Category: Geeky/Programming

Categories
Geeky/Programming

XP SP2 Flaws

I have been watching the tech news the last week or so, and there is a big todo about these new XP SP2 Flaws found. I watched and watched, waiting for someone to retaliate, and I finally found the rebuttal I was looking for. The bottom line is, if a user runs a program, that is their choice. The OS can’t stop that. The person should have anti-virus running to see that. They should also only run things from trusted sources. If you goto hacker warez land and start downloading exe’s, and running them, what do you expect? If you play with fire, you are eventually going to get burned. One other thing is people should believe everything they read on the web. If I put a link to an exe on here, you should make sure it doesn’t have viruses, if it tries to connect to the web, ask me why, etc.

XP SP2 Flaw rebuttal

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Saint Cloud Times Local News Syndication (RSS)

Well, I have tested by Saint Cloud Times RSS Feed for a while now, so I will put it out for other people to use. Feel free to subscribe to this feed (in Sharpreader of your favorite RSS Aggregator). It should update every day at 5:00 AM. Right now it just gets the headlines. If anyone want to send any feedback my way, feel free to. Maybe if someone wants to get the whole article I can add that functionality, or the Sports or other news sections. Just let me know. 🙂

Saint Cloud Times Local News Feed  * updated, this doesnt work anymore, removing link

Sharpreader

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Geeky/Programming

Saint Cloud Times RSS Feed

Well, the other day, I wrote into the St. Cloud Times and asked them if they had RSS feeds for the news headlines. I got a reply that pretty much said “what do you want them for?” “go to hell”, so I did a little thinking, and just created a program to scrape the headlines and put them into a rss formatted XML file, so I can read them with my aggregator. I have it done, and I am testing it now, works like a champ. I will probably test it some more, then maybe put it up so other people can use it. 🙂

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Tabbrowser

Well, I emailed the creator of Sharpreader, and I stand corrected, sort of. You can download an extension for Firefox to open external links in new tabs, which solves my problem with that.

Tabbrowser

Categories
Geeky/Programming

RSS Aggregation

Well, for a few months now, I have been reading Blogs and Newsfeeds with SharpReader. I really like SharpReader, but there are few features I think it is lacking. One is the ability to open a new window in a tab in firefox, another is an option to put in startup or not (without having to do it manually), and one thing, not really a feature, but just they way it works. I guess it would be nice to have it integrated into Outlook, so I didn’t have to run two programs. Well, I went looking and found NewsGator. It looks really cool, and integrates into Outlook, but it costs $$ (bummer). Maybe I will try it out, maybe I will get ambitious and just make my own, we will see. Check them out if you want.

SharpReader

NewsGator

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Geeky/Programming

Windows XP Service Pack 2 (for IT Professionals and Developers)

Well, the day is finally upon us, Windows XP Service Pack 2. I installed it on my work laptop, and will soon install it on my home pc’s. I ran the beta RC1 and RC2 and everything seemed to work fine. I am still going to keep my McAfee Firewall , but I might run the XP firewall too. Also IE finally blocks popups and allows you to manage BHO’s (Browser Helper Objects). The version I am linking to
is for developers and IT pros, it is the full install. The single computer install should be coming out this week, or soon.

Windows XP Service Pack 2 for IT Professionals and Developers

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Geeky/Programming

Fedora..RedHat…wtf?

Ok, I am not a big Linux guy, but I think it is cool, kinda easy to use, and has some useful things to it. Red Hat 9 is pretty sweet, pretty cool, from the guys at RedHat. Well, this past year they decided to split off to “Enterprise Linux”, and charge for the OS. Now there is the “Fedora Project”, which is supposed to be the free version of Red Hat’s linux (but they don’t support it – wtf?). Anyways, for now I think I’ll stick with Red Hat 9, running on VMware. Maybe someday I’ll get brave and run it on a PC. Still some things just don’t work (the new Napster for one).

Anyways, I made my first c++ program in like 3 years today, on Red Hat (comes with complier and junk already installed). Pretty cool!

Red Hat

Fedora Project

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Geeky/Programming

PS2 to USB Connector

I finally received my PS2 to USB connector I ordered from Best Buy. My HP laptop doesn’t have a USB connector, and I wanted to hook it up to my monitor and keyboard, etc, and I don’t own a port replicator. There are two USB ports on my laptop, and the wireless keyboard/mouse I own has two connectors, USB and PS2. So now that I have the connector, I can plug the keyboard/mouse into one USB port on the laptop, plug in the monitor, and away we go. Pretty sweet!

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Strings For Windows XP

Strings….nice tool. In Unix/Linux, there is a utility called “strings” which you can use to search files/directories for strings (duh). Anyways, if you want it for Windows XP, you can download it at sysinternals (along with a ton of other cool tools.) I use it alot…for example: In Visual Studio.NET, you can set words to use in comments that will show up in a task list, like ‘TODO, ‘HACK’, etc…and then that line with show up in your task list. Well, when I have to do any classic ASP coding, I use textpad, and it doesnt have a cool task feature like that. If I still use those words, I can mimic a task list. So in my ASP code, I write

‘TODO: Add more logging

and various others on all pages in an application. Then, when I want to build a task list, I fire up cmd.exe, and type

>strings -s serverdirectory | find “‘TODO”

and it will list out every page and line that I have written that. Very cool.

There are tons of other unique uses for this utility also, you should check it out.

strings @ sysinternals.com

Textpad

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Cisco Netflow

Wow..Cisco Netflow. What a pain in the a$$. Anyways, I think I am going
to have the only .NET Netflow Capture and Parsing program in the
world. Hopefully. It really is tough to parse the packets and decode
the correctly, but I am on the right track. Ethereal helped me a bit in
that department. Ethereal has a built in netflow decoder (CFLOW) which allowed me to view the packet part by part, to they byte level and then see how the packets are set up.

Cisco Netflow

Ethereal