James Devine's Website
Archive for the ‘Windows’ Category.
I do a lot of web development and constantly switch back and forth between browers to make sure that sites look the same. Since I run Windows 7 my choice of what version of Internet Explorer I can use is limited to IE8. However it turns out that there is a very nice set of developers tool in IE8 that is accessible by pressing the F12 key (or going to Tools – Developer Tools). It is very easy to switch between IE7 and IE8.
VMware vCenter server reports a lot of performance information and displays tables in the Virtual Infrastructure client. They provide a nice at a glace view, but do not allow for anything more. While poking around the GUI I found a feature to export the performance data to Excel by going to file-reports-performance. This is a nifty tool that is not very well documented.
Occasionally it is necessary to prompt a user for input in a Powershell script. In my case I just need to remind the user to do something, but the same command can get the user input and store it in a variable.
$input=read-host "Hey user, enter some text!"
The text that enters in the above example is save in the $input variable.
For my research I found the need to automatically visit a webpage to run a setup and a teardown script. Turns out that it is fairly easy to do. The script is included below.
#cd to Internet Explorer
cd "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer"
#point ie to the teardown script
./iexplore.exe 10.0.0.20/teardown.php
#sleep for one second - this is needed so IE has a chance to start before it is killed
sleep 1
#kill the internet explorer process
get-process iexplore | stop-process
I have been doing a lot of powershell scripting for my senior thesis. I had the need to run a background job and did not find helpful information through searching Google so I figured I would post this.
Powershell 2 support running scripts in the background with a simple command. The only caveat is that it will only run other powershell scripts.
Start a background job: $job=start-job “script.ps1″
Wait for the job to finish: wait-job($job)
It seems Windows has learned a lot since the horrifically terrible release of Vista. I have been running Windows 7 Professional for the last two weeks and will attempt to sum up the 5 reasons why Windows 7 Rocks! It no only installs quickly, it also runs like a dream … so far anyway.
Multiple instances of a running program are grouped together and you can preview the window by hovering the mouse over the task bar icon. This features is great when web-browsing. IE and Firefox both support the preview of each open tab.
In short Windows 7 is a great improvement over Vista. That said there are still some caveats. The most major one being the price. Yeah its nice, but $200 nice – in this economy probably not. I have also found a few applications that worked well under Vista that refuse to run in Windows 7.
Google has had sync available for quite some time, but up until recently it has only allowed for contacts and calendars to be synchronized between your phone and Google.The feature has been a great and allowed users to easily back their data up to the “cloud” where it will forever reside. Recently this feature got even better with the addition of the ability to sync mail and the addition of push. Now your phone can maintain a connection with Google allowing new emails, contact updates, and calendar updates to be automatically pushed to your phone. So far the service has been great (flaky at times though). The only down side- watching your cellphone battery die much faster.
I recently order an MSi Wind 10″ Netbook. I will be traveling to Europe in a week and wanted something small and portable that will let me surf the web and do some on-the-road web development. After hours of searching the MSi U100-451US seemed like the best choice. I picked one up for $279.99 at eWiz.com.
Processor: Intel Atom N270 1.6 GHz (with hyperthreading)
RAM: 1 GB DDR (PC5300 (upgraded to 2GB)
Included Peripherals: On board mic, 0.3 MP digital camera, wireless, 10/100 Ethernet, bluetooth
A great how to on installing RAM in the Wind is available here: http://www.laptopmag.com/advice/how-to/msi-wind-ram.aspx. One thing that is not mentioned on the webpage is that some models of the Wind have a “warranty void if removed” sticker covering one of the screws on the bottom of the netbook. It took me far longer then it should have to realize that there was a screw under the sticker that was preventing me from removing the bottom.
A word to the wise, do not go with really cheap RAM. I bough a cheap RAM stick from ebay for $12 and it did not work. I ended up going to the local computer store and getting a Crucial 1GB PC 5300 RAM stick for around $40.
One of my first orders of business was to install Vista Ultimate on my new netbook. At this point you are probably laughing “haha Vista on a netbook, what an idiot.” I was a little apprehensive about installing Vista on such an underpowered machine (my main pc running Vista has 8 GB of RAM with a Quad core processor). I was inspired by this article: http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4505 which actually says they saw an important in running Vista over XP in terms of both performance and battery life. Low and behold Vista runs like a dream, even with the sidebar running and the Aero theme running. In fact the thing that really hurt my “User Experience Rating” the most was the GPU, which actually scored respectably for a netbook. Aside from the GPU, the CPU scored the next worse which again is not surprising from the atom chip, but this is still respectable for a netbook.
These results were after I downloaded all of the drivers and MSi utilities from the MSi website. Surprisingly all of the Vista drivers are available from the support site. The version says Windows XP 32bit oallthe downloads, but they contain Vista drivers as well.
After installing Vista and downloading serveral hundred megabytes of updates I loaded up Adobe CS4. Again you are probablly saying something to the effect “Photoshop won’t run on a netbook”. That was my exact initial response, but I figured I would give it a try anyway. I was pleasently suprised. Photoshop actually ran very smoothly and the layout changed to take advantage of the netbook’s quirky resolution. Now I’m not saying that I have an amazing editing machine, but I can open and edit psd files on the go as well as fire up dreamweaver to do some web developement.
The MSi Wind is a solid mobile computing solution. I find myself using my netbook more and more. Its ultraportable and ultralight design make it perfect for a college student who wants to take notes in class or those that want to be able to use the internet on the go without havng the carry around a heavy full-sized laptop. It also can run some fairly intense applications like Photoshop with only a slight delay.
I recently worked with Jim Kukunas on implementing a parallel GPGPU merge sort algorithm that utilized the NVIDIA CUDA architecture. The project and source code can be seen at: http://jamesdevine.info/index.php/projects/cuda-parallel-merge-sort.
1.) If you receive a suspicious email don’t open it! If you get an email from a website that you do not have an account at just delete it. A lot of viruses and attacks will try to look like a legitimate message from a bank or other website like EBay.
2.) If you happen to open an email you think is suspicious there are a few tell tail signs that something is not right. Look for broken English. People sending fake and malicious emails are not very intelligent and often are not from the US. An email from your bank or any account you have online will almost NEVER have misspellings and poor grammar.
3.) Never click on a link in an email or webpage unless you are 100% sure where it goes. It is possible to make a link like ebay.com go to an entirely different site. Try it- click the previous link that says ebay.com and you will be taken to my website! There is a very easy way to look out for this. Whenever you put your mouse over a link you can see the actual website link in the bottom left hand of the web browser. Take a look at the following image for a demonstration. If you see a site that does not look right DO NOT CLICK on the link. If the link contains and odd extension like .hk (for hong kong) it is probablly a site that will contain a virus. Another sign of bad site is if the link has a series of numbers such as http://10.128.11.111. The series of numbers is called an ip address which is a unique number for each computer on the internet, much like a telephone number. If you click on a link like this there is a good change you will be directed to a site containing a virus.
4.) Any time that you enter your personal information into a webpage make sure that the address bar has https:// instead of http:// (see the picture below for a demonstration). This will ensure that your information is being sent encrypted to the website you are viewing. If you do not see the https:// in the address bar then any personal information you enter will be sent in clear text across the internet. Any legitimate website with a login (such as your bank) will use encryption (the https:// in the address bar).
5.) Run an antivirus program. If you are running a PC you absolutely must run antivirus. My personal recommendation is Panda Antivirus (http://www.pandasecurity.com/homeusers/solutions/antivirus/). I have had found Panda to work the best and its only $50 a year for a version that can be installed on up to 3 computers. If $50 a year is too much (and believe me its not) there are free programs like AVG Free (http://free.avg.com/) and Avast (http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html).
6.) Update your system. Antivirus programs should be set to automatically update and automatically scan. Windows updates should also be set to automatically update. Software manufactures put out updates for a reason. Most of the time systems updates address security vulnerabilities.
These tips are not meant to be the end all guide to web browsing safety. People writing malicious code are always at least one step ahead of antivirus manufacturers. The key is to be proactive and use caution when browsing the Internet- it can be a very dangerous place.