November, 2008

DDD

What does it stand for? Basically 3-D, yes that’s correct. But why am I blogging about it you ask? Well the next evolution of HDTV and HD monitors is upon us. Why play a game or watch TV normally when you can put on some 3-D glasses and have the images pop out at you! DDD.com will give you a quick run down of whats out there, they even have 3-D Starter Packs, but you have to already own one of Samsung’s 3-D Ready PDPs and HDTVs. A 24″ Wide LCD monitor runs about 1999 USD(must be the glasses!) While you can snag a Samsung 50″ Plasma, which is 3-D ready for 975 USD

I dont know, I like my quaint little 37″ LCD Screen just fine, I dont need to be laying around with a pair of glasses on my head just so some zany character pops out at me… for gaming possibly, but I will wait till the technology has matured.

NS

VMware workstation 6.5 new features

The newest release of VMware Workstation 6.5 will support for Direct X 9.0c and Shader Model 2, which basically means you will now be able to play 3D games in a VM! Utilizing ACE (Assured Computing Environment) technology you could take your 3D games and apps with you, securely Another Major new enhancement is called “Unity Mode” here’s an insert

“Unity mode — Integrate your favorite guest applications with your host. Open the application window, enter Unity mode, and the Workstation window is automatically minimized. The guest application windows look just like host application windows, but with color-coded borders. You can access the virtual machine’s Start menu (for Windows virtual machines) or Applications menu (for Linux virtual machines) by placing the mouse pointer over the host’s Start or Applications menu, or by using a key combination.”

Click here to read about all the other enhancements.

 NS

The Definitive Fix for Internet Explorer 7 runonce issue!

After battling spyware till you have it on its knees begging for forgiveness, you’ll breath a sigh of relief, its finally gone, then you go to surf the internet and you get the dreaded Runonce page error. Two of the specific error URLs are below http://runonce.msn.com/runonce2.aspx and http://runonce.msn.com/runonce3.aspx

You can spend alot of time running around trying to find the fix, diving into the registry or you could just open notepad copy the text below and save the file as ie7fix.reg.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]

“RunOnceHasShown”=dword:00000001

“RunOnceComplete”=dword:00000001

Double-click on the registry file you created and you should be good to go! Remember to set your home page to techtarget.com

I know this has been posted in about a billion places, but no one has ever explained it in english, so here it is. Enjoy.

 NS

New Xbox 360 Dashboard to be released tomorrow

For anyone who’s been living under a rock. “The New Xbox Experience” as most people are calling it is to be release to the public tomorrow, im not sure when, but im assuming midnight tonight. The interface will be much cleaner with some new features added into the mix. Among them are avatars, Netflix, and the ability to copy the whole game to the harddrive. I havent tested this option, although one would assume that load times would be greatly reduced. The disc would still need to be inserted, but hopefully this gets rid of the hum of the DVD drive… The avatar is customizable, you start with a random avatar, then you change his nose, eyes, ears, and of course clothing is customizable, although scarce. Who wants to bet that with some Microsoft points you could buy all the virtual clothes you wanted!

Anyways like anything thats free, if it makes my Xbox Experience better, im all for it!

Quick update as I puruse the “Net”.

“Microsoft has branded it the “new experience.” Unfortunately, the full experience will only be available in the U.S. In Canada, gamers will have to settle for a sleek redesign.”

Key to the above statement is that Canadians wont get Netflix. There is also a rumor where US Xbox Live users will be able to partake in online game shows with live hosts, sounds very interesting…

Also Microsoft is giving away 1 Million Microsoft Points which equates to about 16,000$ to spend on online content.

For the full Canadian story head here and watch a GameTrailers.com Preview here

Microsoft to Challenge Facebook and MySpace

Well it was bound to happen, Microsoft sees the success of MySpace and Facebook and wants a little piece of that pie. Microsoft wants Windows Live to be the centerpiece of everyones internet experience. Changes will be happening in the next few weeks as they incorperate new revisions of their email client, calendar, and picture services. Check out some cool slides here at Eweek.

With 460 Million users world wide they may have a platform to stand on, provided they make this transition painless, judging from the changes already made to hotmail, its a little less then smooth!

Little side note, Microsoft paid 240 million for 1.6 percent of Facebook, which is privately held.

I welcome the changes, new features, improved performance, and more free online hdd space, all for just being an MSN Live member, that I like!

NS

The Death Of Packaged Software: Microsoft Store Opens On The Web For U.S. Shoppers

Well here it is… Microsoft Opens their online store officially… you can check it out here

Is this the end of packaged software? I think it might make a slight dent in some ways, but in other way not. There was no Canadian site, but I compared Vista Ultimate SP1 Full @ 319.00 USD to Futureshop where it was 329 CDN. Considering you dont get a CD with the download option I would rather just order it from Futureshop. With exchange rate these days you are paying much more for the download ( instant shopper gratification i guess ) For another comparison, Gears of War Special Edition is 69.99 at Futureshop, but on Microsoft’s Online Store it is 69.99 USD also, and this one is strictly a shipping item… so yeah Microsoft opened the floodgate for lazy tech’s who would rather order software, download, and use it immediately. One more thing to note is that they make the download available to you till the software reached end-of-life, I would just download and burn it anyways.

The Online store also sells peripherals like XBox 360’s, controllers, and mice/keyboards.

So basically Microsoft is competing in the retail space, allowing Value Added Resellers to compete for sales in SMB and Enterprise spaces.

NS

Wireshark and Wireshark Portable

“Wireshark is an award-winning network protocol analyzer developed by an international team of networking experts.”

One of the best network analyzing tools out there bar none, formerly known as Ethereal to you veterans.

Well today I get a call from a client, she has been having these issues where someone seemed to be connecting to her PC without her authorization. Winvnc is on the machine, and it is secured with a password. TCP Port is open and the Javaport is also open on a slightly different port. Part of the solution is to lock it down, so I set VNC to prompt when someone is connecting to the PC, which was fine, whoever it was always connecting cannot connect anymore. Although they still try to, she just denies it. How would one go about finding the culprit? Well I would say use Wireshark!

With Wireshark you can analyze a connection, in this case a 3Com Nic. What Wireshark will do is analyze every packet that comes through that card, so if a person or machine tries to connect to her machine, we’ll know about it. The program will analyze the packets and use DNS to convert IPs to names thus making it slightly easier. So lets say someone inside of the network is playing a joke on her… well tomorrow when I have Wireshark running and logging all connections to and from her PC, whatever IP is trying to access her PC on either of the ports in this situation will be identified via IP and hostname.

There are two revisions of Wireshark, or should I say two types, installable, and portable.

You can download them from here I myself like the portable one, you can have it on a USB stick, which installed WinPcap when in use, and uninstalls it when you quit the app.

If anyone has ANY questions please feel free to leave a comment! You can also check out the FAQ here

NS

www.Hotmail.com Changes

Well, they changed it again… I for one don’t mind the changes that much, although thousands of users do!

Here are some inserts that I found around the web.

“This format is terrible! I wonder who decided to make these changes because whomever it is, they SUCK! I think I will be changing my e-mail service provider as well,” reads a comment by a user not happy with the change.

“I wish we could have had a choice on whether we wanted our individual format to change because I surely would have declined the offer because I hate everything about it! BOOOOOO!”

While another Hotmail fan wrote: “You have to search for everything (addresses are not displayed). Some things need to be left alone. Fire the person who decided to do this. BAD IDEA.”

If people keep pushing, we may see a button on login, “Use Old Hotmail Format”. I wouldn’t care either way. Everything seems to work fine for me… in Internet Explorer 7 that is. I can drag and drop emails, I don’t have to search for names I just start typing an address and it pulls up any relevant emails or names, and the search engine works fine…

Google Chrome is another issue, some things seem to be broken, i.e. you cannot drag and drop and you cannot resize windows. I have the feeling that the people complaining may not be using Internet Explorer 7. Maybe thats the whole issue, Microsoft decided to make Hotmail only work with Internet Explorer 7, perfectly that is. If anyone has tested this with Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer 6/8 Beta, or Opera let me know what you find.

Cheers,
NS

ProCurve POE Switches

Just configured my first set of POE switches. Funny how hard it was to find a working COM port, I wish HP would just enable some sort of USB connection to configure their switches. Ah well, I hooked up a ProCurve 2600-24-PWR to an old system I had, connected the RJ-45 to Serial adapter to the system, fired up Putty-Portable, and got connected via SERIAL connection. Once you assign an IP address to the device you can connect to it via Telnet, again through Putty-Portable.

Obviously I am not going to get into the setup of the device but I wanted to point out one crucial command that must be entered. Its called “Power Pre-Std-Detect”. This allows the detection of pre-standard PoE devices, then provides power to them; see list of supported devices in the product FAQ at www.procurve.com If this isnt enabled, its a good chance that your PoE devices will start to reboot spontaneously. Note that after updating the firmware on a 8-Port PoE switch the “power pre-std-detect” was enabled by default.

If this helps just one person then my job is done

NS

USBDLM (Read this you won’t be dissapointed)

Okay so you have about 6 network drive letters, and you plug in your USB stick, it says it found the drive okay, but you dont see it anywhere, well it is there, just hidden, and you have to go into disk management to find it and change the drive letter with a few clicks here and there, simple enough for a power user yes, but this process has now been made simple for anyone. USBDLM (Universal Serial Bus Drive Letter Management) reserve a set of drive letters, say you have network drives lettered F through L, you can specify that these drive letters are to be avoided when assigning usb drive letters, i.e. when plugging in a usb stick it will take any drive letter other then F through L. I have used this application for a couple years now and thought I would share it to everyone here.

Here is an insert from the website, you can view and download the application from this link here

USBDLM can for newly attached USB drives

check if the letter is used by a network share of the currently logged on user and assign the next letter that is really available
reserve letters, so they are not used for local drives
assign a letter from a list of new default letters, also dependent on many different criteria as the active user, drive type, connection (USB, FireWire), USB port, volume label, size and others
assign letters for a specific USB drive by putting an INI file on the drive
remove the drive letters of card readers until a card is inserted
show a balloon tip with the assigned drive letter(s)
define autorun events depending on many different criteria
many other things, see help file, available online as HTML version too

If you are looking for an easy way to set this program up check out this blog or read the help file from the author which is much more detailed