centre{source}
INTERACTIVE AGENCY
Web Development
Windows
Website Grabber | Offline Browser
Today, we had a client call us and ask if we can ’save’ their website from an aggressive website designer that is holding their site hostage. I told them yes and thought an easy solution would be to find a utility that allowed us to easily clone/grab their website. I must say, I was surprised at the difficulty in finding a free utility to do this.
Part of the problem came from the search terms I started with. I thought this would be called a ’site grabber’ - and many paid utilities thought the same :) I then switched to Website Clone, but to no avail. Finally, I that download.com called these utilities “Offline Browsers”. Doing a quick search for Offline Browser struck gold!
Open Source Office can handle Blackberry
CentreSource has jumped on the Blackberry bandwagon! After complaining for months that I spend too much time with email, I gave up trying to avoid the problem and simply decided to further my addiction :) We purchased three new Blackberry 8703e’s and have now started the painful process of getting them to work in our Open Source environment. That’s right, Blackberries in a world without Outlook and Exchange. The verdict? It works, but not great.
Easy way to burn an ISO
If you own a single slot CD-R, you may wonder how you’re supposed to burn copies of your disks and/or make exact images of your distributions. One popular way is to create an ‘Image’ of your CD-ROM in the format of an ISO. The ISO file is an actual image-copy of the CD-ROM - not the files itself. This may be hard to understand, but CD-ROM’s have more info associated with them other than the files that are stored on them. Special security, volume info, etc. - all stored at the low level of the CD-ROM. While all of this fascinating, it isn’t the point of my post :) If you need to burn an ISO, here is a great site that makes it super simple: Right click -> Copy Image to CD. That’s it! Thanks Alex Feinman.
Outlook Header Annoyance
One of the worst thing Microsoft Outlook ever did for the Internet was decide that when someone forwards a message, they don’t need to include any of the SMTP headers along with it.
This, of course, renders the message useless to any poor administrator trying to track down a problem that a user is reporting. When someone, for example, forwards a message and says “Hey, I keep getting this spam message — can you do something about it?”, this is what it looks like from Outlook:
puttycyg
I am a big fan of the cygwin suite of UNIX tools for windows, but one of my biggest annoyances was that the shell you run in cygwin is always displayed in the most horrid terminal environment (basically a glorified DOS window).
Enter puttycyg — it allows you to use putty as a raw terminal emulator (i.e. without telnet or ssh) in running your cygwin shell. From puttycyg’s README:
RATIONALE
The Windows Console is an inadequate terminal emulator. It is impossible
to resize horizontally without pulling up a dialog box. It is impossible
to send an ASCII NUL. Basic keyboard options do not exist such as
configuring the ASCII character sent by the Backspace key.
MS Access Error: Disk or network error.
One of our clients called and reported an issue with a MS Access database. The user was able to open a network based .mdb file, but when they tried to click on a switchboard button they received the following error message: “Disk or network error.” There are many resources that deal with this error, but none of them provided the needed solution. The TMP/TEMP directories were set properly, the JET Engine was updated, and the .mdb file was not corrupted (verified on another computer).
Microsoft’s Anti-Spam Efforts
I’ll give credit where credit is due. This is a cool idea:
Microsoft has taken a new approach to security in particular in the enforcement side. They took a clean computer. Infected it with a common malicious code. That code turned the computer into a Spam zombie. A Spam zombie is a computer that is connected to the Internet that has been infected and checks in with the zombie controllers to let them tell it what to do. Microsoft documented 5 Million connections used to send over 18 million Spam messages in less then 3 weeks. This was just one computer. There are reported to be thousands of Spam zombies out there. Microsoft cordoned their Spam zombie off the net so it could not be used to actually send the Spam. Microsoft filed a lawsuit and contacted ISP’s to try to discover who is really sending the Spam.
Windows File Deletion
I have not been keeping up my rep as a bonafide Microsoft-hater lately, so here come some gripes with a few things that bug me in Microsoft software.
First up is a dangerous inconsistency in how Microsoft Windows handles file deletion. On your average workstation, when you “delete” a file, it’s not actually deleted, but rather just relocated to the Recycling Bin. However, when you delete a file or files from a share on a server, these files are not copied to the Recycling Bin. They are in fact just deleted. This is probably because Windows engineers figured it wouldn’t be practical to transfer all that data over the network to the workstation Recycling Bin (I guess). Why they didn’t just have the deleted files be relocated to a recycling bin on the server is beyond me.
In any event, the ramifications are that users in Windows are generally not overly-cautious in deleting files because they generally have the safety net of the Recycling Bin. This dependency is dangerous when they encounter shared files because that safety net disappears. I just had a client call me with precisely this situation — he had deleted (accidentally) an entire folder from a share and was asking why it wasn’t in his Recycling Bin. Naturally we could retrieve it from a backup, but not everyone is so lucky.
At first I thought there was something I was overlooking here — surely Windows wouldn’t leave people hanging in such an obvious way, but alas, as some quick research has confirmed that this it’s true.
One of the many ways in which Samba has a leg up on Windows for filesharing is that Samba allows you to account for this problem by using the “recycle” vfs object so that files are never deleted, but are instead moved to a directory. Example config:
When to Say When
One of the harshest realities for small businesses in the increasingly modern world is managing technology costs effectively. The balance between cost and productivity when it comes to technology is an extremely delicate one, and small businesses are often left in the lurch, because they lack the knowledge and resources to plan around the problems.
In no area is this more acute than in the realm of simply managing and fixing workstation PCs. In a larger environment, this problem is often alleviated by employing smart strategies for imaged workstations that can be wiped and re-imaged at a moments’ notice. However, options like these simply aren’t viable for an environment that is too small to justify the cost (or in an environment that simply can’t pay the cost regardless — i.e. non-profits on shoestring budgets).
As consultants for many companies like these, it has often been left to us to make wise decisions in these situations — and it’s extremely difficult. The most common problem that organizations face on their workstations is the ever-present threat of infestation by spyware and viruses. So a decision we have constantly had to face is “how much work should I invest (on my clients’ behalf) towards trying to fix this PC before giving up?”
The answers are a bit startling and perhaps unintuitive (or at least unfortunate). We have come to a few conclusions and rules as a result of the experiences (good and bad) that we’ve had:
Windows Update Sucks: Error 0×8DDD0007
At 2AM in the morning, I had a Eureka about the future of computing. As things get easier and easier for users - the art of troubleshooting and problem conveyance (yes, the conveying of errors by software) will diminish!
Today at school, my wife was unexplainably blocked from Internet Access. She contacted the IT department and they told her that she either had a virus, malicious spyware, or needed to upgrade to SP2. Ironic bed-fellows…
