Handy installation and uninstallation utilities

Clear your computer from unnecessary programs

When buying a new computer, it is very likely that the supplier has attached a lot of programs for you to evaluate. Often, this is applications that we simply do not want. With this begins the tedious work to uninstall the various trial versions of Office Package, antivirus software of dubious character and crapware which we will never use.
A tool to speed up this process is Pcdecrapifier.
No installation required, it is enough to run the file, which can be downloaded from their website.
At boot you choose which programs are undesirable. Thereafter the uninstallation process is started. The advantage of this app is you do not have to click and choose, and choose to wait again. Everything runs on automatic. A couple of OK on the road and your computer is free of crapware, as it so fittingly called.

Speed up installation of common applications and additional

For installation of a new computer, the process of installing some standard programs can be timeconsuming.
This applies primarily to programs such as Java, Flash, Acrobat Reader and Silverlight. Applications that everyone needs right from the start to be able to move around freely on the web. Since this software is constantly updated, it is not practical to package them together. It would then be forced to make a new package each week
This is where Ninite enters into the game. From this page http://ninite.com, you can easily choose what products it is that we want, which is then packaged as a script and downloaded with the selected programs included. The advantage is that you can always download the packages from the web. These are therefore always up to date and then downloads, simply run the script from any PC. To make matters even better so says no thanks Ninite automatically to every conceivable add-on products as they try to cheat on us during the installation of these components. Example of these is the Google Toolbar, McAfee Total Protection, Live Toolbar, etc.
Very practical and effective!

Note: the bad grammar is to be blamed on Google translate. This post was originally published in a small-minded language from the polar regions

References:

• http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/
• http://www.ninite.com/

Online storage solutions

This is might not be entirely relevant, cause Microsoft are in progress of making big changes to the structure and workflow of Skydrive and it’s siblings Live Mesh and Foldershare(LiveSync). However if you’re like me and using Live Mesh to sync your essential files between computers this might be of value to you.

I have a lot of pictures. 3-4GB and steadily increasing. These needs to be backed up somewhere and I don’t really believe burning a lot of discs that’ll I'll loose anyways. Picasa is too limited i space and like Live Spaces, everything is about sharing there. Which is not always something we want to do with photos, believe it or not.

Skydrive was looking quite good for its 25GB of storage, but management was limited to using webgui which was too much work. I was looking for a way to access Skydrive through Explorer when I came across this little simple solutions.

Get the skydrive address for one of your folders. For example http://cid-c2daa1333635cc9a.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public
Now change it to this:
https://wb9rpt.docs.live.net/c2daa1333635cc9a/.Public

Add this address to a custom network location from My Computer interface. Now you can drag and drop files to skydrive!

Caution though, it’s not very reliable. When trying to shuffle +2GB for uploading it choppy at best. For better performance one might use SDExplorer, which seems promising. Gladinet is also a good candidate, but I’ll usally try to avoid 3rd party applications when there’s an built-in alternative.

If it’s not working for you, try and access Skydrive from Office 2010 first. This might be necessary to “activate” the feature.

• References:
• http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/index.php?/topic/16691-access-skydrive-from-windows-explorer/page__st__30
• http://www.cloudstorageexplorer.com

Fears come true

I've always been uneasy about browsers capability to store passwords for sites you visit. Seems no one talks about this, but I've always restrained from using it, seeing how this kind information would be the motherload for any curious wannabehacker.
Today I came across the tools to do just this, extract stored passwords, in plaintext.
The accused are Nirsofts;
Protected Store PassView - http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/pspv.htmle
Network Password Recovery - http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/network_password_recovery.html
IE7 Password - http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/internet_explorer_password.html

All of the above works on XP, though only IE Passview paidoff with Vista. It returned a networklogon password onto a network computer and the google password. And this without any administrative privileges! Now, obviously this requires local access but imagine an intruder has gained access to your work computer while your at home or something like it. He would only need plainuser access to run this! From that he/she could extract your company network logon username and password. Easy enough to use this as an bridgehead into given companynetwork.

What do we learn from this? Never save passwords in any form of credentials manager!

Virtual visions visualises with Vista

My first dust with Vista was short. Had it for a day. a lot of bling bling and then bac k to xp and ubuntu. Well since I bought a stronger computer I thought it was time to actually get to know the "new os of tomorrow". I suppose we all have to, at some point. Well, at least they implemented a nice event manager in Vista now. Really nice with filtered searches, possibility to save them och so on.
Anyway, that's not really why I posted this.

Well, im running Vista. Got 2GB memory. What can do with this? The answer is, run my own private virtual network. That's right, perfect conditions to set a couple of virtual clients and servers, maybe try out Server 2008, see how that's working. But here is the big "but", finding a virtualization software that runs on X64 Vista isn't a walk in the park. MS own Virtual Server R2 kept shutting me down, wouldn't even run installer. Xen Virtualization complained about my x64 bits processor, that was obviously, not, ok. Vmware was my first choice, knowing I would wanna run the machines from my linux systems, but that also had a... mysterious... teasing ability. I would run the installer, make my installation choices and entered installpath, the installation would run, almost finishing then ROLL BACK in last seconds. Without any warning or explaination!
Well I thought MS own virtualization software would run, so I left vmware alone and tried the other softwares. And they failed also. So I searched the net for solutions to Vmwares, and I found it. Enjoy.
1. Download VmWare Server 1.0.3
2. Open a cmd windows with admin rights
3. />Bcdedit.exe /set nointegritychecks ON
4. />bcdedit -set loadoptions \”DISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS
5. Run VmWare installation program with admin rights
6. Ok unsigned drivers.
This will remove driver signing, supposedly forever, I had to "ok" a few unsigned drivers to complete the Vmware installation. So the startup-configuration program ( bcdedit), denied access to installer before. Strangely enough it claimed that the drivers was useless and incomplete after the installation. But the program still worked to my satisfaction.

Vista just worries too much, kinda like my mother... computers just got a little less cool...


Reference:
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=79979&tstart=0

Firefox going up in flames

Everyone who is in into computers and internet today have seen how the browser is getting more and more power. Rich applications are being developed by the dozen and standard programs are getting less and less spotlight. Well, unless you're a gamer then. Many professionals are saying the browser is becoming more and more like an OS. This is nice and all, but now I'm gonna get to the point. For the last 6 months or so, firefox has been acting kind weird when it's running under XP. It's behaving more and more like explorer.exe, that is hogging all the memory doing... what does an OS do on a saturday night? I dunno, but it shouldn't do stuff when I'm not.
To the point, I've been using Ubuntu the last year so I haven't been so disturbed by the fact that I've fixed it. Now however I've looked into it.
It seems that a LOT of people are having the same problem on the net. One would think it would be easier for me just to point towards the right direction. One would think...

Here's how it supposed to be solved. Doesn't do much, but it does something.
1. In firefox addressbar: about:config
2. Add new integer, name it "browser.cache.memory.capacity"
3. As value type -1
4. Depending on how much RAM give above new value:
RAM 128-512 : 5000
RAM 512-1024: 15000

The case of the mysterious dns

My internet connection has been acting strange lately. Internet is working fine when I start the computer, but I can't access my internal network. So I do an />dhclient and I can access the internal network, but not the WAN. Truly annoying. First I explored the option of this being a problem with the ipv6 protocol, so I disabled as far as my abilities could handle. But this only made it work temporarily. Then I noticed that my standard gateway was pointing to an, to me unknown, dns address, 192.168.200.2 when my real dns is 192.168.0.1. I change this, and everything is working again. But it just keeps coming back. I try to make /etc/resolve.conf read-only, and again, it's only working for a short while then it's right back at that mysterious dns.
After surfing around www.ubuntuforums.org for a while I finally find something that so far seems to be working. Here's what needs to be done:
in file "/etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf" look for this segment :
request subnet-mask, broadcast-address, time-offset, routers,
domain-name, domain-name-servers, host-name,
netbios-name-servers, netbios-scope;
Remove "domain-name-servers,"
and at the line "#prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;
I changed 127.0.0.1 to my DNS 192.168.0.1 and removed the commenting sign #.
This procedure tells the system not to ask the router for it's dns information and what dns it SHOULD use. Apparently this is a problem that's not uncommon with routers from certain companies that begin "D" and end with "Link". See I can keep a secret!

Anyways this has been a truly annoying problem I can't for the life of me see WHY the company would construct such a designflaw. Well, I suppose it could be Ubuntu, but hey, why blame them, they're free!
I'm sooo loking forward to getting my new Linksys router! Cheap stuff always mean more work, unless it's Cisco that is, thats a lot of work anyways.

Now but most current problem is avoiding those godforsaken DOS attacks and little scriptkiddies who keep scanning me. Couldn't they at least try to hide it? Now I have to after them. Well my first move in this defence stance is going to be finding a way to handle all my firewall logs. As of now I'm sending them to my email, and there no great way of screening them there... If only there were some sort of online syslog server I could deliver them to, and filter there too then obviously. I'm starting to consider building a phpscript that can filter them for me. Only problem is that I have to find some way to handle emaildeliveries. I could leave a computer on round the clock to handle these things, but since I'm living in a very small apartment I'm not too happy about the idea of having a server humming all night long just to keep track of the firewall logs.

Sigh. I will have to look into this further...

References:
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-140225.html
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-231965.html

a small announcement

I would just like to take this oppertunity and declare my love for 'prototype.js'. Thats all.