Software – Page 25 – ReadMyDamnBlog 2023

Online backup – yet another player

I have before talked about Online backup, and now a new player has entered the arena https://www.carbonite.com. Well new and new, it would appear to have existed for some time, but I just recently heard about it. Pricing is very similar to Idrive.

I have not tested this service yet, but a quick comparison to the previous favorite (www.idrive.com) lists these pros and cons;

Pros;
Unlimited backup (not like Idrive where unlimited equals a fair use limit of 150GB, I never understood this)

Cons;
Data can be decrypted by the hosting company. This WILL require a subpoena, but never the less data CAN be decrypted, in the case of www.Idrive.com you can set your own encryption key for TOTAL privacy – for most this is not an issue, but if you are concerned about privacy this may be a dealbreaker, furthermore there is the issue of national law – what is legal to store in Denmark (where I live) may not be legal in the USA and vice versa eg. copyrighted music – having total privacy does tend to keep my mind at ease about such matters.

Conclusion;
It is interesting, but for now I think I’ll stay at www.idrive.com mainly because of the privacy issue, and besides I have already uploaded about 110 gb data *sigh* the thought of restarting the process can kill any initiative 😉

2009-10-16/1 Comment/by Mike

AutoIT3 – Excellent scripting tool

Devlopment, Scripting, Utility

autoit3 If you once in a while work with installing software, then you HAVE to check this out.

http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/scite

It is a scripting language that will make it very easy to install and modify installed software installations, it uses a very intuitive VB variant that is very easy to understand and the help is just wonderful. One of the VERY neat features is that once you have completed your install script you simply compile it and viola you have an .exe file, thus you can simply add an install.exe file to the package you wish to distribute and the enduser do not need to have any scripting engine etc. installed, it IS neat..

So you might think, “well if its a VB vaiant, why not just make the whole thing as a VB-Script” – well you could – but have you ever tried to access files/registry etc via a VB script, well sure it is possible but the code quickly become unnessesary complex, this scripting language is straight out of the bag – copyfile( from, to) as easy as that.

The scripting engine has support for;
System variabels (eg. @StartMenu = location of startmenu, @StartMenuCommonDir = location of All users start menu etc etc.)
File management (copy / delete / move files)
Directory management (copy / delete / move directories)
Registry access (read write)
Replay keystrokes

and a whole lot more..

This is from the introduction in the help file;
Easy to learn BASIC-like syntax
Simulate keystrokes and mouse movements
Manipulate windows and processes
Interact with all standard windows controls
Scripts can be compiled into standalone executables
Create Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs)
COM support
Regular expressions
Directly call external DLL and Windows API functions
Scriptable RunAs functions
Detailed helpfile and large community-based support forums
Compatible with Windows 95 / 98 / ME / NT4 / 2000 / XP / 2003 / Vista / 2008
Unicode and x64 support
Digitally signed for peace of mind
Works with Windows Vista’s User Account Control (UAC)

Inspiration;
If you are interested I have created an uninstall script for McAfee Virus Scan and ePO agent,

you can download it here for inspiration;
https://readmydamnblog.com/downloads/McAfee_Uninstall.au3
or the compiled EXE version here
https://readmydamnblog.com/downloads/McAfee_Uninstall.exe

For more on uninstalling McAfee Virus Scan and ePO please see https://readmydamnblog.com/?p=147

2009-10-15/1 Comment/by Mike

File check-summing – MD5

Security, Utility

winmd5_screenshot Some times you download large files and you might want to verify the integrity of the file, or it could be that you are the distrustful type and simply want to verify the file integrity just because you can!?

MD5 is an older check-summing algorithm, basically you put data through this algorithm and it spits out a long check-sum – change as much as a comma in the file or text and the check-sum changes. MD5 is no longer considered ‘safe’ as some vulnerabilities have been discovered, however it would still be complicated to ‘fake’ the right check-sum for a file – so for something as trivial as file check-summing I would consider MD5 safe enough – then again it depends what are you looking for corruption errors or deliberate attempts of tampering (for the latter you should perhaps go with SHA1 instead).

Fine, so you got the MD5 check-sum (eg. 73f48840b60ab6da68b03acd322445ee) from the website, how do you compare it to the file you just downloaded?

Well I found this util which is free and fairly easy to use.
http://www.winmd5.com/?rid=winmd5

Direct Download

2009-10-13/by Mike

KB936181 Windows Update problem

OS

I just had the pleasure of fixing a computer with an update problem, it would not install KB936181 no matter what was done..

I found this guide on some page;

How to fix the KB936181 Windows Update problem:
Click Start -> Run, type cmd and click OK

Type ren %windir%\System32\msxml4.dll msxml4.old, and press Enter
(Ignore any errors stating that the file could not be found)!
Next, type exit, and press Enter

Now, simply visit the official Microsoft KB93618 download
link and manually download and install the update

Restart your computer and if all goes well, your
KB936181 update issues should be history.

This sounded quite sane, so I decided to try it… However after renaming the file I tried to run the update and got the three options 1) Modify 2) Repair 3) Remove, and I decided to go for the remove option, after this I reran the advertisement from the update server (SCCM WSUS) and viola it installed without a glitch.

As the user said, what a stupid update 😀 I could not agree more..

2009-10-13/by Mike

Microsoft Security Essentials – Final version released

Antivirus, Security

Microsoft-Security-Essentials The long awaited “Microsoft Security Essentials” is released 🙂 and as the beta looked promising and the company I work for has been using “Forefront Client Security” (the corporate version) for a year now, I was looking forward to trying this out…

I fired up my browser and went to “http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/“, however as I live in Denmark I was met by this message;

Not available in your country or region
You appear to be in a country or region where
Microsoft Security Essentials is not available.
Thank you for your interest in Microsoft Security Essentials.

Shown in 9 languages (of cause not in Danish), well bummer… However as I have access to a US proxy I just changed the proxy settings and things brightened up 🙂 So I am now the happy ‘owner’ of “Microsoft Security Essentials”, the thing about this is it’s free 😀

Should you want to check this product out, just direct your browser to; http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

And should you get the same annoying message stating that it is ‘Not available in your country’, then you might want to take a look at; www.torproject.org TorProject is mostly an anonymity solution that allows you to browse without being tracked by IP etc, however they also offer the possibility to select which breakout/proxy you wish to use, and here you can select a US breakout and you can fool the MS server into letting you download all the same – you may also need to modify your IE settings to show a US regional code etc. but it should all be possible..

Want more details and maybe a review?
Visit here; http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/mse.asp

Enjoy.

Update!
You may be able to download MSE from here even if you are not in the US 🙂

2009-10-08/by Mike

Web Timemachine

Fun, Web

I really got a kick out of this;

http://web.archive.org/collections/web.html

Here you will have the opportunity to see how websites looked in the past, it was funny looking at some of my old websites and reliving how they looked 🙂 Nostalgia.

2009-10-02/by Mike

Keyboard shortcuts for Windows.

OS

Every now and again you tend to forget which keyboard combination it was you had to press in order to minimize a window or what ever clever thing you need to do, this is especially a nuisance if your mouse somehow is not working.

Well Microsoft kindly enough has a page listing the shortcuts for you;
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/126449/en-us

or click more for a transcript here…

Shadowcopy schedule log errors

Backup, OS

Have you ever tried enabling Shadow Copy on a server drive? Shadow Copy (in this “Shared folders” variant) is a poor man’s backup/version control, it will allow you to restore previous versions of files deleted via shares.

Technical info on how it works;
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc785914(WS.10).aspx

A more lo tech approach here (visual demo);
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/docs/ShadowCopiesSharedFolders.swf
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techinfo/overview/scr.mspx

Image1

Anyhow, once implemented Shadow Copy will begin to “backup” data via a Scheduled Job if you so choose (the scheduled job is added to the scheduled tasks in the control panel automatically).

However, when I looked in the logfile for scheduled jobs (see image1) there was mention of an error (which is odd as the schedule is created by the system and as such should be correct);

.

"ShadowCopyVolume{eeacaa88-d521-11da-a3c1-00170859ede5}.job" (vssadmin.exe)
31-08-2009 12:00:00 ** WARNING **  Invalid working directory..
The specific error is:  0x00000003: The system cannot find the path specified.

Now this was odd because the Shadow Copy backup worked without a glitch and files could be restored, so why the error!? Well a bit of digging around brought me a step closer to the truth, but sadly not all the way (I now know how to fix it, but not why the errormessage appears)..

It would appear that the error is related to the “Working directory” in the scheduled task, and the suggestion was to clear the “Working directory” field in the scheduled job – does it make sense? well not really, working directory pointed at “%systemroot%\system32” which equals “C:\windows\system32” and this folder DO exist but never the less it did the trick – no more errors in the SchedLgU.txt file.

shadowcopy1 So the task is easy, simply delete the folder “working folder” in the scheduled job, normally called “ShadowCopyVolume{……….” and the errors are gone. Is this really nessesary? Nope, not at all it’s purely cosmetic, the job works even with the error message, so it’s only if you get annoyed by error messages in you log files.

.

2009-09-10/by Mike

Duplicate files cleaner

Backup, Utility

Stumbled across this pice of software “Duplicate Cleaner“, a utility to remove duplicate files on you harddisk – a growing problem with the harddisk sizes these days, I guess I alone havearound 4TB disk storage and I would be VERY surprised if there was not a duplicate file or two. The software also supports hardlinks which sounds interesting.

I will be testing this software in the near future.

Screenshots here;
http://www.digitalvolcano.co.uk/content/duplicate-cleaner/screenshots

2009-08-28/by Mike

DVD Backup made easy (excellent for digi pictures)

Backup, Utility

2009-08-28_2308 Have you ever tried to burn your collection of digital photos or mp3 files to DVD? Sure you have, how did you accomplish it? By sorting files into groups of 4.6gb and burning one dvd at the time? Most people do it this way, you could also use winrar or other and create compressed files with a size of 4.6gb (one per dvd) – however that is not optimal if you later wish to extract just that ONE file you deleted by accident or if one DVD gets corrupted…

What to do!? Well I stumbled across this blog post;
http://www.jonnysblog.com/2009/04/12/how-to-split-directories-to-span-dvd%E2%80%99s/

Where several utilities are mentioned;
SizeMove (see above link for screenshot)
SizeMe

I also stumbled across;
LargeBackup2DVD (a full featured backup solution)

UPDATE;
A related product Dirsplit has come to my attention, this appear to be more related to sorting than size, but may still be interesting to you;
http://code.google.com/p/dirsplit/

2009-08-28/1 Comment/by Mike