I recently upgraded my mom’s PC from XP to Vista. As far as I can tell, the Vista installer copies your old XP files into a folder called Windows.old, and you can’t boot into XP once Vista is installed in that partition… but for some reason, every time I’ve installed Windows Vista the computer boots into a “Windows Boot Manager” where you can pick whether to boot into your Vista installation or an “Earlier version of Windows”. This screen comes up even if you got rid of your “earlier version”.

By default, there’s a 30-second countdown before it boots into your default (Vista) installation. Naturally, we want to skip this menu entirely and boot straight into Vista. Here’s how to disable the Windows Boot Manager and boot straight into Vista:

• Don’t try to change anything in msconfig, it only lets you reduce the countdown to a minimum of 3 seconds.
• This setting can be changed easily from within Vista, so don’t download any programs, especially those that cost six dollars.

1. Bring up the “System” information window by pressing Windows Key + Pause/Break (or: Control Panel -> System, or right click My Computer -> Properties).
2. In the left sidebar, click Advanced system settings to bring up the System Properties window.
3. In the Advanced tab, under Startup and Recovery, click the Settings… button.
4. Uncheck the box next to “Time to display list of operating systems:”, and make sure Vista is selected as your Default Operating System.

The next time your system boots, it will boot Vista instantly instead of showing the boot manager.

I recently found a small (and free) application that allows you to click anywhere on any window and drag to move it by holding the ALT key. I really liked this functionality in GNOME and I remember looking for a program that would do it in Windows. The program has the option of auto-starting with Windows, and it’s pretty light on resources (as you’d expect from a program with such a simple purpose).

AltDrag sits in the tray (with the option of hiding the tray icon), and holding shift+alt will snap the window to window / screen borders to keep everything tidy. You might not find it useful at first, but you could get used to it in a hurry.

As an added bonus, it lets you move some elements that aren’t meant to be moved. See what you can break with it!

http://code.google.com/p/altdrag/

Did you know the guy who wrote PuTTY also wrote a bunch of free puzzle games for Windows, Linux and Mac? The games, currently 27 in all, are freeware with sources available. The games include Minesweeper and Sudoku clones, as well as a few I’ve never seen before.

Whether you love puzzles, or just hate spending time productively, these games are definitely worth checking out. Try solving an enormous 30-vertex game of Untangle.

Version 3.0 of my favorite cross-platform SFTP/FTP client was released over the weekend. Filezilla now boasts full drag and drop support, which was my most desired feature in the 2.x versions. It also got rid of the purple and orange icon, which was probably my second-most desired change! I do tragic amounts of FTP stuff at work, so I’m pretty happy to have the drag and drop functionality finally implemented.

You can snag up a copy of the free software, now specifically called “Filezilla Client” at the Filezilla project website. (and NOT at filezilla dot com or any of the other sketchy sites using the Filezilla name)

Meanwhile, still no major updates to the server software, which is my favorite “nearly zero config” FTP server software for Windows.

Also I’m not dead. I just forgot about my blog.

The Parallels people have put out some “Mac vs. PC” spoof ads to promote their virtualization software. I’m not sure I understand the sense in touting the ability to run Windows to sell a Mac.
“Windows is no good, so why not use a Mac….. to run Windows?”
The commercials reminded me of a little comic strip I created last year (yeah, I was doing it before it was cool :p)

Apple’s current ad campaign is irritating, bring back the lovely Ms. Ellen Feiss!

As an extension to my earlier tutorial, [How to] create an offline WAMP demo kiosk in Vista, I thought it would be worthwhile to discuss how to host more than one offline demonstration site on the same machine. These instructions will work on a Linux installation of Apache as well as our Windows installation from Apache2Triad.

This is useful if the extra sites you’re hosting have web-root-relative links (with leading slashes like "/files/document.html") that would otherwise point to http://localhost/files/document.html instead of http://localhost/site3/files/document.html, for example.

In this example, We’ll pretend you already have a site set up on localhost in your webroot. The easiest way to add new sites is with virtualhosts. To set up virtual hosts, we just need to add a bit to our httpd.conf file. Locate httpd.conf in your (apache2triad directory)/conf/ directory, and find the section for Virtualhosts. It should have a sample Virtualhost entry commented out for you already, but you need even less than that.

In your httpd.conf, add these lines:

NameVirtualHost *

<VirtualHost *>DocumentRoot C:/apache2triad/htdocsServerName localhost</Virtualhost>

<VirtualHost *>DocumentRoot C:/apache2triad/htdocs/site2/ServerName site2</Virtualhost>

<VirtualHost *>DocumentRoot C:/apache2triad/htdocs/site3/ServerName site3</Virtualhost>

…and add more blocks like this for any additional sites. Windows users, note the direction of the slashes! Don’t forget that you need to restart Apache any time you make a change to one of your conf files.

All you need to do now is add aliases to your hosts file for each virtual host you added.

In Windows, the hosts file is found in C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc
Locate the line for 127.0.0.1 and add your “ServerName” aliases like this:

127.0.0.1    localhost    site2    site3

You can now access your sites by typing their ServerName aliases in your address bar. "site2" would take you to site2, for example, and all your root-relative links would work.

Today I was asked to put together a fully-roamable version of a demo website on a laptop with Vista basic. This way, you can demo your site with a working db to a client while you’re out on a yacht with no wifi, for example. It’s fairly simple, but there are a few stupid things you need to do to get it working in Vista.

Objective: To create an instance of an existing website with Apache and MySQL that runs completely off localhost, so demonstrations can be conducted without a network connection.

For this project, I chose to use the very-awesome Apache2Triad. Apache2Triad takes care of PHP and MySQL with remarkable ease in XP, but we’re not using XP today.

Download and install the “Edge” release, 1.5.4 from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93507 . This will take care of MySQL, but the Apache services won’t start properly in Vista. To fix that, you’ll have to install Apache 2.2.4 over top.
Get the MSI installer of Apache 2.2.4 from http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi , and do a ‘custom’ install into the same path as your Apache2Triad installation. UAC will ask you for allowance, and a blank message box with nothing but an OK button came up (a cmd window came up to tell me that the Apache service was already installed, and that I could press esc to quit, but I just ignored it). Click to allow the UAC, and OK on the mystery window. When prompted, put in localhost for the host and server names. You can leave the email address blank if you want. The latter installation will add a shortcut to the Startup folder in your start menu, you can remove that.
After a reboot, Apache and MySQL should both start automatically.

Try navigating to localhost in your browser. The second time you installed Apache should have a message telling you that “It works!”. Navigate to your site root, (C:\apache2triad\htdocs by default) and paste in a copy of your demo site.

Check out http://localhost/phpmyadmin , and use the Import feature to recreate your database(s) from SQL dump files. (Oh, by the way, go make SQL dump files out of your database with Phpmyadmin’s “Export” if you haven’t already.) Click the Privileges tab in Phpmyadmin and create the accounts you need.

Navigate to http://localhost/ again and try out your site. If all went well, you should now have a working copy of your website that you can take with you and demo for clients anywhere.

Paul Neave has put together a very impressive flash app that lets you input coordinates and a time, and view the night sky as it would appear on a cloudless night. It helped me identify a few of the stars and constellations visible from my house. You might recognize the name Paul Neave as the guy who made the Flash Earth application, which is also very cool. I couldn’t find a lot of information on his website, but it looks like he used a star map/database from somewhere and wrote it into that awesome dome-y interface.

If you’re into computer science or information technology, you’ve no-doubt been unwittingly signed up as the tech support go-to guy for your entire family. In many cases, the same goes for your circle of friends and neighbours. Sometimes it’s an easy way to make quick money, but it can be a hassle. There are a few things you should bring with you to every housecall to make your job that much easier:

The first is a Knoppix live cd or equivalent, these come in handy for all sorts of tasks, especially when the machine is wrecked up really badly.

The second is a USB flash drive full of common utilities, the tech support equivalent of a cartoon doctor’s little bag with a red cross on it. Here’s a list of portable applications that could help you out in the field.

1. ClamWin portable – the portable Windows version of ClamAV. Scan your client’s PC and remember the number of infections you find, so you can tell your friends later.
2. Recuva – a utility for restoring things that were accidentally deleted. It’s safer to have it on your flash drive than to try to go to the website and try to download it onto your clients’ machine.
3. SIW – System Information for Windows. SIW lets you quickly get all of the information about a system that you could ever want. Especially useful for figuring out the specific devices in a system without opening the case up. Also be aware that it has some password- and key-recovery features, which you may want to be careful with.
4. Portable Firefox and 7Zip – Your client’s browser may be crippled and unusable, this is the most common problem I’m asked to help with. 7Zip doesn’t hurt to have, in case you need to get into archives that aren’t supported by the system.

If you come prepared, you’ll be done and out of your neighbour’s musky, cigarette smoke-filled house in no time.

AllSnap is a freeware system tray app that makes all top-level windows snap to screen and window edges. It has a few other handy features, like the ability to constrain windows to the visible screen space, so they won’t be dragged off the edge. It’s handy if you want your messenger windows nestled up beside your browser and dreamweaver windows, for example. It helps make the “tile windows” command a little snazzier.