Create a new folder, rename it to:
GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
After hitting <return> the folder will be a shortcut to the Windows 7 Administration GOD Mode. Enjoy. (Thanks Damir)
How to shut off Outlook 2007 Security Questions
I had the task to make my Outlook Task List appear on my iPhone. As everyone knows Apple did not do anything about todo lists or tasks on their phone… well there’s an app for that: Most of the task applications on the iPhone use Toodledos services to sync task lists with the desktop.
To sync the Toodledo service with the desktop you need another tool. This tool uses your Toodledo account and your locally running Outlook to sync between both. So this little desktop sync tool needs access to the Outlook data: This means you will maybe be bugged by Outlook that some program wants to have access to the data. You can allow it for a number of minutes but not forever.
Okay one solution would be to install appropriate antivirus tools to suit the operating systems security needs. Because this wasn’t a solution in my case I needed something more sophisticated to solve the problem.
Now that’s the point where “Advanced Security for Outlook” from MapiLab comes into play. This Outlook Plugin extends Outlooks Security Dialog and adds things like “always allow”:
Source 1: http://www.toodledo.com/
Source 2: http://www.mapilab.com/download/
One step closer to digital nirvana…
Thanks to a podcast I found a great software for my iPhone and iPod touch. It’s a small tool which does cost less than 3 Euro and it’s served by a server tool which runs on Windows and Mac OS X.
It’s called Air Video and it’s frikin’ awesome! ™
What you do is you install the server software and point it to all your directories / drives that might contain video material. You then take your iPhone and install the client app. If you configured the server to be available over the internet you can now connect from anywhere you want using a pass-pin (which is generated) and a password (which is set by you). And by “from anywhere” they mean “anywhere”. WLAN or 3g didn’t make any difference in my test. You start the client, point to a video file and most of the time you are asked if you a) want to directly play is (if the file is ipod-compatible) or b) if you want to live-convert it and play it (when the file isn’t compatible and needs to be re-encoded live for you) or c) if you want to add the file to a conversion queue which will off-line convert the video for you.
In terms of “finding your video” it does look like this:
Simple, eh? Taping a video will bring up this screen:
As I said – Play directoy, Play with Live Conversion and Offline-Conversion-Queue…
It did work with EVERY Video I tried. When I tried Full-HD Movies my serving PC wasn’t able to handle the load but everyhing in SD worked great which is perfect for me.
Therefore I can highly recommend this tool – it really does work better than anything I’ve seen before.
Finally Aero Glas!
Hurray for VMWare! – I am using their products for years now – both private and on my job. It’s a blast to work with the Workstation and Fusion. Now they brought a major update to version 7 for VMWare Workstation and version 3 for VMWare Fusion. I upgraded my VMWare Fusion installation and finally the one feature that I missed the most on my Windows Vista and 7 virtual machines is available now: Aero Glas!
Oh… and it’s faster too :-)
a Visual Studio documentary
There’s a great Visual Studio documentary on CH9. Highly recommended to anyone who wants to see what happened from the start till now.
“Welcome to the first installment of the Visual Studio Documentary.This is an hour long documentary that is split into two parts, roughly a half hour each. Welcome to part one, where we take you back to the days of MS-DOS and Alan Cooper who originally sold Visual Basic to Bill Gates back in 1988. Next week we will feature Part Two but for those that would like to watch it sooner, here is Part Two. In addition, each week we will post a longer and more in-depth stand alone interview from the interviewees that were featured in the documentary.”
want some more expresso?
Almost three years ago I wrote about this nice little Regular Expression Tool which provides not only a RegEx-Builder but also a clean and nice interface to test and play.
It was a CodeProject sample project in that time and as it turns out it became a full blown version 3!
Obviously the user interface was revamped completely:
So you now not only get the Testing and playing but also a Regular Expression Library, a cool How-To, a more useable design mode and you can even output your final regular expressions to C#, VB.NET or managed C++!
Great stuff! Even better is the fact that it does not come at any costs. Despite the fact that there’s a registration you can just get your free license on their website.
Source 1: http://www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htm
Source 2: want some espresso?
a new version of Notepad++ is available.
Great stuff this week: Notepad++ was released in a new version 5.5. Nice new features all around:
this new Windows Resource Monitor…
…is just great! A cool tool to find bottlenecks and the cause why your machine is just slow right now.
APC PowerChute Business Edition and VMware Server…
I’ve run into several problems while trying to install the current 8.1 version of the APC PowerChute Business Edition.
Basically I get this error message when I am trying to install it:
So you can simply not install this version of PowerChute on this machine – OR you could go here and follow the link to the Download of the 8.0 version of the software. This will start the setup with this screen:
Great! Just get the “old” version and use it.
Source 1: APC PowerChute and VMWare
Welcome to the world of tomorrow!
So here we are on a new blog engine. It took me the better part of two days to do the Migration of 2,869 posts and 2,732 comments, a lot of pictures and movie files.
I will write an article on this but for now only two captures images from the migration:
yeah PHP rocks!
had to do some regex action to do the url rewrites
maybe I should…
…switch this website to another weblog software in the future. The dasBlog development isn’t exactly what I would call fast-paced. It even seems that there was no movement at all for the last year at all regarding new features.
I took a short look at a current WordPress installation we did for our Developer Website at sones – and I have to admit that feature-wise this WordPress is way beyond anything I could achieve in dasBlog anytime soon.
Additionally the fact that the skin of this site seems to be broken (especially for older browsers) I would have to do a skin-redesign – turns out that this is way easier in WordPress than it is in dasBlog.
In case of low performance: check your systems latency
I ran into some strange problems with a notebook that leaded to sound drop-outs or things like sluggish UI and HDD performance. So I tried almost everything troubleshootig the problem. That worked for some problems but there are occasions when I want to have a more systematic approach to those kinds of hardware / driver related problems.
One tool that can help to find hardware / driver problems is the DPC Latency Checker. This tool measures and displays the latency of your system. All you have to do is watch as the measurements scroll by and remove / disable one device after another from your machine. As soon as the latency turns green again there’s a high probability that the device you removed last has a problem of some kind.
On my machine everything is in the greens now – after some BIOS and driver updates. If your system has some issues you would see something like that:
(courtesy of Gnawgnu’s Realm)
Source 1: http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml
Source 2: http://gnawgnu.blogspot.com/2009/01/dell-latitude-e6400-sound-problem-fixed.html
Useful tools: OnTopReplica
Normally I am using a notebook and a 24” Widescreen TFT as a Dual-Monitor solution. In fact I am mostly using the 24” TFT for work and the notebook 14” TFT for all the things that don’t need to be in focus right now like Instant Messengers.
Now in those few cases when a video needs to be played I want it on the main monitor but I want it to take as little of space as possible. And I want it On Top of everything else… maybe sometimes I even want to control it’s opacity a bit…
Now there’s this cool tool called “OnTopReplica” – It’s available for free on Codeplex and works out of the box without installation.
After you start it you’ll end with a small glas window where you can right-click to get a menu. You choose a Window which needs to be replaces – for example the YouTube Browser Window. After that you can even control which region of this Window should be displayed. You can resize, move and of course control the opacity of this window.
It’s also great for presentations because it allows you to simply resize any window you like. It will resize it and while it does that the window always is “live” – so everything you’re doing in the original window will be displayed in the replica.
making things up…
While trying out the new Mozilla Weave I came across the nice interface the guys built into their sync service. Funny messages included.
Source: http://labs.mozilla.com/weave/
How to remove a team project from Team Foundation Server 2008
Well, if you don’t want to have them removed just form your Team Explorer in Visual Studio you want to go to your Team Foundation Server Remote Desktop and open a commandline.
Change to the folder %program files%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE and do this:
tfsdeleteproject /force /server:" "
cool new feature: reduce volume
When you start a Skype call WIndows 7 will immediately reduce the volume of all other sounds by a defined value. 80% is default. Great and useful feature!
the .NET Framework sourcecode release and how to unpack it…
It’s great to finally have the .NET sourcecode for debugging purposes – inconveniently it’s in a format you might have your difficulties just browsing along. A little tool is here to help!
After you installed, let’s say the WCF sourcecode and debug symbols you get a directory structure similar to this:
This source.zip.tmp file holds the whole sourcecode as one big package. It can’t be unpacked – even one would suggest that by just looking at that .zip ending in the name of the file.
Instead this is a plain-text file of a certain yet simple format. I wrote me a little tool to unpack this file into it’s original files and directories.
You can get the little tool, including sourcecode, here: UnpackMSSources.zip
To start the magic, you would like to go to the command line and start the tool with two parameters. Parameter 1 is the path and filename of the source.zip.tmp file. Parameter 2 is the part of the Path that needs to be cut-off. For the WCF Sources it’s “/DEVDIV/depot/DevDiv/releases/Orcas/SP/ndp/cdf/src/” for example.
The tool will then start to whirl through the file and extract all the files it founds into directories it’s creating along the way. After some seconds you would end with a directory tree like this:
Have fun!
Source 1: http://referencesource.microsoft.com/netframework.aspx
Source 2: http://www.schrankmonster.de/content/binary/UnpackMSSources.zip
farewell Songbird
After not less than 3 and a half hour Songbird finished with importing the iTunes library I am using for about 6 years.
The first impression is: Cool, it’s got plugins!
The second impression is: Booh, it wants to restart (while stopping the music) to install!
It’s not faster than iTunes. And this is a sad thing, because the only thing I hoped it would be was faster. It’s not – the UI it’s as fast and responsive as iTunes’ UI – at best. With just a few clicks the whole songbird window went into sleep mode and the well known beachball came into the play.
Even worse: for some strange reason Songbird consumes considerably more CPU time while just sitting there and playing an MP3 than iTunes does:
18,7% CPU load used by songbird just by playing an mp3 (no filtering, no visualisation, no nothing)
2,3% CPU load for iTunes while doing exactly the same. Even the same mp3 was played.
iTunes even takes less memory… oh dear: A long way to go for the Songbird team.
taking Songbird for a spin (again)
Since my last Songbird experiences were not that great I thought it would be a great idea to take the newly released 1.2 version of Songbird for a spin.
It’s said that the new version is faster and more stable. I installed 3 hours ago and I still cannot use it since it’s syncing with iTunes ever since.
More on that topic when songbird is ready….
Source: http://getsongbird.com/
a new version of the TFS Build Status Screen
There’s an update of the beloved TFS Build Status Screen tool. And the most frequently asked feature is now built-in: Scaleability.
You can scale the status screen now to fut even on the smallest screens…hurray!
Source: http://raquila.com/software/team-foundation-server-build-notification-screen/
getting System.ServiceModel.AddressAccessDeniedException in automated WCF Tests
We’re currently running several build processes. So each time someone checks new code in one of the build machines gets the whole package and builds it, runs tests on it and stores the result of this whole process on the Team Foundation Server. Great stuff so far.
Until you start to do things like automated WCF Testing. We’re using the selfhosting capabilities of the WCF to start a ServiceHost and then run tests against it. This works great locally. It does not on the build machines. Even if you promote the Build-Service User to Administrator you won’t get the love.
The error you might get would look something like this:
The exception contains an URL which tells you to add the Service URL to the machines URL Access Control List. On Windows XP and 2003 you have to install the Windows Support Tools and use the httpcfg command. On Windows Vista and 2008 you should use the already installed netsh commandline tool.
Since we need to get this to work on all current and future build servers I decided to add the netsh call to the build script, which looks like this:
” border=”0″ alt=”Add this Target before any tests in the .proj file and you’re set.
Source 1: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=70353
small and reliable SFTP server for Windows
I had to transfer some data the last days and I wanted to do it fast, encrypted and using only one tcp port. SFTP is one of those protocols that come in handy in these cases.
Since the machine that would host the SFTP service is a Windows machine I reached out to find a free, reliable and easy to install and use SFTP Server.
I found Core FTP mini-sftp-server. It’s a small download of just one .exe file. When you start it up it’ll show the dialog above. You can configure username, password, port and path. Click “Start” and off you go. Works as advertised.
Source: http://www.coreftp.com/server/