Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day: 07/26/2009

Saturday, August 01, 2009

Nero now offering a “Free Forever” Version (Basic burn and coping only, email needed-ware)

Windows 7 Hacker - Nero Now Offers Free Version for End Users

“Windows 7 offers a lot more built-in burning features than any previous versions. However, I still prefer using the 3rd party burning tool for any my burning tasks. Nero is my favorite tool for this purpose.

Now it’s even better that Nero offers a free version that is promised FREE FOREVER. Nothing is better than that. It’s a striped down version that only contains simply data burning and disc copying features for CDs and DVDs. And it should be good enough for most of the people

…”

Nero – Nero 9 Free Version

“What’s better than free? Free forever! Nero offers you the chance to enjoy Nero’s world-renowned data disc burning and copying features for an unlimited time, absolutely FREE!

Enjoy basic data burning and copying capabilities for your CDs and DVDs from the world’s most trusted digital media brand, Nero.

…”

Sure Windows 7 is coming with ISO burning backed in, but still having this is cool… Hey it’s “Nero”!
(Why oh why doesn’t Win7 also include ISO mounting too? sigh… but that’s a whine for another day)

Anyway… Just enter your email address and the download enables and starts, quick and painless…

Standing up to say, “Installing Security Patches != Install New App’s” – Just say Yes to “Security Updates should only offer Security Updates”

THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA" - Patchers Demand Security Updates Only

“Spread the word. If you want to put in your blog site a campaign to showcase that you too are sick and tired of prechecking of software installers that are included in security updates.

Put this code below into your blog site (in Community Server it's in the News section) to showcase that you have had it with vendors that are sneaking software onto consumer machines in the guise of security updates.

=====start here=====
<a href="http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/blogs/mowgreen/index.php?showentry=1564"><img src="http://imk3xq.bay.livefilestore.com/y1p1UoWJx5pbfw0Eua0Ybyw20g4Nb3NSaNwtb57Dy3ITBVUguIg513j_SoQHAjUuLg0RuhDZVbD8AMTDiUbDfNb92wldtgJuOGU/banthechecksmall.PNG" alt="[Security updates should only offer Security updates]" title="Let's get vendors to stop offering toolbars and extra software with Security Updates" border="0" /><br /><br />
=====stop here=====

It will resolve into that red banned check logo you now see on the left side of the blog and point to Steve Wechsler's campaign to stop vendors from doing this.

…”

The Clippings of Chairman Mow - Hey, Software "Vendors", Stop installing CRAP with your security updates !!!

“A notice appears on your PC about an update for Adobe Flash Player. Adobe, in their infinite wisdom, doesn't inform Users why this update has come out.

The User, thinking that it improves the Flash Player, hurries to install it, clicking quickly through the installation pages.
When the update is done, guess what ? There's another toolbar installed to Internet Explorer !!!

In the US, it will likely be either a Yahoo or Google tool bar.

Lord knows which tool bar Users in other regions find installed.

Or, there's an update to Sun Java. Again, there's no explanation about why there's an update. Once more, the beaten down weary from constant updating User doesn't notice that Sun is also offering a tool bar, which in the US is probably the MSN tool bar. European Users will likely have other crappy tool bars stuffed on to their systems.

Now, why are these "vendors" allowed to install 3rd party tool bars along with .... wait ... wait ... wait some more ...
SECURITY UPDATES

…

Signed,
One Pissed Off User Who Refuses To Take It Anymow !!!”

I HATE it when installing a security update, the “update” also wants to install new app X, Y or Z. I’ve bitched about this before, and am doing so again.

If you, vendors, feel you MUST include other ~~crap~~ stuff in your “security updates” at least have the decency to uncheck it by default! GRRR!!! Every time I install a “security update” and I have to uncheck a bunch of ~~crap~~ stuff it leaves a bad taste in my mouth and a feeling of dislike toward that company. It just smells bad, you know?

Look, I’m already pissed off that I have to apply this security patch for your software anyway… Now I also have to have to be careful to that I, or my family, don’t install MORE of your stuff, stuff that if I wanted I’d already have?

Yes, I know no code is prefect. Believe me I KNOW! And security updates are a fact of life and I appreciate that you are patching your software, but please just patch the software! Don’t “offer” other ~~crap~~ stuff with the patch.

Say it with me, “Security Updates should only offer Security Updates!”

Is that really so much to ask?

Friday, July 31, 2009

[Humor] – Noah Tweets

Historical Tweets - Noah’s Ark, as Told by @EddieIzzard

This made me snort laugh… ;)

If you tweet, and have an “accepting” (i.e. you’re open to laugh at yourself or beliefs, are not overly sensitive, etc, etc) sense of humor, then you owe it to yourself to check out Historical Tweets

Craig's Utility Library v1.5 – Sometimes we just need that Image to ASCII art converter (and all those other cool things in Craig’s grab-bag o’ code)

Craig's Utility Library - Craig's Utility Library Code 1.5

“…

Released: Jul 29 2009

Updated: Jul 29 2009 by JaCraig

Dev status: Stable

…

Downloads & Files

Utilities1_5.zip, source code, 3104K, uploaded Wed

Release Notes

This release contains the following added functionality:

Javascript minification

Image related classes:

Converter from an image to ASCII art

Ability to draw rounded rectangles

Take the negative of an image

…”

CodePlex - Craig's Utility Library

“Project Description
Craig's Utility Library (or CUL, as in cull because I'm not that creative), was initially designed through a number of projects that I've worked on. Over time I assembled a number of classes to handle various tasks and continue to add a number of items in my spare time including the following:

Encryption

AES

Caesar

DES

RSA

TripleDES

Vernam

Hashing

MD5

SHA1

Compression

Deflate

GZip

Serialization (XML, SOAP, and binary)

File management (including FTP and HTTP)

Email

Pop3 client (SSL capable)

MIME parser

SMTP email sending (SSL capable)

Exchange inbox email retrieval

HTML related functions

Javascript related functions (including minification)

CSS related functions (including minification)

Image manipulation

Cropping, resizing, rotating, flipping

To black and white or sepia tone

Threshold and edge detection

Text drawing, watermarks, object drawing helpers

Taking a screenshot which spans monitors

RGB Histograms

Various convolution filters such as sharpen, sobel emboss, etc. along with the ability to create your own easily.

Various other filters such as "jitter", pixelate, sin wave, median filter, and dilation, red/green/blue filters,

Multiple blurring techniques including box blur, Gaussian blur, Kuwahara, and Symmetric Nearest Neighbor blur

Bump map and Normal map helpers

ASCII art generator

Adjust brightness, gamma, and contrast

Active Directory querying

Includes functions for active users, all users, all groups, active members in groups, etc.

Exchange querying

Free/Busy data

Get next/previous available time for appointments

Get contacts

Get appointments/events

Get emails

Get the GAL

SQL query helper

File formats/Microformats

XMDP

RSS (with iTunes/Zune information embedded for podcasts)

vCard/hCard

vCalendar/hCalendar

iCalendar (with email sending capabilities, cancellation, and automatically putting it in Exchange)

APML

OPML

FOAF

XFN

CSV

RSD

BlogML

Code to render a web page to BMP file

WebBrowser control cache clearing class

Reflection helper

Randomization

Including string randomization based on allowable characters, date randomization, and Lorem Ipsum generation.

Environment information

Process management

Error/Information gathering

Track back and ping back helper classes

Math related classes

Matrix

Vector

And some basic data conversion

…”

Craig’s taken his grab-bag of utility functions and shared it with the world. This is a code distribution, so only grab it if you’re into code (and who isn’t? lol).

You’ve got to love the scope of all this… There’s got to be a bit of code here for about everyone. The license is very loose and open as well making it easy for us to stand on a giant’s shoulder’s (i.e. to leverage Craig’s cool work).

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Let sanity rein in your SharePoint deployment and configuration management - SharePoint Action Framework (SAF) Released

Mark Jones - SAF is released!

“At Last! Finally, we have released the SharePoint Action Framework (SAF) on CodePlex!! Please take a look at : http://saf.codeplex.com .

Now that I can take a minute, I just wanted to spend a bit of time detailing why we have spent the best part of 18 months (with lots of late nights building it!) Here's a FAQ to give you some answers:

If you are developing with SharePoint, do you suffer from any of these ?

Lots of Defects caused by differences in SharePoint Farms. – eg. “It works on Integration, but not on QA!” .

Your Development team find it time consuming telling your Release team what to do for each release. “How hard can it be to put 5 columns in a Content Type?”

You have release documents (notepad, word, etc) that don’t contain enough information on how to deploy, or they always miss things and are extremely time consuming to create. “By heck surely there must be a better way of telling the Operations team what I need doing ?”

Deployments to key farms are always late and very stressful. “I hope we don’t get a release like that again, I didn’t finish till 2am”

Developers find it hard to do daily builds as SharePoint Config is not part of the daily build process.

Its hard to reproduce what you have on one farm to another.

Changes to Testing and Live Farms never seem to be applied to the Development Farm.

You have lots of Features doing "similar" things, but not many are reusable.

Why we built SAF (“Techy” answer)?

Put simply, SAF allows you to author SharePoint configuration changes so that you can install (“do”) or uninstall (“undo”) them on your Dev, Test and Live Farms. …

…”

CodePlex - SAF - (A SharePoint Build and Deployment Tool)

“…

Project Description
SAF is a way to automate and repeat configuration changes in SharePoint using "Actions". These actions can then be grouped together as Xml into a "Macro" and then run from a Feature, STSADM command. MSBuild or WCF Service (coming soon).

Installation Instructions
To install or upgrade SAF please read this : http://www.collaboris.co.uk/blogs/09-06-18/How_to_install_SAF.aspx

Latest Info
For the latest blog posts about SAF, please go here : http://www.collaboris.co.uk/Blogs/Mark.aspx?CntCatID=dc5a1df9-790f-43ee-b3e8-c0124927b7af

…”

While I don’t do SharePoint much these days myself, I do hear and read about it and it seems that configuration management, deployment and code promotion is a major pain point. I saw SAF and thought that it might those of you fighting this battle…

Some additional and related blog posts from Mark Jones, How to Install SAF, Run STSADM commands from SAF, Content Migration using SAF

.Net 4 Beta 1 “Experimental Edition” – C# programmers getting “Software Transactional Memory,” STM.NET

InfoQ - .NET 4 Beta 1 Now Supports Software Transactional Memory

“Microsoft has released a new version of .NET 4.0 Beta 1, one that incorporates STM.NET, the Software Transactional Memory. STM is an alternative mechanism to lock-based synchronization used to control the concurrent access to shared memory.

…

STM uses an optimistic approach to accessing a shared piece of memory. Instead of blocking the writer until it is safe to perform the changes to the shared data, the thread accesses and edits the shared data while logging each read and write it performs. In the end, it verifies if another thread has happened to access the shared data in the same time. If not, a commit is executed and the changes are made permanent. If another thread has accessed the data, the transaction is aborted, and all changes are rolled back.

STM.NET uses Atomic.Do() to mark statements that are to be executed as one transaction:

…

Requirements: Visual Studio 2008, Windows Installer 3.1 or later, Internet Explorer 5.01 or later. STM.NET is currently available only for C#.”

All About Microsoft - Microsoft releases second, 'experimental' version of .Net 4 Beta 1

“Microsoft released its first Beta of Visual Studio 2010 and the accompanying .Net Framework 4.0 back in May. On July 28, Microsoft announced it was releasing a second version of .Net 4.0 Beta 1.

Huh? That was my reaction when I saw a tweet about it earlier today. (Thanks for that, dotnetangel.)

But, yes, it’s true, as Senior Vice President of Microsoft’s Developer Division Soma Somasegar blogged today, calling the second version of .Net 4.0 Beta 1, STM.Net (with STM = software transactional memory), an “experimental” release. Somasegar said Microsoft had made the STM.Net code available for download via the MSDN DevLabs site.

…”

Somasegar's WebLog - STM.NET on DevLabs

“Today we made available STM.NET on MSDN DevLabs. STM.NET is an experimental enhanced version of .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 that enables software transactional memory for C# programmers.

Transactional memory is a technology that frees developers from worrying about the mechanics of fine-grained locking and synchronization in multithreaded applications by providing transactional semantics for reading and writing to memory. It enables developers to focus on application logic instead of the details of memory I/O when building multi-core and many-core programs.

….

One of the best aspects of STM.NET is its integration with Visual Studio tooling. STM.NET works with the Visual Studio 2008 debugger to allow you to see the values of transacted variables as they appear while running inside the Atomic.Do delegate as well as their values as they appear outside.

STM.NET is available for download today. Share your thoughts and experiences on the project’s forum, and read more about STM.NET on the STM.NET Team Blog.

…”

Interesting, in both the technology and how this is a .Net 4 thing that runs in VS2008. I like the concept behind STM, but will sit on the sidelines watching until there’s VB.Net support and it’s baked a little more. Still it’s nice to see this kind of thing moving forward…

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

P2 eXplorer v2.0 – Free utility to easily mount and explore forensic HD images (dd, FTK, EnCase, SafeBack, etc)

Paraben Forensics - P2 eXplorer v2.0

“…
Paraben's P2 eXplorer allows you to mount your forensic image and explore it as though it were a drive on your machine while preserving the forensic nature of your evidence. In fact, P2 eXplorer is one of the only programs that mounts images as logical and physical disks. This means all the deleted, slack, and unallocated space is accessible. An image isn't just mounted to view logical files; it is mounted as an actual bit-stream image, preserving unallocated, slack, and deleted data. P2X is easy to use and most importantly, it's free to registered users.
FEATURES:
Mounts images as physical disks
Mounts Paraben's Forensic Replicator images (PFR)
Mounts compressed & encrypted PFR images
Mounts EnCase images (up to v6)
Mounts SafeBack 1, 2 and 3 images
Mounts SMART images
Mounts FTK DD and Encase images
Mounts WinImage non-compressed images
Mounts RAW images from Linux DD & other tools
Supports Dynamic drive images
Auto-detects image format
Supports both logical and physical images types
…
…”

Not a utility you might usually see me mention, but it’s one of those, if you need it you need it (and I know I’ll need this in the future… so… ;)

(via EDD Update - Free E-Discovery Tools that May Be Worth a Bundle)

Monday, July 27, 2009

The Microsoft Office Visualization Tool (OffVis) – Spelunk (view, browse, peek into, etc) Microsoft Office Binary Format files

Microsoft Downloads - The Microsoft Office Visualization Tool (OffVis) Fact Sheet

“…

Version: 1.0

Date Published: 7/27/2009

Language: English

Download Size: 421 KB - 842

The Microsoft Office Visualization Tool (OffVis) allows IT professionals, security researchers and malware protection vendors to better understand the Microsoft Office binary file format in order to deconstruct .doc-, .xls- and .ppt-based targeted attacks. The unique, easy-to-use tool offers a comprehensive view of any Microsoft Office binary file format sample simply by hovering a cursor over it. The tool then graphically shows important data structures and records for Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office PowerPoint and Microsoft Office Excel. Users can then browse and click through each record.

…”

From the above fact sheet:

“…

About the Microsoft Office Visualization Tool

…Microsoft then offered OffVis to participants of MAPP to test. Now, MAPP partners and virus analysts use it to visualize and understand vulnerabilities, and it has helped them write detection signatures for their products. Security researchers and IT administrators now also will be able to use it to further understand file formats and identify relevant areas to invest their efforts. The tool is able to parse the complete file format and also directly identify recent publicly exploited vulnerabilities using the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures list.

…

The tool is available for download at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=158791

…”

This is a very cool tool to allow interested parties to spelunk into Microsoft Office binary files (Word/doc, Excel/xls, PowerPoint/ppt). This is a step beyond just a hex view, but instead understands and can parse the Microsoft Office binary file formats and structures.

No install required, just unzip it and run OffVis.exe (Got to love XCopy deployment’s ;)

What is Scrum? A funny 2:47 minute video of a Daily Scrum.

Steve's Tech Talk - What Is Scrum?

“…Seeing this, I thought that it would be good to show engineering process as well. Here a video about the Atalasoft Engineering Scrum Process that I put together:

…”

While this video had me laughing out loud, I still felt it was an interesting view and introduction to the “Daily Scrum” (aka daily standup, etc) part of Scrum.

Creating a bootable/installable Windows 7 (and Vista & Win2k8) USB key the easy way - “A Bootable USB” utility from AskVG.com

Tweaking with Vishal - A Bootable USB: Utility to Create Bootable USB Drive to Install Windows Vista, Server 2008 and 7

“…

Imagine a situation where you need to install Windows Vista or 7 in a system but you don't have access to DVD drive. We all know Windows Vista, Server 2008 or 7 comes in DVDs and you'll need a DVD drive to install them. Then how will you install them? The solution is, you can create a bootable USB drive which can be used to install Windows without using DVD drive.

We have posted a detailed tutorial to create such bootable USB drive long time back, you can read about it here.

The above method is very easy to follow but wouldn't it be great if we can use a utility to do the whole task automatically? Our reader "Aris" has created a small utility exclusively for AskVG readers which creates a bootable USB drive to install Windows Vista, Server 2008 or 7.

…

…”

Nice! SO much easier than manually creating a Win7 USB boot/install key. This is going to be a must have utility in the near future

(via The Road to Know Where - Free Utility Creates "Bootable USB Drive" for Windows 7 Installations)

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Visual Basic gets some T4 Toolbox love – The T4 Toolbox now supports C# and VB as a template languages

T4 Toolbox - 9.7.25.1

“… T4 Toolbox now supports both C# and Visual Basic as template language:

…”

Oleg Sych - T4 Toolbox: Visual Basic as Template Language

“As of version 9.7, T4 Toolbox now supports Visual Basic as the template language in addition to C#. You can now create text templates in Visual Basic and perform advanced code generation tasks such as create multiple output files from a single template, automatically add output files to one or more target projects, automatically check out files from source control system if they were modified during regeneration and more.

T4 Toolbox now comes with a set of project item templates for Visual Basic. Here is what you will see when adding a new item to a Visual Basic project.

…

Entire functionality of the core framework of T4 Toolbox is now available to Visual Basic developers. I have updated the T4 tutorial series to provide examples in both C# and Visual Basic.

…

CodePlex - T4 Toolbox

“T4 Toolbox is a library of code generation templates for Visual Studio.

…”

Oleg Sych - T4 Toolbox

“You may have noticed that in my last couple of articles about T4, the download links point to a CodePlex project called T4 Toolbox. I think it’s time to explain what this is all about.

What is T4 Toolbox?

T4 Toolbox is a set of ready-to-use code generation templates and essential supporting tools like custom directive processors, packaged in a simple installation program. Each completed code generation template includes a Visual Studio project item template to make it available in the Add New Item dialog of Visual Studio.

…”

Got to love it when the programming language I dream in (sigh) gets some T4 related TLC.