kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Tag Archives: Utilities

PowerTray 0.9 Beta Released

Well after several weeks of trying to work on things (and 10 days of waiting for SourceForge) I’ve managed to get the first Beta-build of PowerTray published and available for download.

The initial version has a few interesting features:

  • Plugin-based architecture to allow for future feature development
  • XML configuration file to allow for assignment of Hotkeys
  • Plugin for Google Search
  • Plugin for Wikipedia Search (english only)

This project can be downloaded from the SourceForge project site. Please leave your comments and thoughts on future enhancements.

Firefox Plugin – AdBlock Plus

Recently I was looking for something to block ads while I surf the net, something quick and clean, and preferably a plugin for Firefox.  What I found was an extension called AdBlock Plus by Wladimir Palant.  This has been a great little extension, as it blocks ads, (images, swfs, scripts) from appearing on the page at all by using url blocking with wildcards.

In the event that there is a small subset of legitimate content within a larger mostly-ad-riddled domain, you can whitelist the “good” segment as well.

I’ve been using this one for about 2 weeks now on both the Macbook and the windows box, and to be honest, not noticing a big lot of difference… but maybe that’s the point.  I can honestly say I don’t remember seeing a lot of ads in the past couple of weeks… I’ve tried turning off the ad-blocker on a few selected pages (i.e. yahoo.com) and immediately a whole bunch of ads showed up.  So I guess it must be doin’ somthing!

One mildly annoying thing that ABP did was cause flash videos (ie Embedded YouTube videos) to display incorrectly.  The solution is to deselect the option  Show tabs on Flash and Java.  Thanks to Vaughn Dickson over at Ninja Monkeys for posting the diagnosis and fix!  :)

New look for Google Analytics

New look for Google AnalyticsLast week Google revamped their web-statistics package Google Analytics.  The new look boasts some very web 2.0-ish graphs and provides all the same reports as before.

One of the new features is a drill-down world map, which provides a bit of an easier view of where your visitors are coming from.  Some more detail from the “what’s new” email that was sent to analytics subscribers:Geographic Drill-down reporting

  • Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.
  • Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.
  • Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
  • Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion University tips are available from every report.

This is a great new look for the Analytics tool, which in fine Google tradition has been kept as a free service for everyone in the web community.

You can read more detail in the Google Analytics Blog post by Jeff Gillis from the GA team.

Good on ya, Google.  I’ve enjoyed looking through the GA changes over the last week or so and will do so in more detail in the coming days and weeks.  Now if you could just fix that pesky 10MB file limit in GMail….

Lets Get Virtual!

Several months ago I picked up a new machine, a MacBook, from which the bast majority of these blog posts have flowed. I absolutely love my MacBook and I can see myself becoming a regular Mac user with future computer purchases. That said, for about the past 15 years, I’ve been a devout Windows user. I do still on occasion develop Windows-based applications and it really is much easier to do that on a Windows machine. ;) So, what’s a geek to do? It sure wouldn’t look very technology savvy of me to carry around a second laptop when I have this sleek MacBook so… Virtualization to the rescue! Apple offers a Beta of its BootCamp product to work with OS X 10.4. It would allow me to install and boot Windows directly from my Mac. Not a bad option, but I had some issues:

  1. All the rebooting to switch OS’s would be annoying at best.
  2. The partitioning magic that ships with BootCamp wouldn’t work. To use it, I would have had to wipe and reload OS X and Windows.
  3. Couldn’t use BootCamp to boot from my brand spankin’ new external drive.

So the other options I was left with are Parallels and a new offering from VMWare called Fusion. Parallels has been around for a while and does a decent job of supporting Windows, and a few other OS’s as well (Linux, Solaris), but lacks 64-bit Windows support. Fusion also has similar support capabilities, but does come with some bugs as the product is still in a Beta cycle. What finally sold me on Fusion were three separate things:

  1. VMWare’s support for virtually any operating system I could throw at it (including 64-bit versions of Windows)
  2. VMWare’s website contains tons of pre-built “Virtual Appliances” which are self-contained operating system/application bundles which can be up and running within about a minute of the download completing.
  3. Portability. VMWare has an application called VMWare Player which is available for both Windows and Linux which will allow me to port my virtual machine instances to other computers. Geek factor? Yes.

OSX in V

Screenshot of me installing Visual Studio 2005 on Vista in Fusion on my MacBook with the blog post in the background. ;) For those of you interested, here’s the configuration I’ve got for this VMWare client:

  • Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Edition
  • Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise Edition
  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition
  • 1GB dedicated system memory
  • 1 Virtual CPU (may switch to 2 for some operations (ie large compiles)

In getting everything setup there are already three unexpected features of VMWare Fusion that have impressed me. These are features that were either undocumented, or listed as missing in the last few reviews that I’ve read. Couple of Windows Vista caps in a Very small screen.The first thing that I noticed by accident is that the Command key opens the Start menu! For me, this is a major selling feature, I use keyboard shortcuts for literally everything. This feature is also missing from Microsoft’s own RDP client for OS X. The second is a bit more intriguing: when you resize the VMWare window, the resolution of the Windows Vista client is adjusted to match. No scrollbars. No distortion. Genius! Finally there is automatic drag-and-drop support for transferring files between my OS X installation and my Windows Vista installation. In fact, the two screenshots above were dropped into vista, stitched together, and then dropped back into OS X. Though it’s only been installed for a short time, I think that this VMWare environment will solve my mobile computing issues, allowing me to port a Windows installation with my Mac and live in both worlds.

Getting WGET for OS X 10.4.x

!!! Geek Alert !!!

Sometime ago Apple removed the tool wget from the OS X toolset and replaced it with the arguably more powerful curl tool. This new tool is great, and it has many new advanced features that the older wget tool lacks. However curl has one thing against it: it’s somewhat more complicated to use (and its man page is much longer). As a result, I find I use wget far more frequently.

So the question is, where to get wget?

The answer? Right here!

You can download a package of the binaries and an install script/readme file from here. (Thanks to Quentin Stafford-Fraser for doing the initial version of the binary pack).

Alternately, you can follow these steps (shamelessly cannibalized from wincent.com) to acquire and build wget for yourself. Note: This does require that you have the Apple Developer Tools (XCode) installed.

# Make a working directory somewhere, anywhere in fact.
mkdir wget
cd wget# The original instructions called for you to get the source from the cvs repository
# but it looks like that copy of the code no longer exists.  I believe they switched to
# a subversion repository, but since OS X doesn't come with SVN by default, we'll
# just have to do things the old fashioned way
# Download a copy of the source code for wget.  I found mine at
# http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/wget/
# (pulling down a file like this is a perfect use for wget)
curl http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/wget/wget-1.10.2.tar.gz -o wget-1.10.2.tar.gz

# Uncompress the archive
tar -zxvf wget-1.10.2.tar.gz

# Move into the new wget source folder and perform the build actions
cd wget-1.10.2
./configure --with-ssl
make

# Run the installation command.  This will require the root password to complete
sudo make install

# Exit the sudo
exit

# The default installation folder is /usr/local/bin. In Mac OS X 10.4.x, this folder
# is not a part of the $PATH variable by default.  You can add it with the command below
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

Again, a big thank you to those whose articles I plagiarized referenced. These binaries above were compiled on the MacBook (Intel Core Duo, OS X 10.4.9). I would think that they will work on any Intel-based Mac for sure, not sure about PowerPC versions. Let me know if this works out for you!

EDIT (2007-06-02): Judging by some of the comments, it appears that this build does not work on PowerPC-based Macs.  I’m looking into the steps required for creating a universal binary now…  Stay Tuned!

DD-WRT: Routers the Next Generation

I realize it’s not a new technology (its on ver. 23), but its one I’ve recently adopted.  We’re planning on doing some re-arranging to put an office in the house, and that means computers in different rooms.  What I need now, I said to myself, is a way of extending my wireless network to another room… preferably with a router on the other end too so I can plug in a non-wireless computer.

The problem: The firmware for my Linksys WRT54G doesn’t allow that, at least not easily.

Enter the DD-WRT firmware package to save the day.  This package gives you full “god-mode-like” control over your router’s settings, and thus your entire wireless network.  Multiple routers can be placed in the same space to allow a WLAN to be extended to a much greater range (this is the same basic principle as a cellular network).  The principle is referred to as a Wireless Distribution System (WDS), with the individual access points acting as repeaters.

Next week I’ll be picking up the second node for my Wireless home network so that I can finally move that other computer upstairs!  :)

DD-WRT has a ton of other features including the ability to host a hot-spot of your very own.  This is particularly useful for small businesses who may wish to offer wifi connectivity on their premises.  Check out the DD-WRT wiki for a full rundown on what this package can do.

For additional information on tricking out your Linksys WRT54G, check out Aaron Wiess’ article “The Open Source WRT54G Story” on wi-fiplanet.com.

Outlook 2003 RSS Plugin – RSS Popper

xml.pngRecently we’ve begun to deploy some Web 2.0 technologies within the workplace, namely blogs and a wiki.  The team I’m on is fairly technical, and in some ways its a bit surprising that none of us had tried something like this before… but that’s a post for another day.

With the increasing popularity of the tools, it became evident quickly that browsing through all the pages on a daily basis to help monitor content and just stay on top of things.  The solution: an RSS reader of course.  I’ve been used to using SharpReader on my older Windows machines, and since I’ve moved to the Mac I pretty much rely on the Google-tabs pages to track all the headlines.  But in the office I quite literally live in my outlook.

Enter RSS Popper.  This is a quick to install plugin for Outlook which places a “mail items” folder under your mailbox, and fetches all of the new entries from specified RSS feeds, and can do each feed at a custom interval if need be.  This is a basic plugin, there’s no doubt about that, but its quick and reasonably reliable.

Try it out, download your copy of RSS Popper from the website.

WordPress Upgrade Script

For those of you who run your own blogs, and take care of the updates yourselves, I’ve created a WordPress Upgrade script. Note: This is a Linux/Unix/Mac OS X shell script, not a Windows batch file.

The script is very simple:

  1. Download the latest WordPress archive from the website
  2. Uncompress it to a temporary location
  3. Migrate all of the themes, plugins and uploads
  4. Copy over wp-config.php
  5. Back up the old version
  6. Move the new version into the proper folder

Inspiration for this came with this week’s WordPress 2.1.1 update. I figured if I have to keep up with all the security updates, I might as well just build a script to simplify matters.

Download a copy of the script from here.

Questions, comments, compliments or constructive criticism will be gladly accepted!

GMail-based File Storage

Google “G”With the advent of Google’s GMail a few years ago, and their explosive increase to 1GB (and subsequently 2GB) of storage in 2005 it was only a matter of time until they opened up the API to allow people to take advantage of GMail’s features.

Enter a series of add-ons for various operating systems which allow you to use your GMail account as a file storage location. They provide the ability to store files in an Internet accessible location, and retrieve the files from any computer which can access GMail and the internet.

Now, if you’re thinking this sounds like it would be a very slow mechanism to transfer data you’re right. These plugins essentially need to perform all the same functions as any other email client to send and retrieve the files. But it’s a case of accessibility vs. speed. For those files you just can’t live without, this may be the solution for you.

It can also clutter up your account a bit. If you still have a bunch of GMail invites, send one to yourself and set up a separate account to use as your “G Drive”. :D

For Windows users, download GMail Drive. For Mac OS X users, download gDisk.