2008

The Great Zero-Fill Challenge

Windows Performance Tools

Remember Bootvis? That’s it, on the right. Microsoft made it to help OEMs setup XP systems...

Kill-a-watt

NewEgg is currently selling this handy little device for 18 bucks, plus $7 in shipping. And...

http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html#

Microsoft DHCP Team Blog

IE8 beta 2

Short and sweet: I have found no showstoppers, and several things to really like, in IE8 beta2...

Vista and multiple displays: annoyance

This is bugging me. Recently I added a spiffy new monitor to my desk. My primary work system is a...

About the users

If you’re anywhere in IT, I think you’ll profit by reading Joel Spolsky’s...

Computer Description

SF-DC-01. Many organizations name their computers (or at least the servers) like this....

Troubleshooting pool memory

PC Incubator

Observing chkdsk

I recently had occasion to suspect there might be problems on my Vista laptop’s C: drive, so I...

ReadyBoost Blues

About a week ago, I noted in the winsat article that I was trying to get ReadyBoost to work on my...

Windows perf team blog

Someday, this won’t seem like much.

Windows Memory Management

Unless you’ve studied it a bit, you probably have a few wrong impressions about how Windows...

Lazy Linux Admin: 10 tricks

Exchange Admins, read this.

Running Exchange 2003? Exchange 2003 Disaster Recovery Operations Guide Exchange 2007? Disaster...

EasyVMX

Vista --> XP downgrade notes

If you have a legit copy of Vista Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate, you can downgrade to XP...

Windows Scripting and CLI Reference...

I consider scripting to be an essential skill for a serious sysadmin. Anything you’ll have to...

Poor Man's Tripwire for Windows

I’ve been thinking lately: one of the more frustrating experiences in sysadmin is when you...

Writing better

A sysadmin often needs to write convincingly and well. Emails to the boss, the users, other...

FSMO roles command.

Quick and dirty. You want to know which domain controllers hold the FSMO roles in your Active...

winsat perf-testing tool

I’ve been trying to get a CF card to work as ReadyBoost memory. Still no success on...

Bandwidth reference

Ba-dum PAH!

Update service uptimes

The folks at Pingdom have been monitoring availability of the update services for Ubuntu, Apple, and...

USB speeds clarified

Windows Search 4.0

So a few days ago I installed Windows Search 4.0 on my Vista machine. Searches that used to be...

There is no bubble

There is no bubble. There is no bubble. There is no bubble.

Linux still <1%

Rootkit Detection

OS Wishes

Today Ed Bott wrote about why you’ll have a long wait for Microsoft’s next OS, and...

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Structured Sysadmin

WMIC snippets

Regex Cheatsheet

Browser Plugin Version Checking

Forty Percent of Web Users Surf With Unsafe Browsers. Here’s the report that number comes...

Regex helper

Bandwidth calculator

IT gone horribly, horribly wrong.

The video below leaves me not knowing whether to laugh or cry. A little more on the crying side,...

Risk (the game)

A good clean game of world domination. Just what you need on a lazy Saturday afternoon,...

The unavailable Vista Feature Pack

Long Zheng broke the news about the first Feature Pack for Windows Vista, which Microsoft documents...

ReadyBoost Compatibility

quuxpad comments now enabled

I’ve enabled comments to this site via Disqus. I have no idea who (if anyone) reads this...

How Mannix Made the Internet Possible

It’s been 40 years since the CarterFone decision allowed US citizens to plug their own phones...

Windows cached logins

Eicar

Dipity Timelines

Sometimes a good way to understand a thing is to chart its history. Learn where it came from, and...

oldversion.com

jperf for network bandwidth testing.

“The network is slow.” I’ve long been a fan of Iperf for testing this common...

Drop.io - handy way to share files

I recently discovered drop.io. It’s a handy and fast way to share files temporarily, without...

Groqit

Batteryrefill.com

Cheap Wireless/Ethernet Bridge

Back home on the quux ranch, I needed to connect my wife’s OfficeJet R60 wirelessly. But this...

The Enterprise Octopus

Laxative Candy

Some lessons, you learn the hard way. Watch out for sugarfree candy which uses Sorbitol as the...

What it's like to write a technical book

Screamin' Deal on MS Software

Microsoft have a new “gamevertisement” website up. It’s at www.server-quest.com,...

Simple System Backups

Lately there have been a few interesting offsite backup services offerred in the home user space -...

<$200 ebook reader coming soon

Today is Memorial Day in the USA.

Oooh. 256GB "cheaper" SSD.

I’m not one of those people who goes all fanboy on the latest CPU, motherboard, chipset,...

OpenID: Thoughtful Consideration

Stackoverflow

Hackers Diet: Followup

Maybe no one really cares about this, but I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts just in case...

Belated MicroHoo Thoughts

All the yacking about the MicrosoftYahoo deal left me cold. I didn’t get it; I felt that a...

Cableships of the world

The Hacker's Diet

OK, I admit it. I’m in my 40’s, and I’ve gotten fat. In fact my Body Mass Index...

xkcd rendition of the Google honeynet

What Google's honeynet found

This paper (pdf) is absolutely fascinating, in multiple ways. The first thing that fascinated me was...

Microsoft/Yahoo

Oh, yeah. It occurs to me that a technical person with a blog more or less has to comment about the...

The lessons of Amazon's S3 failure

Techie news sites have been all a-twitter about the Amazon S3 outage today. Many writers and...

CMDOW

Vista's Integrity System

Vista SP1 for tech customers

Troubleshooting XP's Offline files

I recently had an a problem with XP’s Offline Files. The system was XP Pro SP2 with all...

HoboCopy

69 *nix cheatsheets

MS shouldn't challenge Google in ad space

Economics of online backup

Truthy news

Sometimes, the internet (and the print/TV/radio media which are by now inextricably intertwined with...

The missing PIM Triple Play

Microsoft Outlook has, for me, almost always been the one app I just could not live without. Not...

Windows Flight Data Recorder - awesome

Seattle Transit Blog

Lost in Seattle

GPupdate - syntax

Conflicting reports on the cable cuts

Hmm, this cable cut thing is starting to get very muddy. A recent article seems to change the timing...

Choosing Computer Names

Crossloop

Vista SP1 Released ... sorta

Today SP1 for Vista was Released To Manufacturing (RTM). But users like you and I won’t be...

Fourth cable incident in mideast

Some forums and blog posters are noticing a fourth cable cut, and linking back to this article as...

News Map

More Telegeography maps

World submarine cable map (telco/data) |...

Wysiwyg Trac

Last month, I noted that a plugin to allow wysiwyg editing in Trac had come out. Finally! I’d...

Sad day in the wiki world

It’s not like I ever really felt a need to edit Ward’s Wiki before. But today I tried -...

Network Weather

Kindle

Infoesthetics.com

Who's cutting the cables?

Yesterday, two data cables under the Mediterranean sea were cut. Today, a third cable was cut, in...

Microsoft Bids on Yahoo.

So I finally get around to looking at Techmeme this morning around 10:30 AM. And the page is almost...

Days between Windows releases

I like graphs, so I’ll go ahead and hotlink these from Ed Bott’s interesting thoughts on...

Wink & how to set prefs for CMD console

A friend suggested Wink to me. It’s a pretty nifty little program for creating movies out of...

MrNaz

In Defense of UAC

Low tide. Dang.

Blog Post Lifecycle

MS Influentials

Do we need IPv6?

Timothy Lee at TechDirt makes a case that maybe we don’t. He notes that none of the biggest...

Vista: first year security report

Jeff Jones has put out another of his controversial Vista security reports. This latest one (pdf...

WMware Stage Manager - wow.

If your IT work takes you anywhere near a set of dev/test/prod environments, you really owe it to...

Windows Hotpatching

Office Live Workspace Beta

After signing up for this more than a month ago, and never getting my ‘your workspace is...

Visions of Seven (already!)

WMIC Snippets

The Filing Cabinet

AndLinux

Flashlight party favors!

These flashlights are cheap in cost: $12.89 gets you seven of them - and no shipping charges either!...

Can you virtualize Vista?

Why hearing aids suck

Website SSL cert: $9/year

Is OpenID ready?

Now that Yahoo and Blogger have started offerring OpenID, it’s probably safe to say that this...

Paglo

Miss me?

Mark Russinovich's blog

California = US broadband heaven?

California’s Governator commissioned, and has now received, a state of the broadband report...

Shipping Seven blog

Contact lense computer display

“ everyone’s first vi session....”
— http://bash.org/?795779?

Security software = protection racket?

MS Launch Event Calendar

DFS changes in Windows 2008

If it's not one thing, it's another

ArsTechnica’s Iljitsch van Beijnum turns in a thoughtful essay on the next internet overload....

Windows 2008 Virtual Labs

Dude, where's my 4gb?

Sun to buy MySQL

<scratchme> This is interesting news indeed: http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/01/16/sun_to_acquire_mysql_for_1_billion/
<quux> Yeah. I am a little nervous about it.
<quux> imo, imprinted in Sun's DNA are 3-4 standout traits:
<quux> 1) great hardware
<quux> 2) litigious
<quux> 3) snarky
<quux> 4) wierd OSS licensing
<quux> and, I guess, finally, a sort of 'blowing in the wind' business strategy
<scratchme> Sun's sue-happy nature with regards to Java is IMO what created .NET.
<quux> Right. It doesn't stop there. They were the ones who *kicked off* the whole EU thing
<quux> They were also one of the earliest driving forces in the MS<>DoJ thing

Vista's UAC: how it works

MacJobsWorld

I guess tumblr doesn’t (currently) let me add a few comments to a video link, so here we are....

Edited Scrapbook theme

I have made a few customizations to lab111’s wonderful Scrapbook theme for this...

The Danger of Free

Has my ship come in?

Telecommuting - bad for the ones who...

ArsTechnica looked at a study which suggests that morale may go down among the non-telecommuters who...

Saying thanks

Verify email addresses

Taking VMware Server 2.0 out for a spin

Thanks to a good friend, I got to spend a few minutes playing with VMware Server 2.0 beta, which now...