Friday, August 20, 2004

Cool Search Tool:Recall Toolbar

Recall Toolbar
"Recall Toolbar is a better browser history.

Recall Toolbar is a personal search engine that helps you instantly find that needle that you're trying to find again in the haystack of pages you've already visited.

Recall Toolbar creates a local (i.e., on your hard drive) index of pages when you visit them. No information about the pages you visit ever leaves your computer.

Recall Toolbar does for Internet Explorer what Lookout does for Outlook. In fact, Recall Toolbar was inspired by Lookout.

Recall Toolbar contains no spyware."

I live on the Net. I always seem to find myself looking for a past site I saw "xyz" on... "I know I was there sometime... grrr..."

Sounds like this tool will help me. And the price is JUST right. :)

It's toolbar is just one button, which when clicked, opens a local page where you can enter your search terms.

In looking at its communication via Fiddler one thing to note is that even though it's supposed to be local, it does talk to an external web server. The indexed data DOES appear to be local, but...

In looking at the conversation it doesn't look like your search terms are sent off your machine. Just that the UI is external. But if you are paranoid, you might want to look yourself...

Also it appears uses the same search engine that Lookout uses, one based on Lucene.

(via using Stuart.Cogitation;)

Update #1 8/20/2004 3:35PM PST:
I missed this on the FAQ

"Q: Free and no spyware, huh?
A: Yes, really. Here are the details:
If Recall Toolbar takes off then I'd like to add text ads like you see in most search engines. If I do that, then the search results display template, which is downloaded from here when you search, will be updated to pair search terms with an appropriate ad. "

So your search terms DO appear to be leaving your machine... No different than using any other internet search engine... still something to be aware of.

Wife Objects To Midget Above The Fridge

Wife Objects To Midget Above The Fridge

LMAO...

I'm the "organized" one of my family too...
Except I don't ask, I just do... (Guess that's cause I'm the grumpy/bear like one of the family too :)

Information Bridge Framework Training: VPC with Hands-on Labs and Demo

Information Bridge Framework Training: VPC with Hands-on Labs and Demo

The VPC I blogged about here,
Michael Kiselman: Finally!!!... IBF VPC with Demo and Hands on Labs available to anyone just for asking! , is now available as a free download...

You'll need 6-7GB free to download and set this up. The end VPC image is about 4GB... But it gives you everything you need to play with IBF.

The shame is that I've not had much time to play with this yet...

Fricken work! ;)

SANS - Internet Storm Center - Cooperative Cyber Threat Monitor And Alert System - Current Infosec News and Analysis

SANS - Internet Storm Center - Cooperative Cyber Threat Monitor And Alert System - Current Infosec News and Analysis

"Anti-Spyware Tool Kit

Yesterday's diary entry solicited a number of replies regarding the "tool kits" people use for fighting spyware, malware and viruses. I've collated the most popular, from both e-mail submissions and some from the Handlers themselves. This list is not necessarily complete in anyway...just a starter for people to help build their own kit.

Tools:
Spybot - Search & Destroy: http://security.kolla.de/ orhttp://www.safer-networking.org
Ad-Aware: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/
SwatIt:http://www.swatit.org
TDS-3 - Trojan Defence Suite: http://tds.diamondcs.com.au/
TrojanHunter: http://www.misec.net/trojanhunter
TheCleaner: http://www.moosoft.com/
BHOdemon: http://www.spychecker.com/download/download_bhodaemon.html
SpySweeper: http://www.webroot.com/
Process Explorer: http://www.sysinternals.com/
HijackThis: http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/
AntiVir: http://www.free-av.com/
AVG: http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_index.php


Sites:
Rogue/Suspect Anti-Spyware Products & Web Sites: http://www.spywarewarrior.com/rogue_anti-spyware.htm
Broadband Reports (aka DSL Reports): http://www.dslreports.com/forum/security,1

Please note, some or all of these tools are NOT for the novice, and should be used with GREAT care. If you are not careful, you may damage parts of your operating system. "

I want to be able to find this info again... posting.

Gmail Notifier

Gmail Notifier

New "official" GMail New Mail Notifier (beta) from Google.

(via Will's Blog - Adventures of an IT Grad)

Thursday, August 19, 2004

GNUWin -- Open your Windows (GNUWin II)

GNUWin -- Open your Windows (GNUWin II)

"GNUWin II is a free software compilation for Windows. You will find three main features on it :

Software
GNUWin II includes numerous programs, completely free, which cover a wide spectrum of uses. The complete application list, sorted by type, is available here.

The software included in GNUWin is not shareware nor freeware, but original free software and Open Source software, for which the source code is available, and that is and will always be free (free both as in "free speech", and as in "free beer").

Most programs included in this CD are also available for free and Open Source operating systems, such as GNU/Linux, BSD, etc.

Articles
You will also find numerous articles that explain the free software and Open Source spirit.

On-line help and explanations for GNUWin
To help you discover the fascinating world of free software and Open Source, we ourselves wrote a few texts, notably a F.A.Q. (Frequently Asked Questions) that should answer the first questions of most new users. If a particular term sounds unfamiliar to you, the glossary might be a great help. Furthermore, technical words found within the texts are links that lead to the respective glossary entry; you can thus simply click on a particular word if you want an explanation of its meaning."


Enough free Windows apps to fit on two CD's. The app list is here.

Downloadable as CD-ROM sized ISO's so you can burn to CD or mount with DaemonTools, Alcohol 120%,Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP or Virtual PC (where I'm playing with them).

I like free...

Freeware Suggestions under Windows (OSNews)

Freeware Suggestions under Windows

Nice two page article on freeware apps for Windows. Grouped by category (Audio, Video, Browser, Productivity, etc) there's also a little blurb on each app.

Mostly names you probably already know (firebird, MyIE, OpenOffice,etc), still nice to have them in one article.

(via theofficeweblog)

.NET and integration with BCP

.NET and integration with BCP

Nice code sample on running BCP from .Net.

Short and sweat. provides a nice example of how to run a command line app from .Net, capture the input,etc all via System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo.

Oh so true... Quote of the Day

Quotes of the Day - The Quotations Page - 8/19/2004

"Accomplishing the impossible means only that the boss will add it to your regular duties.
Doug Larson"

Mr. Larson must work in my office... :|

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

"Here's how I track down memory leaks in my .Net apps - level 400"

Here's how I track down memory leaks in my .Net apps - level 400

Nice article about hunting down memory leaks in .Net. Also some links to utilities to help with this.

RSS Weather

RSSWeather.com

RSS is just too cool in all the usages it can be put too...

At RSSWeather you can create a custom RSS feed for the weather in your area (or an area of interest).

Subscribed.

(via Steve Makofsky's WebLog)

... New Hotmail Services


MSN Suspends Search Beta%3B Adds New Hotmail Services


"...Also on Tuesday, MSN introduced what several new, free MSN services that it's calling "life management features" for its Hotmail customers. Among the new services MSN added are online calendaring, online task manager, note creation, and reminders. MSN also added new functionality to the contact management service that's already available to Hotmail users, enabling them to store more detailed contact information than just names and e-mail addresses. All of these new services are available immediately, according to Microsoft..."

Cool... New stuff for my Hotmail account (it's confirmed that I see these new features).

The calendar stuff looks nice.

Now I need to see if it sync's with my Outlook.

Carlos Aguilar Mares Home Page (Cool Tools)

Home Page

"WebChart: Control for rendering charts in ASP.NET and WinForms application
XGrid: IE Behavior to render XML as a grid with filtering/paging/sorting support in the client-side
X-Map: Html Map Editor, application to create HTML Maps.
ForumColorizer: Simple application to generate the markup to add posts in the forums at www.asp.net so they look like VS.NET .
Excel Xml Writer: Library to generate Excel workbooks in .NET.
NEW!!! New article on how to create your own Visual Studio .NET Project Template. "

Also available is DBDiagrams, which is talked about here

Some nice and cool utilities and libraries...

(via Alan Dean)

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

IBots Revolution v2.0 (GotDotNet User Sample)

(GotDotNet User Sample) IBots Revolution

"IBots Revolution v2.0

Arena Battle Robots

"Features:
- Arena Builder.
- Robot Builder based on visual/schematic "programming" (SchematicControl).
- Code bots using Sensors, Values, Operators and Behaviors (SchematicNodes)."

This rocks! A very cool download (with c# source code too).

Build your bots (in a cool visual enviroment), build an arena and watch them fight it out!

I can see this helping me waste a good bit of time... err... I mean, I can see myself doing a good bit of bot research with this tool....

:)

Monday, August 16, 2004

Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 Migration Toolkit Beta

Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 Migration Toolkit Beta

"Thank you for your interest in the Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 Migration Toolkit (VSMT) Beta. A free, downloadable tool for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, VSMT automates the migration of an operating system and installed applications from a physical server to a server running within a virtual machine that is provided and managed by Virtual Server 2005."

Interesting... Since Virtual Server uses the same HD images as Virtual PC, I'm thinking I can use this tool to help me create VPC images I can use locally...?

That would REALLY help me as I move off of Win2K and to XP, but need to still support Win2K.

Beta signed up for.

nSurvey 1.2 Released

free .net survey software solutions web based

"NSurvey has been released in v1.2.

Many new cool features were added in this release :

- Previous / next paging has been added
- Survey's progress can be saved by user using cookies on his computer and resumed later
- Progress information can now be shown to the user in page numbers or percentage progress
- Receive a short or full report email notification of an entry after it has been saved in the DB
- The web.config can be configured with your SMTP server basic authentication credentials
- Installer supports now integrated security beside the old SQL security one
- Query string, session, cookie or server variables values can now be piped into "default text" enabled answers
- New hidden field answer type added. This type is best used with the default text value piping options
- Question of another survey can be copied into the current survey from the insert question screen "

My fav open source survey tool has rev'ed again... This is a professional product and it just gets better.