monline

"This article discusses the essential network ports, protocols and services that are used by Microsoft client and server operating systems, server-based programs and their subcomponents in the Microsoft Windows server system."

A very nice collection of all the Windows network services and their protocol+port usages.

I already posted about HashTab, a utility available for both Windows and Mac OS X. It integrates well with the OS and allows you to generate MD5 (or other) checksums easily. There're a couple of alternatives in case of Windows though.

If you put pictures in a watched folder inside Picasa, then the folder will appear in the app's folder list the next time you start it. It'll show you the picture count behind the folder's name as it should. However what if you've other (sub-)folders in there too? Picasa shows only the top-level contents of a folder (when you select it in the folder list), ie. you don't see in a selected folder the pictures of it's sub-folders (these sub-folders appear in Picasa's folder list as separate items). However, the folder deletion process works recursively, ie. it'll delete all sub-folders (and all their content) too!

HashTab makes it easy (using context menu items in Mac's Finder and Windows' Explorer) to generate all kinds of checksums of a selected file (unfortunately it does not support multiple file selections). In v1.2 of the Mac port the following hash functions are available: CRC32, HAVAL (32-3, 32-4, 32-5), MD2, MD4, MD5, RIPEMD (128, 160, 256, 320), SHA (1, 224, 385, 512), Tiger, Whirlpool. My personal favourite is Whirlpool, but for file integrity checking MD5 became the defacto standard, ie. this is the one you'll most likely encounter on download pages.

I've done a little performance test of these two virtualization solutions for Mac OS X using a Windows XP SP3 for the guest OS. My conclusion is that they're pretty close in most aspects ... or at least in the aspects that are relevant to me. And VirtualBox being free for personal use makes it a clear winner for my needs (at home).

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".