Anyone remember how back in OS 9 you could collapse a window into its own title bar? Well, that functionality can be had in Windows. Winroll is an application that allows you to obtain the same functionality that you used to have in OS 9. To quote the Winroll site: Make a window roll into its title bar, send it to the back or make it stay on top. Minimize, maximize or close all visible windows, including minimizing to the tray area. Make a window translucent on Windows 2000 or above. WinRoll is lovingly hand-crafted in 100% pure assembly language to give the fastest response and the smallest memory footprint.…
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Getting Started with Amazon's EC2 Cloud
Yesterday I did a quick review of the various cloud offerings from Amazon. Previous to that I had done a review of using S3, the Amazon storage service, with Mac OS X, primarily through the lens of using S3 as a destination for Final Cut Server archives. Today I’m going to go ahead and look at using EC2 from Mac OS X. To get started, first download the EC2 tools from Amazon. Next, log into Amazon Web Services. If you don’t yet have a login you will obviously need to create one to proceed. Additionally, if you don’t yet have a private key you’ll need one of those too –…
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Keystrokes For Windows/Windows Server Explorer
There’s nothing that makes you faster with navigating around any GUI-based OSen than keystrokes. Navigate around the system, browse web pages and even swap between command windows at blazing speeds. You’ll get faster but you’ll seem exponentially faster to those trying to watch you work. I’ve done posts on Mac OS X and Safari. Now, here’s one for navigating around Windows with the same speed with which you navigate OS X. If I skipped something feel free to let me know and I’ll add it; there are a plethora of options and these are the ones off the top of my head… While I was shooting for Windows Explorer, most…
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Windows memory dump files.
One reason not to disable virtual memory on any Windows boxen is that you might need to grab information from a dump file. If a booted OS doesn’t have at least 2MB of virtual memory then no dump file. The default location of memory dump files in Windows XP is %systemroot%/minidump (btw %systemroot% is your Windows install directory). These are created as a result of a blue screen (bsod is not your friend – unless you’re testing a DoS). Since blue screens are typically due to hardware or drivers, and there are often many of each of those, it can help to check out the dump files. If you have…
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Config AutoPlay (GUI & Registry) for Windows
When you insert a drive into a Windows, by default it’s gonna’ likely mount the drive (and run the autorun.inf if there is one or AutoPlay to play the music if it’s an audio disc). When you insert a disk or drive into a Windows computer you can hold down the Shift key and it will disable the auto-run and AutoPlay functionality of the system. But you can also control that functionality at a pretty granular level. The most common way to do so is likely using the Global Policy Editor. To do so, open gpedit.msc, click on Computer Configuration and then Administrative Templates, then System and select the option…
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Windows Steady State
The typical school lab: We want to update an image once a quarter or once a year, deploy it and have nothing change between quarters. In Microsoft Windows, there are about as many ways to go about this as there are IT guys. Some will use Altiris or something like that to reimage the machines every night. Others will use policies to lock everyone out of everything and trust that. But what if you don’t have a dedicated IT staff and honestly don’t really have the time to deal with it in a smaller lab environment. Well, introduce Microsoft’s Steady State (it’s actually been around for awhile, getting renamed every…
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Windows XP: Reset Product Key
Microsoft is getting more and more picky about that product key and the Genuine Advantage program. So if you’re finding that the warnings and annoy-ware are getting to be too much to handle then reset it. To do so, first edit the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMicrosoftWindowsNTCurrent VersionWPAEventsODBETimer registry key to be some number or letter. This will overwrite your existing product key and allow you to enter a new one. Next, click on Start and then Run and enter the following command (assuming Windows is installed in the c:Windows directory): C:Windowssystem32oobemsoobe /a This will bring up the Activate Windows wizard. Here, select to update using a telephone service representative. Here, select a location and…
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RightThumb Windows XP Image Augments in Batch
Save time. Don’t touch a lot of photos one at a time. You can resize images en masse using a variety of tools on the Mac or Windows. Most notably, Photoshop. But there are also less expensive tools, if not free ones out there. For example, RightThumb. RightThumb lets you resize images, filter images, change formats, add prefixes, etc. Nice little tool and free to boot.
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Windows: Local Policies
From Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP there are two utilities that can be used to create policy lists. The first is Group Policy Object Editor, gpedit.msc. The second is secpol.msc. For the purposes of this document we will use gpedit.msc as it provides most of what is available in secpol and far more granular policies for workstation control. To open GPO Editor click on start then click run and then type gpedit.msc. Now you will be looking at two sections, Computer Configuration and User Configuration. Computer Configuration controls global settings such as password policies and Log on Locally. For the most part these can typically be left as-is. The…
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TrueCrypt
Great encryption software, although there is no full disk encryption for the Mac from TrueCrypt I hope to see it eventually. By the way, I didn’t mention this yet: it’s free. http://www.truecrypt.org/ UPDATE: While TrueCrypt does not do full disk encryption (FDE) for the boot volume still, it does do FDE for other volumes fairly easily and of course free. If you need FDE for boot volumes on Mac OS X check out PGP and CheckPoint FDE. PGP Desktop is easy to install and use and has a great command line interface. CheckPoint though seems to be a bit more mature and has an easier methodology for mass deployment.