a collection of some unimportant notes from long time ago
Hasn’t updated this blog for a long while! I just took a good look and I thought this blog is swarmed with things tagged geek stuffs, which probably isn’t what I made this blog primarily for.
So I am starting my second blog that focuses on these things:
Hopefully I’ll be migrating my tech posts over there soon — if I can get off my lazy ass 😛
Many of us Windows users have experienced the frustrating mysteries – we find our hard-disks shrinking and shrinking after some period of usage. Emptying the recycle bin didn’t solve the mystery, neither did clearing the TEMP folder.
Here I’ll present two amazing, freeware products from Piriform
This program is an excellent clean up utility. As far as I have tested it myself, this is unlike many other products which try to delete as many files as they could to make them sound useful. CCleaner performs safe operations and I haven’t broken my computer with it. On my first time use, it discovered and recovered more than 1GB of my hard disk space!
Another freeware product from the same company. Defraggler is originally intented to use as a defragmentation tool, but it surprisingly served extremely well at discovering large chunk of mysterious files that choke up precious disk space. One unique feature this piece of software has is the ability to defrag individual files. And the Analyzer is blazing fast too – it analyzed my 80GB drive in less than 10 seconds. Then I switched to the File list, and I can immediately sort by file size to find out the biggest files on my disk!
Seasoned users might say this cygwin command accomplishes the same result:
du . 2>/dev/null | sort -nr | less
But that would probably take 10 minutes instead of 10 seconds!
My latest favorite method to do this is to use WinDirStat. I’ll let the official screenshot speak for itself:
Totally reveals the answer, although Defraggler could still be faster in showing the biggest file.
This is mainly a reference for myself in case I forget how to do it later, as it took me a good deal of time to figure out.
I want to unit test applications that send emails. Obviously I don’t want to be opening a dozen of real email accounts just to test this thing out. Naturally I would want to install an SMTP/POP3/IMAP server on Windows, and there is one free (open source) option that is quite promising – hMailServer. However, it still involves 2 (quite major) inconveniences for my use case:
Then I came across exim on cygwin. exim is (as it claims to be) a vast improvement over the good ol’ sendmail. So I gave it a shot – man, that was awesome! I can now direct my application to send to arbitrary address like [email protected], [email protected] and I can view the results immediately in a text file, solving the two problems mentioned above. Here’s what I did:
exim-configprimary_hostname and set it to mail.locallocaluser, comment out the line check_local_user (If you don’t know what that means, just search for the line localuser:)127.0.0.1 mail.localAnd there you go! You can now send mail to *@mail.local. To view the mail, go to /var/spool/mail which contains all the mail in text files. A simple tail -f /var/spool/mail/foobar can monitor the mail sent to [email protected]
A simple test to make sure everything’s working:
$ exim -bt [email protected] [email protected] router = localuser, transport = local_delivery # If something is wrong in your config, it would say "Unrouteable address" # Now let's try sending an email $ exim -v -odf [email protected] Hello World! . LOG: MAIN <= [email protected] U=Chris P=local S=296 delivering KEQKED-0002RS-A7 LOG: MAIN => foobar <[email protected]> R=localuser T=local_delivery LOG: MAIN Completed # Cool, let's see if it really delivered $ tail /var/spool/mail/foobar Received: from Chris by mail.local with local (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from <[email protected]>) id KEQKED-0002RS-A7 for [email protected]; Sun, 08 Feb 2009 15:20:39 +0800 Message-Id: <[email protected]> From: Chris <[email protected]> Date: Sun, 08 Feb 2009 15:20:39 +0800 Hello World
Many criticize Windows as being not user-friendly to power users – you can’t do things the fast way even when you’ve used it for a couple of years. Here’s some tricks I’ve accumulated over the years to make using Windows (hopefully) as swift as a *nix guru.
Why should we use Windows when we want performance and speed? Well, I guess that’s we game players have to live for
This is undoubtedly the coolest and most powerful trick for Windows power users. To be able to type whatever command you want from the Windows command prompt is like being able to place symbolic links in /usr/local/bin
%HOMEDRIVE%:%HOMEPATH%\Commands.sysdm.cplCommands path to %PATH% in Advanced -> Environment VariablesTalking about the Run dialog, there’s a handful of useful commands you may want to memorize to speed things up a little bit:
The clipboard is designed decades ago. Given today’s computers’ memory size, there’s no reason to justify why we can only hold one value in the clipboard. Enhance it with this freeware ClipX. You can store like 25 previous clipboard entries (including pictures, files) and recall them with one key combination (default: Shift-Ctrl-V). Very handy for system admins and programmers
Microsoft changed the popular key combination Alt-Ctrl-Del to open a screen with a list of not very useful options instead of opening the task manager. Here’s the new key combination to open the Task Manager directly:
Ctrl+Shift+Esc
There are various reasons you might want to do this instead of Win + L, such as from within a BAT script. Anyway here’s how to do it
rundll32 user32.dll, LockWorkStation
Oops, there’s no tricks to it. Download my recycle utility.
Update 2: I’ve given this product some real life usage tests. I must conclude that the antivirus component’s performance is slow, ugly and unacceptable. I was fooled by its small footprint (memory usage), but the scanning speed is slow and it effectively renders my computer unusable when I am doing any slightly more demanding operations. Bottomline: Stray away from this if you want any performance at all – for that purpose, I’d say ESET AntiVirus is still the best
Update: Unfortunately, after some testing, I just realized Comodo’s UI still requires the use of a mouse. Although it has slightly more options than ESET’s firewall, the mandatory use of mouse still sucks.
In the past I’ve always used the commercial NOD32 Antivirus. Since version 3 it has also included a firewall in the ESET Smart Security. I have been quite satisfied with NOD32 Antivirus since it has a solid detection rate and more importantly to me, very minimal use of system resources. This is unlike say Norton, which is notorious for eating up 50% of your system resources even when it is doing observably nothing.
Recently though, I started getting annoyed enough by ESET’s firewall’s user interface. Simply put, I’m getting really annoyed by the fact that I have to constantly click the freqently appearing pop ups. What’s worse, the pop ups must be clicked by a mouse – it doesn’t support using a keyboard with tabbing to the right button.
That’s not too bad though, after maybe a year of using it, I’ve learned of its configuration enough so that I could set up rules to prevent the pop ups from appearing so frequently, but the occassional pop ups that appear finally drove me to investigate into better solutions.
Then I found Comodo Internet Security – which comes with an Antivirus and a Firewall.
Comodo has been well known for its firewall, but the Antivirus component is the company’s new invention – this is like the reverse of ESET, which is best known for its antivirus but then expanded its market to firewall too.
I still haven’t used Comodo long enough to do a comprehensive review of the two, but there’s one thing that I can say for certain: Comodo’s user interface is so much nicer and provides much more options than ESET.
And from somewhere I’ve read, performance and low system resources usage is one of the design philosophies of the Comodo’s team. I forgot where exactly but I think I read it from the Comodo’s official forum – you can probably take a look and you’ll quickly realize how interactive the support staff are in the forum – something that blew my expectation for a free product.
So, give it a try for this free security product, it’s definitely not wosre, if not way better than, most of its paid counterparts.
I recently encountered an error where when I do a less in cygwin it goes WARNING: terminal is not fully functional Quite some people seem to have encountered this problem before and there are some discussion threads on the Web, but I couldn’t find a page that pointed out the direct solution after some googling. Here’s what I did to fix the problem: It turns out that the environment variable TERM is somehow set to dumb instead of the normal cygwin. Apparently the dumb terminal is not as fully functional as cygwin. Here’s what I did to confirm the problem:
$ echo $TERM
dumb
I got less working properly again by doing:
$ export TERM=cygwin
$ less
It turned out that somehow the $TERM environment variable got set to dumb. To fix that, simply run sysdm.cpl from a Windows command prompt, and delete the environment variable TERM. cygwin will then default TERM to cygwin
Update: Check out the new tool cmd-recycle which is a lot more robust, written much more cleanly and just more cool!
I wrote this simple utiltiy some while ago, thought I might as well publish it here.
Just copy recycle.exe to WINDOWS\system32 and you can start using
recycle
Full source code included (using C#). Enjoy!
I just saw Google advertising their new experiment venturing into the Web browser scene. The Chrome browser, like everything else from Google, is in BETA.
Now that is what concerns me most: Will this beta software just adds to foes Web developers have to fight when combating cross-browser compatibilities? Does the fact that it is beta imply that it will be constantly changing, which mean we’d have to cope with like 10 more different cases of different versions of Chrome?
Under normally circumstances, if you request an HTTP protected resource with your Web browser, the server would return 401 Unauthorized and an popup would appear to ask you for the correct credentials:
That doesn’t look too Web 2.0-ish. Currently there is way to work around this using an AJAX request first (there’s an article that discusses the specific technique used). That way, the browser would “remember” the Authorization header used in the previous AJAX request, so when the user requests another protected resource in the same domain, the browser would also try to include the previously used Authorization header.
However, I couldn’t get it to work.
It turns out that the difference between my approach and the approach used in the article above is this:
// My way (doesn't work)
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest;
xhr.open ( 'GET', '/url/to/resource', false );
xhr.setRequestHeader ( "Authorization", "Basic " + Base64.encode ( username, password ) );
xhr.send ( null );
// The working way
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest;
xhr.open ( 'GET', '/url/to/resource', false, username, password );
xhr.send ( null );
Unbeknown to me was the fact that the 4th and 5th parameter of XMLHttpRequest.open() could be used to specify the username and password for the request.
Apparently, the browser doesn’t remember the credentials if I call XMLHttpRequest.setRequestHeader directly.
Note: All these have only been tested to work with MSIE/Firefox. Opera for instance, doesn’t seem to remember the credentials no matter what I tried – it would still pop up an authorization box when the user request a protected resource.
