There are lot of performance improving tips out there in the Internet on how to speed up web pages. Recently I came across these references and tools that will be useful.

1. Steve Souders from Google presents "Even Faster Web sites"
2. YSlow from Yahoo!. A firefox add-on that analyzes web pages and tells you why they're slow based on the rules for high performance web sites
3. More website optimization tips here
4. Webpage performance analyzer here

Recently I purchased some old Tamil Movie VCDs, I wanted to copy them to my PC so that I can carry it in my Zune player or to my Digital Media Centre in my house. When I tried to play one of them, it played very well on my DVD player but not in my PC (Windows Media Player or VLC Player). In PC they played only with Nero Showtime software. After some digging, I learned these are VCDs which have been written with 800MB of data - more data than normal 700MB CDs and many applications may have difficulty in reading them. I tried copying them using XCopy/Windows Explorer/Robocopy and all of them failed. I found a free software IMGBurn from the authors of DVD Decrypter that allows copying & recording of many types of CD/DVD images to Hard Disk & recordable media.

I used Imgburn's "Read" option to read the contents from the VCD and copy it to my hard-disk. By default it copies the file as *.bin, but you can rename it to *.mpg, after which Nero Showtime can play it. You can also create image of the disc into ISO files for backup purposes. Once copied I imported the files to Adobe Premiere Elements to convert them into WMV format which created the entire 1.6GB Movie to a 1.2GB WMV file (if you want to use the movie with iPod/iTunes use the export to MPEG4 option.

Disclaimer: I have given the above suggestion only for legal usage of content that you have purchased and have a right in your country for making backups.

I am not active into Twittering. Frankly, I didn't get the idea of it for quite some time after its launch - even after I created a twitter account two years back. But over the last few months I am seeing more buzz around twitter than ever before. For me it is becoming to be an interesting tool as I seeing more use for twitter as a professional business tool. Marketing agencies using it to follow it buzz around their products, business houses using it for networking and so on. Today Microsoft's PR agency Waggener Edstrom released a tool "twendz" a new tweet-analysis tool. Few months back there was this blog post on the CEOs around the world who are twittering.

With all this around, I dusted my twitter account and have started to use it. Let us see if I do it with some discipline and at least the same frequency I do my blogs (of course tweets are supposed to be quick tiny updates unlike a blog). You can follow me on twitter here.

In my Windows 7 x64 machine I thought I will give Google Chrome a try. After I clicked on download, I was surprised to see Google use Microsoft Clickonce technology to download the installer which in turn installed the browser. Clickonce is a cool technology that if used correctly can reduce lot of the pain consumers have today in installing/updating applications in Windows Platform. In my opinion unfortunately it is also a technology that has generated little interest inside Microsoft outside the team that wrote it. Till date I haven’t seen a single Microsoft application including the recent Windows Live Wave “3” products (which can benefit greatly from it) use Clickonce for their installation. I wonder why?

Anyways, coming back to the topic. After I installed Google Chrome in Windows 7 x64, I was unable to browse any pages. Whatever URLs I entered there was no action. After some web searching I realized this is a known issue and you need to append a switch to make it work properly. Most of the sites gave the switch as an image but it turns out the correct one is --in-process-plugins (not the two dashes in the beginning and not one). You need to right-click on the Google Chrome Icon, in the Shortcut tab, in the targer text box add this switch to the right of the chrome.exe text. Something like below:

C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --in-process-plugins

(in the above line, replace the [USERNAME] with the appropriate name of your default user folder (or) easiest is to leave whatever it is till chrome.exe and append --in-process-plugins at the end)

After this switch, Google Chrome seems to run fine. I didn’t find any killer feature that will make me switch to Google Chrome from IE 8 and FF 3, but Chrome does seem to load the pages faster than the competition.

Next to Google search or sometimes more often than that, a website I turn to most often is Wikipedia. It has helped in resolving many arguments that I have had with my wife on who a signer for a song was, which movie Rajini acted in the 1980s and in which state is Darjeeling and so on. A good example was after we watched Mani Ratnam's "Guru" we were curious to find out how closely the movie portrayed the original story of Sri Dhirubhai Ambani, turning to Wikipedia told us more on Sri Ambani and his life than what we could have got even from Reliance website. Especially after I bought an Apple iPhone, browsing Wikipedia for an information has become a near addiction.

For last month or so I have been seeing the "Donate to Wikipedia" banner in the site and today I decided to the good deed as the first transaction in the new year. I went ahead and donated $30. Rather than putting up with Advertisements, any day I will prefer to pay to get the content that I want - but I know I am part of a minority who feel this way. How about you, do you feel the same?. Post your opinion in the comments link above.

Virtualization (the ability to run multiple OS simultaneously) is gaining lot of traction nowadays. In the PC world this started initially with VMWare and Virtual PC (which Microsoft acquired from Connectix) for development and testing purposes soon gained popularity in the servers. In servers virtualization is used to consolidate servers and applications into fewer servers and also used for running legacy OS and applications.

Today the entry barrier is greatly removed for Virtualization software with many of them available free (as in free beer), following is a partial list of them.

1. Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 for desktops
2. Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 for servers
3. VMWare Player for desktops
4. VMWare Server for servers

Recently few more has joined the list, they are:

1. VMWare ESXi - A hypervisor that allows you to run production applications at near-native performance is now free
2. Sun Microsystems' Virtual Box - A popular desktop virtualization software that Sun Microsystems recently acquired from Innotek and turned into an Open Source GPL software
3. Microsoft recently released its Server class production ready Hypervisor product called Hyper-V that is going to be part of Windows Server 2008 for a nominal fee of $28.

Even if you have a hard disk with hundreds of GBs, you will run out of space soon. At that time you want to see what is taking most of the space. Using Windows Explorer and going to each folder is a time consuming job. Several years back I got introduced to a tool called "Tree Size" that displays chart like bars against each folder so that you can easily see the usage. Today I found a free tool to do the same thing better - WinDirStat. Apart from bars, it displays a beautiful squarisish picture of the usage based on file types. Check it out.

I came across this brilliant site called "Geonames.org" - a Geographical database for download free of charge containing over eight million geographical names. The site allows you to search for any city or place or postal code and the best part is all of this is also available through a number of webservices and a daily database export. This can be useful while you are developing a website and have to get input of a city or determine a place in a transaction.

Check out these examples:

1. Chennai
2. 600017 (Postal Code in India)

GeoNames was founded by Marc Wick. Marc is a self-employed software engineer living in Switzerland. Thanks to Marc Wick & the other volunteers of the site.

Both in my home and work I have powerful 8GB Quad-Core Desktops running Windows Vista x64 and I love the machines. I use extensively Windows Live Writer for writing my blog posts and Live Messenger for IM. Now they come as a single install package (Windows Live Suite) easy to install. When you try to install it on 64-bit Windows the installer fails. I then found this article on how to get the individual MSI files and install the programs from C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\WindowsLiveInstaller\MsiSources.

The most common question I get about Tamil Unicode / Tamil IT is how do I input Tamil text in Windows?.  Over the years my answer has varied and if you ask others it certainly varies between individuals and their choices. There are plethora of choices now available:

1. My first in the list will be Murasu Anjal. If you are using Windows 2000 or older this is the best software out there. Rock Solid and supports multiple keyboard formats, has convertors for various encoding and the paid version ships with high-quality Tamil Fonts. Unfortunately my good friend Muthu Nedumaran hasn't updated Anjal for Windows Vista and x64 platform.
2. Inbuilt IME in Windows 2000, 2003, XP & Vista. The upside to this is that OS out of box solution and downside it supports only ISCII layout.
3. Microsoft's Indic IME 1 (v5.0) from BhashaIndia.com. The upside is that it supports multiple keyboard styles, downside it is buggy and not works in all software.
4. Keyman software and plug-ins for Tamil. The upside is that Keyman is a very popular IME framework that support hundreds of languages. Downside the plug-ins are made by individuals as voluntary effort and may not be without errors.
5. E-Kalappai - This is another variation of Keyman and is widely popular in blogosphere.
6. Azhagi - Works well, supports multiple keyboard formats. Unfortunately only the paid version supports input into Microsoft Office and other applications.
7. Finally, this is what I am using nowadays - NHM Writer. This software is from my another friend Badri Seshadri's publishing firm New Horizon Media. Thanks to NHM you have a free Tamil Keyboard Software (less than 1MB download) that works in Windows XP, 2003, Vista & Vista x64. It works across applications as it uses Windows Text Services Framework (TSF)

My earlier blog posts on related items:

• Enabling Tamil Inputs and Fonts
• Indic Languages in Microsoft Software
• Read multiple encoding Tamil pages in Firefox
• Indian Language Open type fonts

Though Microsoft Silverlight is a cool technology, it pales in front of Adobe Flash (98% of browsers have it) in terms of availability. It is not an unique MS problem, it is a problem for any new offering when there is an incumbent who has a majority market share. To change this requires education, awareness creation and put it in front of users at many as possible in exchange for an added value to them. I was pleased to see Microsoft doing some steps in this direction (unlike their pathetically nil action to have .NET Framework Runtime in desktops widespread in its earlier days) by having a beta of Silverlight enhanced downloads when people come to MS Download Center site. 

Sometimes you are stuck by not able to delete the file because some application unknown to you is holding the file lock. This freeware (Unlocker) helps you in those scenarios. I haven't tried it yet, use it at your own risk !

What looked impressive for me is the GUI listing of all applications having locks over files in a folder.

Windows Live Search seems to have introduced a video search recently. When I searched "Vishwak" the results page impressed me - you can mouse over on a result image and see the video playing in place with audio. Surprisingly it included results from Google's YouTube as well and playing it in a Live branded page.

Microsoft have released for some time now preinstalled and preconfigured Virtual Images (in Virtual PC VHD format) of Exchange Server and SQL Server for evaluation. The list is expanded to cover many more of MS softwares including ISA Server, BizTalk, System Center, Windows Server 2008, Vista Enterprise and Office 2007. There are also candidates that are time consuming to install and configure like MOSS 2007 & VS 2005 Team System. With these images, all you have to do is download them and run the VHD files with Virtual PC or Virtual Server (both are free from Microsoft). It can't get easier than this.

At some point I guess all server software will come in this fashion, even for production environments. Whether it is Windows or Linux, Server software are becoming more and more complex to configure and secure that it is only logical for Product companies to give them precooked and ready to eat.

You can download the images from microsoft.com/vpc

As I posted in the past if you need to do screen shots then you can use the free Zabgrab or if you are using Windows Vista the Snipping tool. But what if you want to capture a web page that scrolls for multiple pages. The hands-on winner to do is the award winning Snag-It!. The other day on a Windows Server 2003, I wanted to do a screen capture and for some reasons Snag-It, refused to launch and kept crashing. So I looked for an alternative and found this article on another tool (free) called WebShot that also allows programmatic API to do the same. Tried it and my problem was solved.

Nowadays I access my mailbox in Hotmail mostly through Windows Live Mail client. So I didn't notice the increase in storage until I saw this post. All Hotmail users are supposed to have got their mailboxes upgraded to 5GB of space and Hotmail Plus (paid) users like me get 10GB of space. I thought 2GB in GMail was lot of space, now what do I do with 10GB?. Will GMail now give 100GB or like Rediff/IndiaTimes offer unlimited storage, let us wait and see.

When you thought most of the basic innovations are done in the web search (at least to what is searchable on the WWW) there comes a new feature from Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft. That is the power of competition.

Last month it was Microsoft's turn, where Windows Live Search team posted about the enhancements they have done in their image search. This one is interesting - it allows you to look into the photos and describe about the image inside. For example I can say, show me only Black and White Images (filter:bw) or only images with face closeups (filter:face).

Google too has these features, but I found the face filter to work well in the Windows Live Search.

To say it politely I am not for forwarding an email beyond the first level - there are few exceptions that warrant few levels of forward. Recently I got an email forwarded from a company, in that in between in one of the forwards it had unpleasant words. The person who sent me the mail should've deleted the thread and just sent the final items he had to say to me. Instead he forwarded without going through carefully, I objected to derogative words used which hurt me. He came back and apologized. This could've become a big issue when it is between companies and can lead to law suits.

I started to do this post to leave you with the screenshot below showing an email I received from one of my friends - which was forwarded to 12 levels. If I was interested in harvesting email IDs - I could've easily got about 200+ IDs from this single email!

Sometimes you want to identify a SPAM message source or just to find out who left that blog comment you might want to know to whom the IP block has been assigned. Though it is difficult to pinpoint it to an individual organization (especially SMEs who will have only few IP numbers or Dial-up/Home users where the IPs will be in their ISP's names) there is a service that can give you some information. You can American Registry for Internet Numbers Whois Service or Asia-Pacific NIC's Whois Service. Use one of the services and input the IP address for which you are interested to find the block owner.

My official (Vishwak) email is configured with Office Outlook for last 6 years+. My personal, blog and newsletters are with Hotmail. And I have been a paid Hotmail user for years, so I read my Hotmail through Outlook Express ON & OFF. When about a year back Microsoft came out with Windows Live Mail Desktop (now desktop is dropped and for short WLM) I switched to that. With Hotmail, WLM works great - it syncs up all folders in Hotmail including Inbox, Sent Items, Junk e-mail, Deleted Items, Drafts & custom folders.

I like a lot the new Yahoo! Web 2.0 Mail interface. This email ID is being used by me for a lot of my memberships including INFITT, so I wanted the convenience of using it offline with WLM. Yahoo! mail doesn't expose Web Interface, so you need to use conventional POP3/SMTP interfaces. Yahoo! requires you to be a Paid user for that - so I paid $20 or so per year. I could easily get the POP3/Inbox configured, but sending emails was becoming an issue. Finally here is the configuration that works for me:  

And recently when I wanted WLM to be moved from my desktop to my Laptop so that I carry the emails with me. Yahoo! mail works with SMTP, so it doesn't sync the Sent Items folder from WLM to Yahoo! mail online. Though WLM did have an export option, it didn't work - pains of using a Beta software . After few tries I found a quick 'n' dirty way to solve it. I dragged all the mails from Sent Items of Yahoo! account in WLM to a new folder I created under Hotmail account in WLM. Installed WLM in my laptop, synched my Hotmail account. Then I configured the Yahoo! account in WLM, did the reverse process of Hotmail folder to Yahoo! Sent Items. In short, I used Hotmail as a backup and restore for Yahoo! mail

If you are using any of the Microsoft Search tools like MOSS 2007, Desktop Search, Vista Search, SQL Server FreeText Search or Indexing Server you will need a piece of software called IFilter. IFilter is a set of DLLs designed for each file format that you want to be indexed and searched.

Microsoft ships for their file formats in Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) when you install the Office Suite in the machine. Out of box, the search tools include for IFilters for Text, HTMLs, etc. But if you need to index additional file formats most commonly for PDF (Adobe  Acrobat) you will need to download IFilters for them and install. The installation will not give you any User-Interface Application or will you need to configure anything. Just install the IFilter package and reboot your machine or indexing service. That's it.

The sources for getting IFilters are many, I have listed few of them below:

• FoxIt Software IFilter - Download here (32 and 64bit). This supports 64bit of Vista and Windows XP, many of the other IFilters don't
• Adobe's own IFilter for PDF files - Download here. If you have the Free Acrobat Reader 8.0 or so you will get the IFilter also pre installed along with it  
• Search Windows Live Gallery for more IFilters here. Here you will find for PDF and several other file formats

The built-in file download applet in any of the browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari or Opera) leaves much to be desired. They don't support accelerated downloads (parallel downloads), most of their resume function don't work as advertised. So you will need to use a 3rd party download manager especially for huge file downloads. The 3rd Party applications since they hook into browser process they tend to slow or destabilize the browsers. Over the years, I have found GetRight to be the best download managers. 

After I moved to Windows Vista on a 64-bit Hardware I wanted something less resource hungry and with less frequent updates. I found Free Download Manager and I have been pleased with its performance for last several months. Check it out and the best part FDM is free and it is spyware free.

Many times when you technical documents or just presentation you will find useful wanting to capture some portions from the screen. Earlier in November 2004 I had written about using OneNote 2003 to do it and in October 2004 I had posted about using a freeware Zabgrab to it.

Though OneNote (esp. OneNote 2007) will work with Windows Vista, Zabgrab doesn't. So in my laptop with OneNote 2007 I don't have a problem, but when I am using a Vista machine without what to do?. Apple Mac 10.x have an easy to use Screen grab tool in-built in the system menu.

The good news is Windows Vista bundles (out of box) a great screen capture tool called "Snipping Tool". The tool helps you to Capture a portion of your screen so you can save, annotate, or share the image.

 
(Thanks to my colleague Murari Rajagopal for telling me about this useful applet)

You can find the Snipping Tool either via Start > Accessories > Snipping Tool or by simply typing Snip into any Search window. But it is easy to create a shortcut for it by using the path %SystemRoot%\system32\SnippingTool.exe. This path should work in all Windows Vista (32 bit) editions. It also has rudimentary painting (pen) tool. The tool allows you to copy the URL associated with a screen area and you can control this in your application through this API

Over the last few months I noticed tons of SPAM entries in the trackback lists in this blog. I realized it is better to switch off “Enable trackback service” in your dasBlog configuration:

But what about existing SPAM entries that are already present in the blog. I found it to be very tedious to delete every SPAM Trackback URL manually. That’s when I decided to have a tool written to address this issue. You can download this Free Open Source Application from here. Run the application and point it to your das-Blog content folder, it will read all the *.dayfeedback files and display all the unique domains in the Trackback URLs. Then in one go you can clean up all the *.dayfeedback XML files.

The Source Code (Visual Studio 2005 Project) can be downloaded from here. Please note the application is in Beta and no major code-audits and reviews have been done on that; so I strongly recommend you to take a backup of your content folder before using it. Download the application from here

Designing Windows Application UI with Visio: I had this application to be written by one of my team members in Vishwak. The Engineer understood the functionality and came back quickly with a working prototype. But the User Interface left much to be desired - it was a typical Geeky UI, it required me to select a check-box for each entry (I had to select 20,000 Checkboxes in a grid for the entries in my blog). So I decided to re-do it. I started writing the User Interface suggestions as a Word Document, that's when I thought there should be a better way to do this. Though we have Visio extensively for UML, Flow-Chart, Network diagrams, DB Designs I haven't personally used it for UI Design. I thought let me give it a try and picked up Visio 2007 and started doing the UI design with it, with the help of my Delivery Manager (Chandra) on Visio techniques I completed it in 20 minutes or so. The Engineer understood this instantly and the next day I had the application completed (Download the UI here in Visio format or in PDF format)

At the end, I felt good that I learned a new item (Visio for UI) today.

With the hundreds of usernames and password every typical Internet user has to remember, it is necessary to use a Password Manager. A typical Password manager is an application with a secure database that will store and retrieve hundreds of Usernames and Passwords with one key “Password“. Most of these tools have high level of security measures ensured to protect the passwords stored, both from in-memory and from-disk attacks.

I have been initially using Password Safe, then moved to Keith Brown's Password Minder that we extended in Vishwak. Password Minder was not managed by a community and we also didn't want to commit resources to keep the project alive - earlier 3 years back Password Minder filled a vacancy neatly. As a result the application has bugs that needs to be fixed in our extension and poor Windows Vista compatibility. In Open-Source now you have lots of Password Managers which have more features, works across platforms, offers better security - most important has vibrant communities behind them that keeps the projects updated regularly.

I have weight between the choice of commiting resources to fix Password Minder or to move to a new application.In the end, I decided to move. After evaluation of many products, I have ended my search with KeePass. This is a perfect Password Manager that offers state of the art security, works on multiple platform (Windows, Windows Mobile, Linux, MacOS, J2ME, PalmOS) and very easy to use.

I still run Password Minder, but every time I need to access a site that is in Password Minder I first recreate it in KeePass, delete it in Password minder. This way I hope to fully move to KeePass in few weeks.

One challenge while you are blogging is to find appropriate photos (stock images) that are free for usage. While Google and MSN Image Searches will list images, they may not come with right to use. I normally try and substitute with the photos I have taken - of course this is not possible always. For these scenarios I found these sites that offer Royalty Free Images.

1. Stock.XCHNG (Tons of Free Images)
2. Morguefile (Also free images)
3. iStockPhoto (Not free, but Affordable prices)
4. Corbis (Excellent images but expensive)
5. GettyImages (One more Paid Site with good images)

I have been using dasBlog Software for running this blog ever from its start. I am extremely pleased with the software, its:

• ease of use
• ease of backup. just zip four folders - SiteConfig, Content, Logs & Themes
• zero-install. just xcopy, no databases to install or configure and
• price point (free!)

In the last 4 years I never had problems with dasBlog, it just worked, Period. Yesterday night was different - my blog was down overnight, and it was purely my fault.

I have been following Scott Hanselman's blog about the daily builds of dasBlog, supporting Windows Live Writer Beta2 and Akimset Comments Spam support. I got adventurous, kept copying various daily builds; on top of it I posted some pre-dated posts from Windows Live Writer Beta 2. I suppose I somehow managed to corrupt the data-files for last two days. Today morning I realized my goof-ups, deleted two days data files, came back to release version of dasBlog, posted the two entries back. (Kiran: If you are wondering what happened to your comment, you know what happened now!).

Today when I visited the Sourceforge data repository for the dasBlog builds, I saw that I could nominate my favourite project to their Sourceforge.net 2007 Awards. I went ahead and nominated dasBlog to "Best Technical Design" category. I request all other users of dasBlog to do the same. 

Finally, after nine months dasBlog is getting a new fully supported release. All the new features like Akimset support, Windows Live Writer Beta 2 Support and more are expected in the release on 18th June 2007. That's good news and I am waiting...

BTW, I went nuts doing this post. As everytime I submitted, all the images were coming broken. It turns out dasBlog replaces all occurence of its name as hyperlinks and it can be configured in the settings.

This post is about three items related to blogging.

Windows Live Writer Beta 2

Microsoft have finally released the new version (Beta 2) of Windows Live Writer. I consider Live Writer to the best software from Windows Live team. After their initial release - no news from them for almost a year now. It was as bad as dead, and I thought it is one of those Microsoft's experiments that don't make it. Writer is probably the software I use most after Explorer, Outlook, Internet Explorer in that order. I am happy to see the project living and improvements made in the new version. And it supports dasBlog better than ever.  Windows Live Writer (and the new Messenger 8.5) introduces a new installation UI that gets displayed on the Right Hand Bottom of the screen area - this is unlike the regular installers which take up center of the screen and disturb your regular work.

30 Guidelines for a Good Blog

Since I have been blogging for few years now, people  ask me about what are the guidelines to follow when you start a blog. I always got away by saying keep posting often, don't just post links and don't talk about work. Today this need is solved with Scott Hanselman posting an excellent list of "30 Guidelines for a good blog". Scott Hanselman is one of my fellow Microsoft Regional Directors and a regular technical blogger.

What is a Blog?

About a year back (I read this only today) John C.Dvorak has commented on how large sites push out ordinary web pages and call them blog. He was expressing in this column his anger on the loose usage of the term "Blog" and what he expects to be in a good blog.

Since I blog on my own website I don't visit my Windows Live Spaces*  that often. When I logged in today by chance, I was surprised to see the amount of improvements that has happened there - including the number of gadgets, customization options, layout and the growing feature list. I only wish they make it more easy for novices - by making things simpler and less of a clutter.

I liked the What's new feature, which shows when the blogs of my contacts got updated. The best part is it automatically picked my contacts from my Messenger list - which is a good approximation of people I know personally and whose blogs I will be interested to track closely.

* I wanted to say My Spaces, but that might mean a different website than the one I am referring!

Microsoft is releasing a suite of Designer products for Web and Windows called "Expressions". These products promise to make the designer and developer collabration lot easier that it is today. Unfortunately when first announced they decided not to include Expressions in MSDN subscriptions. MSDN Subscriptions are the most common way Microsoft developers and partners get access to Microsoft Software.

Through the Microsoft Regional Director program, we "RDs" made our disappointment known to Microsoft and why it is important for Developers to get access to "Designer" tools. Fortunately Microsoft listened to us and other similar voices and through this blog post here from Somasegar (MS VP) Microsoft has decided to include Expressions with MSDN Subscriptions.

I am pleasantly surprised at these instances where Microsoft listens to you!. 

I have always been only using MSN Messenger, so I never got motivated to install Yahoo! Messenger and have one more program running in my PC. Few months back Windows Live (MSN) Messenger started supporting to add contacts of Yahoo!, so that you can communicate with Yahoo! users from MSN Messenger itself and vice-versa.

I didn't think this to be that important, as most of my contacts were in MSN. But now I have few of my friends in Yahoo! who never IMed me before, contact me and we started chatting. I realize now this is a cool feature that MSN and Yahoo! have brought in.

If you are doing Webpages in Indian Languages like Tamil, Hindi, Punjabi, etc. and you want to embed dynamic fonts (fonts that are shown without being installed in your PC) you need two items:

1. A tool to create Dynamic Fonts (EOT) - this can be done by the free Microsoft WEFT Tool. Netscape's Dynamic Font technology Bitstream has been discontinued few years back.
2. Apart from WEFT, you need the actual Open Type fonts for the language. Unfortunately the fonts that ship with Windows XP or MS Office or MS BhashaIndia.com sites are copy righted and cannot be used without explicit license from Microsoft. So you need free Indian Language fonts to do this.

Govt. of India has released free Indian Language Software and Fonts CD for about 10 languages (and growing) in its ILDC.in website. You need to register here and download the fonts for the particular language you want.

Related Links:

• Read about my presentation on stage during the release of Tamil Free Software CD here
• Microsoft Office 2003 in Tamil Language

Today I added to my blog Snap.com's quick preview feature. To use this, just hover your mouse on any external hyperlink on this page that points to a URL outside www.venkatarangan.com. For example, hover on top of this word "Vishwak" (or) "Easytools" to see a quick snapshot of those sites.

Hope this is useful for readers. Please post your comments.

Apart from Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) the two other Windows Live Services that I use everyday and can't live without are:

1) Windows Live Favorites (comes as part of Windows Live Toolbar) that lets you keep bookmarks across all the PCs you use synced up using your Windows Live ID. On an average I use at least 3 machines (My Office Desktop, Laptop and my Home PC) everyday and before this service, I was going nuts emailing the links. Several years back I have been a user of Yahoo bookmarks service that lets you store and search bookmarks through a webpage but I missed the browser integration convenience.

The only nuance I found was if you are using Windows Vista, for some reasons the option to install Favorites button doesn't appear in WL Toolbar. You just need to go to favorites page directly and install it from there. I don't know the reason, but It works.

2) Windows Live Writer - the blog writing client software that I am using to write my blogs. dasBlog before 1.9.x didn't support file upload from WLW, but now everything works great. I am one happy blogger! 

If you are using Windows Vista and wish to Remotely connect to that PC from a Windows XP machine, then remember to download the new RDP Client 6.0. This version is for Windows XP and in this version Clipboard copy-paste works flawlessly between Windows XP Host and Vista Client machines.

RDP Client 6.0 Download

Don't mistake the above to be screenshot of new Hotmail (Windows Live Mail Beta), instead it is the new desktop version (Client Software) of Live Mail. It is called "Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta". It is a neat replacement for Outlook Express and gives you offline mail access.

It sports the following features:

1. Ability to work not only with Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) but with Yahoo Mail (need to be a Yahoo Plus user), GMail and more.
2. Active Search -  a new feature by which a keyword of the current email is determined and Live Search result for it is shown in a right side pane
3. Supports RSS (Feed) Subscription apart from the regular NewsGroup subscription

It works in Windows XP SP2 and Vista. You can download it from Windows Live Mail HTTP site and discuss about it here.

I always felt that Security Softwares (Antivirus, AntiSpyware, Firewall) available today have not evolved for a long time. They lack User Interface and the engineering perfection that many other software have achieved. These suites also take a lot of system resources unnecessarily as many of them are badly developed.

All along I thought I was the only one feeling this, but today I was glad to read an article in Washington Post echoing the same sentiments.

Microsoft today announced the public availability of pre-configured VHD (Virtual Machine Images) files for common server scenerios. These contain trial editions of Microsoft Server softwares like Windows Server 2003, SQL Server 2005, Exchange Server 2007 and more, setup as VPC images and ready to run in few minutes after download.

Microsoft Partners and ISVs can use these to create new images with their solutions pre-installed. This makes businesses' experience of trying out new softwares (especially complex setups like Active Directory or Exchange Server) that much more easier.

This completes the cycle of Microsoft making everything available for trying Virtual environments - first they made Virtual Server free, then VPC 2004/2007 and now pre-configured images. (Read my earlier post on this)

It is only once in a while, Microsoft comes out with such goodies especially those concerning Licensing (doing something like this earlier would have been possible but complicated due to legal licensing issues involved). Thank you Microsoft  and don't stop with this, please come out early with VHDs for all common scenerios.

Download from Technet VHD site here

This tip is useful if you are using any of the Microsoft Desktop Search Technologies including Windows Vista/Office 2007/Windows Desktop Search/MSN Toolbar Search. Many times you will find yourself scratching on how to do a power search that the UI doesn't expose.

Recently I came across this help file on Advanced Query Syntax (ADS)) in Windows SDK (Unexpected place to find it). Check it out.

There are some jewels there like:

• size:>50<70 - Search for a file with in this limit
• kind:im - Search only IM conversations
• kind:email - Search only email communications
• store:outlook - Limit search to Outlook Store alone

One tip which is not in the document:

• folderpath:Microsoft - Limit search to what is in "Microsoft" folder (Outlook folders)

Internet Explorer 7.0 introduces a convenient Search Box to the Right Hand side of the address bar. By default the search is done against Windows Live Search, but if you click on the drop down next, it will allow you to install other Search providers. My favourites are Wikipedia and Amazon. If you are browsing this option from India - you will see two Indian providers - IndiaTimes & Naukri.

IE 7.0 allows you to install your own Search provider as well - useful for Website publishers for custom searches. Earlier doing this meant reading a (though a simple) XML format, now the new page makes it as simple as filling two text boxes. Some cool thought from someone in Microsoft, way to go.

I had written about 6 months back about the revamped Hotmail to Windows Live mail. Though it was better than the aged Hotmail interface, it still lacked fit-and-finish elegance.

Today I was happy to see a new version(M8) of the UI when I logged in to my Hotmail ID - Microsoft certainly have improved the experience and it is feels more responsive and stable than the previous version. Check it out.

 

Few weeks back I installed the free Windows Live Toolbar - normally I am skeptical on installing any IE Toolbars (Browser Add-Ons) as they tend to destabilize your Windows Explorer and IE. But WLT so far seems to be stable and causing no performance issues. Two things that you can get only if you have the WLT are Live Favourites (that allow synching your Browser Favourites online and access it from any computer) and PC Health (Free OneCare Virus Scan and PC Optimization tools like Registry Clean). Check it out.

I have been using various versions of Outlook for almost 6 years now - before which my email reader of choice was Eudora. Even now I wish Outlook can get some EMail features (especially the handling of POP3 downloads) from Eudora, I love Outlook as a great PIM (Personal Information Management) tool.

Anyways, coming to the issue for this post - for some reasons after my last install of Windows XP in my laptop some of the rules where not running, I couldn't edit those rules either. I found no way to get rid of these rules altogether.

(Delete/Change grayed in Rules Dialog)

After some web search I found this article on "Everything You Need to Know About How To Troubleshoot Microsoft Outlook" and found a command-line switch /CleanRules, running Outlook.exe using this switch, all the client rules got deleted and I am good to go. I then found this official Microsoft Article which lists all Outlook Command-Line switches. Check them out, they could prove useful on a rainy day.

As you would have noticed I have upgraded my blog software to latest version of DasBlog - version 1.9.6264. I have used a new theme for UI from this version. Let me know whether you like this theme.

About DasBlog 1.9 - posted by my fellow RD Scott Hanselman (one of the Authors of DasBlog)

 

I am doing this post using Windows Live Writer. The latest build had a built in support for dasBlog (blogging software I use in my blog).

If you need more information on customization WLW for dasblog, read this post from Scott and this post from dasblog.Info.

Update Posted on 2/Oct/2006: When I first using WLW I was using dasBlog 1.8.x, which didn't support image uploading. I had to FTP images and for some firewall issues with my ISP, FTP from WLW was not working. Since I upgraded my blog software to dasBlog 1.9.x the image upload problem was solved. I am now able to upload images to my blog using WLW itself. Thanks to dasBlog & WLW authors.

One of the challenges of web development is the plethora of web browsers & OS combinations and the differences in rendering between them. Normally you need to test in atleast 3 to 4 "Level 1" browsers your work before releasing wide. Beyond this number, it becomes expensive to maintain all the different hardware/os/browsers available. There has been commercial sites available for some years now offering screenshots taken in different browsers. Now you have a free version at use Browsershots.org. Check out here for the various versions it has for Vishwak.com website.

The way it works, is it queues you job requests and processes them in multiple machines (shotfactories). The best part is the entire source-code that makes this work is available - so you can go check out how they made this whole thing work across platforms.

Update (15/Nov/06): A new site that offers limited (only till viewport) for IE 6 & 7 a similar service is IE Web Renderer.

When it comes to backup, I make it easy with my laptop. All my data files (Documents, Emails, PowerPoints, SourceCode, Music, Photos etc.) are stored in a seperate partition (It has grown into a compulsion for me over the years to ensure this partition is always D-Drive (D:\) and name it Data). So I normally XCopy (or Robocopy) the entire D-Drive to my external USB Drive or to my Office Network Share periodically.

But when it comes to the OS Partitions, it is not so easy. You cannot simply copy the OS partition files, you need to do what is called as "Imaging" or "Ghosting". When you take an image of a partition or an entire hard-drive, a copy of it (sector by sector) is written into an image file, which you can restore back to get your partition/HDD back exactly as it was before. Though writing a program to do this is not technically so difficult especially if you can boot into DOS and you are able to write decent C & DOS Interrupt programs, but most of the commercial products in the name of simpler UI and running from within Windows GUI have made it very complex and pricey.

Anyways for several years the only popular product to do this was Norton Ghost (still available) - the number of machines/OS setup that Ghost has saved for me is not small. Nowadays, I prefer Acronis True Image. I recently bought a copy of their Home Edition and tried it in my laptop, it took less than 20 minutes to backup my C-Drive (Windows XP 20GB - 11GB used space) to my external USB Seagage 100GB drive. It did pretty a good compression to get the image file size down to about 5.68 GB.

If you are new to imaging check this Audio Visual Introduction at Acronis website to learn more about Disk Imaging.

If you are one who is involved in working/creating/viewing a lot of XML files and XSLT transforms - you need something more than Notepad & IE. You need a professional XML Editor like Altova XMLSPY or Visual Studio 2005, but they can tend to be very expensive for simple XML tasks. Microsoft after 8 years has reintroduced a new version of its free XML Editor called "XML Notepad". Give it a try.

References:

1. Microsoft XML Team blog post about XML Notepad
2. MSDN Documentation on XML Notepad
3. Download XML Notepad Installation Package - Size: 3.29MB (Requires .NET Framework 2.0 Runtime)

Virtualization is a very handy arsenal in an IT Pro toolkit, especially if you are managing large number of servers with different software combinations for development/testing (or) if you are like me trying out various OS and softwares.

Business and Dev Environment - Keep them seperate
Nowadays, I use a vanilla Windows XP/Windows 2003 VPC image and use it to try out new softwares. In fact, in my laptop I have only basic softwares to do my daily job (Business Environment: Windows XP, Office 2003, Antivirus, Windows Live Messenger, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Nero Burner, WinRAR,PDF Printer/Reader); everything else runs out of Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 (or Virtual Server 2005 R2). So my development environment (Windows Server 2003, IIS 6.0, VS 2005, SQL Server 2005, EasyStruct 4.5, etc) is itself an image - I run the VPC image only when I want to development. I also have VPC images for doing Beta Development, like MOSS 2007, WinFX (.NET 3.0), etc. This way my business environment is always simple, clean and always working - I don't get into a broken/slow PC while doing a client presentation/deal document.

Virtual PC and Virtual Server - Free!
The good news is that both Virtual PC and Virtual Server 2005 R2 are now free from Microsoft. Recently MS has finally announced the successor to Virtual PC 2004 - Virtual PC 2007 and have even committed to provide the new version too free. The new version will support Vista OS both as Host and Guest; and also x64 hardware.

Support Windows Vista
Until Virtual PC 2007, you can download VPC 2004 VMAdditions for Windows Vista if you are in MS Connect Program. If you have tried to run Virtual Server 2005 R2 in Windows Vista HOST OS, you would have realized it is not possible to run the Virtual Server Administration website - here is a solution for that.

References:
If you are using Virtual PC/Virtual Server, then a great reference is Microsoft's Virtual PC Guy Blog. Also if you have built a VPC image and then clone it to multiple PCs then this blog entry from Microsoft David Wang is useful. Today we ran into a problem that was addressed in this blog entry - we installed a new VPC image, copied it to another machine, ran both the images, but we were unable to ping from one Guest OS to another; though we are able to ping individually each of Guest OS from any HOST PC; it turned out that the two Guest OS had the same MAC address and we had to change it in the .VMC file - it can't get simpler than this!

 

Everytime I visit flash based webpages with audio content I wonder why there is no mute button in the right-click options of a flash file?. Why you may ask - I am listening to music in Windows Media Player like I am now and so I don't want to mute my entire machine; I keep browsing and to my annoyance a webpage starts playing loud audio and I can't mute that webpage alone.  

Since I haven't heard any one else raising this, I kept saying to myself I should be crazy. Thank God, I am not alone (or crazy) - I recently came across this same ask in an Adobe Employee's blog, scroll down to the third comment section.

Adobe doesn't seem to be listening (may be they have muted themself out to user comments ) as I don't see this feature even in their new Adobe Flash Player "9" version released several months after this post.

I have known about technorati.com for quite some time. It is one of the popular sites that keeps tracks of millions of blogs and their postings. I never took the effort of knowing more about it or registering my blog link in the site until today. I stumbled on their site through an Internet Search and noticed an advertisement "Claim your blog", couldn't resist the urge, went ahead and registered my blog. You can see here my Technorati Profile.

Microsoft has released recently few new Themes for Windows XP. I came across them while I was downloading some other files in Microsoft Download - I couldn't find a landing page for a list of all themes, so following are links to download each theme.

1. Microsoft Windows Theme Nunavut
2. Microsoft Nature Theme 2
3. Microsoft Windows Theme Ontario
4. Microsoft Egypt Nile Theme
5. Microsoft Thème Québec
6. Microsoft Historic Monuments

 

I am sure most of you would have tried one of the free desktop search applications like Google Desktop Search, MSN Desktop Search or Copernic. These work great for home users and for those who have all the files in their laptops/desktops. For those in Enterprises where most of the corporate data is stored in central file shares or in Sharepoint servers, till now there was no convenient way to search both Desktop and Enterprise data. Recently MS released the free Windows Desktop Search for Enterprise that does everything the MSN Desktop Search does plus has the ability to search Sharepoint sites and File shares.

Configuring this can be little tedious - my good friend and Sydney RD Adam Cogan has written this good guide on doing it, check it out here.

After been hearing about Plaxo.com service for several years; ignoring tons of update requests I keep getting from my contacts using Plaxo - finally two weeks before I have started using Plaxo. The main value I saw in the free service - was that by installing the Plaxo Toolbar in my outlook, I can sync up all my contacts, calendar, tasks and notes and access them anytime by logging into Plaxo.com using a web browser.

Most of the time I work late hours, so after a long day don't feel like carrying my Laptop home - but in the morning when I need a contact detail to quickly send an email and I don't always have my mobile phone synced. Plaxo's service is perfect for that need and also it also doubles up as a good back-up facility. If you have multiple machines - Plaxo can be used to sync the contact/calendar details between them as well. Apart from this the Outlook toolbar adds some nice goodies like duplicate finder/remover, etc.

Though Plaxo is not a killer app (or) a new innovation, it is certainly worth to keep. I am curious on how effectively this feature set will be met by Windows/Office Live offerings. I will be watching the space, will update here once Windows/Office Live gets released.

As you might be knowing I use dasBlog.NET server software (a community developed blogging engine) to power this blog. Today while going through the activity list that shows the statistics of visits and search result referrers, I noticed that all the referrers from Google Search are being blocked by dasBlog. This was not good news.

On investigating I found out that the "Movable Type Blacklist" option in dasBlog configuration has to be disabled to get this problem resolved. This is due to the fact that the blacklist has been discontinued and that causes havoc with dasBlog. My fellow Regional Director and one of the Volunteer Project Managers Scott Hanselman has a post on this.

dasBlog download: The latest version of dasBlog can be downloaded from this SourceForge project and support forum is here

Recently in many Microsoft Presentations and in blogs by MS Employees, I noticed a new Windows XP theme. I searched on the Microsoft.com, MS Windows XP Plus but couldn't find it. Since it was used by MS I was sure it was not a 3rd Party add-on; I don't like 3rd Party add-ons as almost all of them require you to run an application which takes up CPU and Memory. Only the *.theme files that come default with Windows XP, doesn't require any additional code to run.

Eventually I figured out that the theme was called "Energy Blue" and comes with Windows XP Media Center Edition, I was lazy to install Media Center just for getting to this theme. The other day in Download.com newsletter, I was lucky to find a link to a 3rd party installable that had this theme ready to install. I downloaded it from here and it worked beautifully. The best part is that this download doesn't add any executable, it just bundles the Energy Blue Theme files as it is, which can be installed in Windows XP Professional.

Till Windows Vista, this will give your desktop a fresh look for some time. Enjoy!

Many times you have images or photos and you want to do some quick work on them - like crop the image or edit the color, resize, etc. Over the years, there were many tools I found useful to do these.

1. Adobe Photoshop Elements - This lite version of Adobe Photoshop is the best tool in the market and it cost only US$99
2. Irfanview Photo viewer - This is a popular free image viewer, support virtually all image formats. Also supports basic image cropping, few effects and allows batch processing for resizing, format change and more. Highly recommended!
3. Image Resizer - This is part of Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP, which are free add-ons you get from Microsoft.com website. This one allows you to resize one or many image files with a right-click.
4. Paint.NET - If you are frustrated with the Windows MS Paint application, then this is the one for you. It is a free graphics and photo manipulation software based on Microsoft .NET Framework. This one has lot of commercial quality features including Layers, History, Plugins and more. Best part is it comes with full source code, which can be worth a read if you are working on Windows Smartclient applications. There is a video here from MSDN about how they build this application.
5. Picasa - This free software from Google is good if you only want a software to effectively manage photos and share them. The beauty of this one is that it is simple and looks awesome. 

I haven't added in the above list Microsoft Acrylic because it is in beta and not released. Acrylic is based on Creature House Expression, a product Microsoft acquired in 2003 from a HongKong company. The current CTP release of Acrylic supports export of XAML, which is a new markup language used in Windows Presentation Framework (Avalon) of Windows Vista. As a sidenode, I noticed Paint.net uses couple of third-party softwares. Following a link from one of them, I came across this company Skybound who seem to be making available for reasonable price good .NET Winforms components for functionalities like Windows XP Themes, Rebars and Autocomplete. Check them out.

MSN Toolbar Suite containing Windows Desktop Search is gaining momentum. Late last week they have introduced in the suite a  New! Tabbed Browsing capability to IE. Interesting stuff. Currently I use Avant Browser (based on IE Engine) as my browser. I am going to use MSN Toolbar for some time and if its Tabs feature is fast, stable and convenient, I will certainly switch to it. 

Post your experiences on tabbed browsing in IE here. You can read my earlier blog on Desktop Search posted here.

In my last post, I mentioned that I am using Sauce Reader to do my postings. Though I managed to do text only posts, I am having problems with posts that include images. Sauce Reader supports two image upload options - MetaWebLog API and FTP. MetaWebLog is not supported in dasBlog 1.7.x and for some reasons (which I am yet to figure out), my FTP server refuses to get connected from Sauce Reader or even from IE. My FTP server gets connected only from GlobalScape CuteFTP, even though the FTP server is Windows Server 2003/IIS.

While using Sauce Reader I noticed that its UI looks sharp and clean; curious on the 3rd Party controls they could be using I went into the "C:\Program Files\Synop\Sauce Reader" folder and I noticed they used a handful of third-party components (a combination of free/commercial). I found the list of components impressive, so giving them below:

1.  .NETXP  - This is a set of free packages that include lots of Windows XP like controls, Alerts, Reusable forms, Wizards, FTP Client, MSN Messenger/Outlook style alerts and more. Check it out. [Free & Commercial]
2. .NET Components from Chilkat - Seeing their website this company seems to make lot of email, HTML related components for .NET & ActiveX. [Commercial]
3. XML-RPC.NET from Cook Computing. [Free]
4. esellerate - A Software commerce Provider. [Commercial]
5. NET Html Agility Pack from Simon Mourier - An agile HTML parser that builds a read/write DOM and supports plain XPATH or XSLT [Free]
6. SharpZipLib - A Zip, GZip, Tar and BZip2 library written in .NET. [Free]
7. Infragistics Windows UI Development Tools [Commercial]
8. Apache log4net - A tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. [Free]
9. Lucene.net  - Lucene.Net is a byte-to-byte port to .NET of Jakarta Lucene a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java. Now it is commercially available as Search Black Box.  [Free & Commercial]
10. NetSpell SpellChecker  - A free .net Spell Checker. [Free]
11. Microsoft Application Block [Free]

I have been using Sharp Reader for reading all my subscriptions and  using the Web UI of dasBlog to do my postings. Though I love Sharp Reader for its simplicity, lately I was feeling down because an update for it is long overdue.

Anyways, after trying out Newsgator, FeedDaemon and others now I am using Sauce Reader. I like the neat Interface, especially the clear, legible fonts (I guess enhanced by Clear Type). I will likely stick with this, will keep posted on how my trial goes.

This posting is posted from the WebLog feature of Sauce Reader - hope it comes out clean.

I have been trying out Firefox and Opera, mostly on-and-off and always reverting back to Internet Explorer. What I liked in these alternate browsers are their tabbed browsing feature. Ofcourse, there are IE based alternate browsers also – Applications that use IE’s Rendering Engine, in other words wrappers around IE. After trying many of these IE based alternatives, I seem have found something I like – “Avant Browser”. I have been using Avant for over 2 weeks now and I didn’t have a single reason to go back to “Vanilla” Internet Explorer.

Avant is a small download (less than 1.3MB). It is absolutely free (free as in free beer), no spyware or adwares. The things I like in Avant, are its simple UI and the tabbed browsing that works - capturing almost all new window creations. A recently added feature is a new toolbar “Similar Websites” that shows a menu with websites that are related to the current webpage you are seeing. The surprise in this for me was that it works even for “Tamil” websites – and as the Red Arrow on the image above shows, it even shows the menus in Tamil.

If there is one tech bulletin that I don't miss everyday, then that is reading “The Register” of UK. Though there are hundreds (if not thousands) of tech websites and newsletters, what really differentiates The Register, is its:

• Selection of news that it features
• No nonsense design of its daily email
• Writing style of stories - Straight, Crisp & to a large extend un-biased

In today's bulletin Register talked about VMWare's ACE Solution - which it describes as a Software in a Can. The idea seems to be that when you distribute an application, you bundle a managed OS along with it. Definitely Interesting!. I am going to download the eval and give it a Spin, will come back with notes on how it went.

After I posted the above, Sriram V has pointed out in his comments about Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 Migration Toolkit (VSMT) supporting similar (if not exact) features. Let me try that as well.

MS has posted a fix for this at KB 890175
Also available from Tools->Windows Update, option from IE. 

I read yesterday about the recently discovered Security Problem (Command Execution Vulnerability) with IE and wanted to do a quick fix to protect my machine. Actually the problem is not with IE, but with an individual ActiveX control (Microsoft Help Control - hhctrl.ocx, found in C:\Windows\System32 folder) which allows any command to be executed.

So the first step, I did was to login to my PC as Administrator, then Run the command Regsvr32 /u c:\windows\system32\hhctrl.ocx. Though this protected me from the vulnerability, F1 key (help) in all applications in my PC didn't work. So I reverted back by doing Regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\hhctrl.ocx.

Then I figured a simpler solution, I remembered that Windows XP SP2 (which I was running) has the option “Manage Add-ons” (which I have talked about earlier). I went to Secunia.com Vulnerability test page, did the left click on the link as wanted; the page happily complained that I had the vulnerability. I was expecting this - but what I was after was to get the hhctrl.ocx loaded. Once it was loaded by IE, I went to “Manage Add-ons” dialog in IE and disabled for good the hhctrl.ocx. I went back to the test page, this time it throwed a script error - no more vulnerability!. This setting affects only IE and so F1 is available in other applications as usual. Try this and post your comments below.

Remember, this is only a QFE and you should use it only till the time MS hasn't released an official patch.

I have written about Spywares and tools to remove them couple of times in my earlier posts. Now the fight against Spyware seems to be getting decisive - Microsoft finally is wagging a full “War” against this threat. First came Windows XP SP2 with Security enhancements in base OS and in IE. Now MSFT has come out with a tool to detect & remove Spywares. This tool is the result of their acquisition of an Anti-Spyware company called “Giant” less than a month ago. You can download Microsoft Anti-Spyware (Beta) from here.

I downloaded and have installed it yesterday. My first impression seems to be favourable, that unlike other Anti-Spyware software it doesn't complain (with big red marks) all the cookies as Spywares. Though there are privacy issues with Cookies, I feel many tools seem to blow it out-of-proportion and scare Normal users. Also it seems to have a simple User Interface that will make users comfortable. Let me see how it really scores in the long run it comes across Spywares and with compatibility to other applications and websites that I use.

Contrary to popular belief, Spywares don't come only when you read an email or browse to a malicious website. Many of them now come piggybacking applications that we install – these are like Trojan Houses. Sometime back I downloaded and installed an IM Enhancement software called “MSN Messenger Plus”. During installation it seems to ask for permission to install some additional s/w thru' an innocuous dialog. First time when I installed it I missed the option and I got left with a plethora of Spywares in my machine. It took couple of hours to figure out it was because of this. Even uninstalling didn't remove everything; I had to “Windows System Restore” to restore the machine to the point before I installed the software to get rid of everything.

Thinking about this I realized that this incident could have happened to me on any Operating System – though Windows now happens to be the target for most of these attacks because of its popularity. This is because to install a software I needed to have higher privileges and when we do install a software with those privileges we should be aware of the risks as  well of installing Software from unreliable sources. So in this direction, it is good to see Microsoft investing effort & money against Spywares, and lessons learned here are going to be useful to Computing Industry in the long run.

Many times I was left scrambling to figure out, on what a particular DLL file does, its purpose or for god's sake why does it even exist?. It will be good if we can have a central database of all DLL files (atleast the popular one's).

And this is precisely what Microsoft's DLL Help Database does. It is a database of all DLL files released with various products of Microsoft. Give it a search like 'MSO9.DL' and it comes back with this result page. Very useful, especially when you are debugging a fault or a bug.

As a related site, there is this 3rd Party site , which has a collection of hundreds of DLL files that you can download. Useful when a file is missing and you are not able to find the original source (CD). Since the site is not recognized by any of the leading software vendors, apply care before use.

 

When you are writing technical articles or a spagetti blog (with general, travel and also Technical entries) like this, you will need to use screenshot images.

The problem with screenshots (especially with today's high-res displays) is that the saved image files are huge in size. To solve this, you will generally resize the images. With reduction in size, Screenshots becomes unreadable.

While doing such a screenshot today for an earlier entry,  using Adobe PhotoShop Elements (PSE) and Zabgrab (the free utility I use to capture a portion of screen) I came across a nice option in Photoshop elements. It is called “Adjust Blacklighting” available under the “Enhance” menu option in PSE.

1) The original screenshot  I started looked like this (753x688)
2) I resized the image to 400x365. It looked like this, with unreadable text.
3) Next I used the Adjust blacklighting option like this
4) Finally with Auto Levels and adjusting Contrast, I got the final output like this. This definitely looks readable even at the 50% reduced size.

I guess this entry will be useful for non-photoshop pro's like me. Did you find this tip useful, post your feedback below.

Download ZAPGRAB2.zip (9.41 KB)

Spywares are irritating and outright waste of resources.

The first step towards fighting Spywares is to get a good detection and fix tool. Apart from the tools I mentioned in my earlier post on spywares, I recently found a free anti-spyware tool SpyBot-Search & Destroy. This tool has been around for sometime and is famous on the Internet for its effectiveness, but I discovered it, only recently

The next step against spywares, if you are using Windows XP, is to install Windows XP SP2. Among the many enhancements of Windows XP SP2 the one I simply love is the “Manage Add-Ons” menu in IE Tools menu. This option (finally) allows me to View/Disable/Enable all the IE Add-Ons and ActiveX controls loaded by IE.

(Read here on what I learned while doing this screenshot?)

HTTP Trace
When you are doing some HTTP upload or download development, like in a Web Client it is useful to do a HTTP Trace. A HTTP Trace basically dumps on screen or in a file the entire dialog that takes place between your client (typically your Web Browser) and the server (Web Server).

One handy HTTP Trace tool I use is called Fiddler. Fiddler is free and is developed by a Microsoftie. The good thing I like in Fiddler is that it works without any configuration. You just browse from your favourite browser or client application as normal, and fiddler is tracing it in the background. In fact, Fiddler doesn't even have an options dialog box!.

There is also an useful Page in Fiddler website that links to useful HTTP/HTML Resources on the Internet.

Web Service Trace
If you are programming SOAP/Web services, it is useful to have a SOAP Trace utility. A SOAP Trace tool is a specialized HTTP Trace tool that understands SOAP messages and displays them accordingly. If you are programming with Microsoft WSE 2.0, then a good free tool is available from Mike Taulty. Once you have downloaded the application, you read the example.config file. It has a small portion of XML Configuration code, that you need to insert in your web.config or app.config files for tracing to begin.

Mike's WSE 2.0 Tracing Utility is written in .NET Framework 1.x. I loved this tool so much I used in my WSE Security session in this India Tech Ed 2004.

With the hundreds of usernames and password every typical Internet user has to remember, it is very important we all use a Password Manager. A typical Password manager is a secure database that allows us to store and retrieve hundreds of Usernames and Passwords with one key “Password“. Most of these tools have high level of security measures ensured to protect the passwords stored, both from in-memory and from-disk attacks.

For last several months I am using the popular Password Manager “Passwords Safe”. This Windows tool is an open-source Sourceforge project, that is free for use. The tool is easy to use, has a decent secure database, nice features like “Browse to Site”, Comments Field and more. Many of my friends and colleagues have been using it for months and they will Swear by it. Unfortunately, last couple of weeks I am finding for some reasons in my laptop, Password Safe losing my latest update of stored passwords. Even the backup file doesn't show my recently stored passwords. And all this happens randomly. This may be due to my configuration, but I am moving.

I decided to move to a native managed .NET tool called “Password Minder”. Password Minder was written by Keith Brown, an authority when it comes to Security in Windows/.NET world. You can read about how Password Minder works in this MSDN Magazine Article and the Internals of it here. The latest version 1.5.0.4 has an extremely secure database and application architecture. But it lacked some of the “Tricks” of Password Safe. This included the ability on Right Click to have “Copy Username to Clipboard”, “Copy Password to Clipboard”, “Browse to site” and comments field. Though the source is available for the tool, I decided to write to Keith Brown for his permission to modify with these changes and release the new build. He readily agreed, so ladies and gentleman, please await shortly a build of “Password Minder” with these changes.

Also when I first ran “Password Minder” I realized it didn't allow my Normal Windows user to run the program. On investigation it turns out for the path I have set for storing the Password XML, the permissions where wrongly set. So I turned off the option “Let Password Minder Control the DACL” in the dialog shown below and then manually set the permissions for the XML file. Everything is fine, the tool works perfectly even from a Normal Windows user. If you let Password Minder store the XML file in your profile, you may not face this problem in the first place.

(Path in the screenshot above is fictitious )

Inserted on 18th October: “Today we have released the Password Minder with the above enhancements as Password 1.5.0.4, Extensions 0.1. You can download either the Installable MSI file or Complete Visual Studio.NET project as a ZIP file from EasyTools.com Freebies page“.

Microsoft has published a KB article on programs that have problems with Windows XP Service Pack 2 here. Leave aside the list of programs, what I found interesting in the KB, was a command I learned “Tasklist.exe”.

Tasklist.exe is a command line tool, that basically lists all the running processes in a machine. It can accept an optional username and password and be able to run in that context. Tasklist.exe /svc will result in a display of all processes running as service, including the DLLs they have loaded in their memory. This can be useful when debugging a problem, especially to find out on what one instance of the mysterious svchost.exe process has loaded inside it.

Tasklist.exe /m SEARCHCONDITION, will result in display of all process that have the matching string named DLLs loaded in them. For a full list of options from command line, try “TaskList.exe /?“

It is generally believed Spyware/Adware gets installed only if you visit the darker lanes of Internet. But in reality it turns out that even if you are browsing the Internet only for emails or go to your favourite portal, your PC is vulnerable to Spyware. This is in spite of your PC being protected with a decent Firewall and Antivirus installed.

Spywares are programs that install without our knowledge in your PC and monitor your activity, especially on what you are browsing. They frequently are used as Advertisement vehicle, throwing up pop-up ad windows when you are using your PC. 

Apart from a Privacy stand point of monitoring what we browse, spywares also have a danger by exposing our PC to attacks. Since all the spywares are unwanted software they waste our processor, memory and other precious computing resources.

Just any other computer issue, Protection against spyware starts with education. The first place you should go is Microsoft's Security page “What you should know about spyware”, then to PC Magazine's page '11 Signs of Spyware' and then finally go to 'How to Avoid Spyware'. After learning about Spyware, the next thing to do is to get a anti-spyware tool that can scan your machine and if found, remove all the spyware the installed. Most professional Anti-spyware software also give you a shield to protect your PC from future spyware's invasion. Some of them even provide blocking of pop-ups and advertisements shown in webpages.

Today I tried out these two anti spyware software, the first is Webroot Spysweeper (Freeware version doesn't provide updates) and the second is new Yahoo Toolbar with Anti-Spyware software. Spysweeper is by far the best among all Anti-Spyware software, it seems to have to have a comprehensive scan facility supported by constantly updated fingerprint database.

There are many more Spyware Tools available in the Internet: See List at SpyChecker & See List at PCWorld. You can also read PCMag review on many anti-spywares here. If you wish to read details about a particular Spyware - what it does, how to remove, etc. then  go to Pest Patrol Research site, which is like encyclopedia of all known spywares. Pest Patrol is the same anti spyware technology that Yahoo uses in its Yahoo Toolbar.

Finally don't throw up your hands in the fight against Spyware, help is on the way in the forms of Microsoft's Windows XP Service Pack 2. SP2 has many security features that fortifies your internet connectivity, especially it improves default security of Internet Explorer. Many of the spyware gets installed as an ActiveX control or as a Browser Helper Object (BHO, the same technology that your friendly Google/Yahoo/MSN Toolbars uses). The changes in SP2 is likely to reduce the attack surface available significantly. After a long wait of nearly a year, Microsoft today announced that they have gone gold with the release of Service Pack 2.

As with any other user with digital cameras, I too have built over the years tons of Digital photographs.   Now for the last 1 year, after my Son was born, the photos have increased in leaps. After downloading from the camera I keep them organized in Folders (Family, Vaageesh, Travel, Business, Friends,  Presentations & Venkatarangan). When I last counted, the Photos folder in my laptop was about 1.8GB!. The problem I have is not with storage - with the ever decreasing cost of  Hard-disks, this is not a problem. The problem is on sharing this with my friends. Since I have my own domain and web server space, I didn't opt for any of the online paid/free photo services that offer you to upload and build your own digital photo albums. This includes MSN Photos, Snapfish, Kodak's oFoto & Yahoo Photos! In the early years, I was using Microsoft Front Page to create my albums (using FP's Templates) and upload my photo albums. This had two drawbacks, I should have FrontPage Server Extensions in my server (which my Admin strongly don't approve)  and the other was the template was looking very old. Even with Frontpage 2003, Microsoft hasn't update the template. So it was time to move on...

After several searches, I found a near perfect solution for my problem. It was Microsoft FotoVision. FotoVision is not a commercial product, but a free sample with Source from Microsoft. The application demonstrates the best practices for building a good Windows Smart Client Application. There are three modules to this application: 1)One which runs in the desktop that allows to edit/modify your photos and organize them into Albums. 2)A very similar one to above, but one which runs in Microsoft Pocket PC and Windows CE Devices 3)Third is an ASP.NET Web Application that accepts your photo albums from client application and displays them online in neat Albums format. Once you have setup the Web Application, which is a simple XCOPY Deployment, permission setting and running an EXE in the webserver to setup your password, you are ready. Just fire up the Client application and start playing with your new photo albums and publishing them with a single button press. While I am writing this, I came across Jalbum, let me give it a try and post on how I think it compares with FotoVision. Before I end this, I suggest you also visit Photo Basics at MSN.com, for some easy articles on taking good photographs.

While Windows Explorer makes basic file handling like copying, moving, deleting very easy through its intuitive GUI, it leaves much to be desired when it comes to advanced tasks. For doing Advanced file handling tasks, I generally turn to DOS Command Prompt, where I can use wild cards like ? or * to tag along multiple files.

One file handling task that I find myself often doing is to have my Digital photos renamed manually to meaningful names from the cryptic DSCF0001.JPG types, that my digital camera keeps by default. Normally I use rename *.JPG command to get it done, but that was until I found this program. This freeware by name “A.F.5 Rename your files” allows you to rename multiple with ease and power. Check it out.

Today, after you have your base Operating Systems setup, Antivirus has become the first application to be installed. In fact, most manufactures now ship PCs with pre-built A/V programs in them.

At workplace, we have been using Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition for several years now. Protecting all our 50+ workstations, file servers, web & db servers. The product has got good Admin tools, central update server and auto-update features.

Still many users (especially home users) find these A/V products to be expensive for them (from an Indian Standpoint) costing Rs.2000 or more. With today's falling PC prices this is about 10% of a HomePC cost and they have to keep paying it for every year for renewal. About a year back, I found a Free Edition A/V Product (free for Home Users) and I have been using it in my Home PC; Recommended it as well to my relatives and friends with good feedbacks. The product is called "AVG Free Edition" from Grisoft. It has all the basic A/V features and also auto update. Give it a try in your Home PC and put in your comments below.

Check out my earlier entry if you are wondering whether “We can get the upper hand at Virus”.

As many of you noticed I am using the .NET dasblog engine for blogging. Though the official page for dasblog is still dasBlog.NET, they seem to have moved home to Gotdotnet. Anyways, thanks to Rockford Lhotka, I got the new version of DasBlog today. Download: DasBlogWebSetup-1-5-3337-0.zip (669.39 KB)

How to upgrade from older versions of dasBlog?.

Though I don't know the official upgrade steps, since dasBlog is an ASP.NET application, I tried the following XCOPY method and it worked. I ensured that I don't overwrite the data folders that dasBlog uses (content, logs and SiteConfig).

1. Backup your entire web folder (say blogfolder1) where you have your current blog running
2. Extract the zip file and install the new version into a new web share (say blogfolder2).
3. Delete all folders except Content, Logs, SiteConfig in the current web folder (blogfolder1)
4. Copy all folders except Content, Logs, SiteConfig  from the new web share (blogfolder2) to the current blog folder (blogfolder1)
5. Test your blog
6. Delete blogfolder2 and remove the webshare

This entry is in continuation to my earlier post “World of PDF”. You may to read this first, if you are new to creating PDF files.

Today in the Chennai .NET User Group, Prashanthan K pointed to an interesting link to iTextSharp. This is a  port of the iText open source Java library written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. iText# is a library that allows you to generate PDF files on the fly.

I am yet to try this out. But the sample is pretty impressive. An “Hello World” file in PDF is generated with the following 5 lines of code!!!.

Document document = new Document();
PdfWriter.getInstance(document, new FileStream("Chap0101.pdf", FileMode.Create));
document.Open();
document.Add(new Paragraph("Hello World"));
document.Close();

Happy PDFing in .NET

When reading mails in Hotmail, I dislike the idea of hyperlinks in the message opening up in a framed browser window. One problem is that it eats up browser space and the other being I cannot add it to my favourties or email the URL.

Look at this, a simple hyperlink to www.venkatarangan.com in a hotmail message, is turned into a URL beast:

http://64.4.16.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=09127ba509d5e08eae29a46ded62cadd&lat=1075044828&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2evenkatarangan%2ecom%2f

On an evening where I had nothing else to do, no India Cricket Match, no calls, no reading; I sat down to write this tiny program that solves this problem. 

Just right click and copy shortcut on the Hyperlink in Hotmail,  switch to this application, press Decode button. The decoded (Simple) URL is copied into your clipboard. Now you can launch IE and paste the simple URL.

Download v1.0.0.1:

• Application - URLDecode1001.zip (5.42 KB)
• Source Code - URLDecode_Source_1001.zip (33.67 KB)

The application is written using Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 and requires Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 to execute.

If you wish to run this with .NET Framework 1.0, then download this Configuration Zip file and unzip it into the same folder as the main application.

• Configuration: urldecode_config.zip (.82 KB)

I always believed if not for sweeping waves of HTML in mid 90's, the document management world today will only be of Adobe Acrobat (PDF). PDF supports lots of interesting features, but not limited to Cross-Platform, wide availability, Ability to Embed Fonts (People who view the document need not have the fonts in their machines), Hyperlink, Form Input, Accurate Layout/Alignment (Unlike HTML), Zooming, Index, Search, OCR and more.

PDF viewers (Software like your browser that is needed to open PDF files) is available on all major Operating Systems and Platforms. This includes official Acrobat Reader from Adobe for free in Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Solaris, HP Unix, IBM AIX & OS/2 (do you remember this) . Adobe also has free pocket viewers for Pocket PC, Palm & now Symbian OS (your right, it is the OS that powers you new Nokia phones like 3650, 7650s and Sony Ericsson Phones like P800/900) . Of course there are tons of open source/third party viewers as well.

PDF Creators (Software like your MS Word to create the PDF files in the first place). Officially (i.e. Adobe) Adobe Acrobat is the way to create PDF files. This is a commerical software that allows you create intelligent PDF files that have content stored in their native formats of text, images, tables, etc. This allows you to search the document, index them and zoom to near infinite levels. MS Office is yet to support export/save as to PDF (as of version 2003). Though the latest versions of Star Office 7.0 and the Open Office 1.1 support export to PDF.

3rd Party PDF Creators, if you just want to create PDF files on the fly for simple sharing with friends and collegues, then you can turn to the scores of free PDF creators. Most of them install a printer driver in Windows. Then from any Windows Application that supports printing (are there apps that don't???) , you can print into this driver. This driver captures the input binary print stream and saves it as a PDF file. My favourite out of these free PDF creators is PDF 995 from www.pdf995.com.

There are scores of components (ActiveX, Java) from 3rd parties that allow you to create PDF files from your applications natively. Most popular is ActivePDF, though I feel theIr pricing is high for independent developers and Small & Medium ISVs. I am searching for a good free/affordable component that supports creation of PDF files. Let me come back and post here, once I find one. Till then happy PDFing.