It would be great if I could have another button on IE's download box (or this could be a Firefox extension I guess). Right now there are Open, Run, and Cancel. My pick for a 4th one is Unzip. It would download the .zip file, do a standard unzip like when you right-click on a file and Extract All, and then delete the original .zip file.
Every once in a while you find a tool that is just great at doing what it does. It takes very little system resources, might not even require an install, and works as fast as you can reasonable expect the task to be done. I found one such tool for removing duplicate photos.
Duplicate File Finder is the latest find of mine to go in this category. It doesn't require and install, is free, and quickly scanned several thousand photos, and then showed me the path names of each set of duplicate photos, allowing me to choose which ones to delete. It was a bit tedious to do the selecting, but I think manually doing that is the only acceptable way given the dire consequences of accidentally deleting the wrong photo.
Here at NDSU we use the content portal known as Blackboard. A few years back I was on my slow internet connection at home and noticed a URL full of POSTDATA in the address bar that would appear momentarily each time I logged in. The connection was slow enough that I was able to copy and paste it into a bookmark. Seeing as it contains fields like "&encoded_pw=XXXXXXXXX" and "&user_id=XXXXXXX" it was only natural I would try it as something to keep me from having to login manually every time. And it works still, 2 years later.
Here's how you can hack your own Blackboard login so that you never have to type in your username and password:
Now clicking that bookmark will log you in to Blackboard from any computer. Once again, be very careful with it, because you don't want other people logging in as you.
This is very handy for a tablet PC where you would have to key in the username and password using an onscreen keyboard. I'm sure you can find other sites out there that this would work for too.
As I dragged some photos out of Windows Photo Gallery into a folder so that I could upload them all to Facebook, where I then manually tagged them and added captions, I wondered why there isn't a program that could do this. It should be possible now given Facebook's Application Platform.
Features:
Also, how about something that adds in support for creating albums in WPG? (Again, assuming some sort of plugin model exists.)
So I was annoyed by the blinking light that my desktop has when it's sleeping, and decided to put it into hibernation. I was then further annoyed by the lack of a hibernation option in the Vista shutdown menu, and even more annoyed when I couldn't find a way to re-enable hibernation. Via Google I then found several sites confirming that there is no way to enable or disable hibernation in Vista using the GUI (I think I disabled it by removing the hibernation file in Disk Cleanup). However, it is possible to enable or disable it via the command line, and you can read about it at those sites I linked to above.
Instead of doing this though, I have found it just as convenient to use the command shutdown -h. Just type that in the search box in the start menu and hit enter, and the computer will drop into hibernation, whether the menu option is there or not.
I had been using https://example.com/exchange to login to Outlook Web Access, but starting with Exchange 2007 this added numerous steps. I had to accept an unsigned security certificate, fill out a pop-up login box, accept another certificate (because it transferred me to https://servername.example.com/owa), and then login to the actual application. If you're like me and looking for a shortcut, just use https://example.com/owa. Only one sign-in.
I just finished running a benchmark on the new server's RAID 5 array. Nothing really surprising but decent performance I think. There are 4 500GB Seagate ST3500630AS drives in a RAID 5 using the built-in NVRAID on a Asus M2N-E motherboard. The OS is on a separate drive.
I know, I know, this may seem painfully obvious to some people, but it is something I hadn't thought of doing before. Say you have a domain controller on one network, and you have your laptop on another network across the WAN. As long as your domain controller is open to the Internet (DMZ or on a routable address or something) just set your primary DNS server to the IP address of your domain's DNS server. I suppose your domain controller has to be on a routable address then too (meaning you can directly ping it from anywhere in the world).
Now you should be able to open up any MMC tool, like AD Users & Computers, and use it to remotely administer your domain. It would make sense that you could even set a computer's DNS entry and even join it to a domain from a remote location.
One implication of doing this is that now all your name resolution (converting google.com into an IP address, etc.) is now relying on your DNS server staying up. Which makes me wonder how Windows uses the secondary DNS server entry. Does it wait for the first one to time out? How long would it wait?
Nitevision: a name which strikes fear into the hearts of many a Medora call-center workers.
To be fair, it's not that bad of a program. It's what Medora has used for motel reservations for many years. Written by REMco Software out of Dickinson, ND, Nitevision is a client/server application which keeps tracks of motel reservations, who is checked in, which rooms are clean, etc. As near as I can tell the client sends raw SQL queries to the server which then spits back some data for the client to display. A workable strategy, I think. However, there are some problems.
I started working in Medora's call center at the beginning of the summer of 2005, as a lowly Customer Service Representative (don't be fooled, I have really really really enjoyed all of my jobs in Medora). I vaguely remember how the Nitevision server had to be restarted quite often because all the clients on the workstations would simply lock up. I remember more closely how this also happened in the summer of 2006 when I was a team leader, supervisor of CRSs. At one point I was even trained in as to how to restart the server because the IT guy wanted a day off. I don't think I ended up having to restart it, but the Internet connection did go down at one point while he was gone, which is another story on its own (credit card processing requires an Internet connection). Anyways, the restarts were so frequent that Nitevision got its own server so the ticketing system could stay up while it was rebooting.
Enter me (again), in the summer of 2007, as the IT assistant. Now instead of crossing my fingers in hopes that it didn't crash, I had half of the workers asking me why Nitevision crashed on them all the time. I didn't really know, but us two IT guys spent a lot of time thinking about it. Many hours were spent on the phone with REMco support, and they even remoted into the server to delete some rows in a logging table that looked like they were taking a lot of space. The problem went on though, with crashes becoming a daily occurrence, and often-times hourly during busy times of the day (early morning: lots of reservations, and mid afternoon: lots of checkins). We poured over all the diagnostics we could find: CPU usage, RAM usage, HDD activity (which is actually difficult to monitor), network activity, and the Event Viewer.
Finally I cracked open the SQL Server logs. I should have done this sooner, but SQL Server Management Studio wasn't installed on the server and I didn't have it on my desktop. When I got it installed on my laptop though, I found the following error message repeated tens of times in the minutes leading up to each server crash: "This SQL Server has been optimized for 8 concurrent queries. This limit has been exceeded by xx queries and performance may be adversely affected." xx would be a 1 or 2 for about 20 minutes (always spaced evenly exactly one minute apart) and then it would jump to 20 or 30 for the last few minutes before the crash.
Shortly thereafter we discovered that the server was running the Microsoft Data Engine, better known as MSDE, also well-known for being limited to 8 concurrent queries. We have 10 call center computers, 6 front desk computers, call accounting, online reservations, accounting staff, and 3 group sales computers fighting for database access. REMco would not really acknowledge that this was the problem, and it's quite possible that they had no experience with this scenario, because judging by a list on their website of their customers, I suspect that we are their largest. In the end though they did decide to help us move to a trial version of full-blown SQL Server 2000.
Migration day was quite exciting. I arrived for work at 1:00pm to discover that they had taken down the server at 10:00am to start the migration. And it still wasn't up. I found a number of funny things going on:
They were using "SQL Editor." I had seen this tool before on the Nitevision server. It seems like some watered down version of Management Studio. I suspect the tool does not have functionality for attaching and detaching databases, which may be why they weren't doing that before. I don't think it supports Windows authentication either, because they weren't able to connect to the new database engine...and that's because...
They installed the new engine with only Windows authentication. Yes, the entire Nitevision program runs using SQL authentication. SQL Editor uses SQL authentication also. Upon pointing this out, it seemed that it wasn't merely an oversight on their part. Rather, I think they genuinely did not know the difference between the two authentication methods.
We finally got the thing running around 3:00pm. Since then it has only required reboots every other week as it gradually begins to more frequently freeze up for 30 seconds at a time. End result? Nitevision humming along acceptably, except for some annoying accessory apps running on the server that are poorly setup. I'll elaborate on them some other time...along with several other interesting stories as I remember them.
Well here we go; I'm going to detail the unpleasant experience of setting up our new server as best as I can remember it.
Problem 1: Floppy disk with drivers needed for RAID functionality. We actually had a floppy drive, and even a computer to connect it to, but no floppy disks could be found. So we drove a couple miles to someone's house and found one floppy--and old Intel motherboard driver disk. We fired up the ancient computer there, put the disk in, put the CD-ROM from Asus in the optical drive...and got stuck. It wouldn't read the disk. Closer examination revealed that it was actually a DVD disk, which the 5+ year old computer couldn't read. We took the floppy home and made the disk there.
Problem 2: Getting the computer to boot correctly. Having not dealt with a floppy drive for several years, we were both unfamiliar with the cause of those cryptic "failure to find boot disk" messages, which were very vexing. We initially blamed it on the RAID and how that fit into the boot order.
Problem 3: Not having disk 2. Server 2003 64-bit comes on two CDs. We had 2 MSDN-iso burned disks, one labeled disk 1 and one labeled disk 2. The second one was most certainly not disk 2. Off to MSDN to download...and in the meantime we went ahead and installed updates and Service Pack 2.
Problem 4: We ran disk 2, only to get a warning that Service Pack 2 had already been installed. We proceeded on anyways. Around this time we started getting random lockups. Then a message popped up detailing that the RAID had entered a degraded state. After messing around in the RAID software for a couple minutes, we decided that one of the drives was bad, and that we would have to reinstall on a RAID composed of the three remaining disks.
Problem 5: Windows installed again, everything updated, RAID fails again. So this time I backed up an image of everything we had setup to another computer, re-installed Windows on one of the SATA HDDs (not in a RAID) and restored from the backup. This seemed to work alright, until we started to have a LOT of problems installing Exchange Server 2007.
So we re-installed again (fourth time if you're counting). By now I figured that something was up and these disks weren't actually failing. But we were also sick of the RAID idea so just installed Windows on a spare IDE HDD we had laying around. In the meantime, we figured out that the disks probably hadn't been given adequate time to rebuild (although I'm still not sure why a new RAID with empty disks needs to be built).
This is the install we are currently running on, and it's working quite well. After the RAID was given time to build (I went into the BIOS RAID control panel and told it to rebuild) it has been running fine. We had quite a lot of trouble again with Exchange Server 2007, but that is another story altogether...