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:

For the past few months I've been putting off and putting off reinstalling Windows on my main home PC. It's become slower and slower to the point where it's painful to use. The problem is that I'm an inveterate application trialist. Over the years since I installed XP on that machine I've installed countless applications. I've tried out dozens of text editors, dozens of sound file converters, dozens of applications for creating icons, document management systems, Perl, Python, Ruby, IDEs like Eclipse, Visual Studio and Komodo, programs for my PDA, then programs for my Blackberry, applications I've been documented for work, tech authoring applications, you name it.

Some of the apps I just uninstall after playing around with them for a while. Most of them I just left there in my programs directory. As a result my Windows Registry was collosal, my C drive was chock full (even though I install applications to a programs directory on D) and the whole system was generally fantastically bloated and lethargic.

I'd resisted doing a reinstall because I knew I had lots of programs that I use occasionally but don't have the installer for. Reinstalling Windows, therefore, means hours online tracking down and downloading the installer again. There's also the driver problem. All those obscure drivers I've had to install over the years will vanish on reinstalling Windows.

However, what finally convinced me to bit the bullet and reinstall was hearing about a program called DriverMax on the Mike Tech Show #185.

DriverMax is a free program that allows you to save some or all of your drivers and then import them again later. You don't need to know where to find them, DriverMax locates them all and then allows you which ones you which to save. It also allows you to save them as a zip file if you just want to archive them periodically. I just let DriverMax save everything and told it to save to my 1 terrabyte "My Book" storage device.

After reinstalling Windows sure enough I had driver issues. I couldn't get any sound out of my speakers and, looking in Device Manager, there were three missing drivers. So I just reinstalled DriverMax, told it to import all the drivers I'd saved and, hey presto, everything sorted itself out.

If you need to do a Windows reinstall I'd recommend you make life easier on yourself by using DriverMax.

I was intrigued to hear Dave Winer talking, in a recent TWIT podcast, about his FlickrFan program that get photos from Flickr and other Internet sources and shows them as your screensaver. Unfortunately this is Mac-only at the moment.

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, when you browse to a PHP page, you just see the text of the PHP script, it means the server knows nothing about PHP. To it the PHP script is just a text file, so it sends you that, like it would a .txt file.

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 problem:
Set up command-line FTP access to a Windows 2003 Server machine to allow scripts to save files to that server via FTP.

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.