I posted on the DataMystic forums (manufacturer of TextPipe Pro) a brief tutorial on how to create powerful clip-board macros with help of TextPipe Pro and the free hotkey utility, AutoHotKey – two utilities from my standard toolbox.
Archive for the 'Windows' Category
Hear hear! I was recently commenting Ballmer’s statement that Windows 7 would “be Vista, just a lot better.” Now it turns out Windows 7 will not be Vista but perhaps—hopefully—an entirely new direction for Windows. InfoWorld writes:
The reworked Windows: tighter, leaner
The operating system itself has gotten a considerable amount of reworking below the presentation layer. If M3 is any indication, that work has led to a tighter OS, and by “tighter” I mean that resource requirements are being lowered.
That’s the right direction! Microsoft should stop calling Windows 7 the “Vista 2.0!”
Update 29 October 2008: Or that would be the right direction. Randall Kennedy’s review of the first beta of Windows 7 doesn’t sound promising. Hopefully Microsoft has still a very long to-do list. They’d have the time, but do they have the focus? Otherwise Ubuntu, or perhaps PC-BSD look ever more enticing.
I see Microsoft has already started to lay down the groundwork for the failure of Windows 7 (Ballmer: Windows 7 is Vista, just ‘a lot better’, InfoWorld). Saying something like that at this point in time should work about as well as if John McCain were to declare that “he is George W. Bush, just a lot better.” People don’t like Vista as there is very little apparent gain from it (as compared to XP), and if Windows 7 is Vista 2.0 it must mean that large number of Vista’s obnoxioius features will still present in Windows 7.
When Windows NT came out its benefits were obvious over Windows 98. Subsequently Windows 2000 took out the rough edges off of NT making the new environment very useable, and lightyears ahead of 98 in stability, features, etc. XP further refined that lineage. Vista, on the other hand, has no such apparent benefits over XP. Even though Microsoft has put significant amount of time into developing the kernel under the hood, to the users it looks more bloated, more resource-hungry, more glitsy, but with few features that leave the user wanting to switch over (DirectX 10 being perhaps one of the only ones.. and if you don’t play games, even it has little significance to you). Obviously Windows 7 continues the lineage, but just as John McCain is desperately trying to point out that he is not George W. Bush, Microsoft would be well advised to play down the likeness of Windows 7 to Vista.
Rather than advertising Windows 7’s already painfully obvious lineage, Microsoft could, for a change, attempt something revolutionary such as making the new version of the Windows actually less resource hungry so that it would run faster on the same hardware as its predecessor. With many UNIX distributions such as FreeBSD that is generally the case; new versions squeeze more torque out of the same hardware than did their predecessors.
I’ve been using Van Dyke Software’s SecureFX for a long time for FTP transfers. It’s a decent software, but I’ve always found its user interface a bit clumsy (floating windows inside a master window..). Recently the need for secure connections has become increasingly important, and SecureFX doesn’t support Explicit FTPS, or “FTPES”. The difference of the “explicit” and “implicit” FTPS was well described on a page found on Enterprise Distributed Technologies site:
Before the FTPS Internet Draft was published a somewhat abortive attempt at offering a secure version of FTP was made. This is now referred to as implicit FTPS. It is a very simplistic technique which involves using standard secure TLS sockets in place of plain sockets at all points. Since standard TLS sockets require an exchange of security data immediately upon connection, it is not possible to offer standard FTP and implicit FTPS on the same port. For this reason another port needs to be opened – usually port 990.
Implicit FTPS is in the process of being phased out in favour of FTPS as described in the Internet Draft. This newer variant of FTPS is now referred to as explicit FTPS. It has a some substantial advantages over implicit FTPS:
- It is a standard extension of FTP and is therefore supported by most FTP servers.
- It uses standard FTP ports meaning that there is no need to open addition ports in firewalls when upgrading from FTP to FTPS.
- It is more flexible in that it allows security to be turned off and on in a single session.
- It is compatible with the RFC2228 standard.
I decided to review some other FTP clients at hand. The excellent Filezilla would be perfect, except it doesn’t yet support RSA-key based SFTP authentication making it unsuitable for accessing the roots of remote systems. Its Explorer integration was also imperfect in that attempting to drag a file from a connected ftp site to the desktop (outside of the program window) resulted in an error.
I tried FTPRush, but gave up on it after a while — could not get FTPES working properly. It probably would work, but the reason for why it did not work was not obvious.
WinSCP offers SCP/SFTP (both key and password based), but it doesn’t support FTPS, explicit or implicit.
CuteFTP Pro supports all three connectivity types, but while existing key types can be defined, it’s finicky on the format of the key (I could not get an externally generated key working). Additionally it only supports *one* RSA key globally for all profiles AND it doesn’t allow dragging-and-dropping items from a connected remote site to the local desktop or other explorer location (i.e. outside of the application window). I crossed it out.
I looked at the screen shots of CoreFTP.. and they were enough to convince me I would not want to try it.
Finally, I gave the latest version of the ‘ol WS_FTP Professional by Ipswich systems a try, and found all three connectivity types easily configured. It also wants to generate RSA keys itself, but at least each profile can have its own key and drag-and-drop out of the application window works. Seems it’s the winner, for now (Filezilla holds a lot of promise — once they implement RSA key authentication it may well come out at the top.. especially since it’s free software).
N.B.
Two other slightly different kind of FTP clients worth mentioning here are WebDrive and SFTP Drive which map Windows drive letter(s) to remote FTP site(s). Both work very well; WebDrive is a bit more configurable (and a bit more expensive) of the two. Both support SFTP (password or RSA key pair authentication), WebDrive additionally supports WebDAV, Amazon S3, and insecure FTP. Neither program offers support for FTP(E)S. (Update: read the post comments regarding FTPS support in WebDrive.)
I’ve been using Marteau’s Total Uninstall for quite some time now, and generally it works very well. It keeps the system clean of the junk programs generally leave behind when they’re uninstalled. However, couple of days ago Total Uninstall totally uninstalled my system. I needed to print a listing of the contents of a folder, and I remembered a program I had tried at some point, ExpPrint. I downloaded and installed the latest version of ExpPrint, 3.1.0.1, and printed the directory. Few hours later it occurred to me that the excellent file manager that has long been part of my core utilities, Directory Opus, might have the directory printing functionality built in — something which I confirmed quickly. It also turned out that that the directory printing features of Directory Opus worked better and were more configurable than those of ExpPrint… so I decided to uninstall ExpPrint. I fired up Total Uninstall, selected ExpPrint, and started application uninstall which quickly completed. I then clicked on the “Uninstall” button of Total Uninstall to remove the scraps left behind by the software.
Only this time I would be treated to a total uninstall of my Windows XP as I was about to find out. Total Uninstall first displayed few items that “were added after the program [to be uninstalled] was installed”. They were generic context-menu items, so I made sure they were unselected, and proceeded. Program worked for some 20 seconds and then produced a lengthy list of all the registry values it had deemed part of the ExpPrint, and thus removed. Only the list contained good part of my XP’s registry values including all context-menu items, all file associations, etc. Needless to say, after that nothing worked, including the system restore.
Nor did it help to attempt to restore system state (there would have been a very recent system state available) from the recovery console as outlined in a TechTarget article. Windows would just not start. Realizing that even if I were able to get it back up and running, the configuration would likely never work very well, I resigned to a full reinstall with a sigh. Since the filesystem was intact and since I keep good backups, I lost no data, just time.
Lesson learned: it’s worth keeping a restorable image backup of the system/program files partition in addition to data backups.
Update 17 September 2008: I’m still using Total Unintall, or at least “have been using it”. Yesterday I was installing some Photoshop plugins, and while doing so accidentally installed a plugin into inDesign’s plugin folder. So I fired up Total Uninstall to remove the software. The result: the entire plugins folder of inDesign was wiped out. Fortunately only files were touched, and fortunately Total Uninstall removed them to Recycle Bin, so restoring them was fairly easy without a lengthy repair/reinstall of inDesign. But as it seems Total Uninstall doesn’t have a feature to preview what is about to be uninstalled, I’m now questioning how good of an idea its continued use is. I’ve found the program quite effective, but errors like this make it hazardous to use. I’m going to suggest a preview as a new feature, but meanwhile—until/if such feature is added; see my feature request on Martau.com—I may opt to use some other uninstaller that does provide the preview as well as the option to choose whether or not to remove the “left over” items the uninstaller has found, or if no software provides such feature I may lay off 3rd party uninstallers for now—it’s better to have clutter in the system than to have to have to reinstall everything. I took a quick peek at Total Install’s competition (including Your Uninstaller!, Advanced Uninstaller PRO, free Revo Uninstaller, and the popular, also free CCleaner), and I wasn’t impressed. Let’s hope Martau adds the uninstall preview; it’s otherwise the best tool for the job!
Update 21 September 2008: My over-zealous spam-filter had caught Martau’s response to the initial problem in August. It has been addressed in the current release and “total uninstall” should no longer happen! Also, it turns out that the detected changes display (the “Changes” tab) in Total Uninstall displays all the changes that the program has detected for each installed program, and that will be reverted or removed during the uninstall. Thus, by reviewing the detected changes in prior to starting the uninstallation process any unpleasant surprises can be avoided. This is pretty much what I was looking for with the “uninstall preview” feature (as outlined in 17 September 2008 update above). Good job, Martau! Now I can continue to recommend Total Uninstall as the best uninstall tool available for Windows!
I like Yahoo! Widgets (formerly known as “Konfabulator”). I use XP for some time to come and thus don’t have the option to use Vista’s widgets (the only thing in Vista that currently has some draw to it is DirectX 10, but I digress..). Every now and then a widget “gets lost”. For example, when starting a program (like a game) that changes the display resolution, the widgets get tossed around seemingly randomly, and sometimes they end up outside of the active (and possibly maximum) resolution of the display. Closing a widget and reopening it won’t help. Uninstalling Yahoo! Widget Engine probably helps, but who wants to do that regularly? There’s an easy registry fix (and if the problem is frequent, one could even write a small batch file that would place the widgets at their desired locations).
Shut down Widget Engine first (also from the system tray), then find the following key in your registry with regedit (you may want to use search especially if the system has many users and thus many SIDs).
The keys that determine the widget locations can be found at
HKEY_USERS \
user’s security ID, or “SID”,
… e.g. S-1-5-21-1482476501-362288127-1801674531-1233 \
Software \
Yahoo \
Widget Engine \
Widgets \
widget name, e.g. “Calendar” \
Windows \
Main Windows \
Positions <- delete this binary value
Then restart Widget Engine (and reload the “lost” widget if it’s not loaded by default). It the default placement is in the middle of the screen (or middle of the “active” screen on some multi-monitor systems).
Disclaimer: As always, the usual disclaimers and warnings apply to any registry mods. Know what you’re doing since it is possible to destroy your Windows installation with careless registry edits.