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.

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.

Updated Dec. 2008, Looks like moving from Blogger to Wordpress broke this post quite a bit

I’ve been looking for a bookmarklet that would turn plain-text URLs into clickable links for a while, because it got tedious opening big blocks of plain-text links in Google Reader or in torrent trackers. I had it on my to-do list to write one, but I happened upon one that had already been written at squarefree.com’s bookmarklets site. ..I just wouldn’t have guessed the name.

To make this worthwhile, here are my 3 favorite bookmarklets:

1. Linkify – Turns plain text URLs into clickable links. Try it out here if you want: http://www.dmack.ca
2. Hide visited links – makes visited links invisible (in real time, even). Try them on the above url once you make it a link.
3. Remove redirects – a good way to get around a lot of interstitial ads. Removes redirect scripts from urls in this format: http://www.example.com/out.php?url=http://www.example.org/

Post your favorite bookmarklets in the comments section!

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.

Neutrality.ca is “An open letter to the government of Canada” about the issue of net neutrality in Canada. I remember when the neutrality buzz was in full force, but all of the articles I saw were USA-specific, and it never fully occurred to me that this could be- and IS going on here in Canada. According to neutrality.ca, Shaw Cable (my ISP) is guilty of intentionally throttling competitors’ VoIP services unless the customer pays an additional “Quality of Service” fee.

Sorry if I’m really late posting this, I’ve been busy
Canadians: tell your friends about neutrality.ca, and tell them to tell their friends. I think I may actually email my MP, as the Internet is probably one of four things I take seriously.

Even though most of the videos you’ll come across on the web these days will be flash based, a few of them still use embedded WMV/Quicktime. (…You know, the technologies that Ms and Apple spent so much time and money developing?) For those of you using Firefox in Vista that want a quick and painless way to watch videos at places like gametrailers, NeoWin has the info you need (care of the Mozillazine knowledge base).

Neowinian Basho1 posts:

You need to copy three files (npwmsdrm.dll, npdrmv2.dll and npdsplay.dll) to the “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins” directory.

Done. You don’t even have to restart the browser. Check about:plugins and try watching a video to see if it worked.

Back in December, I checked out TVersity [ http://www.tversity.com/ ] as a way of streaming media to the Xbox 360. I followed a guide* that someone had linked me to, but it turned out to be really easy to set up anyway. After some fiddling, and the newer version’s release on Christmas, I’m now able to use the Xbox 360 to:

• Stream basically any format of video including Divx, Xvid, FLVs (from Youtube etc.) and Quicktime.
• Listen to Shoutcast streams live on the Xbox in game.
• Watch movies with external subtitle files.

It’s all fairly simple to do, and the TVersity site has an excellent forum and site-wide search if you have any problems.

*The guide I linked to says you can’t use TVersity on videos from USB devices, but I tried it and I was able to stream music videos from my external disks. My guess is they were using a USB 1.1 bus or something.

It comes with some radio stations (and Flickr feeds!) out of the box, but I had to mess around a bit to get it to play custom shoutcast streams.

Importance of specs
The first PC I installed TVersity on has a 1.2GHz processor and 768MB of memory… You can probably guess I enjoyed only limited success. I installed the media server on my other PC (Athlon 64 3500+ with 2GB of RAMand a much better GPU) and I was able to do everything I wanted without issue. As expected, large videos hang for a moment before they begin streaming, but that’s normal.

Playing shoutcast stations
I was able to listen to my campus radio station by saving the PLS file locally, adding it as if it were a normal playlist, and restarting the media server. Prior to restarting, I was able to see the radio station on the Xbox, but it wouldn’t play. I’m not sure if I had to adjust the maximum allowed bandwidth or not to play 128kbps streams. Watch out for that if you have problems.

External subtitles
I downloaded and installed the external VobSub filter (vsfilter.2.37_nt.exe) and I was able to watch All About Lily Chou Chou on the Xbox in full subtitled glory.

Story link is to the forum thread where I fiddled with TVersity. If you own a supported device, try it out.

TechEBlog has a list of the top 5 most creative uses (yet) for the Wii remote. It’s got Youtube videos for each one. My favorite is the RC car controller, where the Wiimote is used to control a real-life excite-truck. Some clever engineers need to pick up some nunchuk attachments and some Lego Mindstorms and start making robots.

Bram Cohen made an announcement at the utorrent.com forums that the Micro Torrent project had been acquired by Bit Torrent inc.

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This is Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol, and Ludvig (Ludde) Strigeus, the writer of µTorrent.

Together, we are pleased to announce that BitTorrent, Inc. and µTorrent AB have decided to join forces. BitTorrent has acquired µTorrent as it recognized the merits of µTorrent’s exceptionally well-written codebase and robust user community. Bringing together µTorrent’s efficient implementation and compelling UI with BitTorrent’s expertise in networking protocols will significantly benefit the community with what we envision will be the best BitTorrent client.

What does this mean for the µTorrent community? Not much, at least not at first. The intention is to maintain the website as it is, and keep the forums and community active. Moving forward behind the scenes, we will continue to develop µTorrent and will be using the codebase in other applications, especially ones where a fast, lightweight implementation is more suitable, such as embedded systems on TVs, cell phones, and other non-PC platforms.

The existent µTorrent and BitTorrent communities are immensely valuable to us, which is why we are announcing this here first to make sure you’re all the first to know about the news. The plan is to continue to foster the health and growth of the community that has been critical to the success of µTorrent. Thank you in advance for your support.

Bram and Ludde

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both Bram and Ludde are available now on IRC #utorrent and will be answering questions for the next few hours.

A new forum has been created – uTorrent/BitTorrent – please use this new forum for all topics related to the uTorrent acquisition

Fans of the “Very tiny Bit Torrent client” immediately began to worry that this move might make it not-so-tiny in the long run. I had a laugh when the 7th, 8th and 9th posts in the thread all said “back to BitComet for me!”.

I’m hopeful that they won’t lose sight of their vision; tiiiiiiiiight code. It seems the BT community is antsy because of Bram’s dealing with the MPAA. A lot of people are afraid of a repeat of the Napster disaster, I’m hoping everyone learned enough from it not to let the BT project die at the hands of legitimization.

Also, you can see what Wired has to say