Category Archives: Utilities

*Sweet* Explorer Replacement (w/qualifications)

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Posted by admin on December 18, 2008 – 5:01 am
Filed under Utilities

I’ve looked for a long time for a decent Explorer replacement. You know, what once was called a “File Manager”.

Funny how that entire class of application seems rarer now than a graft-free politicians office. The built in Windows Explorer is good enough for most, though it’s generally woefully lacking in virtually all aspects that make a good File Manager. This is an area where I actually have real commercial experience, too. I wrote the Windows version of the venerable WindowDos file manager in another lifetime. It’s actually still up, though I don’t believe it’s really being sold anymore. And that was back in the days of WFW3.11, and Win95, when 8.3 names were still very much in-yo-face, and NT was this weird OS that nobody had the hardware for. OS2 was a much better choice<g>.

Anyway, I’ve checked out a number of them over the years, including Directory Opus (very good, but $$$$), XYPlorer, Explorer2, Total Commander, and plenty of others, but, with the exception of Directory Opus (Dopus to those in the know), they all came up short for me.

But I recently came across AccelMan, by FlexigenSoft.image

Wow. Very cool, highly customizable, fast, nice and “keyboardy” for those that like to leave the mouse behind when browsing.

It does multiple pane browsing (and not just your Commander-style 2 pane, oh no, you can pile ’em on baby!), has a built in file viewer, hex viewer, graphic viewer, plus a command line and console view, customizable filters (show all Document files, or VB Source files, or Graphics files, for instance), and easy to edit bookmarks (files and folders). It’s its own app, so it’s not an Explorer addin, nor does it attempt to replace the built in Explorer, and as far as I can tell, it doesn’t muck with your system, at least not much.

But the best part? They’ve decided to make it freeware. When you download, be sure to grab a license key (it’s right there on the same download page). Then, after installing, register the app with the key and you’re set.

Just to be fair though, the app isn’t perfect. I’ve noticed a few crashes when mucking with some of the more esoteric customization features, and there are several things I wish they’d do different, as well a few features I’d love to see. Given the freeware nature of the product, who knows if there’s updates in the offing, though it appears to have been updated as late as June of this year.

That said, the basic functionality appears quite stable (so far anyway) and you can’t beat the feature/price ratio!

(UPDATE 12/20/08) I’ve submitted a number of comments to Flexigensoft about AccelMan, but to date, haven’t received any response. Granted, it’s the holiday season, so I’ll definitely give them that.

AccelMan is a product I’d +really+ like to see continue, even if just to get a few minor fixes in. Hell, I’d be happy to pay their original posted price if they’d get back to me about whether there will be any updates in the near future.

At this point, the biggest issues with the app that I’ve seen are:

  1. Inconsistent startup. Sometimes, it’ll start right up. Sometimes, you click to start it and nothing appears to happen. A quick look at taskman reveals that the app started and is running “hidden”. Kill that process and start it again, and, so far, anyway, it always starts up properly then. This is probably why I’ve seen more than a few posts about the 3.5 version simply “Not working” on people’s machines. I’m guessing it’s some internal window positioning code that’s wack. Can’t be too tough a fix.
  2. Even more bothersome is that if you copy files, delete folders, create new folders, etc etc, the Tree/File List isn’t immediately updated. I can replicate this behavior consistently, and it’s unbelievably annoying<sigh>.
  3. No command line parameters. Minor issue, but it sure would be nice to create shortcuts on the desktop to start in a particular folder, or with a file highlighted, but there is no support for that. Even Explorer can do this!

Bottom line: AccelMan is still definitely usable, but the above glitches are enough to make me think twice about moving to it completely as my FileManager of choice, which is terribly unfortunate.

Command Line Email

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Posted by admin on December 1, 2008 – 4:03 am
Filed under EMail, Utilities

Every once in a while, I’ve run into the need to send an email via the command line. Often, this is during make scripts, or other long processing batch jobs. I’ve almost always ended up succumbing to “net send” and being done with it, but that’s not an option anymore with Vista. The good ol’ (and much maligned) Messenger service is no more under Vista and Server 2008.

So, I need to send an email via command line.

There’s piles of little email apps like this floating around, but most don’t support TLS, secure sockets or authenticated smtp access, which, for better or worse, is what GMail requires now.

After a good deal of searching, I ended up coming across the very nice (and free), MailSend utility by Muhammad A Muquit.

Sending email from the command line is a simple (albeit a tad long winded) command, all on one line of course:

mailsend -from you@gmail.com -to someone@domain.com +cc +bc -d gmail.com 
    -smtp smtp.gmail.com -v -starttls -auth-plain -user you@gmail.com -pass "yourpassword" 
    -sub "Test Subject" -M "This is the body of a test message"

Quite handy.

What’s next with Reflector

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Posted by admin on August 21, 2008 – 1:13 pm
Filed under .NET, Utilities

One of my favorite .NET tools is about to transition in an unknown way.

“After more than eight years of working on .NET Reflector, I have decided it is time to move on and explore some new opportunities.”

So begins the email I just received from Lutz Roeder, the man behind Reflector, an almost scarily powerful tool for .NET development.

Eight years? Wow. Just doesn’t seem that long. But I can completely understand the desire to move on.

Unfotunately, the following passage gives a little clue as to what might be next.

“Red Gate will continue to provide the free community version and is looking for your feedback and ideas for future versions.”

Ah… So there will be a community version and then something else. The thing is, Reflector seems to be one of those tools that’s incredibly useful, to an incredibly small audience. And almost useless to everyone else. A bit like the SysInternals tools I’ve mentioned before. So successfully “productizing” it might be a pretty good challenge.

The thing is, even for me, and even though Reflector has been quite useful, I’m not sure I’d have paid for it, to be brutally honest.

But I have to applaud Mr. Roeder for what he’s accomplished and congratulate him in moving forward.

Very Cool VS2008 Add In

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Posted by admin on July 25, 2008 – 3:46 am
Filed under .NET, Utilities, VB Feng Shui

I’ve always been a big fan of the MZTools addin for VB6, so it was a little disappointing, if not understandable, that for his .NET foray, he’s wanting to get paid a little something for it.

Not that that’s bad, I just haven’t been able to commit to MZTools for .NET just yet.

In the meantime, I stumbled across a very slick little VS addin called DPack.

It’s actually a small set of different addins. Doesn’t look like you get the source, which is unfortunate, but the features are pretty slick, plus they work in VB, C++ and even C# and Ruby.

The Code Browser alone is worth the download. With one keystroke, you get a window like this:

image

It’s nicely sorted, browsable, and with one other click, takes you directly to the given code element. Even better, you can assign direct keystrokes to filter only methods, classes, properties, etc. By default, ALT-M shows just the methods in the current file, for instance. Reminds me of the old F2 (Function list) key that used to be in older VB’s. I missed that key<sob>.

Also particularly nice is the “Surround Selection With…” feature. You can’t customize the surrounding text but they give you the most common items (surround with TRY CATCH, FOR NEXT, DO WHILE, REGION, etc, etc.), so that’s not too bad.

It seems very quick and stable. And the best part is, it’s completely free!

Fun with the Clipboard

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Posted by admin on April 9, 2008 – 2:46 am
Filed under Utilities, VB Feng Shui

Have you ever clipped something to the clipboard and wished you could immediately “do something” with it?

For instance, if I clip a URL, it’d be nice to simply be able to immediately “open” that URL.

Or if a clip a phone number, how about dialing that phone number (intelligently, of course, adding or removing 1+ and dealing with area codes, prefixes and the like). Esp useful for WebEx or Gotomeeting conference calls that require not only dialing a number but dialing the meeting access code as well.

Or how about immediately jumping to Google Maps to highlight a place if you just clipped an address?

I’m building a little open source example utility to do these very things, but was wondering if there wasn’t something else it could do as well (within that general idea) that I’m just not seeing.

Two or three actions just doesn’t seem like enough to warrant a whole utility.

Or is there already a utility to do this?

Any thoughts?

FEBE to go

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Posted by admin on March 14, 2008 – 2:36 am
Filed under Utilities

If you use FireFox (and if not, what’s up with that), you need to check out Chuck Baker’s FireFox Environment Backup Utility (FEBE).

Slick little tool for saving all your FireFox goodness for that day when, suddenly, you realize you’ll be paving your machine and having to dig through your subconscious to come up with all those bookmarks, RSS feeds and FireFox extensions that you use everyday but couldn’t name to save your ass.

Network Autotuning and Vista

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Posted by admin on July 24, 2007 – 11:49 pm
Filed under Troubleshooting, Utilities

I’ve noticed over that past few weeks of running Vista that certain things tend to be A LOT slower now, even given the fact that I recently picked up a gigabit network card for my server, and a gigabit switch, so I could make use of the built-in gigabit network adapter on my new workstation motherboard.

For instance, I use a program called VBLiner to line number all my VB source right before I compile it. The line numbering process itself is very fast, but the program would pause, noticeably, for each file it opened. It was almost as if the process of locating and opening the file was slow, but actually reading it was very fast.

Today, it finally got to be too much, so I had to start digging.

Come to find out, Vista has this nifty new thing called “Network Autotuning” that, apparently, doesn’t work particularly well.

You can see it yourself by opening a DOS box (with Admin priviledges), and entering

NETSH INTERFACE TCP SHOW GLOBAL

You should end up seeing something like this:

image

That “normal” is the problem.

Execute this to turn off autotuning:

NETSH INTERFACE TCP SET GLOBAL AUTOTUNINGLEVEL=disabled

turn it back on with

NETSH INTERFACE TCP SET GLOBAL AUTOTUNINGLEVEL=normal

and, apparently, using this will sometimes work, too, though I’m a bit hesitant to bother at this point.

NETSH INTERFACE TCP SET GLOBAL AUTOTUNINGLEVEL=HIGH

Nothing like a built-in network performance de-tuner.  It’s STRESS.EXE but without all the hassles of actually having to run a utility. Grrr.

Sony MicroVault as MultiBoot System Tool

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Posted by admin on July 19, 2007 – 2:01 pm
Filed under Hardware, Utilities

With the success I had with getting a bootable image of MFSTools onto my old 1GB USB stick, why not go all out.

My local Fry’s has on sale Sony MicroVault USB sticks with a slide out connector.

image

I picked up a 4GB model for 37$ and am thinking a multi-boot setup with multiple partitions.

  • MFSTools, for all my Tivo adventures.
  • DOS6.2 with all my various boot tools, SpinRite, etc.
  • Ultimate Boot Disk, with various OpenSource DOS’s, plus some Linux stuff to, I believe.
  • A BartPE Windows XP boot partition.

Anything else that might seem useful?

Niceties about the USB boot disk option:

  • It’s fast
  • You don’t have a reburn a DVD to make a change to the configuration
  • The sizes are to a point now as to be actually useful

I probably won’t toss my trusty DOS 6.2 boot floppies just yet, ’cause some of my machines can’t boot to USB, but I suspect that will be changing over the next year or so.

Bootable USB Keys

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Posted by admin on July 11, 2007 – 5:54 am
Filed under Hardware, Utilities

Maybe I’m jumping on the band wagon a bit late with this one, but it’s pretty slick if your machine’s BIOS will support it.

It IS actually possible to write a boot sector and boot files to those little 256mb+ USB keys that you can get in the gumball machine down at just about any local soda fountain or 10 cent store these days.

Why would you want to?

  • They boot a LOT faster than CD or DVD
  • They’re rewritable without any special considerations.
  • You don’t have to have special burner software to update them (other than what’s required to lay down a boot sector).
  • You don’t have to suck up an EIDE channel just to be able to hook up a CD to boot to.

It was that last part that hooked me. I’m in the process of upgrading a TIVO to 320GB and my shiny new iron only has 1 EIDE port (and 2 channels). One to the old TIVO drive, one with the new drive and, bang, nothing to boot to (You don’t want to boot to Windows with your TIVO drive attached, Windows like to stamp any drives that it can see, which can screw your TIVO drive all to hell).

With a bootable USB key with MFSTools on it, I can boot to the USB, and still have both the HD’s connected to copy and back up between them.

I know, I know. Grab an old machine with 2 IDE ports and my problem was solved. Well, the only old machine I have left is way, way old, and it’s bios doesn’t even recognize the 320gb drive I’m using to upgrade. The other, not so old machine, is just waiting to be hauled to the hazardous waste site, cause it won’t even give up a POST BEEP.

To get DOS or windows on the disk, you’ll need to format the USB Key with a boot sector. The easiest way I found to do that is this HP utility. It should let you format the drive and copy the boot sector over from a boot floppy. Once that’s done, you should be able to grab a copy of BARTPE and build up a fully USB KEY bootable copy of Windows XP, assuming you have a bootable CD of Windows XP. Well, it ain’t a “full” Windows XP but it’ll get you loaded and able to grab info of an otherwise unbootable drive.

To get Linux working, you gotta go deep. You’ll have to use SYSLINUX, and/or ISOLINUX to overwrite the DOS boot sector with a LINUX boot sector.

To get MFSTools working on the resultant LINUX USB key, you’ll need to get the ISO first. Mount it using something that’ll mount ISO images, like Elaborate Byte’s free and excellent Virtual Clone Drive. Then copy the whole thing down to the USB key. This won’t copy the boot sector, though. That’s what SYSLINUX was for.

Still won’t quite work though. You have to copy the contents of the ISOLINUX folder down to the root of the USB key. Then Rename ISOLINUX.CFG to SYSLINUX.CFG. That’ll allow the ISOLINUX image to boot to a ram drive like it does normally when booted from CD (at least, that’s the way I understand it, knowing what I know about Linux at this point).

If all that’s done right, and assuming that your machine supports booting from USB, and assuming you’ve configured the BIOS to allow it, reboot and feel the joy.

If it doesn’t work, take two aspirin, reboot and… be thankful Windows doesn’t require this sort of nonsense….???? Ok. I jest.

BartPE is a very interesting possibility because it’s relatively easy to build and you can add your own Windows tools to the mix (up to the size of your USB key anyway). Could come in very handy for recovery and forensics work. And USB Keys are more scratch resistant than CD’s. Plus, some have that nifty, switchblade action with the USB plug.

image or image

Oh, and one final tidbit for any security oriented people, check this out and see if you get any sleep that night.

Ultra-Speed Wonder-Blogging

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Posted by admin on July 4, 2007 – 11:00 pm
Filed under Blogging, Utilities

I’ve read a ton of good press about BlogJet and from the demo I looked at it’s pretty slick. But BlogDesk is free and does everything I needed it to, until now.

I have to say, Windows Live Writer is an awfully nice way to write blogs, and it’s free as well. It works smashingly with dasBlog, sets up on Vista without a hitch, has a built in spell checker, which myself (and a lot of blog writers out there) need, and can even edit blog entries using the styles cribbed from you blog itself.

Check out this screenshot of Live Writer entering this actual entry.

image

Sweetness. And it pulled the style sheets automatically. It doesn’t look exactly  like my blog, but hey, that’s pretty good for being editable!

Finally, if you prefer, there’s all sorts of effects you can give graphics as you paste them in. I tend towards the simplistic, but there’s drop shadows, overlays, transforms, etc to play with.

UPDATE: Well, Live Writer is nice, but it’s definitely still beta. With lots of images, it seems to crash when loading drafts to continue editing. But it works well enough for image-light pages, so your mileage may vary.