The name of this technology? It used to be called Interix, then became Services for UNIX (SFU) as they added more bits on top of Interix, and is now known as Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA). The current name is more of a mouthful, but is a more accurate name.

Microsoft don't advertise SUA. Some of us have been using it, and its predecessors, for years. But, on the whole, it's a pretty well kept little secret. And, not surprisingly, it's only available on the server versions of Windows, or the desktop versions aimed at business users and IT professionals.

So, to run SUA, you need one of the following versions of Windows:

• Windows Server 2008
• Windows Server 2003 R2
• Windows 7 - Enterprise or Ultimate Edition
• Windows Vista - Enterprise or Ultimate Edition
        

To enable and install SUA:

1. Go to the Control Panel.
2. Click Programs and Features.
3. Click Turn Windows features on or off in the left panel.
4. Select the check box for Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications.
   
   
5. Click OK.
6. In the start menu, click All Programs > Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications > Download Utilities for Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications.
   
   
7. Download the SUA installer from the Microsoft website.
8. Once downloaded, double-click Utilities and SDK for UNIX-based Applications_X86.exe in your downloads folder.
9. Step through the auto-installer.
   
   I'd recommend you choose the custom setup and enable the GNU Utilities and then, in the following step, select all three check boxes to allow su to root, enable setuid and enable case sensitivity.

      
Now, you can go back to the Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications start menu item and launch a Korn shell or a C shell and, within that shell, run UNIX commands:

I know a lot of developers who don't like SUA, but personally I've always liked it. It's really handy sometimes to have UNIX commands available within Windows, and it's a great way to familiarise yourself with UNIX tools like vi.

An important resource for SUA users is the SUA Tool Warehouse:
http://www.suacommunity.com/tool_warehouse.htm

The example Microsoft gives is a document with three sections in it but the PDF that you generate ends up containing Section 1 followed by Section 3.

You might have encountered this problem if you’re a FrameMaker user and assumed it was an Adobe issue. It wasn’t, it was a Windows issue.

Here's the hotfix:
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=952909

But one thing that’s always irked me is the fact that, for some reason, Microsoft decided to remove the Text Document option from the right-click > New option in Windows Explorer.

I quite often add little text documents here and there and I always found this shortcut in XP provided a handy way of doing this. You could just right-click > New > Text Document, then double-click the file that was created and edit the document in your default text editor.

Putting this shortcut back again involves editing your Windows Registry. Not for the feint-hearted. But fortunately, someone has done this for us and created a .reg file that you can just save and then double-click to add the settings (provided you have administrative privileges for your PC).

You can get this file here:

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/154554-new-context-menu-restore-default-menu-items.html

Scroll down the page to the heading To Restore Text Document and click the Download button.

Follow the instructions on the page. It says you need to restart your computer. In fact you can just end the Explorer process in Task Manager and start a new Explorer process and you’ll have the shortcut.

Note: I found the first half of the video the most interesting. After that the interview moves onto other things and only returns to help towards the end. Unfortunately there’s not a whole lot of detail about how the new help system will differ from good old HTML Help. There’s no demo, for instance. Still it’s interesting that Microsoft are still investing in the idea of client-side help.

Note: This video belongs to Dan Fernandez and Channel 9.
If you're having problems viewing the above video, try the orignal video on Channel 9,
or view it in Windows Media Player.

This is annoying, because you have no idea where in that vague time range your defragmentation job will fall. Can you kick it off when you go for lunch and expect it to be complete by the time you get back? Or is it an overnight job? However, it's better than so many other progress messages that attempt to tell you how long you need to wait, but inevitably lie to you. For example, I've been having problems with Outlook recently. I had to kill and restart it twice today. The second time it came back it had the familiar message "The data file 'Personal Folders' was not closed properly" and a progress bar with a “seconds remaining” count.

Microsoft seconds obviously don’t work like normal seconds because after waiting for the count to work its way slowly down to "20 Seconds Remaining" I had to sit there for at least 30 seconds before it changed to 25 Seconds, then 30, then 35, then 40, then 45, then 50. From "50 seconds remaining" it took 2 mins 10 seconds before it finally finished and Outlook came to life.

If you don't know how long something's going to take, don't just make something up. And don't mislead the user into expecting something to take less time than it really will. The principle should be that software should not lie.

And don’t believe the Microsoft hype that disk defragmentation is now automated in Vista, so you don’t need to think about it any more. In fact, the Disk Defragmenter’s scheduler is set, by default, to kick off at 1.00 am every Wednesday morning. That’s fine if you leave your computer switched on every night. But if you never leave your computer on on a Tuesday night, it’ll never get defragged.

Personally, I liked the old Disk Defragmenter, with its coloured bands.

This isn’t a Photoshop job, it’s a real error message, presumably tucked away in some remote corner of Microsoft Word.

Update:

Turns out it's nothing to do with Word (more's the pity). It's a "feature" of Notepad++, which is my text editor of choice right now. I must have been closing down Notepad++ at the same time as Word.

So you can force the new tags to show up by either changing the name of the file, or moving the file to a new location, but as soon as you change its name back to what it was, or move it back to the directory where it was the first time you played it, the original tags will show up again in WMP's list pane.

I thought clearing the cache would sort this problem, but if you go to Tools > Options > Privacy and click Clear Caches, the old tags still show up.

The solution is fairly drastic. You've got to blow away the existing database. The effect is that from that point on WMP starts reindexing all your media as you play it - filling up its database again. Note: you don't lose your playlists - these are stored elsewhere.

Here's what to do:

1. In Windows Explorer, go to the following directory:
   
   On XP:
   C:\Documents and Settings\$USER$\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Player\
   
   On Vista:
   C:\Users\$USER$\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player
2. Delete any files you find named CurrentDatabase_*.wmdb and LocalMLS_*.wmdb.
   
   If you can't delete the files, make sure Media Player isn't running. You may need to use Task Manager to kill off any Media Player processes that are running. For example:
   
   wmpnxcfg.exe
   wmpnetwk.exe (you have to list processes by other users to see this)

I've just added an article (my first since revamping this site) that describes how to take control of the iPlayer's KService Windows service and the iPlayer program itself: khost.exe.

Read the article: Preventing BBC iPlayer running all the time

To add a ^M in vi enter Ctrl+V followed by Ctrl+M.

By default you don't get to see the Administrator account in the Manage Accounts window, so you can't set the password for Administrator. So first up you've got to show this hidden account. Doing any of this assumes that you're logged on to the PC as a local administrator.

To show the hidden Administrator account:

1. In the search box on the Start menu, enter:
   cmd
2. Right-click cmd.exe in the list that is displayed.
3. Choose Run as administrator.
4. In the command console, enter:
   net user administrator /active:yes

That's it, your done. Refresh the Manage Accounts window and the Administrator account will show up. Now you can select it and set its password.

Windows 7 is getting some rave reviews after the recent PDC. Personally I'd just like Microsoft to fix Windows Explorer.

For me, the best thing in Vista is finding things from the Start menu. That's the way I start most applications now: Windows key, type the first few letters of the application you want, press Enter. The worst thing about Vista is that there are real problems with Windows Explorer. If you're on a network it can work like a dog. After pressing Windows key + E it can take over a minute before you can do anything in the Windows Explorer window. But I've discovered one way of speeding up Windows Explorer a little: remove your network drives.

Right-click on Network and choose Disconnect Network Drive and remove any drives that show up. This brought my start up time for Windows Explorer down to 18 seconds. Still an annoying delay, but just about bearable.

I should add that I suspect the problem I'm having has something to do with the fact that my work network runs on Windows NT, which is not supported for use with Vista. Because of this, my laptop is not part of the domain. If, like me, you update Windows as one of the first things you do with your new laptop, and you put SP1 on it, you won't be able to join an NT domain. If you're in this situation you should make sure you add your laptop to the domain before you add SP1.

However, it's occasionally useful to have a Linux machine available to test something out, and great way to do this is to use a virtual machine. VMware would be your first choice if you want a virtual Linux machine, but, with a little effort, you can also use Microsoft Virtual PC.

Here's how to get Ubuntu on Virtual PC:

1. Download and install Virtual PC.
    
2. Download an Ubuntu Desktop Edition ISO. I downloaded 8.04 ("Hardy Heron").
     
3. Start Virtual PC, and create a new machine.
   
   (Video by Robert Cain: http://arcanecode.wordpress.com/)
     
   Note: Make sure to pick “Other” as the OS type.
   Give the machine 512 MB of RAM.
     
4. Start the new virtual machine.
     
5. When it starts up, go to the CD menu and choose Capture ISO image, pointing it at the desktop ISO you downloaded from Ubuntu. Capturing an image means the ISO file will show up like a CD in the virtual machine.
     
6. Ubuntu will start running from the CD image. When it starts, choose your language and then, at the next screen, press F4 to select an alternate starting mode.
   
     
7. When the menu pops up, change to Safe graphics mode and press Enter.
   There is a problem with the mouse not working in Virtual PC and this takes a little fiddling about to fix it. There is also an issue with sound (see the link at the bottom of this post for details about how to fix that - personally I didn't need sound, so I didn't bother trying to fix that).
     
8. Press F6.
    
9. Edit the command that is displayed, using the arrow keys to move the cursor to the end of the line and adding a space followed by “noreplace-paravirt” (without the quote marks) to the end of the command, then press Enter.
     
10. Leave the selected option as Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer.
    Note: do not choose the Install Ubuntu option.
      
11. After Ubuntu loads (note that at this point it's just running from the CD image, it's not installed on the virtual machine) double-click Install on the desktop.
    This runs the Ubuntu installer.
      
12. Follow through the installer. This part is very simple.
       
13. Once the install is done, go back into the CD menu (right-hand Alt key gets the mouse pointer out of the virtual machine) and release the ISO, otherwise when you reboot you'll go back to the installation menu.
      
14. Click the red button, top right of the Ubuntu desktop and shutdown the virtual machine.
    If it hangs at this point, don't worry about it.
      
15. Close the Virtual PC window and choose to shut down the machine.
     
16. Go into the Settings for the virtual machine.
    Robert Cain's video shows how to edit the Settings if you've never done this before:
    
     
17. Make sure Networking is set to the network adaptor that your PC is currently using.
    Note: if you want to be able to connect to/from the Ubuntu VM and your host PC, you need to use the Microsoft Loopback Adaptor. If this doesn't show up in the list of network adaptors you'll have to install it first. This is really easy. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/839013, or this video from http://veedee-eyes.com
    
      
18. Save the Settings.
      
19. Start up the virtual machine again.
      
20. Once it gets to the "GRUB" line, press Esc.
    You should now see 3 entries to select from.
      
21. Leave Ubuntu 8.04, kernel 2.6.24-16-generic selected and press e.
      
22. On the next page, select the second entry that reads kernel /boot/vmlinuz… and press e again.
       
23. You will see a command line that ends with “xforcevesa”. Edit this, as before, adding a space followed by “noreplace-paravirt” (without the quotes) at the end of this line, then press Enter.
       
    You are now back at the previous selection screen with the entry kernel /boot/vmlinuz… still selected.
      
24. Press b and Ubuntu should boot correctly.
      
25. Once Ubuntu has loaded, open a terminal window (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and on the command line enter:
       
    sudu nano /boot/grub/menu.lst
     
26. Enter your password and page down to near the bottom and locate “kernel /boot/vmlinuz…" in the “Ubuntu 8.04, kernel 2.6.24-16-generic” section.
      
27. Move the cursor to the end of the line after xforcevesa and add a space followed by “noreplace-paravirt” (no quotes).
      
28. Ctrl + O to write out.
      
29. Enter to accept the name.
     
30. Ctrl + X to close the file.
      
    Ubuntu should now be running inside Virtual PC.
      
31. Click the network icon in the upper right side of the Ubuntu toolbar:
     
      
32. Choose Wired Network.

That's it.

Now you can fire up an Ubuntu machine whenever you need it. And when you close it down, choose Save State and when you start it up again you'll be able to pick up exactly where you left off - for example, any programs that were running when you saved state will still be running when you start up the VM again in six months time.

I found the following site extremely helpful:

http://arcanecode.wordpress.com/2008/04/24/installing-ubuntu-804-under-microsoft-virtual-pc-2007/

If you get stuck, it's worth reading through all the comments on this page, which provide a lot of useful information.

Ctrl + Shift + Esc        Displays the Windows Task Manager

My morning routine when I'm working from home involves going into Task Manager and closing down everything I don't absolutely need to be running just to make working on a VPN ever so slightly more speedy.

So here's a good one. Texter is a little application written by someone at LifeHacker. When you run it it sits in your system tray and replaces predefined sets of characters with longer text. So if you type the same thing several times a day, you can type a few characters and it's automatically replaced by your name as you type. For example, to type Alistair Christie I could just type ac, hit the Enter key and ac is replaced by my name.

If you're a coder you'll probably find this particularly useful as it lets you enter big chunks of code with just a few key presses.

Download Texter from the Download link on the Texter home page.

Important

• Go to the Preferences and turn off Enable Universal Spelling AutoCorrect. It's clearly supposed to work on whole words to correct spelling, but unfortunately it corrects before you've finished writing a word. For example, if you try to write agree, as soon as you get as far as agre it changes the word to agree, which means you end up with agreee. Similarly, if you try to write another you get aanother. This maybe works on some platforms, but on my Vista laptop it's obviously broken. But no matter, Texter is fine without this.
• Replacements don't work everywhere. For example, they don't work in the Run dialog box. From what I've read, this used to work in XP, but doesn't in Vista. Shame, because it would be useful to be able to run a program by just typing a few characters in any application.

Windows Explorer

Alt + D to select the current path

Alt + down arrow for a list of previously entered paths

Alt + up arrow to go to the parent directory

Internet Explorer

To open Internet Explorer and get to www.itauthor.com:

1. Assuming you have an Internet Explorer icon in your Quick Launch panel, press Windows key + number (e.g. if IE is the third icon in the Quick Launch panel, press Windows key +3).
2. Press Alt + D to select everything in the address bar.
3. Type in itauthor.
4. Press Ctrl + Enter to add www. to the front of what you typed, .com at the end and then search for the URL.

And, I must admit, there's more than a grain of truth in a few of the ads (e.g. the one with the boxes and the one about the upgrade).

UPDATE (25/7/2008):
I just realised the one about the upgrade wasn't on that video. It's on the one below, right at the end.

Setting up Windows Remote Desktop to allow you to use another machine on the same local network is very straightforward. Getting a Remote Desktop connection to a PC on a private external network is a little more tricky. I use PuTTY to SSH to the gateway machine at work.

Part of the PuTTY session is a series tunnels from ports on my local machine to ports on machines on the remote desktop. One of these is a mapping from the localhost port 3389 to port 3389 on a machine at work. Port 3389 is the port used by Remote Desktop, so this tunnel should mean that, once PuTTY has connected me to the external network, I can Remote Desktop to localhost and I will, as if by magic, get the login prompt for the remote machine.

However, having copied back into PuTTY the sessions from my previous Windows installation*, when I connected to the remote machine and then did a Remote Desktop to localhost I got the error message: "The client could not connect. You are already connected to the console of this computer. A new console session cannot be established."

The reason for this, it turns out, is that Remote Desktop knows it shouldn't allow circular connections: from this computer to this computer. So it rejects attempts to connect to 127.0.0.1. Now, as localhost resolves to 127.0.0.1, this gets rejected also.

However, on Windows, all other IP addresses in the 127.x.x.x range also represent the local machine, and Remote Desktop does not block these addresses. So this allows you to map port 3389 on one of these addresses (e.g. 127.0.0.2 or 127.254.254.254) to port 3389 on a remote PC and then you can specify that address in the Remote Desktop login window.

Note: Although the Source port field is clearly intended just for a port number, you can also put an IP address in there, followed by a port number - for example, 127.254.254.254:3389 - and then the remote IP address or hostname, followed by the port number, in the Destination field.

* The PuTTY sessions for each Windows user are stored in the Windows registry in:

HKEY_USERS > [GUID for user] > Software > SimonTatham

Before reinstalling Windows I'd exported the whole registry to a .reg file on my network drive. To put the details into the new registry all I had to do was open up the .reg file in a text editor, save it with a name like putty.reg on the desktop of the target PC, delete everything in the file after the first line up to the start of the HKEY_USERS > [GUID for user] > Software > SimonTatham section and everything after that section, then save it again. Then you just need to right-click the icon on the desktop and choose Merge.

The following instructions tell you how to achieve this. It's a bit geeky I admit, but once you've set it up you don't need to do anything but plug in your MP3 player, phone or PDA and it gets loaded up with the latest podcasts you want to listen to. Additionally, it deletes old podcasts for you, so you don't have to do that manually to free up space for new stuff.

• A Windows PC
• An MP3 player of some description that shows up as an external storage device in Windows Explorer (in my case my Blackberry Curve
• Perl installed on the PC
• A couple of Perl scripts written by me (see below)
• A podcast receiver such as Juice
• Microsoft SyncToy

1. Download and install Perl.
   
   
   
   I use ActivePerl from ActiveState. There might be other versions of Perl for Windows, but ActivePerl is easy to install and does the job, so I'd recommend using that. Download the Windows MSI installer from ActiveState and then just run it like any Windows installer. It's dead easy, but if you need instructions you can find some in this article on About.com.Note: You want the Standard distribution, which is free. You'll get asked for registration details but you can leave the fields blank and just click Next if you want.
2. After installation is complete, open a command console window and type perl -v.If Perl is correctly installed you should see the Perl version details.
   
   
   
   
3. Download and install Juice, or any similar podcast receiver.
   
   
4. Subscribe to some podcasts in your podcast receiver.
5. Set up the podcast receiver so that it starts up when Windows launches (e.g. put a shortcut to the application in the Startup subdirectory of the Windows Start menu) and set the download folder in the Preferences, making sure there are no spaces in your directory names (i.e. D:\MyStuff\MyPodcasts good, D:\My Stuff\My Podcasts bad).
   
   
   
   
6. Set the scheduler so that as well as checking for new podcasts when the application start (see the Preferences) it also checks at regular periods thereafter. For example, I have Juice set to check for new podcasts every four hours:
   
   
   
   
   
   So you've now got things set up so that you get new podcasts onto your PC automatically. Pretty straightforward stuff so far. The problem with this setup is that your hard disk will gradually fill up with an enormous amount of MP3s. The next thing to do is to set up a Perl script that will delete old files from your download location for you.
7. Create a directory to hold the Perl scripts you're going to need. For example, mine live in:D:\Alistair\ProgrammingStuff\PerlScripts
   
   Note: As previously noted, the directory names shouldn't have any spaces in them.
8. Use the following link to download a zip file containing two Perl scripts:http://www.itauthor.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/podcastperlscripts.zip
9. Unzip the file and save deleter.pl and run-synctoy.pl to the directory you created in step 7.The script we're interested in right now is deleter.pl. It's a simple script that just deletes files in or below a specified directory that are older than a specified number of days old. Here's the code in case you're interested (don't worry, you don't need to understand this to use the script):
   
   

      1: #!perl -w

      2:

      3: use strict;

      4: use File::Find;

      5:

      6: # This script deletes all files older than a specified age

      7: # in, ***or below***, a specified directory 

      8: # (or the current directory if none specified)

      9:

     10: # To test the script (i.e. list files that would have been

     11: # deleted, without actually deleting them),

     12: # comment out the line containing "unlink $_".

     13:

     14: usage() if (! @ARGV || $ARGV[0] =~ /\D/);

     15:

     16: my $age = $ARGV[0];

     17: my $dir = $ARGV[1] || '.';

     18: my $message  = "\nThe following files have been deleted:\n";

     19: my $files    = "";

     20:

     21: find(sub { $files .= "$_\n" if (-M $_ > $age && $_ ne "."); }, $dir);

     22: find(sub { unlink $_ if (-M $_ > $age && $_ ne "."); }, $dir);

     23:

     24: $message="\nNo files were deleted.\n\n" unless $files;

     25: print $message.$files;

     26:

     27:

     28: sub usage {

     29: print <<'EOF';

     30:

     31: USAGE:

     32: ========

     33: <scriptname> n [directory]

     34:

     35: Where:

     36: - scriptname is the name of this Perl script.

     37: - n is the number of days previous to today.

     38: - directory is an optional parameter that specifies

     39:   the directory where files exist.

     40:   Note: the default is the current directory.

     41:

     42: For example:

     43: - "perl deleter.pl 5" - deletes files older than 5 days.

     44: - "perl deleter.pl 120 c:\temp" - deletes files in or below the

     45:   c:\temp directory that are older than 120 days.

     46: EOF

     47: exit;

     48: }

   
   Now the script is in place, you can set up a Windows scheduled task to run this script.
10. From the Windows Start menu select All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Task Scheduler.
11. Choose Action > Create Task.Note: These instructions are for Vista but the process should be very similar on XP.
12. In the General tab, give the task a name – for example, podcast-deleter.
    
    
13. Make sure the Run with highest privileges check box is selected.
14. In the Triggers tab, click New.
15. In the New Trigger dialog box, set up the schedule for the task. For example, I have my task scheduled to run daily at lunchtime (13.19 to be precise).
    
    
16. Make sure the Enabled check box is selected and click OK.
17. In the Actions tab, click New.
18. In the New Action dialog box, leave the Action as Start a program.
    
    
19. Click Browse and find the perl executable file. If you installed ActivePerl, the path is probably C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe.
20. In the Add arguments field, enter the following on one line:
    
    – the full path to the deleter.pl script
    
    – the number of days old a file must be older than for it to be deleted (I've got mine set to 5)
    
    – in double quotes: the full path to the directory into which your podcasts are downloaded
    
    The value I have in this field is:
    
    D:\Alistair\ProgrammingStuff\PerlScripts\deleter.pl 5 "D:\Alistair\Downloads\podcasts"
    
    Note: you can leave the Start in field blank.
21. Click OK and, back in the task Properties dialog box, click OK again.
    
    You've now got a scheduled task that will run automatically every day and delete your old podcast files. I listen to a lot of weekly podcasts, mainly from the BBC, and I've almost always listened to them within the 5 days they get to stay on my PC.
    
    Now let's turn our attention to getting the podcasts onto your MP3 player.
22. Download and install SyncToy from Microsoft.
    
    Note: Make sure you get version 2.0 or higher. If the link above doesn't work by the time you're reading this, go to the Microsoft Download Center and search for "SyncToy".SnycToy is a great, free application whose silly name belies the fact that it is a seriously useful tool. In short what it lets you do is choose two folders that you want to synchronise. Typically you'd use it to automatically backup documents, images or music onto a network drive, an external hard drive or another computer on your network. But here we're going to use it to copy over your podcasts from your PC to your MP3 player, phone, PDA etc.
23. Make sure your MP3 player is connected to your PC.
24. Start SyncToy and click Create New Folder Pair.
25. Using the Browse buttons, enter the paths to the podcasts directory on your PC ("Left Folder") and the destination directory on your MP3 player ("Right Folder").
    
    
26. Click Next.
27. Select Echo.
    
    
    
    Echo provides a one-way sync from left to right. This means that new podcasts on the PC will get copied to your MP3 player, and when the script deletes podcasts they'll be deleted from the MP3 player.
28. Click Next.
29. Give the sync job a name, making sure the name doesn't contain any spaces.
    
    
30. Click Finish.
31. You can now click Run to run the synchronisation for the first time.
    
    
    
    Note: the first time you run a synchronisation it may take quite a long time to complete. Be patient. For subsequent syncs it does incremental backups and is much faster. Now we need to automate SyncToy to run at regular intervals. Fortunately, SyncToy comes with a separate executable that's designed to be run from the command line. We're going to use the other Perl script you downloaded to run this executable silently, in the background, without the user interface being displayed.
32. Go to the location in which you saved the Perl scripts you downloaded earlier and open run-synctoy.pl in a plain text editor such as Notepad or UltraEdit.
33. Carefully edit the values for the three variables so that they reflect the correct details for your setup:
    
    $destination
    
    The full path to the directory on the MP3 player where you want podcasts to be synced to.
    
    Note: Make sure you use two backslashes for every backslash in the path (so G:\Music becomes G:\\Music).
    
    $synctoy
    
    The full path to the SyncToyCmd.exe file.
    
    Note: If the path contains any directories with spaces in their names you're going to have to rename these. For instance, I had to rename SyncToy 2.0 Beta as SyncToy-2.0-Beta. Also, make sure you specify the command-line version of the application, SyncToyCmd.exe, and not the user interface version: SyncToy.exe.
    
    $flag
    
    The name you gave to the folder pair in SyncToy.
    
    Note: the quoted value must start with a space followed by -R followed directly, with no space, by the name of the folder pair.
    
    Here's what my version of the file looks like:
    
    

       1: #!perl -w

       2:

       3: use strict;

       4:

       5: # Edit the following to the destination drive & path for your MP3 player:

       6: my $destination  = "G:\\Music";

       7:

       8: # Edit the following to the path to SyncToyCmd.exe on your computer:

       9: # Note: The path must not contain any spaces.

      10: my $synctoy      = "D:\\programs\\SyncToy-2.0-Beta\\SyncToyCmd.exe";

      11:

      12: # Edit the following to "<space>-R<name of folder pair set up in SyncToy>:

      13: my $flag      = " -Rpodcasts-to-blackberry";

      14:

      15:

      16: unless (-e $destination) {

      17:         die ("The desintation location:\n" . $destination . "\ndoes not exist -");

      18: }

      19:

      20: unless (-e $synctoy) {

      21:         die ("SyncToy not found at the specified path:\n" . $synctoy . " -");

      22: }

      23:

      24:

      25: `$synctoy, $flag`;

34. Save your changes.
    
    OK, we're near the end now. Congratulations if you've got this far.
    
    Pretty much all we have to do now is set up another Windows scheduled task to run this Perl script on a regular basis. The reason for using a Perl script here, rather than just running the executable directly is that it allows us to check whether the remote destination is available (e.g. your phone or MP3 player is connected to the PC) before attempting to run SyncToy.
35. Back in Task Scheduler (All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Task Scheduler) choose Action > Create Task.
36. In the General tab, give the task a name – for example, Sync-podcasts-to-Blackberry.
37. In the Triggers tab, click New.
38. In the New Trigger dialog box, set up the schedule for the task.
39. You probably want to set up a few of these triggers because you may not always have your MP3 connected when the task kicks off, especially if it's your phone. For example I've got four triggers set up, at 11am, 1pm, 3pm and 5pm:
    
    
40. In the Actions tab, click New.
41. In the New Action dialog box, leave the Action as Start a program.
    
    
42. Click Browse and find the run-synctoy.pl script.
43. Leave the Add arguments field empty and in the Start in field add the path to the directory in which Perl lives. If you installed ActivePerl, the path is probably C:\Perl\bin.
44. Click OK and, back in the task Properties dialog box, click OK again.
    
    You've now got a scheduled task that will run automatically several times a day, causing SyncToy to copy new podcasts to your MP3 player and delete the old ones.
    
    And that's it!
    
    The beauty of this setup is that the end result is you always have a recent selection of podcasts to listen to on your MP3 player, you don't have to manually delete old podcasts, all you do need to do is plug the device into your PC. Job done!

]]> http://www.itauthor.com/2008/05/16/podcast-automation-without-itunes/feed/ 3 http://www.itauthor.com/2008/05/13/getting-internet-explorer-to-work-with-the-smoothwall-web-proxy/ http://www.itauthor.com/2008/05/13/getting-internet-explorer-to-work-with-the-smoothwall-web-proxy/#comments Tue, 13 May 2008 21:33:05 +0000 ac http://www.itauthor.eu/2008/05/13/getting-internet-explorer-to-work-with-the-smoothwall-web-proxy/ After reinstalling Windows recently I found I had a problem accessing the Internet. The problem was DNS-related because pages loaded incredibly slowly but, provided they didn't time out first, would eventually load. I realised that turning off my SmoothWall Web proxy solved the problem, but without the Web proxy I couldn't use Dan's Guardian.

Dan's Guardian is a content filtering service that can be installed as an add-on to SmoothWall. I have SmoothWall running on an old PC, behind my Sky router, as an always-on firewall for my home network. Because I have two kids, I want to filter Internet content and Dan's Guardian does a pretty good job of this. I like it because it's very configurable and allows me to determine the level of filtering, specific sites or domains to block, exceptions to filtering, types of files to block and so on. However, Dan's Guardian relies on transparent Web proxying being enabled, so I need to have that turned on:

Anyway, I couldn't figure out what the problem was until I eventually found a page on the SmoothWall Support site called "Using ident on Windows XP - common problems", which says:

Ident is a service running on port 113 and as such, port 113 needs to be opened on the workstations, in order for ident to be able to server the username. If the built-in firewall is enabled on any Windows operating system, it needs to be configured to allow access to port 113. This can be done using a log-in script or by manually configuring the Windows firewall software. Please refer to the Windows documentation for information on how to do this.

And then a lightbulb went on and I remembered that I'd previously had Windows Firewall turned off. Sure enough turning it off again solves the problem and lets me access the Internet via the transparent proxy. But, as the quote describes, you can run Windows Firewall so long as you add port 113 as an exception. To do this, go to Control Panel, open up Windows Firewall, click the Exceptions tab:

Click the Add Port button and add port 113, with a description:

However, I found a similar program for PC:

http://www.codeplex.com/FlickrNetScreensaver

It's a little disconcerting not knowing whose photos are going to appear on your screensaver, but you can choose a tag (e.g. "nature") which lessens the scope for weirdness - like photos from someone's family holiday, or baby's Christening, showing up.

If, however, you get a blank page, it suggests the Web server knows that .php files should be served up like Web pages, but the PHP isn't being handled properly.

On Apache, the most likely cause - or at least the first thing you should check out - is that the httpd.conf file hasn't been updated properly to point to the PHP module. Make sure this file contains LoadModule, AddType and PHPIniDir statements such as the following (these are for an XAMPP installation of Apache/PHP on Windows):

LoadModule php5_module "c:/xampp/php/php5apache2_2.dll"
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
PHPIniDir "c:/xampp/php"

If these lines are in the httpd.conf file, the problem may just be that the file hasn't been read since the change was made. Restart Apache and the changes in the file will be applied.

The solution:
FileZilla - but you need to know the recipe of the secret sauce!

I started by installing Windows own FTP server (an extra Windows component that you can add via Add/Remove Programs). I then enabled this in the IIS Manager. However, the problem I got was that, although I could FTP to the server I couldn't save anything, do an ls or a pwd or anything useful.

So plan 2, after disabling Windows FTP, was to use FileZilla. This is an open source FTP/SCP project and you can download server and client software here:

http://filezilla-project.org/

However, I'd recently installed Apache/PHP/MySQL using the very wonderful XAMPP (see XAMPP - Web server + MySQL in minutes), so I already had FileZilla, I just hadn't enabled it. I did so and everything seemed to work except that when I FTPed to the machine as any user, with a legitimate password I'd get a "530 Login or password incorrect" message:

C:\Documents and Settings\ac>ftp showcase.memex.co.uk
Connected to showcase.memex.co.uk.
220-FileZilla Server version 0.9.23 beta
220-written by Tim Kosse (Tim.Kosse@gmx.de)
220 Please visit http://sourceforge.net/projects/filezilla/
User (myserver.myorg.co.uk:(none)): Administrator
331 Password required for administrator
Password:
530 Login or password incorrect!
Login failed.

The secret is that you have to go into the Admin program for FileZilla and add users/groups in there, specifically assigning each access to parts of the file system and defining what they can do (e.g. read, write, etc).

With XAMPP this is easy. From the XAMPP Control Panel, click Admin for FileZilla:

Enter the Administrator password:

Create groups with the appropriate access rights. Then create users and assign them to a group:

Now you can open up a command console on a remote machine, enter ftp servername and log in to the server to put/get files as required. ]]> http://www.itauthor.com/2007/11/07/getting-command-line-ftp-working-with-filezilla/feed/ 1 http://www.itauthor.com/2007/10/31/more-good-stuff-from-windows-live/ http://www.itauthor.com/2007/10/31/more-good-stuff-from-windows-live/#comments Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:16:31 +0000 ac http://www.itauthor.com/wordpress/2007/10/31/more-good-stuff-from-windows-live/ If you haven't had a look at Windows Live for a while, it's worth a look. There's a couple of really nice things on there now. The first one is the one that's had a lot of publicity: Spaces. This is, in effect, your own Web site on live.com. You get to choose a URL (e.g. yourname.spaces.live.com) and your get a personal Web space with a blog, a photo gallery, storage space for saving files that you want to access from anywhere, an event planner and the usual friends list. You can set up the permissions to keep everything private, make everything public, or specify who gets to see your pictures, your blog, your stored files, etc.

The other excellent addition to Windows Live is a replacement for Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, which, until today, was my default application for viewing image files from Windows Explorer and doing a slideshow. It's called Windows Live Photo Gallery. It does all the stuff Picture Viewer used to do, like rotating your photos and doing a slideshow, but it also makes it really easy to adjust your images, including cropping and resizing them.

If you have a look at my recent post on My podcast recording setup, the photos in there were fixed up using Live Photo Gallery. I took the photos in my poorly lit study, beside a very yellow desk lamp, without any flash lighting. The results were not great, but clicking the Auto Correct button worked wonders and made it look like I'd taken the photos beside a window with plenty of natural light. I also increased the brightness and contrast a little and then cranked up the Sharpness setting to the max just so's the settings on the mixer were as clear as possible. Compare a detail from the original photo and the fixed version:

Original:
 
Fixed:
 
The fixed version is quite grainy because of the artificially high sharpness setting I used, but I think the result are really good, considering the original photos were so poor.

I've always used Photoshop for most image adjusting, but for little quick things like this, I'll be using Live Photo Gallery from now on. By the time Photoshop has loaded I could have done my colour correction, cropping and resizing and posted the results to my blog.

For more information about Windows Live, see:

http://get.live.com/wl/all

In UNIX you can use the God-like power of the root user to overcome this problem, but in Windows Administrator is bound by permissions like everyone else.

The solution is to use the Windows Backup utility. This saves a backup of the directory of your choice and doesn't care about permissions because, when you restore the directory, the permissions and file ownership you get are identical to what you had before. There's no way to change this, so security isn't compromised by taking the backup.

So if you just want to preserve something against possible overwriting, use the Backup utility. On XP this is usually at: Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Backup.

Apparently this is a known issue and you have reinstall SFU 3.5 all over again after installing SP2.

Pain!

-------------------------

Thanks to the Support guys at work, I've discovered that the problem doesn't, after all, involve reinstalling SFU. The problem is well described here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sfu/archive/2007/04/27/windows-server-2003-sp2-breaks-sfu.aspx

The root cause lies with SP2 unintentionally replacing the SFU 3.5 Interix binaries and Password Synchronization binaries with corresponding R2 binaries. The specific files that get replaced after installing SP2 are psxss.exe, psxdll.dll and pswdsync.dll. First two are part of the SFU 3.5 Interix subsystem and the last belongs to SFU 3.5 Password Synchronization component.

Microsoft has now produced a hotfix that solves the problem by putting back a working version of psxss.exe:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936529

The other day I had to transfer a 2.4 GB zip file, containing a VMware virtual machine, from my PC at work to my home PC (I was working from home). I kicked off the file copy in the evening, using WinSCP and went to bed expecting it to be done by the next morning. Unfortunately the connection had dropped and the copy wouldn't resume, meaning I had to start over. To avoid the same thing happening again I used Accusplit to chop the file into 156 files of 15 MB each.

Copying these across took all day. I started at 7.30 in the morning and it finished just before 6 in the evening. But when I'd done it and I had all 156 files home-side, Accusplit rebuilt the 2.4 GB zip file in just over 4 minutes.

I use Accusplit 3.5, but 4.1 is now available, with 4.5 in beta. It's shareware and you can download it from:

http://members.cox.net/accusplit_support/index.htm

Press Windows key + R  then enter:

• acrobat - Acrobat (if installed)
• appwiz.pl - Add/Remove Programs
• calc - calculator
• charmap - character map
• control - Control Panel
• control printers - Printers & Faxes dialog box 
• control schedtasks - Scheduled Tasks 
• excel - Excel (if installed)
• explorer - Windows Explorer
• illustrator - Illustrator (if installed) 
• nero - Nero (if installed) 
• notepad - Notepad
• photoshop - Photoshop (if installed)
• regedit - Registry Editor
• winver - shows the version of Windows
• winword - Word (if installed)    
• wmplayer - Windows Media Player
• write - WordPad
• wupdmgr - Windows Update Web site

The idea is that you add in a selection of questions/answers (e.g. words/phrases in German and their English meanings, or questions about car engine parts and the answers to those questions), then you just test yourself by going through a few questions every now and again and checking the answers if you need to. I have the program set as a scheduled task so that it pops up every couple of hours and I can do a few questions, or just click Quit. The questions are randomly selected, so you get different ones coming up each time.

The installer I've put up for download comes with a default French/English data file. This presents French words/phrases. You've got to remember the English meanings. Click Next to page through from one French word/phrase to the next:

You can click English if you can't remember the word/phrase.

To add or remove  entries to/from the data file, click Feed.
 
Scroll to the bottom and add more French words and their English meanings, or click in the left, grey column to highlight a row and press Delete on the keyboard to remove it. To get rid of everything and add your own data, highlight the lot and press Delete. The Properties tab allows you to change the button text from French/English to something that suits your questions/answers.

See the Downloads page for a link to the Memory Builder installer.

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

As its name suggests, it's a Notepad replacement aimed at programmers. I recommended JEdit a while back, but I find JEdit is slow to load and memory hungry. Its interface is also very Java-ish, which seems like a nice change to begin with but after a while it starts to feel clunky and unresponsive and you want to get back to native Windows apps. I still use JEdit for Search/Replace, but Notepad++ is good if you want a decent text editor but don't want to pay for UltraEdit.

So how do I get it to autostart.

One solution was provided by my colleague Andrew Waterson:

1. Create a Windows shortcut for an SFU command console.
   To do this go into Start > Programs > Windows Services for UNIX and copy the shortcut for C shell or Korn shell.
2. Put this shortcut in the Start > Programs > Startup folder.
3. Edit the properties of the shortcut. Change its name and add to the end of the Target string the command you want to execute.
   For example, I want to run /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start every time the computer boots. So the Target for my shortcut becomes:
   C:\WINDOWS\system32\posix.exe /u /c /bin/ksh -l /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start

ProKill is a useful little utility for Windows that helps you do this. Download it from:

http://www.white-scorpion.nl/programs/index.html

Put the pk.exe file somewhere in your PATH (you can check what's in your path by entering echo %PATH% at a DOS prompt).

You can then go to a command console and do:

pk -l

to list all the currently running processes. And:

pk -n cron

To kill all those named "cron". Works a treat.

For the other options just enter:

pk

Another one for IE7 users. Similar to the last one but this time "about:tabs" rather than "about:blank".

If on opening a new tab you see the "about:tabs" page and checking the Don't show this page again check box has no effect, you can modify your Registry to fix the problem (looks like something Microsoft forgot to put in there).

Note: Don't attempt the following unless you're familiar with editing the Windows Registry and are aware of the inherent dangers in doing so. Always export a copy of the Registry (or the bit of it you're changing) before making any changes.

1. Go to:
   [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TabbedBrowsing]
2. Add a new DWORD called
   ShowTabsWelcome
   with a value of 0
3. Restart IE7.

As well as zip file, you can also create tar file.

Website: http://www.7-zip.org/

User interface:

The new release is available at:

http://writer.live.com/

The new version allows you to add tables:

maps:

and ariel photos:

Whenever this happens on the local machine I simply Ctrl+Alt+Delete, fire up Task Manager, kill any explorer.exe process that's hanging around and start a new explorer task, at which point the Windows task bar reappears and I can open up a new Windows Explorer window.

But what happens when you're using Remote Desktop? You need to fire up Task Manager but there's no task bar and pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete displays the Task Manager for the local machine.

The answer is simple. Press Ctrl+Alt+End. This displays the Windows Security dialog box, which contains a Task Manager button. Problem solved!

A tip for IE7 users:

If on opening a new tab you see the "about:tabs" page and checking the "Don't show this page again" check box has no effect, you can modify your Registry to fix the problem (looks like something Microsoft forgot to put in there).

Note: Don't attempt the following unless you're familiar with editing the Windows Registry and are aware of the inherent dangers in doing so. Always export a copy of the Registry (or the bit of it you're changing) before making any changes.

1. Go to:
   [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TabbedBrowsing]
2. Add a new DWORD called
   ShowTabsWelcome
   with a value of 0
3. Restart IE7.

Useful tip if you ever need to get a Web server up & running on Windows ASAP. Use XAMPP:

http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html

It's a Windows installer that installs the following in minutes:

• Apache 2.2.4
• MySQL 5.0.33
• PHP 5.2.1 & PHP 4.4.5
• phpMyAdmin 2.9.2
• FileZilla FTP Server 0.9.22
• OpenSSL 0.9.8d

There's also a separate installer that adds Perl 5.8.

It's an ultra-low hassle way to get yourself a working PHP-enabled Web server + MySQL.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
|
-> Software
   |
   -> Microsoft
      |
      -> Internet Explorer
         |
         -> View Source Editor
            |
            -> Editor Name

What is SFU?

Check out these pages:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Services_for_UNIX
• http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/software/os/0,39024175,39150908,00.htm
• www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,4248,1434520,00.asp

A better way is to get the script to email the list of which files had been deleted. This is what the following script does. It also dispenses with the need for a batch file. The Windows scheduled task can then call the script directly. In my case, the scheduled task executes the command:

C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe D:\MyStuff\PerlScripts\deleter-scripts\deleter.pl 1 "C:\Documents and Settings\ac\My Documents\XDA6 My Documents\podcasts"

The script relies on you being on a network on which a mail server is available. That way sendmail is able to work its magic and deliver the email for you. All you need to do is change the value of $mailto to the email address you want the message to be sent to.

The revised script:

deleter.pl

#!perl -w

use strict;
use File::Find;

# This script deletes all files older than a specified age
# in, ***or below***, a specified directory 
# (or the current directory if none specified)
# and emails the results to the address given in the script. 

# To test the script (i.e. list files that would have been
# deleted, without actually deleting them),
# comment out the line containing "unlink $_".

usage() if (! @ARGV || $ARGV[0] =~ /\D/);

my $age = $ARGV[0];
my $dir = $ARGV[1] || '.';
my $message  = "\nThe following files have been deleted:\n";
my $files    = "";
### If you're running it from SFU use this path:
### my $sendmail     = "/usr/sbin/sendmail";
### If you're running it from a Windows shell use this path:
my $sendmail     = "C:\\SFU\\usr\\sbin\\sendmail";
my $mailsubject  = "Old podcast files deleted";
my $mailto       = "you\@your.com";

find(sub { $files .= "$_\n" if (-M $_ > $age && $_ ne "."); }, $dir);
find(sub { unlink $_ if (-M $_ > $age && $_ ne "."); }, $dir);

$message="\nNo files were deleted.\n\n" unless $files;
print $message.$files;

open (MAIL, "|$sendmail -t ") or die "Cannot open $sendmail: $!";
        print MAIL "From: \"deleter.pl script\" <$mailto>\n";
        print MAIL "To: $mailto\n";
        print MAIL "Content-Type: text/plain\n";
        print MAIL "Subject: $mailsubject\n\n";
        print MAIL $message.$files;
close (MAIL);


sub usage {
print <<'EOF';

USAGE:
========
<scriptname> n [directory]

Where:
- scriptname is the name of this Perl script.
- n is the number of days previous to today.
- directory is an optional parameter that specifies 
  the directory where files exist. 
  Note: the default is the current directory.

For example: 
- "perl deleter.pl 5" - deletes files older than 5 days.
- "perl deleter.pl 120 c:\temp" - deletes files in or below the 
  c:\temp directory that are older than 120 days.
EOF
exit;
}

I have this script scheduled to be run once a day at 5.00 am. Here's an example of the email that's waiting for me in my inbox every morning:

All well and good but I have limited space on my storage card, so I need to keep deleting the files from my PC, or they get loaded onto my PDA - just deleting them from the PDA isn't enough because they just reappear next time the PDA syncs with the PC.

What I need is for the old files to be deleted automatically, so that they don't accumulate.

To do this I created (or more correctly, modified) a script that deletes files based on their modification date. I then created a Windows schedule to run this script every day.

Here are the details.

[NOTE: See also the new, improved version: Tuesday, 20 December.]

deleter.pl

#!perl -w

use strict;
use File::Find;

# This script deletes all files older than a specified age
# in, ***or below***, a specified directory 
# (or the current directory if none specified).

# To simply print the names of files, 
# instead of actually deleting them (i.e. for testing),
# comment out the line containing: 'unlink $_'

# To delete the files without printing a list of matched files,
# comment out the line containing: 'print "$_\n"'

usage() if (! @ARGV || $ARGV[0] =~ /\D/);

my $age = $ARGV[0];
my $dir = $ARGV[1] || '.';

print "\nThe following files have been deleted:\n";
find(sub { print "$_\n" if -M $_ > $age; }, $dir);
find(sub { unlink $_ if -M $_ > $age; }, $dir);

sub usage {
print <<'EOF';

USAGE:
========
<scriptname> n [directory]

Where:
- scriptname is the name of this Perl script.
- n is the number of days previous to today.
- directory is an optional parameter that specifies 
  the directory where files exist. 
  Note: the default is the current directory.

For example: 
- "perl deleter.pl 5" - deletes files older than 5 days.
- "perl deleter.pl 120 c:\temp" - deletes files from the 
  c:\temp directory that are older than 120 days.
EOF
exit;
}

# Credit:
# This script was based heavily on a script posted by "FishMonger"
# on the Computing.net forum:
# http://computing.net/programming/wwwboard/forum/13717.html
# on December 06, 2005 at 16:22:31 Pacific

# Modified 12 December 2005 by Alistair Christie (www.itauthor.com/notes).

deleter-nonrecursive.pl

#!perl -w

use strict;

# This script deletes all files older than a specified age
# in a specified directory (or the current directory if none specified).

# To simply print the names of files, 
# instead of actually deleting them (i.e. for testing),
# comment out the line containing: 'unlink $_'

# To delete the files without printing a list of matched files,
# comment out the line containing: 'print $_'

usage() if (! @ARGV || $ARGV[0] =~ /\D/);

my $age = $ARGV[0];
my $dir = $ARGV[1] || '.';

print "\nThe following files have been deleted:\n";
while (<$dir/*>) { print "$_\n" if -M $_ > $age; }
while (<$dir/*>) { unlink $_ if -M $_ > $age; }

sub usage {
print <<'EOF';

USAGE:
========
<scriptname> n [directory]

Where:
- scriptname is the name of this Perl script.
- n is the number of days previous to today.
- directory is an optional parameter that specifies 
  the directory where files exist. 
  Note: the default is the current directory.

For example: 
- "perl deleter.pl 5" - deletes files older than 5 days.
- "perl deleter.pl 120 c:\temp" - deletes files from the 
  c:\temp directory that are older than 120 days.
EOF
exit;
}

# Credit:
# This script was based heavily on a script posted by "FishMonger"
# on the Computing.net forum:
# http://computing.net/programming/wwwboard/forum/13717.html
# on December 06, 2005 at 16:22:31 Pacific

# Modified 12 December 2005 by Alistair Christie (www.itauthor.com/notes).

run-deleter-script.bat

@echo off
REM Open a console window (using /k flag so that it gets left open)

@echo on
cmd /k perl deleter.pl 1 "C:\Documents and Settings\ac\My Documents\XDA6 
My Documents\podcasts"