Various cool software and more

YouTube issues with WP 2.7 (see update at the buttom)

It would seem there is an issue with embedded youtube videos, will my troubbles never end :-(…

If anyone got the inside knowledge on why youtube videos and WordPress 2.7 does not work please let me know 🙁

Just tried with Firefox 3 and there everything worked fine… I do however get the yellow warning sign in IE the lower left corner stating a problem with the page.. but no problems in Firefox.. very strange indeed..

I even tried the procedure described on;
http://www.eastwoodzhao.com/day-4-internet-explorer-youtube-compatibility-issue-fixed/
but still not working 🙁

Additional note; I later found out it works ok on a IE6 I have on a virtual machine, I am beginning to suspect foul play (or at least settings) on my IE7.

UPDATE JAN 5th,
I today also tried on my work pc, and guess what it worked like a charm.  Thus it would seem the problem is with my IE7 at home 😐  How the f… do you debug that 🙁

UPDATE JAN 7th,
I have read and tried a lot of different ideas to solve this, this includes re-installing flash player (for which I was very hopeful) however still no luck.  When I uninstall Flash player a border is shown around the YouTube embedded video, once Flash installed this is removed and replaced by ‘nothing’ a transparent window with no border..  Could it be an IE setting?  Help is greatly appreciated.

UPDATE MARCH.
Sorry for not mentioning this before, but the issue somehow went away by itself during the end of January / beginning of February, very strange 😐

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Commenting on blogposts..

As I was forced to move to a new provider, I used the time to test some additional safety features and as a result I have reopened for commenting on my blog posts.

Happy commenting..

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Avoid getting spammed – when using download forms

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spam
We all know the hassle, you wish to download some neat utility but the download link require you to hand over your email address (download link send via email). Now as a person that has previously released quite a few utilities I can understand why this is, its nice to see who is using your software and neat to have a database you can mail to in case of updates etc, however as not everyone respects your privacy I don’t like to provide my email to just anyone..

So is there a solution you ask, and yes indeed 🙂 its right here;

http://slopsbox.com/

So how does it work, well fairly simple actually, here is a step by step guide;

1. open http://slopsbox.com/
2. click “List (and add) domains
3. Now scroll through the domain names and find one you like.
4. now to create your temporary mail address all you need is your imagination, add whatever you like in front of the domainname you chose before (eg. mr.cool@aliraheem.com) – you can choose what ever you like simply add @domainname to the handle/name you choose.
5. Now goto the site where you want to download, enter “your new email address”.
6. Goto http://slopsbox.com once again, enter the email (the one you invented yourself) and the code displayed, and sure enough there is your email download link 🙂

Ok, the world is not perfect, so do allow 10-20 min for the mail to arrive, if no mail arrive in 20 min try again with a different domainname.

Remember the mail address you ‘invent’ is accessible by everyone, hence make sure not to provide personal details when you subscribe to what ever it is you use the mail address for, once you get your login (to the download site etc) be sure to log on and change the password – anyone who guess ‘your email’ can read your mail so anything provided in the mail must be considered compromised.

But the good news is that you dont have to worry about getting spammed 🙂

Happy emailing..

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Nifty search tip – domain/ip search

Ok just heard about this lately, its actually rather cool.

goto live.com , in the search field enter;

IP:<IP ADDRESS>

<IP-ADDRESS> would be the IP of a webserver, adsl line or whatever, the neat thing is that you will now get a listing of all the domains hosted on this IP..  Nice..

Usually I use google for searching, and they may have a similar feature but I have not had time to dig into that.

What can I use that for you say?  Well, say you want to find more information about the owner of a web-site, well there are all the usual steps like whois etc.  but by using the above you can detirmine what other websites are hosted on that IP, this can maybe give you further info on the owner or the hosting provider.

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Terminal services – too many connections

ts-maxed-out1If you work as a Sysadmin you may have run across the issue where there is no more free Terminal Server “slots” available on a server (As you may know it is possible to connect 3 remote TS sessions against a server, 2 regular and 1 admin/console), this is quite annoying and is often due to one of your colleges forgetting to log out after ending their work on the server (or maybe they had something running that prevented them in disconnecting before the task was done)..

Anyhow, now YOU need to connect via MSTSC and are met with a message stating that TS connections are depleted.  You HAVE to get in, so what do you do?  You can try the Mstsc /Admin (XP sp3/Vista SP1)  or Mstsc /Console (all previous versions) and have it kick whomever is on the console connection (or physically logged on to the server in the server room) – however you may want to be nice and actually have a look and see who is on the server via TS and decide whom to kick.

To do so, goto a command prompt and type;
qwinsta /server:<SERVERNAME>/1

this will produce a list of everyone connected to the server via TS, now you can decide on which connection you want to ‘kill’ and type;
rwinsta /server:<SERVERNAME> <SESSION ID>

For a more detailed description see;
http://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/archive/2003/12/30/46776.aspx

Tnx to Jesper Thulstrup for pointing me in the right direction.

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Free Drive Backup 9.0 Express

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Paragon now offers a free (only for non commercial usage) version of their Drive backup software (Drive Backup 9.0 Express) a Ghost like product, I have not tested the product myself but Paragons products are usually very high class so I would suspect it to be good.

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/db-express/features.html

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AVG Antivirus joins the not so popular club.

AVG Antivirus has joined the not so popular club of antivirus vendors, that has released faulty definitions for their virus scanner.  In this case it caused AVG to wrongly detect a virus in a vital Windows OS file, which in worst case (if you followed AVG’s advice) could lead to a crashed Windows installation.

From the AVG forum here is a possible solution that do not require re-installation;

PC crash after AVG update 9 Nov 2008

Posted by: pa3bar (IP Logged)
Date: November 9, 2008 04:45PM

Many PC’s crashed after todays’s update of AVG. The update destines user32.dll as a virus: PSW. banker4.APSA.
Valid for Win XP SP2 and SP3 with AVG7.5 and AVG 8.
This is not a virus, but an essential part of your windows programme.

prevention:
before you start up your PC, unplug the internet cable. Boot your PC and disable in your firewall the access to internet for the AVG update manager. Reconnect the internet cable. In this way your PC stays safe from the maliceous AVG update.

solution:
if you happen to believe the AVG programme (like I did) when it shows you the virus alert, and have choosen “heal”or quarantine””your PC will no longer restart. It shows a blue screen at start up and tells you it cannot find winsvr, error c0000135. System recovery has no effect. Don’t panic (like I did) but:

-restart your PC in safe mode (press F8 during windows start up)
-open the AVG control centre by clicking the logo or via start-programs-AVG
-go to the virus vault, select user32.dll and click restore.
-empty the virus vault
-close AVG
-now unistall the whole AVG program: start-programs-AVG-uninstall
-reboot the PC and it is fine.

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CMAK additional

Another CMAK tip is to install the Windows 2008 CMAK version, this has new features and is fully compatible with Windows Vista.

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Setting up VPN using CMAK

REPOST: A simple way of distributing a VPN client installation is to create one with CMAK (Found on your WIndows 2003 CD), even though this is mostly aimed at Microsofts ISA server VPN it should work fine with other providers (supports L2TP and PPTP). Its fairly easy to get started and you end up with a single .exe file you can distribute to your users.
One minor glitch seem to be in regard to DNS, you may need to configure a script to deal with this (to ensure that the PPP adapter is the first in the search path. There is a lot more on this in the links below.

Anyway, here is a few links to get you started;
http://blog.msfirewall.org.uk/2008/06/using-cmak-to-configure-isa-server-vpn.html
http://blog.msfirewall.org.uk/2008/06/using-cmak-to-configure-isa-server-vpn_10.html
http://www.carbonwind.net/ISA/VPNQ2006/vpnq2006_4.htm
https://207.46.19.190/windows/windows2000/en/advanced/help/cmak_ops_65.htm
http://www.isaserver.org/img/upl/vpnkitbeta2/cmak.htm

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Norton UAC replacement

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UAC

Many people are tired of the UAC (what is UAC) warnings that pop up ever so often in Windows Vista, every time administrator privileges are required you will be prompted if its ok..  Safer than XP, yes for sure, but also annoying – why can’t it learn like the firewall that only prompts once..  I thought about turning UAC off (which is fairly easy) but again I like the added security.

Well Norton to the rescue, Norton is developing a UAC replacement (free for now) that actually will give you the option to answer “Always allow” to those UAC questions, and if you have a shortcut you launch often its annoying like hell to have to approve it EVERY time – but Norton allegedly solves this by letting you “Always allow” and hence only considder the threat once.  Neat..

More info and free download at;
http://www.nortonlabs.com/inthelab/uac.php

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