Hacks

Increase Hard Drive Speeds in Windows

mikedopp — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:51:40 GMT

Warning this could cause unwanted issues with your hardware as well as your Operating System. Do this only if you feel comfortable doing so. Do not blame me if your Hard Drives life is decreased in any way.

Make sure you have 512megabytes of ram before doing this.

-Start > Run > then type SYSEDIT.EXE
-Expand the system.ini file window.
-Scroll down almost to the end of the file till you find a line called [386enh]
-Press Enter to make one blank line, and in that line type
Irq14=4096

NOTE: The above info for the new line is CASE SENSITIVE
- Select File > Save
- Close SYSEDIT and reboot your computer

Simple and works with Windows Xp - Vista.

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Display Machine Details on Windows Server Login

mikedopp — Thu, 01 May 2008 10:35:56 GMT

If your like me you develop in multiple servers. Using Terminal Services is a easy way to move through these servers remotely and with ease. Often I have 6 or more Remote Sessions open at one time. This as you can well imagine can get very confusing. I got to the point I felt I needed better way to brand my Desktop sessions. I tried wallpaper which by the way works well also. However this trick works as a supplement to the wallpaper trick.This registry edit will add text to the login string on the login after you hit "ctrl alt delete" giving you a chance to identify the machine in case you get confused.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon]

"welcome"="Good Times Enter your own welcome message here"

Make sure the "welcome" is a String when adding it to the registry.

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Mess with your Friends with a fun Pop-Up Trick.

mikedopp — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 13:30:24 GMT

Open Notepad and type:

text1=msgbox("your text here",52,"your title here")

You can write as many text message boxes as you want. The many you write the many pop-ups will appear.

2. Save the text as popup.vbs. Be sure the change the 'Save as Type' to 'All Files' .

3. You can use scary messages to make a prank to your friends, like:

text1=msgbox("Virus Detected",52,"Warning: VIRUS")
text2=msgbox("Virus is installing on your system",52,"Installing...")
text3=msgbox("Virus is installing on your system",52,"Installing...")
4. When you click on popup.vbs you will receive on your screen something like this:

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Windows Server 2003 - IIS6.0 Do not delete the Default Web Site!

mikedopp — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:05:56 GMT

I being a very intelligent web developer (This is true). Decided it might be fun to delete the Default Web Site in IIS6.0 not thinking much of it. Of course it wouldn’t have mattered at all, at least until I decided to install commerce server 2007 enterprise on the production server that I had deleted the Default Web Site.

Why was this a problem you ask? Wow good question. Here’s the long and short of it.

When installing Microsoft Commerce Server 2007 sp1 you can get about oh I’d say 5 minutes into the install until you get to Web Site configuration settings. You put your user name in the little sign in box as well as your password like any good little wizard following monkey. Then terror err I mean error strikes you. The error says hey idiot I cannot find your "Default Web Site" you cannot continue. Well gall darn you say I will just right click on the web site folder and create a new web site called "Default Web Site". Ah doesn’t that feel better? You say to the Monkey wizard (Commerce Server 2007 sp1 config wizard). No says the error again. So you jump up and down screaming at the server. What the brown bananas do you mean its right there!

Well turns out that there is a super er... uber secret metadatabase that keeps a ID stored for every site created and the one you just created "Default Web Site" is W3SVC/890987799887.... on and on for about 6 more decimals. Problem is Windows likes the "Default Web Site" to be W3SVC/1. What do you do? Uninstall IIS? Holy foolish that would be.

Try this before moving on.

There is a fun little vb script built just for this occasion. "adsutil"! Remember it and love it.

First we need to make sure there for whatever reason isn’t a W3SVC/1 already there ( I know you are saying: but the story you took me down this long path and....) No worries its always good to dot your T’s and Cross your I’s or is that wrong too?

Go to your nearest command prompt.

make sure you are at the root of C:\

cd\Inetpub\AdminScripts

once there run this: cscript adsutil.vbs enum w3svc/1

If it comes back with "path requested could not be found" you know your hosed.

Try this: cscript adsutil.vbs enum w3svc

All kinds of data will fly by and the world will turn upside down (unless you are in Australia. However if you are there you are smart enough not to delete the web site in the first place.).

You should get: w3svc/Info w3svc/Filters and at least one w3svc/### where the number is the interesting part.

To find your new default web site number will take some looking up. Hunt by using this: cscript adsutil.vbs enum w3svc/### putting the numbers you saw in the list.

Ok the good part.

Create the new W3SVC/1

cscript adsutil.vbs create_vserv W3SVC/1

Copy it

cscript adsutil.vbs copy W3SVC/### W3SVC/1

Set It

cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/1/ServerComment "Default Web Site"

So now you have a new Default Web Site and you now know not to delete it again or there will be consequences.

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Vista Memory Issues: How to clear the memory without a 3rd party application

mikedopp — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:27:20 GMT

I believe it was Joe Levi who was running into vista vs. Visual Studio 2005 memory issues while compiling our latest build of www.lifetime.com . We both run Vista as our development environment (We watched all the sessions at mix07 and vista looked like it worked fine with Visual Studio 2005 + 2 hours of patches). We did some MSDN surfing and found a way to clear the memory within Windows Vista ( basically it kills all idle running applications).

Here is how:

Create a shortcut:

Add Location of Shortcut:

"%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks"

Click Next, Change the name of your shortcut:

To:

Then Finish.

Extra Credit:

Set up a the windows task manager to run this task every oh half hour or so.

Feel free to use the XML provide to update your task. Courtesy of Joe Levi:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?>
<Task version="1.2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/windows/2004/02/mit/task">
<RegistrationInfo>
    <Date>2008-02-26T10:20:16.4557818</Date>
    <Author>*Add Your Info Here*</</Author>
    <Description>%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks</Description>
</RegistrationInfo>
<Triggers>
    <TimeTrigger id="502f2271-c7c8-428a-9ac6-47359a741e19">
      <Repetition>
        <Interval>PT30M</Interval>
        <StopAtDurationEnd>false</StopAtDurationEnd>
      </Repetition>
      <StartBoundary>2008-02-26T07:00:00</StartBoundary>
      <ExecutionTimeLimit>PT30M</ExecutionTimeLimit>
      <Enabled>true</Enabled>
    </TimeTrigger>
</Triggers>
<Principals>
    <Principal id="Author">
      <UserId>*Add Your Info Here*</UserId>
      <LogonType>InteractiveToken</LogonType>
      <RunLevel>HighestAvailable</RunLevel>
    </Principal>
</Principals>
<Settings>
    <IdleSettings>
      <Duration>PT10M</Duration>
      <WaitTimeout>PT1H</WaitTimeout>
      <StopOnIdleEnd>true</StopOnIdleEnd>
      <RestartOnIdle>false</RestartOnIdle>
    </IdleSettings>
    <MultipleInstancesPolicy>IgnoreNew</MultipleInstancesPolicy>
    <DisallowStartIfOnBatteries>false</DisallowStartIfOnBatteries>
    <StopIfGoingOnBatteries>true</StopIfGoingOnBatteries>
    <AllowHardTerminate>true</AllowHardTerminate>
    <StartWhenAvailable>true</StartWhenAvailable>
    <RunOnlyIfNetworkAvailable>false</RunOnlyIfNetworkAvailable>
    <AllowStartOnDemand>true</AllowStartOnDemand>
    <Enabled>true</Enabled>
    <Hidden>false</Hidden>
    <RunOnlyIfIdle>false</RunOnlyIfIdle>
    <WakeToRun>false</WakeToRun>
    <ExecutionTimeLimit>PT0S</ExecutionTimeLimit>
    <Priority>7</Priority>
    <RestartOnFailure>
      <Interval>PT5M</Interval>
      <Count>3</Count>
    </RestartOnFailure>
</Settings>
<Actions Context="Author">
    <Exec>
      <Command>%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe</Command>
      <Arguments>advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks</Arguments>
    </Exec>
</Actions>
</Task>

Enjoy!

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Force Windows Vista to update with a little scripting.

mikedopp — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:01:36 GMT

Windows Vista SP1 is set to be released any moment. If you want to get a jump on the download and install that takes multiple restarts and a full 2 hours. At least for me. However once it is installed Service Pack 1 really feels smooth.

Here is the script to change your registry to allow for the windows update download:

@echo off

reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\VistaSp1 /f > NUL 2>&1
reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\VistaSP1 /f > NUL 2>&1

reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\VistaSp1 /v Beta1 /t REG_SZ /d dcf99ef8-d784-414e-b411-81a910d2761d /f
IF NOT %errorlevel% == 0 ( goto ERROR)

:SUCCESS
@echo.
echo ===========================================================
echo Windows Vista SP1 registry key has been set successfully.
echo Please check for updates in Windows Update.
echo ===========================================================
@echo.
goto END

:ERROR
@echo.
echo ===========================================================
echo FAILED to set Windows Vista SP1 registry keys.
echo Please run this script by right clicking and selecting
echo "Run as Administrator".
echo ===========================================================
@echo.
goto END

:END
pause

Or feel

free to download

file (will need adminstrator permissions to install)

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Meta-Tags basic tips

mikedopp — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 11:15:43 GMT

Types of Tags

A user-defined or system META variable will allow you to add information to the HTTP header for a page (the information about a page that is not visible to the site visitor; i.e.: source code)

The NAME or HTTP-EQUIV attribute declares a variable for the page and the CONTENT attribute assigns a value to the variable. A META tag supplies information about the page, but does not affect its appearance.

System META variable
Meta tags that use the HTTP-EQUIV attribute as the name portion of their name-value pairs supply special instructions to a Web browser, such as an expiration date or a display-refresh (redirect) value.

Example: <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://mikedopp.com/">
User-defined META variable
Meta tags with a NAME attribute, which do not correspond to HTTP headers, are used to reflect property associated with the page.

Example: <meta name="keywords" content="metatags, tips, tricks,">
Example Set of Meta Tags

Here’s a example set of tags, of course you will need to replace the words in red with your own information. Remember to paste this in to a blank notepad text file and save it first prior to copying it into your source code.

This goes in the < Head > section of your code.

More Meta Tag Tips

If you wish to indicate to a search engines spider that you don’t want a certain page indexed, insert the following Meta tag:

When you mouse over an image in IE6, a menu pops up with options such as Save, Print & Email Image. To disable this, include the following meta tag:

Robots.txt

Note: Not all search engines or their spiders will notice or use the meta tag and not all spiders will take notice of the robots.txt file.

You can also include a robots.txt file on your site that will tell search engine spiders to ignore folders and to spider the site. You can find out more about this at: Robotstxt.org
If you don’t want your page showing up in a Search Page insert an underscore in front of the file name:

Example: _pagename.html to prevent this happening.
If you want to prevent a page being saved in your visitor’s cache you can do so by inserting the following three tags:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="0">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Cache-Control" CONTENT=">

It’s also a good idea to get your site labelled at ICRA:
META HTTP-EQUIV="pics-label" CONTENT=
Content Labels generated by ICRA conform to an Internet industry standard known as PICS - the Platform for Internet Content Selection.

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Rockband Drumset works on Windows.

mikedopp — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:18:22 GMT

So I was surfing Youtube for my latest and greatest music videos when I got the urge to see if anyone had posted some interesting videos on Rockband.

Rock Band Drums on the PC.

To my suprise I found this dude had put together an app to use your drums that are included with the Rockband game on you pc. This is so cool. I can now play the drums record my session and share it with the world via Youtube or your favorite video site. Another great how to get windows xp to recognize your usb drumset head on over to Matt Hackmanns Blog.

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Bandwidth costs and time for Sneakernet

mikedopp — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:55:15 GMT

Does transferring a terabyte of data via sneakernet make sense? First, consider the bandwidth capabilities and monthly cost of a few common Internet connections.

    Cost
(month)     Download rate
per second     Upload rate
per second
56.6 Modem     $15     5 KB     4 KB
DSL     $30     192 KB     24 KB
DSL, Premium     $50     384 KB     48 KB
Cable     $50     300 KB     30 KB
Cable, Premium     $80     600 KB     60 KB
T1     $300     192 KB     192 KB
T3     $1,400     5.4 MB     5.4 MB
OC-3     $7,500     19 MB     19 MB

Of course, costs may vary; I chose costs that jibed with my personal experience and lined up with a few cursory searches for pricing around the web. Please let me know you think these costs are way out of line. Assuming for the sake of argument that these are representative costs and throughput rates, how much would it cost to transfer, let’s say, a 20 gigabyte HD-DVD file?

    Download 20 GB     Upload 20 GB
56.6 Modem     49 days     $24.27     61 days     $30.34
DSL     1¼ days     $1.26     10 days     $10.11
DSL, Premium     15 hours     $1.05     5 days     $8.43
Cable     19 hours     $1.35     8 days     $13.48
Cable, Premium     10 hours     $1.08     4 days     $10.79
T1     1¼ days     $12.64     1¼ days     $12.64
T3     1 hour     $1.98     1 hour     $1.98
OC-3     17 minutes     $3.05     17 minutes     $3.05

And how much could we upload or download in total, assuming we had these connections going full-bore, around the clock?

    in 24 hours     in 1 month
    Download     Upload     Download     Upload
56.6 Modem     422 MB     338 MB     12 GB     10 GB
DSL     16 GB     2 GB     475 GB     59 GB
DSL, Premium     32 GB     4 GB     949 GB     119 GB
Cable     25 GB     2 GB     741 GB     74 GB
Cable, Premium     49 GB     5 GB     1.5 TB     148 GB
T1     16 GB     16 GB     475 GB     475 GB
T3     472 GB     472 GB     14 TB     14 TB
OC-3     1.6 TB     1.6 TB     49 TB     49 TB

Let’s say we wanted to send a terabyte of data via sneakernet:

    * Two 500 GB hard drives weigh about five pounds; we can wrap the drives in bubble wrap and fit them in a standard FedEx box.
    * It costs about $60 to send five pounds in a standard FedEx box coast-to-coast in 24 hours.
    * The total transit time is 32 hours: 24 hours, plus 8 hours to copy the data on and off the drives.

We just transferred data at the rate of 9.1 megabytes per second. The only internet connection that’s capable of our sneakernet throughput level is the OC-3. None of the others are even close, particularly if you consider the highly asymmetric nature of consumer connections, where upload rate is a fraction of the download rate.

And what about the cost? Not including the $300 expense of the two hard drives (which I think is fair, because they’re reusable), the total cost per gigabyte breaks down like so:

    Cost per GB
Downloaded     Cost per GB
Uploaded
56.6 Modem     $1.21     $1.52
DSL     $0.06     $0.51
DSL, Premium     $0.05     $0.42
Cable     $0.07     $0.67
Cable, Premium     $0.05     $0.54
T1     $0.63     $0.63
T3     $0.10     $0.10
OC-3     $0.15     $0.15
Sneakernet     $0.06     $0.06

It wasn’t obvious to me, but the sneakernet math clearly works. This is exactly the kind of insight Jim Gray was famous for.

Jim also says the cost of internet bandwidth was roughly a dollar a gigabyte for Microsoft in 2003. Is that still how much internet bandwidth costs today? According to the figures I found, the only connection that expensive today is a modem. And who uses modems any more? It seems implausible that consumer internet bandwidth would be sold cheaper than large blocks of commercial internet bandwidth. Let’s take a look.

    * Amazon’s S3 service charges 20 cents per gigabye to transfer data.
    * Robert X Cringely regularly gets charged 20 cents per gigabyte for NerdTV, and guesses that large bandwidth consumers like YouTube can negotiate rates as low as 10 cents per gigabyte.
    * Mitch Ratcliffe did a survey of internet providers and found that most charge 85 cents per gigabyte, and he proposes YouTube could negotiate a rate of 45 cents per gigabyte.

I’m not sure who to believe. It’s a good sign that most estimates are under the $1.00 per gigabyte rate that Jim quoted in 2003. I’d like to think that the cost of internet bandwidth is getting less expensive over time. High bandwidth costs lead to a de-facto "popularity tax", and that’s like a giant wet blanket over content creators. Cheaper bandwidth is a net public good: it leads directly to more content, and higher quality content, for everyone.

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Zune Playlists Easy to Create.

mikedopp — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:27:10 GMT

I was pondering late last night how can I get along with the new Zune software. No more name calling and bashing the moderators at Zune.net forums. I needed to be a responsible Zunian(no I am not an alien. Just of Zune citizenship) and do more investigating. Here is how the XML is laid out for both the Windows media playlist file and the Zune Media Playlist file.

Here goes my case:

Windows Media Playlist or WPL

<?wpl version="1.0"?>

<smil>

    <head>

        <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Windows Media Player -- 11.0.6000.6344"/>

        <meta name="AverageRating" content="0"/>

        <meta name="TotalDuration" content="5676"/>

        <meta name="ItemCount" content="1"/>

        <title>Happy</title>

    </head>

    <body>

        <seq>

            <media src="Fun\mikedopp_This_is_mikedoppcom.mp3"/>

        </seq>

    </body>

</smil>

Zune Playlist or ZPL

<?zpl version="2.0"?><smil>

  <head>

    <meta name="generator" content="Zune -- 2.1.888.0" />

    <meta name="itemCount" content="1" />

    <meta name="totalDuration" content="5458563" />

    <meta name="averageRating" content="0" />

    <title>7Habits</title>

  </head>

  <body>

    <seq>

<media src="C:\ZUNE\Music\New\mikedopp_dropitlikeitsdopp.mp3" />

    </seq>

  </body>

</smil>

So the difference is?

<?wpl version="1.0"?>

and

<?zpl version="2.0">

In my logical thinking as a Zunian I figured lets just make a template and be happy.

First things first in order for the Zune software to see your mp3’s, wma’s or wmv’s you need to point the software to the right directories. This will assume you already know how to do so.

You will need to edit using notepad or my favorite notepad2 the <meta name="itemcount" to make sure the content number equals the correct number of well items in the mp3 etc directory.

The <media src=""> tag is very important in that you need an absolute path defined for where the media is vs. Happy directory \ song name.

Another concern was does the Zune care about the <meta name="totalDuration" content="5458563" /> ? The answer is no not so much. So my answer would be don’t worry too much about this as the playlist will work just fine without it.

So here is the .zol file you can rename to "whatever.ZPL" and add your own tags and or information ie mp3 and or video.

<?zpl version="2.0"?>

<smil>

  <head>

    <meta name="generator" content="Zune -- 2.1.888.2" />

    <meta name="itemCount" content="1" /> <!-- make sure the correct number of itemCount per song-->

    <meta name="totalDuration" content="0" />

    <meta name="averageRating" content="0" />

    <title>Happy</title>

  </head>

  <body>

    <seq>

      <media src="C:\ZUNE\Music\New\mikedopp_dropitlikeitsdopp.mp3" />

    </seq>

  </body>

</smil>

<!-- Zune Playlist notes:

     you definitly need to use the itemcount and keep it accurate. total duration can be 0 as well

as averageRating Make sure you have absolute paths with media src and type them out.-->

Or you can open up Windows media player drag all the songs you want to be in a playlist as long as they can be seen by the zune software and save the playlist that was just created into the folder that you have the music and the zune software can see..

Once created right click on the .wpl file and rename it to .zpl. The zune software will do the rest.

Enjoy!

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