monline

I wonder how many years have to pass for Microsoft to release a Windows that really works? XP sucked, but eventually SP2 fixed most major problems and it became a quite usable OS. My first experience with Vista resulted in a crash after a few minutes of testing (and it was the final released version). Today I installed Windows 7 Ultimate Ed. in a virtual machine just to see how it is and the first execution of Windows Update resulted in an error (4 updates were to be installed and 1 failed ... the Hungarian language pack of course). Then Windows told me that it needed a restart and I agreed. Unfortunately the restart resulted in an error too ... allegedly Windows Update did not let the restart proceed. What an irony.

I migrated some Windows 2003 guests from Xen virtualization into KVM. Apparently Xen provided virtualized parallel ports to the guest, since starting up the Windows guest in KVM complains about the missing parallel port. The exact error is a popup (appearing before even I logged in) telling me that "at least one service or driver failed during startup". After login I see in Event Viewer the following error: "The Parallel port driver service failed to start due to the following error: The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it."

The solution is documented in the suggested Microsoft KB article. It says it's only for Vista or Win2008 based computers, but the method works for XP, 2003, etc. too. The strange thing is that I've checked a notebook that has Vista Home ed. on it and no parallel ports, and the startup type of the Parport service was set to "3" (as in my Win2003 guest that complained). Thus there must be some other way that Vista knows about not having any parallel ports in the machine and therefore issues no popup error messages. However disabling the Parport service alltogether works too.

Note that on Win2003 (and most probably on XP, Vista, Win7, Win2008, etc. too) you can disable the parallel port driver service with a command too (thus you don't have to dig into the registry ... which has it's risks if you're not careful). Execute the following in a command prompt:

The space between "start=" and "disabled" is important!

I was evaluating various virtual servers and their support for running fully virtualized Windows guests. After having played around with Xen I was about to test VMware Server. Since I already had a fully set up test VM in Xen with a raw disk image file, I simply wanted to reuse this image in a VMware virtual machine. I've done the required prerequisites (updated the IDE controller to the Standard PCI ... one, shut down the vm, converted the raw disk image with qemu-img to the vmdk format and created a vm in VMware Server using this image file). After starting up Windows (2003 Enterprise Edition) it told me that the underlying hardware has changed substantially (sure ... I tested Xen on another server with a different CPU, etc.) and I'm required to reactivate Windows. Now what the hell? During the setup I used a VLK (volume license key) and of course no activation was required. But it seems that even VLK setups require "activation" in case you change some basic hardware. It'd be interesting to find out what hardware change triggers reactivation in this case. The same as in a standard (non-VLK) Windows setup or is there some difference?

VirtualDub is a very good tool for video editing (cutting, slicing, encoding, ...). Unfortunately it's Windows only, so Mac users have to look for an alternative (unless you want to run VirtualDub in a virtual machine ). Avidemux seems to be a good replacement. It also has a copy mode (in case you just want to delete some parts of the video or concatenate a couple of files that share the same format/container and codecs) for copying video and audio streams without reencoding (thus without loss of quility) and a "light"/clean user interface (something that I loved in VirtualDub). And Avidemux is cross-platform, meaning that it supports all major operating systems (Mac, Linux, Windows) and might be portable to other platforms without a major rewrite.

The "original" program was KDirStat and clones for Windows (WinDirStat) and Mac OS X (Disk Inventory X) were made later on.

They are all disk usage utilities and show the sizes of files and folders in a special graphical way called "treemaps".

"PRTG Network Monitor is the powerful network monitoring solution from Paessler AG. It ensures the availability of network components while also measuring traffic and usage. It saves costs by avoiding outages, optimizing connections, saving time and controlling service level agreements (SLAs)."

I was looking for a free solution to monitor the uptime of an internet connection (using a Windows PC) and stumbled on this one. I admit it's a bit more than I was looking for, but there're not that many free utilities for network monitoring so grab it while you can. The freeware edition handles at most 10 "sensors" (ie. you can setup monitoring of 10 network resources). For monitoring the uptime of your network connection you need only one, so it's more than enough.

Windows Update is a tricky thing. It can use a proxy server (see one of my previous posts on this), but it won't use the same proxy as you've set in "Control Panel" / "Internet Options" (aka. IE's proxy settings). Windows XP has a "hidden" HTTP service (it's actually a driver visible in "Device Manager" under "Non-Plug and Play Drivers") and Windows Update uses this service to access Microsoft's servers. To set a proxy for this service, you've to use the proxycfg command line program. However setting a SOCKS proxy won't take any effect (at least it did not for me, neither for airwin). But there're ways to get around this.

WebScarab is a framework for analysing applications that communicate using the HTTP and HTTPS protocols. It is written in Java, and is thus portable to many platforms. WebScarab has several modes of operation, implemented by a number of plugins. In its most common usage, WebScarab operates as an intercepting proxy, allowing the operator to review and modify requests created by the browser before they are sent to the server, and to review and modify responses returned from the server before they are received by the browser. WebScarab is able to intercept both HTTP and HTTPS communication. The operator can also review the conversations (requests and responses) that have passed through WebScarab.

I have been looking for a cross-platform replacement for Fiddler for some time now. Today I stumbled upon Paros, which was written in Java and therefore should run on most Java-capable platforms without modification. Paros is not on par with Fiddler's feature set (and its development has been stalled for the last two years), but it's good enough for capturing/monitoring HTTP traffic on both Linux and Mac OS X.

I've found a thread about the problem, but no solution there. With a little help from Sysinternal's Process Monitor I could find out that the Tomcat installer misses the client subdirectory in the JRE\bin dir and the jvm.dll file inside that dir. In case of Sun's JRE the bin dir indeed contains a client\jvm.dll, but in case of JRockit that dir is called jrockit. Thus you can work around the issue by renaming the jrockit directory inside JRE/bin, do the install, then rename it back. However if you intend to keep the original name, then after the installation you've to alter the JVM path in the Tomcat configuration (the little app. sitting in the system tray) too to match the real JVM path.