blog.arithm

Occasionally I get a bit obsessive compulsive about new applications and will run one on my laptop and another on the desktop to better compare them. Lately I’ve been comparing Stardock’s freeware ObjectDock to open source RocketDock.

Both get high marks for doing what they’re supposed to do, which is be a Mac-esque dock application for Windows. In terms of look and feel, RocketDoc is a little closer to the Mac version I think.

That said, I’m going to stick with ObjectDock for one simple reason: It always works. RocketDock has a nasty habit of not popping up after an hour to two have gone by. This gets to be very frustrating very quickly.  A good dock app can soon become an indispensable part of one’s daily desktop routine. And a broken dock breaks the routine.

The easiest way is to go “under” Emac’s head and not bother with Tramp at all..

The currently distributed version of Tramp (2.0.x) has a design flaw wherein it assumes that ports are designated with a “-p” switch.  If you’re running Emacs on Windows, however, you will probably want to use Putty’s <code>plink</code> command instead of an command line ssh client.  Problem is plink uses a capitalized “-P” to indicate the port.  Urgh.  (Supposedly this is fixed in Tramp 2.1.x..)

Rather than muck around with this, consider tools that map the remote connection such that it appears local.  The well done open source app WinSCP does a pretty good job of this, though is a bit clunky in the way it syncs up its temporary cache.  South River Technologies’ WedDrive, however, is practically seamless.  Well worth the $60 for a one year license.

While I love the reports that Cacti produces, I really hate setting them up. And most of the time I just need something “quick and dirty” to get a better window into what’s going on with a small web/db server combo.

webminstats is a nice little plug-and-play Webmin module that does just that. It will automatically try to setup a dozen or so round robin scripts to collect data against a variety of common services (web server, database, memory, processes, etc.) It can take hours to get the same kind of reporting working in Cacti.

The output isn’t as “pretty” as that of Cacti’s.. but then again pretty doesn’t fix servers.

Yet another de facto Linux command that is oddly missing in Windows.

Some simple log files from a custom app were getting out of control. Google revealed that while basic rotation is possible for the standard Windows event logs, there’s no command in particular for log rotation, aside from some odd looking bat scripts that required typing output to temp directories and the like.

Tried rotatelogs.exe from the Windows distribution of Apache 2.2, but that didn’t seem to work at all.

Today, however, I stumbled across CHOMP. Works a peach, and surprisingly quick. Recommended.

(BTW, looks like the author has his own implementation of tail as well. Maybe this is the replacement for Cygwin tail that I was looking for last August..  Update:  It don’t work so well.)

I’m a big fan of the Mantis Issue Tracker, an open source project in PHP.  Have been using for years. Version 1.1.0 was finally released this last week and includes some very nice usability improvements.

The new time tracking system, though simple, should actually be quite powerful. “Out of box” inclusion of MantisConnect will also be of interest to anyone wanting tighter integration with external applications or their favorite IDE.

Earlier this year I began working with Microsoft SQL Server for the first time. Until now I’ve always been in open source databases, either MySQL or PostgreSQL.

At the time I looked around for a SQL Server-specific tool that simplified the process of sorting through table data (basic column sorting, filtering and the like), since SQL Server Studio seemed to focus primarily on managing query results. I tried a couple of tools like EMS’ SQL Manager, but nothing really stood out. Nothing worth paying for at least.

In the end I went back to my old standby, Minq’s DBVisualizer, which I’ve been using on-and-off since it was released back in ’99. It’s extremely convenient to have all one’s working databases, no matter the server, accessible from a single DBVis interface.

Recently, however, an Oracler tipped me off to Quest Software’s Tool for Application Developers (TOAD). Somehow all my googling last spring didn’t turn this up. Despite being a bit sluggish for a native Windows app, so far TOAD seems to be considerably more powerful the DBVis. I’m just scratching the surface, but TOAD’s inline editing of data is certainly more transparent, and includes nifty little touches like a popup calculator for numeric fields, date selectors, etc. The “group by column” feature is especially handy. Searchable built-in knowledgebase is a godsend for folks jumping back and forth between databases. The built-in session monitor is enlightening.

I’ll post more as I explore TOAD’s built in functionality, which seems to include a host of data differs, graph generation, and report designers.

I still wish I could view all my databases from a single dashboard — TOAD has different versions per database. But if you’re working in Windows, and spend a lot of time sifting through and managing data, then I have to say that TOAD has DBVisualizer beat hands down. Certainly worth the price of free.

For a simple and free (and fairly standard!) way to secure your remote desktop sessions — and without having to figure out the crazy, proprietary Microsoft security stuff — take a look at copSSH. copSSH uses a streamlined Cygwin client to setup an SSH sever on your Windows box.

I’ve recently been using copSSH and PuTTY‘s Pageant authentication agent to tunnel RDP through PuTTY/copSSH SSH connections. Works like a charm.

One gotcha: copSSH doesn’t clean-up after itself well. Consider running taskkill from time-to-time.

C:\WINDOWS\Taskkill /F /IM bash.exe /T

Or if you prefer bashing:

$ kill -9 `ps | grep ^I.*bash$ | cut -c2-9`

Accrue more than 64 zombied PTYs and you’ll find yourself locked out of the server.

For whatever reason this was virtually impossible to find. Even the Great Google knew not.

Hoyasoft’s Windows Media Server plugin, VideoGuard, enables a wide range of simple content protection mechanisms for video streams: From basic HTTP authentication to referer URL checking to MD5 ticket validation. VideoGuard’s snap-in admin interface is intuitive and makes setting up URL-level authorization and/or authentication strightforward.

Though the documentation could do with a serious overhaul, Hoyasoft’s email-based technical support is quite good. (Thanks Steve!)

And most importantly, VideoGaurd seems to be the only product on the market offering this kind of simple security functionality. (Which should probably have been built into Windows Media Server in the first place…)

Well, for whatever reason AOR crashed when I tried to run the licensed version. Fortunately the kind souls at DataNumen let me upload my archive to their FTP server and did the repair for me.

When I asked why AOR wasn’t working here, I got the standard “must be your machine” answer:

Sorry but we don’t know the reason, as we cannot repeat the problem on our computers at all. We have used Advanced Outlook Repair to repair your file without any problems!

I guess the problem may be caused by incompabilities, but our computer installed with Vista and 2007 can also run correctly. So the problem may be related to other software or system confirgurations.

So with some good support here the results are what I was after.. though buyer beware.

For one reason or another I’m always measuring images and other screen real estate in web pages or elsewhere. This recently got a lot easier when I discovered the MeasureIt add-on for Firefox. (Which fits snugly next to ColorZilla, the equally useful in-browser color picker.)

The “elsewhere” part has remained difficult until recently when I stumbled across the Wonderweb Screen Ruler. I find that I will leave it open and on top of the screen for easier use when working with graphics in web apps.

Truly a ruler of rulers.