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.

Process Explorer from SysInternal is a Task Manager on steroids. If you ever wondered about program libraries, dll processes and all those background running applications and services then Process Explorer might be able to help you. PE shows you information about which handles and dlls processes have opened or is loaded. PE gives you a running processes hierarchical display that shows detailed information on how certain applications work and maybe provide a little insight into the way Windows and applications react. PE is more gung-ho than Task Manager so you have to be careful as you can now kill a process and more so if you end the whole process tree.

Unless you’ve very well versed in all the inner workings of windows, you’d most probably not know what each process is. PE helps you along by providing by including a built-in search function that is tied to Google and MSN search (why on earth MSN? I don’t know). If you have no idea about the function of a certain process, right click the process and select Google and you’d be sent on your way to sites that explains what that process is all about.

Another nice feature of PE also shows what TCP/IP connection a process opened. particularly useful for looking out for rootkits, spywares, trojans that try to call back home. PE also has a performance monitor which has all the trapping for a GUI charts and graphs freak. Seeing how much more powerful PE is, the authors included an option to replace your Task Manager with it by Options | Replace Task Manager and will now launch instead of Task Manager.

Download from here.

A film not too long ago ignited a whole new generation of armchair epistemologists with it’s plot proposing that our minds may be living inside an virtual simulation (or matrix if you will), while our physical bodies are being used as batteries. Those familiar with philosophy will be all too familiar with this question posed since Descartes. In the Virtualization world, we have the converse: What if, unbeknownst to us, our computers were really running inside other computers for the selfish self-interest a special group of people? Such a setup has been in use for a very long time in the form of a Virtual Machines/Virtualization which basically fools an operating system into thinking it’s running on its own hardware.

Well here’s the script to detect if your application is running on VMWare or Virtual PC courtesy of Elias (aka lallous) from The Code Project.

*Intro adapted from arstechnica VMWare Vs. VPC.

Freeware MediaMonkey gives you the power to mange your audio files collection with impunity. Edit tags [ a windows shell plugin recommendation at Spherebox called AudioShell], retrieve album art, rips CDs and convert existing files to de facto formats [like mp3, ogg, wma, flac] normalize volume levels across all your tracks, syncs with your portable audio devices within an intuitive interface. More features here.

I’m starting to love it and what’s best is it’s free! (The $19.95 Gold version adds a few more features. Lookie here.) The downside is it doesn’t support some protected DRM files.

quick update since it seems this blog is dying. i’m reaaaalll busy with work (company merger entails political, procedural, chaotic organizational matrix and administrative riff raff + global/regional IT intergration, deployment & migration) and my more technical review is taking up longer than i expected.

anyhow, more time tools, this one adds adds the date, time, and unused RAM to the titlebar of your active Windows application to take advantage of the generally wasted space between the title and the minimize/maximize/close buttons on your Windows titlebar. Why would you want to do that I haven’t a clue (but im not here to you what to do or don’t do, im here to tell you how to do it :D)

download

Ingredients:
1. VMWare Server
2. Mac OS X 10.4.6 iso
3. Daemon Tools 3.4.7
4. At least 6Gb of Free Space.

Machine Specs:
AMD 64 3500+
1Gb RAM

1. Download and Install VMware Server
VMware Server is available for free at www.vwmare.com

2. Download and Install Daemon Tools
Daemon Tools available for free at www.daemon-tools.cc

2. Obtain a legal OS X 10.4.6 ISO
When possible you should operate from a legal copy of the operating system. The image I used is ”Mac OS X 10.4.5 Jas.iso”. *cough*cough*

3. Mount the ISO 
VMware has the ability to mount CD/DVD images but not HFS+ images (the file system used by the Mac OS X installation DVD). You will thus need to load the iso into a virtual drive. I used Daemon Tools version 3.47. Some guides say Alcohol 120% is easier as you can skip step 5b.

4.Create a Virtual Machine
Fire Up VMWare, Select Local Host. Click on New Virtual Machine.  Click Next at the Wizard. Select Custom then Next. Select Other, then pick FreeBSD and click Next. Give your Virtual Machine a name. (I went with Mac OS X). *Put it wherever you want (I placed it in the location where I keep all my virtual machines. Note: make sure you have enough disk space for the virtual machine hard disk file. [6Gb]. Click Next. select Make Virtual Machine Private. Next then User That Powers On The Virtual Machine. Next again. Number of Processors, One. Next. Memory For The Virtual Machine , 512Mb. Next. Use Host-Only Networking (prevent Mac OS X from registering itself during installation). Next. SCSI Adapter , LSI Logic. Next. Create A New Virtual Disk. Next. Virtual Disk Type , IDE. Next. Disk Size, 6. Tick Allocate All Disk Space Now. Next. Wait for the disk space allocation. Give the Disk File a name. I also went with Mac OS X and save it to a location. Finish. Exit VMware.

5. Editing your VMware Config file [*.vmx] 
a. Locate where you’ve stored your Virtual Machine in * at step 4. Open file (.vmx extension) in notepad and add the following line to the end of the file.

paevm=”true”

b. Help VMware find the Daemon Tools virtual drive by replacing the line auto detect with your virtual drive letter.

ide1:0.present = “TRUE”
ide1:0.fileName = “n:”
ide1:0.deviceType = “cdrom-raw”

(note replace n: with the drive you have configured in Daemon Tools).

Close notepad and save the config file.

7. Installing Mac OS X
Launch VMWare Server and start your Virtual Machine. Press F2 and go into the Virtual Machine’s “BIOS” and set the boot order to CD-ROM first and HDD second. Save Changes and Exit. When the Mac OS X boot prompt appears (Read. Darwin) then the installation wizard welcome screen. It may take a while. Be patient.

8. Setting up your Hard Drive
Follow along in the installation, you’ll reach a point where it’s time to select your hard drive, but nothing is listed. Go to the menu and open up the Disk Utility. Create a Journal partition that utilizes the entire disk space. Done. The drive now shows up in setup. Proceed , Proceed.

9. Using a Custom Installation
Select the Custom Installation. You can opt to remove the Languages and Printer Driver Packages. Expand the “Patches” Packages and select the 3 AMD options - SSE2, SSE3 and AMD base system. Proceed along. Done.

10. Make your partition active.
On first restart of your Mac OS X you’d get a b0 error. You’ll need to mark your hard disk partition as active. To fix, boot from the iso again, and at Darwin initial prompt, hit F8. Type “-v -s” and then once a prompt appears, type “fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0“. Type “print” to display a list of partitions on the disk. Find the partition number for the one where you installed Mac OS X and then use the “flag n” command to mark the partition as active (n is the partition number). type “quit” and reboot. Mac OS X should boot off the hard disk as normal now.