AsenDURE @ Corner of 11th & 20th

Two of my tutorials only available at the site:

1. Securing VNC over the Internet
2. Securing UltraVNC over Internet with DSM Plugins

Two Reviews also only available at the site:

1. Multicomp - Verifiying CDs/DVDs after burning.
2. HP iPAQ rx4540 Review

Any Video Converter is an All-in-One video converting tool with easy-to-use graphical interface, fast converting speed and excellent video quality. It allows you to effortlessly convert video files between every format, for FREE! It can convert almost all video formats including DivX, XviD, MOV, rm, rmvb, MPEG, VOB, DVD, WMV, AVI to MPEG-4 movie format for iPod/PSP or other portable video device, MP4 player or smart phone. It also supports any user defined video file formats as the output. Any Video Converter makes it easy for anyone to enjoy the any format video with your iPod, PSP, mobile phone or MP4 player.

Freeware. Download from here.

quick and easy way to add a google map to any web page via wikimapia. interested? check out the tutorial.

wikimapiablog tutorial

Short post coz I’m super damn busy*. The guys at PortableApps.com has outdone themselves with the launch of their PortableApps Suite 1.0 which has the ability to stock your USB drive or any portable media in fact, with a full complement of software that’s ready to run wherever you plug it into any windows computer. Gone now are the days where you had to customize your own autorun.inf file (and also my post on a how-to tutorial) or use pStart to launch the portable applications you’ve copied to your thumbdrive/external harddrive. 

The standard edition of the suite is about 89.5Mb (extracts to 250Mb) and a 30.4Mb Lite version (extracts to 100Mb) is also available. Just download and plug-in your portable media and double-click to install to the root directory of the device.

Plugging your portable media device should now run the autorun.inf which in turn should launch StartPortableApp.exe that’ll present you with a menu-driven UI (looks like Vista’s Start Menu) in which you use to start the various portable applications that come with the suite.

Download from here.

———————————————-in other news————————————————-

* Things doesn’t look so good for our hero. Been busy with WAN problems in Labuan (as usual) thanks to a virus in our internal network from 2 sites in France and 1 site in North Asia which causes DoS attacks on our VPN sofaboxes and our the horrendous service by our very own monopolistic ISP TM which has service disruption every 3 days for this month alone.

Scripting for removal of ePO agent and deployment testing for F-Secure. We’ll be changing from McAfee to F-Secure after a CBA-study (cost benefit analysis) in HQ.

Mail Merge. Migration from Eudora to Outlook 2k3 and iPlanet server to exchange for Jakarta, Hanoi, Bangkok, KL, Labuan, Manila.

WAN infrastructure takeover by Vanco from Atos Origin and replacement of AO’s sofaboxes by Vanco’s Cisco routers for Jakarta, Bangkok, KL, Labuan, Manila.

To prove that IT gets crap irregardless of organization reporting structure here’s an example of IT-related escalation procedure in practice.

This hack is useful when you wish to mass convert many documents (doc, excel, txt, etc) into pdf. Why would we want to do this is covered by Shockw@ve in his article at Spherebox, but I’m sure you all have your own reasons. What this does actually is use Print Conductor to take advantage of the virtual postscript printer installed by all pdf creating applications to print-out pdf files.

Ingredients
Print Conductor
My past article about Print Conductor which enables you to print many files without the need to open them. Download from here.

PDFCreator
While there are many PDF creator programs available. I’m using this simply because it’s the one deployed in my company. Download from here. It should work with all other PDF creating applications like PrimoPDF, novaPDF, et cetera.

1) Download and install application. Launch Print Conductor and select the files you want to ‘print to pdf’.

2) Make sure your file names are appropriately named and to stop PDFCreator from prompting you with the ‘Save-As’ dialog box for each document you convert, make sure that Auto-Save is turned-on in the preference.

3) Select your postscript virtual PDF printer from the printer list.

4) If you should convert many files at once, you’d notice that the Print Conductor will look like it gets cranky, but that’s should just be the printer spooler in the background. You should be able to get back control once that task has ended. Excel’s ‘always-present-save-changes-even-though-no-changes-are-made’ are also the cause for concern.

samurai1337 notes that on pdf995, it loads an advertisment everytime you print.