wisefaq.com

Balloon Tips from the System Tray (SysTray)
(note to self, must add a NotifyIcon to get this to work)

NotifyIcon.ShowBalloonTip Method

Minimizing to the SysTray

Minimizing and Restoring from the Systray

Closing a program and sending it to the SysTray

Putting an application in the SysTray, using a NotifyIcon

You’ll get USB2 speeds, but it does work.  Handy if you’ve left your only USB3 cable at home and brought your Seagate USB3 Portable Drive along with you.

You might have seen this cartoon here before, but it’s worth repeating, as it’s that time of month.  Some organisations require passwords that are longer than the 12 digit codes needed to arm a nuclear weapon.

I’m not the first to notice this. Jesper M. Johansson wrote about in-actionable security advice in an Microsoft Technet magazine article series called Passwords and Credit Cards.

So how do people remember passwords?

1. Write them down and stick them under a keyboard (aka Koolpin$Gorge*)
2. Store them in a password spreadsheet/document?
3. Use a password manager?

It’s option 3 for me.  I use the LastPass password manager. But here are some others to consider:

* a server, for a sensitive organisation, had the server password stored under the server keyboard.
Koolpin Gorge was where the server guy took his last annual leave.

edited 21 September: let’s make it 8 password managers, thanks for the comments folks.
edited 12 October: added Passgen tool description and link.
edited 27 May: added Password Minder.
edited 31st October: added Microsoft Credential Manager & Sticky Password
edited 7 May 2013: updated links/comments.  Added PassBox

Strategies to Mitigate Targeted Cyber Intrusions
At least 85% of the targeted cyber intrusions that Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) responds to could be prevented by following the first four mitigation strategies listed in our Strategies to Mitigate Targeted Cyber Intrusions:

• use application whitelisting to help prevent malicious software and other unapproved programs from running
• patch applications such as PDF readers, Microsoft Office, Java, Flash Player and web browsers
• patch operating system vulnerabilities
• minimise the number of users with administrative privileges.

US Naval Safety Center – Approach Flight Safety Magazine

XAMPP
XAMPP is a very easy to install Apache Distribution for Linux, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X. The package includes the Apache web server, MySQL, PHP, Perl, a FTP server and phpMyAdmin.

Light On The Hill Speech by Ben Chifley

HandBrake
HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder.

Remove Empty Directories
RED searches and deletes empty directories recursively below a given start folder and shows the result in a well arranged tree. Further you can create some custom rules for keeping and deleting folders. Empty files in directories can also be ignored.
[Found this to be an extremely useful program – Dale]

And it’s a bug/feature which is at least 10 years old, and Thomson Reuters have not fixed that issue in those 10 years.

It wouldn’t be that difficult to fix your application guys, here’s how you can do just that with a .Net 2 application.
Poxy proxies

As a workaround, we’re going to have to exclude every sodding database url from our proxy server.

Other references:
Error message: "Proxy Authentication Required" when searching PubMed or Web of Knowledge with EndNote 8.
ISA Server 2000 forum: Problem with EndNote

We’re currently deploying Fix Pack 3 for Lotus Notes 8.5.3.

But before we do that, we need to do an uninstall of s Post Fix Pack 2 RSS hotfix.

The uninstall was failing with a MSI error 1603.  Aaron Stebner’s post on locating 1603 error causes was not helpful with this.  I tried installing Fix Pack 3 over the RSS Hotfix but it failed.

The uninstall command we were using looked something like this:
msiexec.exe /i ClientUpdate.msi

There are some products which state that their uninstall string is to use the msiexec.exe parameter “/i”.  “/i” for install.  This was one of those products.*

I changed the “/i” for an “/x” (uninstall).

Fixed! (kind of).  The uninstall was now reporting a MSI error 1605
This action is only valid for products that are currently installed.

But we make progress!  The “/x” uninstall, even though it returned a 1605 error, managed to remove the references to the RSS hotfix from the Registry.

Which then allowed Fix Pack 3 to install.  Success!

* -  I suspect that some products do this so they get the opportunity to display a “nag” screen aka “Do you really want to uninstall me?”

It, being a Microsoft enterprise hotfix rollup for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1.

And the 15% logon time improvement was just when I applied it to the Windows 7 client.  We’re yet to apply it to our Windows 2008 server farm.

I first saw this hotfix mentioned at the Microsoft “Dude where’s my PFE?” blog.

Update 18th April:
It may cause issues with esri’s suite of products (ArcGIS, ArcInfo …)

Any Video Convertor – Free Edition
This is what I use for converting .AVI to DVD playable discs.

CIFS and SMB Timeouts in Windows
This blog post gives a consolidated overview of the most common SMB timeouts in Windows and their behaviors. Some of these legacy timeouts or timers are optional, implementation specific, not defined or not required by the protocol specifications. Let’s recall that MS-CIFS documents the protocol implemented in Windows NT and Windows 98, whereas MS-SMB describes the extensions added in Windows 2000 and beyond.
(I wish I had this information when I looked at an SMB timeout in: NTLMSSP was returning the error “STATUS_MORE_PROCESSING_REQUIRED”)

Certain Administrative Templates from the Windows XP Security Guide may prevent you from starting the Windows Firewall service in Windows XP Service Pack 2
Actually saw this particular issue last week on an old PC.

Captured Discipline Time Lock Safe
Or you could just buy a cheap electronic safe, reset the password and post the combination to yourself.

Acrobat and Microsoft Office 2010 Compatibility
”Adobe Acrobat X is the first version of Acrobat to support Microsoft Office 2010”

Dennis Higton – An untold story of testing Britain’s first jet plane

Strategies to Mitigate Targeted Cyber Intrusions
At least 85% of the targeted cyber intrusions that Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) responds to could be prevented by following the first four mitigation strategies listed in our Strategies to Mitigate Targeted Cyber Intrusions:

• use application whitelisting to help prevent malicious software and other unapproved programs from running
• patch applications such as PDF readers, Microsoft Office, Java, Flash Player and web browsers
• patch operating system vulnerabilities
• minimise the number of users with administrative privileges.

The Green Bean Weight Loss Diet for Dogs

By using PowerShell like this:

Get-WmiObject -class Win32_PerfRawData_Tcpip_NetworkInterface -ComputerName Localhost | Format-Table Name,@{label="LinkSpeed(MB)";Expression={$_.CurrentBandwidth/1000000 -as [int]}}

which will return this:

I first learnt how to do this by reading this blog post by Dustin Hedges.

I researched this a couple of months ago, in case I need to move off the wisefaq.com domain.  These are my rough notes.

Six weeks out:

• Backup your WordPress site, then make a backup of your domain.
• Read Moving WordPress
• Setup new WordPress Domain, copy the current WordPress DB over, and Change The Site URL
• Setup a 301 (to) Redirect WordPress Posts To New Domain
• Change Website Domain in Google Analytics