Live Messenger client.  I guess I find it interesting the they stuck the Beta moniker on it.  This is an app that has been commercial for quite a while before the Microsoft acquisition.  Maybe they are making changes to the service to further integrate it into the rest of the Windows Live offerings?  Maybe they are working on moving the backend from php to apsx?  I expect to see Passport logins on this service sometime soon.  Let's hope the pricing remains reasonable, or that it gets bundled with other parts of the Live offering (which seem to have decent pricing so far.)

RedmondMag.com has a decent article on VMWare player, that is worth checking out.  Among those tips:

• disable realtime virus scanning on .vmdk and .vmem files.  These files are huge and are read from and written to continuously while your VM is running.  Virus scanning them continuously will greatly reduce your overall system performance.
• regularly defrag your host system disks.

Good stuff.

Shawn Morton has posted a brief how-to on ripping your DVDs for viewing on your X-Box 360.  Good stuff.

Steve Makofsky has turned his Windows Media Center PC into a Media Server.  This is the thing about MCE that beats Tivo, MythTV, etc.  I can't imagine that the MCE interface is that great, but being able to stick an embedded device next to my TVs instead of a PC has great value to me.

I think I will build a new VMWare Server based server, and then take my old Exchange server hardware to build us a Media Center server as well.

Time to start convincing the wife that our five year old needs an X-Box 360.  8-)

Aaron Margosis has posted a new entry on running as a non-Admin, but more specifically on working around LUA bugs.  I even learned something in this one,  that a user can have their own specific entries that map into HKCR.  Cool.

This is so cool.  Just like their free player, VMWare now has a free Server virtualization platform.  I'm definitely considering using this in our home network.  Now all I have to decide is what host OS to run it under, Linux or Windows?

It turns out I probably don't have to change any of the code in USBWiSec.  The problem I was having seems to already have a solution, I just didn't understand what the setting was for.  There's a setting that is labeled Presence Window.  The default is 5.  In the CheckHeartbeat function of the KeyFob class there's a line that says:
            TimeSpan lapse = DateTime.Now.Subtract(this.LastHeartbeat);
            if(lapse.Seconds > SettingsManager.Instance.PresenceWindow)

So basically if the lapse between now and the last time the KeyFob sent a Heartbeat is greater than the setting then set the NotPresent status.  I've changed the setting on my two machines to 20.  We'll see if that takes care of the problem.

Scott Hanselman has a very interesting quote from "super-secret-have-to-kill-you-sources".

Now for the good word. Rumor is that Microsoft already have Vista running on iMacs on campus. Likewise it's rumored Intel has a Vista build running on Mac hardware. So it not only feasible for some users, there is a reason other than just the pure challenge for a good many. [super-secret-have-to-kill-you-source]

I'm not surprised that both MS and Intel would be interested in seeing this work.  I'm pretty psyched about it as well.  I think that the iLife apps are really nice, and the Apple hardware is beautiful.  I'm not sure if I'm willing to give up my Tablet for a MacBook, but maybe if they come out with a 12"er.  I still think it would be way more useful to have VMWare on OSX, and maybe a version that support the virtualization that the CoreDuo chip can do.

As I mentioned yesterday, I installed USBWiSec.  I'd have to say this is extremely useful.  I've been trying to think of some other uses for presence information, to write interesting plugins.

Unfortunately, I have an issue.  Either the app is a bit jumpy, or my hardware (either the token or the receivers) is a bit flakey.  I'm using one token with two receivers, and it is authorized on both machines.  Several times yesterday, and now once this morning, either one or both of the machines has locked with me sitting right by my desk.  I even went so far as to leave the token sitting on the desk between the two machines, but its still happening.

I haven't looked at the code yet, although I did download it and made sure it would compile in VS Express.  I believe it is suppsed to send a heartbeat every 250 ms.  And what I'm guessing is that the app automatically goes to lock on the first missed heartbeat.  This may be a bit optimistic.  I'm thinking that it would be better to have the token be missing for about 5 seconds (or maybe a user configurable time) before going to lock.

Quite a while ago, I bought two of the wireless security devices mentioned in the MSDN Conding 4 Fun article Is That You? Writing Better Software for Cool USB Hardware, however, I never got around to doing anything with them (even installing them.)  This morning I decided to mess around with them.  One of the things that the article mentions is automatically starting your screensaver when you leave.  I thought this would be a nice thing in addition to locking the screen, but I couldn't find that plugin.  So I decided to write one.

The code was pretty simple.  The toughest thing was figuring out the Windows API declaration in C#, I haven't done much of that.  Oh yeah, and downloading Visual C# 2005 Express edition.  The USBWiSec software is all written in .NET 2.0, and I can't seem to add those assumblies to a VS.NET 2003 project.

If you just want to use the plugin, unzip the Screensaver start plugin.dll into your C:\Program Files\PatchAdvisor Labs\USB Wireless Security folder (assuming the default) and restart the app.  No configuration necessary.

Screensaver start plugin.zip (1.98 KB)

Here's the code:


Screensaver start plugin source.zip (9.47 KB)

I haven't managed to read it yet (I know, its only 21 pages, what am I waiting for), but Microsoft has posted a whitepaper on running as a non-user (or least privilege to user accounts.)  Download.

I'm trying desktop search again, this time the enterprise version of Windows Desktop Search. My hope is that this version will be less intrusive than the MSN version. Visually they appear very similar, so we'll see. I do like the functionality. I searched on a term this morning, and it returned notes from One Note, email messages, and source code that had that term in the comments. Cool.

Lifehacker has been posting a series of PC desktops, trying to find the most useful.  One of the desktops from user Rooze had a screenshot of their monthly calendar on it.  I've been thinking how useful this would be, but why does it have to be a screenshot?  I've got web access to my calendar through Outlook Web Access (OWA.)  If your organization uses Exchange, or you have a hosted Exchange account, you probably do too.  Heck, you can probably do something similar with a Yahoo calendar.

Thanks to KC Lemson's blog entry on OWA URL parameters, I was well on my way to figuring it out.

Calendar monthly view:
https://server.company.com/exchange/useralias/Calendar/?Cmd=contents&view=monthly

Calendar weekly view:
https://server.company.com/exchange/useralias/Calendar/?Cmd=contents&view=weekly

Calendar daily view:
https://server.company.com/exchange/useralias/Calendar/?Cmd=contents

For the tasks, I found the Next Seven Days view to be the most useful.  Active Tasks seems like it would make more sense, but it includes Tasks which don't have a due date, which to me means someday/maybe:
https://server.company.com/exchange/useralias/Tasks/?Cmd=contents&veiw=Next%20Seven%20Days

I will probably not keep this much information on my desktop.  For one, I usually have Outlook open, but this might be useful once in a while.  For another, the 1024x768 resolution of my Tablet doesn't lend itself to this much information.  Maybe I should just have the Monthly view?

Here's a screenshot with the monthly calendar view, daily calendar view, and tasks (yes that's right and actual productive day today with no meetings scheduled!!)

Click for a larger view

By the way, here's the wallpaper behind the calendars.

Slashdot has an article on the upcoming density/price-drop of NAND flash chips.  I've actually been thinking about this since the Nano came out.  At $250/4GB, the price is getting close.

Here's my idea, you have a flash drive in your laptop/tablet just for your OS and apps.  Flash drives use less power, are quieter, and generate less heat.  On random reads they are faster than hard drives, although they are slower for writes.  They also have a limited number of write cycles.  Your OS and apps should be largely read-only anyway (and on my machines, they are for the normal logins.)  Obviously, doing this under XP might take a bit of work, since it doesn't very well handle the user not having write access to everything, but with Vista, things become much easier, but using the virtulization store.


On my Tablet:
Program Files   5.84 GB
Windows         8.58 GB
Windows\Service Pack-hotfix uninstall info 475 MB (don't store on flash)
Windows\CSC   5.35GB (don't store on flash)

Equals 8.59 GB to store on the flash disk, using a typical machine of today.  Even if we up the flash drive to 20 GB, with the prices dropping it becomes very feasible.  Now obviously we're not talking barebones consumer priced machines here, although the technology should eventually creep that way as well.

Watch online here.
His futuristic kitchen, office, and airport PCs were really cool. How do I convince my manager that I need those three huge LCDs? I found their Media Center story really good. Of course they are there to make it sound good, but as long as the DRM all works, it looks pretty impressive.

The WMF vulnerability that everyone has been buzzing about has been fixed, and a couple of days early. Read the bulletin, and download the patch.

I haven't tried it yet, but SequoiaView looks like a great way to find what is taking space on your machine.

Mary called me this morning with a computer problem. Her machine is giving her a "Non-system disk, or disk error" message on boot. We tried cold and warm boots, and it is still doing it. I didn't want to try talking her through the BIOS over the phone, so hopefully I can resurrect it tonight. If not, I guess she's getting a new hard drive for Christmas.

Is this the killer productivity app for Windows like QuickSilver is for the Mac? Yesterday I listened to the JKOnTheRun podcast where they interviewed Buzz Bruggeman from ActiveWords. I just installed the demo, and I have to say this is pretty sweet. Basically, it monitors everything you type, and is able to act on special keywords. It sounds really simple, but in the quick amount of time I've been playing with it, I can definitely see how it can improve productivity. I may be buying this one for all my machines.

I do have some initial nits to pick. The biggest one is that its not LUA friendly. Bad, bad, Active words. All of the .aws files it installs are really just MS Access databases, and the user needs write access to them. It also creates a USERS directory under the program directory, and then for each user under that it stores their settings. This really needs to be in the Application Data (or Local Settings\Application Data) portion of the users profile.

According to Jerry, Microsoft is making running as a non-Admin user quite a bit easier (in Windows Vista), but with a price.  There's a new virtulization store for secured portions of the machine (HKLM portions of the registry, Program Files folder, etc).  When an application that is running under a LUA token attempts to write to one of these areas, Windows is going to let it, sort of.  A user specific copy of that registry key, or file will be made, and modified.  This is really great to get those apps who don't run well as a normal user, but it does have some challenges.

Pushing corporate changes to those areas will require spelunking through all the virtual copies.  Its also possible that a user may be able to override an administrator set option.  There will be new APIs available to prevent the system from using virtulization, so modern apps can be updated to behave properly.

You're all running with least privilege on your Windows box right?  Normal user, right?  Well, since you are, I'm sure you've noticed that you can't Run As an MSI file.  Which means that if you download a MSIinstaller, you either have to fire up an admin copy of iexplore, or log off.  Well, Dana Epp points to some cool registry hacks to allow you to Run As a MSI file.  Cool.
Here are the steps:

1. Run regedit.exe under an account with administrative privileges
   
2. Create the key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Msi.Package\shell\runas\
   
3. Set the default value to Install &as...
   
4. Create the key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Msi.Package\shell\runas\command\
   
5. Set the default value to msiexec /i "%1"

Or if you trust me, download the reg file (in the attached zip file) and import it into your registry.

msirunas.zip (.29 KB)

I just found a really nice looking open source disk encryption product, TrueCrypt. I've used Jetico BestCrypt for years, but its a commercial product. One of the arguments for an open source encryption product, is that the code can be peer reviewed. If you read through the TrueCrypt forums, you may get the impression that most people looking for this kind of protection are using it for nefarious means, but there are lots of legitimate and legal uses for encryption. Take my work machine for example. I not only have copies of source code for our products, custom solutions, etc. But I also have copies of some of the financial data of our clients. Do you think that this data might be useful in someone's hands? What about your Quicken or Microsoft Money data? Do you store account numbers in there? That's an easy way to steal your identity. I think I'll give TrueCrypt a try.

It seems that Microsoft has been consorting with the enemy. The IE team has collaborated with Mozilla, and have decided to use the Mozilla icon for feeds in IE and presumably windows. Maybe I should change the icons on my site?

For various reasons, the RSS reader that is built into Outlook 12 isn't working for me, and I'm just a little nervous running intraVnews against the beta, so I'm starting a search for an external RSS reader. My first stop is RSS Bandit. I tried it quite a while ago, and found it to be lacking, but it appears to have improved quite a bit. I especially like that it pulls comments from some blogs to be read right in the reader. Nice.

As I've mentioned, I'm going to participate in the Office 12 Beta program.  Its been quite a while since I've rebuild my Tablet, so I've decided to rebuild it before installing the Beta.  Here's the list of apps I'm going to install (at least so far.)

Activesync 3.8

eWallet

Firefox

Foldershare

iTunes

List Pro

Microsoft Office 12 Beta

MSN Messenger

OneNote Daily Journal powertoy

Send to OneNote from IE

Send to OneNote from Outlook

Synergy

w.bloggar

WinZip

Exifer

Gallery remote

Photoshop

Wallpaper gyro

Microsoft Experience Pack

Power DVD

eReader

Microsoft Map Point

Allofmp3 explorer

Thunderbird

Canon Scanner

Cygwin

Microsoft Reader

Microsoft Tablet PC SDK

Visual Studio

Perl

Acrobat Reader

There's a new Firefox extension out for OneNote users. This allows you to select some text in Firefox, and shoot it over to OneNote. IE users have had a similar powertoy for quite a while. This one works great.

Note the hosting is done on a really cheap free site, where you have to click through an ad page to get to the content.

You often see the term dogfooding on Microsoft blogs. It basically refers to using alpha and beta versions in your daily work to help with the Q&A process. Reading through the known issues list for Office 12 Beta 1 often lists DF4 as a version number. I finally realized that this meant dogfood 4.

Microsoft's beta site is responding now, but its still not fast.

Do you love tabs, but don't want to use Maxton? Do you prefer the speed and security of Firefox, but occasionally need to use IE? Then have I got the extension for you. IE tab uses the IE engine inside of a Firefox tab. I know, its perverted.

Microsoft-watch is reporting that Office 12 will include updated versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Windows Mobile, as well as a new version of OneNote for Windows Mobile. I've been hoping for this for ages. I think its completely logical to at least be able to view, and capture new OneNote content on my Pocket PC. Editing existing content isn't as big a deal for me. Hopefully support will extend back to my Pocket PC 2003 SE phone, and not be limited to version 5 clients.

Looks like I'm not the only one having problems.

Hello,

We have received numerous reports this morning of users being unable to access BetaPlace, experiencing long delays, and some reports of download issues. We have escalated the problem and it should be resolved shortly. We appreciate your patience as we work to correct the issue.

Thank you,

Office Customer/Partner Programs Team

Ray Ozzie, CTO of Microsoft, has started a new MSN Spaces blog.  It will be interesting to see how transparent the blog really is.  Subscribed.

I was invited to participate in the Office 12 Beta. I ran Office 2003 beta for quite a while, and are really looking forward to seeing the new features in One Note. They've just posted the installs, but it looks like the other 9,999 people they invited are trying to download them, because I can't even connect to the site.

With Microsoft's acquisition of FolderShare, its now free. Even with the problems I had with it during Offline folder synchronization, this type of syncing is exactly what I'm looking for. And the price is good. I'm trying it again.

Jason Garms Architect & Group PM for the Anti-Malware Technology Team announced on their blog that the rootkit part of Sony's DRM is malware, and will be detected and removed by their various detectors.

with a catch. There's a new beta service called mozy that is offering 2 GB of free online backup space. It only supports XP (I wonder if it really only supports XP, or if it will work on Win2k3?) A client runs on your machine to push the files to their server. The client does 448-bit blowfish encryption before the files are uploaded, and 128-bit SSL while the files upload. They get to send you spam.

I liked their list of alternatives:

• Burn a new CD or DVD every Sunday night and store them at your brother-in-laws office like it's your religion.
• Pay $100/year for an online backup service that uses old, mediocre software.
• Buy a $200 external hard drive and obsessively "push the button" and hope your office doesn't burn down.
• Do nothing and don't worry about backup. (We suggest closing your eyes, plugging your ears and repeating "I'm in my happy place, I'm in my happy place".)
• Run a cron job of rsync, gzip and mcrypt piped over ssh to your friends server over his DSL line.

Maybe its time to fire up another free gmail account, and give this thing a try.

Looks like my logic was flawed. rysnc doesn't support syncronization, but only mirroring. It can really only copy one way. That's not any better than the batch files I have now. Bummer.

In my quest to find a good file syncronization utility, I've just finished installing sshd and rsyncd on my work laptop.  We'll see how this one works.

First go to cygwin.com, and download setup.exe.  Run through the install, making sure to install cygrunsrv, rsync, and openssh.  Once that process finishes, setting up rsyncd and sshd are trivial.  I installed cygwin in d:\cygwin, so note that in the examples below.

First we're going to create a configuration file for rsync.

rlobrecht@rlobrecht2-gqh ~
$ cd /etc

rlobrecht@rlobrecht2-gqh /etc
$ vi rsyncd.conf

The contents should be something similar to:
use chroot = false
strict modes = false

[modulename]
        path = /cygdrive/d/documents
        comment = Documents
        read only = false

Now we need to install the service.  To do this, we will use the cygrunsrv utility that we installed above.

rlobrecht@rlobrecht2-gqh /etc
$ cygrunsrv.exe -I "Rsync" -p /cygdrive/d/cygwin/bin/rsync.exe -a "--config=/cy
gdrive/d/cygwin/etc/rsyncd.conf --daemon --no-detach" -f "Rsync daemon service"

Now we are going to start rsync.  You can also use Services in Administrative Tools to start the service.

rlobrecht@rlobrecht2-gqh /etc
$ net start rsync
The Rsync service is starting.
The Rsync service was started successfully.

Next we're going to install sshd.

rlobrecht@rlobrecht2-gqh /etc
$ ssh-host-config
Generating /etc/ssh_host_key
Generating /etc/ssh_host_rsa_key
Generating /etc/ssh_host_dsa_key
Generating /etc/ssh_config file
Privilege separation is set to yes by default since OpenSSH 3.3.
However, this requires a non-privileged account called 'sshd'.
For more info on privilege separation read /usr/share/doc/openssh/README.privse
.

Should privilege separation be used? (yes/no) yes
Warning: The following function requires administrator privileges!
Should this script create a local user 'sshd' on this machine? (yes/no) yes
Generating /etc/sshd_config file
Added ssh to C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\services


Warning: The following functions require administrator privileges!

Do you want to install sshd as service?
(Say "no" if it's already installed as service) (yes/no) yes

Which value should the environment variable CYGWIN have when
sshd starts? It's recommended to set at least "ntsec" to be
able to change user context without password.
Default is "ntsec".  CYGWIN=ntsec tty

The service has been installed under LocalSystem account.
$

Host configuration finished. Have fun!

rlobrecht@rlobrecht2-gqh /etc
$ net start sshd
The CYGWIN sshd service is starting.
The CYGWIN sshd service was started successfully.

More when I actually get files syncronizing.

I started installing XP with the player



But its not going so well.

When you install VMWare Workstation, the VMWare tools are .iso files in the directory you installed in (C:\Program Files\VMWare\VMWare Workstation for me.)  The files are freebsd.iso, linux.iso, netware.iso, and windows.iso.

You can mount an .iso in your VM by editing your vmx file, and inserting something like the following:

ide1:0.fileName="c:\Program Files\VMWare\VMWare Workstation\windows.iso"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"

This is a really cool thing.  VMWare has released a free player app.  Basically you take a virutal machine that was built with a full version of VMWare, and can completely use it wth this player app.  I think I will be able to find lots of uses for this.

Interestingly enough, they left the ability to boot the player from a CD, which means you can take an existing VM, or a blank VM and install your own OS on them.  Here's a guide to creating a blank VM.  The only thing you are missing that way is VMTools.  I decided to install the evaluation of VMWare workstation, so I could make a few images that include VMTools.

Well, it looks like VMWare anticipated this.

I'm going to give SyncBackSE a try. It looks pretty interesting.

• Copy locked or open files (XP/2003)
• Fast Backup and Smart Synchronization
• Powerful FTP engine & AES encryption
• Superb feature set and customization
• Generous Licensing Policy
• Extensive Help Documentation

For my Tablet and my Desktop, I keep all files on our file server, and use Offline Files to keep everything in sync. This works really well. Between my work laptop and my Tablet, there are several folders I try to keep synchronized. I had high hopes for the Microsoft SyncToy, but it just didn't work for me. My two biggest complaints are that it isn't schedulable, and it wouldn't overwrite read-only files. Since a large portion of the files I'm syncing are code that are in source control (SS marks them read-only if you don't have them checked out) that just wasn't going to work. My current solution is a set of batch files. This works fine for growing lists of files, but I don't handle deletes at all.

I've been seeing a lot of praise for FolderShare. They have a free option that allows you to sync two folders with up to 500 files each in them. This isn't rearly enough files for me, but I'm going to try it anyway. The clients install easily. All the configuration is doen on the web, and it works just fine with Firefox. I dont' see any performance issues. Files seem to sync pretty much immediately. Its even able to handle syncing into my offline My Documents folder on my Tablet. Interestingly enough, when syncing a read-only file from one machine to the other, the read-only bit is lost. This probably works for me, but I will have to play with it a bit more to be sure.

More to come.

Looks like the OneNote Service Pack was also released. Download.

Available here.

Dana Epp writes about the new User Account Protection (UAP) in Vista.  Basically, every application starts with normal user permissions, even when run by an Administrator.  Either the user, or the app, must request higher priveledges, and the user must acknowldege.  I see one huge flaw.  The dialog just has an Ok or Cancel on it.  Don't they know that all users just click Ok anyway, without reading what the computer is asking for.  This dialog needs something more (like requiring the user to enter their password or even a different password.)

I was copying and pasting messages from /var/log/messages on my Linux box into One Note on my tablet, and my whole world crumbled.  The xterm (from Cygwin) where my ssh session was running just blipped away.  One Note locked up, which I ended up having to kill.  And now I can't paste anything.  Apps seem to think I have something on my clipboard (i.e. paste is available in edit menus, etc.) but nothing will paste.

The XP install on my install has been getting increasingly unstable.  Its probably time for a rebuild, but I just don't have time.

Did this work ok? Too bad w.bloggar doesn't support uploading images via anything besides FTP.

This is really scary (think about how much sensitive information you copy and paste).  Sourcecodesworld.com shows how witha a little Javascript and some server side script your clipboard can be revealed (IE only, of course.)  The code is amazlingly simple. 
<Script Language="JavaScript">
var content = clipboardData.getData("Text");
alert(content);
</Script>

To prevent this:

1. Go to internet options->security
2. Press custom level
3. In the security settings, select disable under Allow paste operations via script.

I received a call from a cow-orker this morning.  Their personal PC won't boot, and they are wondering what to do.  They think it has a virus.  I was at a client site, so couldn't help immediately, but said I would send some links when I could.  As soon as I had a chance, I sent the following list.
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ - created a boot CD with several different virus scanners on it, unfortunately they are all quite out of date.

http://www.ubcd4win.com/ - creates a windows like environment with several virus scanners on it.  You can update the virus scanners while the system is up, so its quite useful, but making it is kind of complicated.  This one also has spyware scanners as well as disk checkers.  It would be my recommended choice if it wasn't so hard to build.

http://www.inside-security.de/insert_en.html - a Linux boot CD that includes virus scanners for Windows.

http://www.aptv38.dsl.pipex.com/RescueME/UpdatePublicAV.htm - Public anti-virus.  Creates a boot CD with a bunch of anti-virus apps on it.

They also had the option of taking their machine to a local PC place and getting their data recovered for $60.  I said that whatever they chose, they should definitely do this.  Well, unfortunately it didn't work.  I just received an email back, and the shop couldn't recognize the drive, and still charged them $60.  I don't know if they made this part clear.  I know that it still took time to try to retrieve the data, but I would be a little annoyed to get charged $60 for nothing.

Just a little reminder to do those backups folks.  I know I'm bad about it, too.

 

 

Those two wireless USB security devices that I ordered, still haven't arrived.  They show the item as backordered.