Download VirtuaWin
VirtuaWin’s Homepage

Windows users rejoice! Linux users have been enjoying virtual desktops for many years now. It has always been something I felt I could do without. VirtuaWin is a simple easy to use virtual desktop manager for windows. Once configured you can switch between desktops with the mouse or keyboard just like Linux. If you have grown acustom to virtual desktops or would like to give it a try you could do allot worse then VirtuaWin. Free, open source and GNU GPL are all good reasons to give VirtuaWin a try.

If you are like me you have a dozen ore two programs running at once, and why not with today’s system power. VirtuaWin lets you organize your software into logical groupings. Since windows treats a second monitor as an extension of your desktop VirtuaWin is particularly good for dual monitor setups giving you a new desktop on both your monitors when you switch. I usually only need two desktops one for my my web stuff and another for program development. These two desktops often contain allot of the same things but are logically separate for me. VirtuaWin helps me achieve that separation of work and play on my Windows systems.

In the virtual desktop world honorable mention goes to Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manage. Also open source Virtual Desktop Manager bests VirtuaWin in most every way. Unfortunately VDM is still in early beta and crashed on me several times in my testing. I have high hopes for this software when an official release is available.

SugarSync (previously known as Hummingbird) is a service from Sharpcast to allow easy network accessible storage across the web. It offers 1 GB of free storage and will eventually offer upgraded storage space for a fee. But is it worth trying…

First Impressions…

The Pros:

The web and client interface is well done and intuitive a good example of new web design. It does a good job of keeping track of the newest version of a file. I have used it in my testing to keep code snippets current as I move from system to system through the day (something I had been doing with GSpace and my Google account). Once setup the process is seamless the client software is good at keeping itself out of the way and doing its job. It even has a very slickly integrated mobile interface that is looks nice (even though I haven’t got a chance to try it).

The Cons:

A couple of years ago when Google announced a web based e-mail account with one GB of storage it seemed like allot. Now Gmail offers over 6GB of storage for your e-mail. One GB for mail two years ago was allot, one GB of storage for files today is not enough. That’s what SharpCast is hoping for that the service is good enough to make you pay for the additional storage. Right now in the beta you get 11 GB since they know 1 GB is useless and doesn’t give people a honest test of the system.

Over All:

This is an impressive offering, a service I for one could really get some use of. Unfortunately it has its problems. SugarSync is headed for a bit more then keeping data files synchronized between your systems. The tabs in their web interface show “Photo Gallery” and “Address Book”, this is a great idea on the surface. When you synchronize key files keeping photos and addresses synchronized is a great idea. Unfortunately for Sharpcast the people that would be interested in SugarSync are also the kind of people that already have a online address book and photo sharing system.

The obvious answer in my opinion is that Sharpcast is just waiting for the phone to ring. This kind of service would be a no brain-er acquisition for Microsoft or Google. Coupled with Yahoo’s Flickr and Yahoo Mail’s address book (soon to be Microsoft owned) or GMail and Picasa this would be a serious value add. If you leverage the already sizable storage that GMail offers (and Microsoft clearly could) with a file synchronizing system as slick as Sharpcast’s you would have something of serious note.

In order to explain fully why I do not use any kind of anti-virus on my personal computer. I must explain a bit about the way things used to be and the way they are now. This story is roughly chopped into three pieces ‘The way things where.’, ‘The way things are.’ and ‘OK so anti-virus is almost useless what do I do?’

‘The way things were’

Most of us are our family technicians, we are the people that setup Mom’s surround sound. When spyware/adware started to get bad we would get the call to come and take care of a friends computer. Often the computer would be spontaneously popping up ads and slowly chugging along hogging what little bandwidth the dial-up had. Along comes the tech friend with a few minor tools like hijackThis and a boot disk and hunts down the offending executable.

The old method for malware writers was a game of hide and seek. Without getting into too much technical detail there are a large handful of places to hide something to make it run at boot on a windows system. Hiding a request to make some code start up and obfuscating the where and the how is all malicious software could manage. In this day anti-virus software was very handy most of the time because it was trivial to remove most problematic programs when they where found. The scanning software did not need to be too fanatical about things since most badware really wasn’t that bad.

In the old days of bad software the payload was often something trivial, funny, or annoying but rarely if ever truly malicious. The Whale Virus filled your hard drive up by replicating itself zillions of times. The Yankee Doodle Virus made your internal speaker play the song for which it was named relentlessly. Most virus writers where not bad people and the few that where bad people knew that when a virus obliterates the system it is on it no longer has that system under its control and can no longer replicate itself.

At this time I recommended and sometimes even used anti-virus software.

And then things changed…

Continue Reading »

Capture is a freeware tool I wrote early last year and have not distributed it anywhere before. When ran Capture creates a txt file named

Info-UserName-ComputerName-Date.txt

this file contains the info below.

I used this on my USB drives to gather information on systems I worked on in my daily PC tech work perhaps someone else will find use for it.

Some info has been replaced with *s since this was taken from a system I once ran this on.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
User Name: ***
Computer Name: ********
Date: 11-02-07
———————–
Resolution: 1280×800
Color Depth: 32
Refresh Rate: 60
———————–
HomeDrive: C:\
OS Version: WIN_XP
Type: XP Professional
OS Serial: *****-OEM-*******-*****
OS Lang: 0409 (English)
OS ServicePack: Service Pack 2
——————————-
IP Address 1: 192.168.1.102
IP Address 2: 5.81.252.191
MAC: 00-16-CF-46-4E-B8
——————————-
Total Space on C: 37.2 GB
Total Free Space on C: 5 GB
Serial Number For Drive C:/ 3961386100
File System For Drive C:/ NTFS
——————————-
Total Ram: 1022.4 Ram Avalible: 174.4
Page File Total Space: 923 Page File Space Availbe: 248
Virtual Memory Avalibe: 1988
Desktop Resolution: 1280×800
——————————-
IE Version: 7.0.5730.11
——————————-
Sound Card: SigmaTel High Definition Audio CODEC
Video Card: ATI Mobility Radeon X1300
NIC: Broadcom 440x 10/100 Integrated Controller
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

I have not worked on this in quite a please report bugs or change requests here

Download Capture .5 Beta

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

E-Mail addresses are today’s de facto communication method. It’s how we keep in touch with friends and co-workers it is important that your e-mail address says what you want it to say about you. Reading something more into a e-mail address is something we all do, if you see an @yahoo.com address on a business card it better be from someone who works at Yahoo.

Below is how I handle e-mail it may not be the best way but it has worked well for me for several years. This is how you can have a nearly unlimited number of e-mail address and only ever have to check one.

1. Get a domain name. I use 1and1 for all the hosting I need and don’t have means to do at home. You can get your domain name and e-mail forwarding and thats is all you need for this. Starting at $1 a month (50% off for the first 3 months). I even host this site and many others at 1and1. I have a “my first and last name.com” and a nice domain name with my family name in it specifically for e-mail reasons.
2. Set up a master account. The address is unimportant since you wont be giving it out to anyone, but what is important is the interface. I prefer a Gmail account, it is free, has a wonderful interface and uses its massive member database to detect spam e-mail amazingly well. With a nearly limitless number of e-mail addresses pointed at your master address a powerful spam filter is important. I hardly hear a whisper of spam on my master account.
3. Set up your forwards. In the 1and1 control panel (as with most other providers) you can set up a *@DomainName.com e-mail address to forward to your master e-mail address. This will send all mail to that domain to the master account.
4. Set up your FROM address. Gmail will allow you to setup multiple “Send As” addresses. Go to Settings>Accounts>Send Mail As. I set up an Admin@ Webmaster@ me@ and so on for the various domains. So I can send mail as any prefix on a domain I own that I want to at that time.

This entire process should take no more than an hour and should be very easy to do.

Whats the upside?

• Being able to tell anyone your e-mail address is TheirName@YourName.com is cool and gets fun looks. People tend to remember that kind of thing.
• Giving a specific address to a site you register for allows you to keep track of who sold you out to a spam list. If a forum asks you to register you can give it the address ForumName@YourName.com and be able to back that up with an authorization response.
• If a specific address starts getting an abundance of unblocked spam you can always set up a filter to block that address.

If you don’t have the desire to go through the above, services like 10 Minute Mail and BugMeNot offer a quick, easy and perfectly acceptable solution to the spam address problem. But I like my way a lot better.