Mark Thomson

Windows Server 2003 ships with security locked down by default. Part of this locking is Internet Explorer Enhanced Security which provides an extra layer of protection when accessing the net using Internet Explorer.

You can uninstall the entire Configuration, or just for users, or just for Administrators. The un-installer is set up like this:

Enhanced Security
->For Administrators
->For Users

If you have just random users connecting via Remote Desktop or Terminal Services, you may want to leave the Users configuration installed.

To remove it:

Click Start, put your mouse over Control Panel, and click Add/Remove Programs

Now click Add/Remove Windows Components

After a few seconds a window will pop-up. Uncheck the check mark next to Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration. If you'd like to only disable it for Administrators or only for Users you can click Details and do so.

Press Next, let it finish, and it's now disabled.

I installed the frameworks and add-on's to Visual Studio 2005 v8.0.50.727.42 and found that all the items in my Toolbox disappeared and some items appeared more than once in other menus.

Apparently if you right click on one of the toolbox control headings, (common controls for example) and select reset toolbox

then right click again and select show all...

then they will be all displayed (with them grayed out)

then right click again and select Reset Toolbox...

should take about 30 seconds and they will all reappear

If this doesn't work you can also try clearing out the cache files for the Toolbox in C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0

Open command line window.

Change to c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin

Execute sdkvars.bat

Then execute sn -k c:\.snk

The key file will be generated for attachment to your project. Right click on your project in Visual Studio and select Add Existing Item. Select the .snk file that you just created.

Then right-click on your project again and select Properties. Navigate to the signing tab. Check Sign the Assembly checkbox, and then choose your .snk file from the Choose a strong name key file dropdown list. Close the Properties window. Rebuild the project to recreate your dll with the strong name.

My sidebar links were running out of control, so I decided to hook up a collapsible menu solution. A hunt around the internet turned up a nice javascript solution, but as usual I had endless trouble trying to get it to play nice with Blogger. For some reason Blogger's security model blocks some javascript from running in the site. Usually it's something as simple as changing &amp;'s in a GET/POST string to &amp;amp's; instead, but this time it was a lot more difficult. Here's how I got it working, so you don't have to waste as much time on it as I did.

I created an HTML/Javascript part on the sidebar and inserted the following block of code:

<ul id="containerul">
<li>
Art
<ul>
<li>
<a href="http://alantew.blogspot.com">Alan Tew</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.maleev.com">Alex Maleev</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="http://absoluteart.blogspot.com">Tim Kane</a>
</li>
</ul>
</li>

<li>
Wargaming
<ul>
<li cteopen="http://<your site address>/cte_specialminus.png" cteclosed="http://<your site address>/cte_specialplus.png">
<span style="font-weight:bold;">Lord of the Rings</span>
<ul>
<li cteitem="http://<your site address>/cte_specialpage.png">
<a href="http://www.lotr-collector.com/">LOTR Collector</a>
</li>

<li cteitem="http://<your site address>/cte_specialpage.png">
<a href="http://thelastalliance.com/">The Last Alliance</a>
</li>

<li cteitem="http://<your site address>/cte_specialpage.png">
<span style="font-weight:bold;"><a href="http://www.thepalantir.org/">The Palantir</a></span>
</li>
</ul></li>
<li cteopen="http://<your site address>/cte_specialminus.png" cteclosed="http://<your site address>/cte_specialplus.png">
<span style="font-weight:bold;">Warhammer 40k</span>
<ul>
<li cteitem="http://<your site address>/cte_specialpage.png">
<a href="http://www.advancedtautactica.com/">Advanced Tau Tactica</a>
</li>
<li cteitem="http://<your site address>/cte_specialpage.png">
<a href="http://www.tauonline.org/">Tau Online</a>
</li>
</ul></li></ul></li></ul>

<h2>Blogs</h2>

<ul id="anothercontainerul">
<li>
Personal
<ul>
<li>
<a href="http://olivepug.blogspot.com/">Olive Pug</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="http://metrobuild.blogspot.com/">Under Construction</a>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>

<h2>Resources</h2>

<ul id="resourcecontainerul">
<li>
Web Design
<ul>
<li>
<a href="http://http://www.sxc.hu//">Stock.Xchng</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.templatemonster.com/">Template Monster</a>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
initiate(Array("containerul","anothercontainerul","resourcecontainerul")); // This must be placed after the menus in order to format them properly.
//--></script>

Then in the <HEAD> block of your site's template insert this code:

<script src='http://<your site address>/javascripts/cte_scripts.js' type='text/javascript'/>

<style type='text/css'><!--
@import "http://<your site address>/cte_styles.css";
--></style>

This all seems to work properly. If you want to add another container grouping, copy the grouping, paste it and change the block name. Then put the block name in as an input to the initiate() code block.

The Unix utility dd is a disk copying utility that can be used from the command line to create a disk image. It can make a bit copy of the drive it's copying. If you have a drive that spins up, but does not mount because of damage, you can use the following:

dd bs=512 if=/dev/disk1 of=/some_dir/image.dmg conv=noerror,sync

Using the switch noerror allows the copy to ignore the errors, and adding mode sync fills the image with nulls at that point.

The bs=512 selects the block size (in this case 512), and if=/dev/disk1 is the Unix path to the actual disk device. Make sure the chosen directory (some_dir) has enough space free to take the entire disk image. You will end up with a disk image the size of the source drive's maximum capacity.

This command line tool is included with all versions of Mac OS X, and is also available on many other Unix platforms. To get started, try the following command.

sudo tcpdump -i en0 -s 0 -w DumpFile.dmp

The sudo command causes tcpdump to run with privileges, which is necessary to access promiscuous mode.

The -i en0 option tells tcpdump to capture packets on the first Ethernet interface. You need to select an interface; there is no default. For a list of interfaces, type ifconfig -a. Mac OS X 10.1 and later provide packet capture support on PPP, so you can also specify a PPP interface here (for example, -i ppp0).

The -s 0 option requests the full packet rather than just the first 68 bytes.

The -w DumpFile.dmp parameter tells tcpdump to dump the packets to a file called DumpFile.dmp.

In response to this command, tcpdump will begin to capture packets and put them in the DumpFile.dmp file. When you want to stop capturing, interrupt tcpdump by typing ^C. You can then display the contents of the packets as text using the following command.

tcpdump -s 0 -n -e -x -vvv -r DumpFile.dmp

The -n option means that addresses are not converted to domain names, which speeds things up considerably.

The -e option causes tcpdump to display the link-level header for each packet.

The -x option causes the contents of the packet to also be displayed in hex.

The -vvv option makes tcpdump's output as verbose as possible.

By specifying -r DumpFile.dmp option you tell tcpdump to read packets from the file DumpFile.dmp rather than from a network interface. Note that you don't need privileges to do this, so running tcpdump using sudo is not required.

You can also combine these steps, as shown below, but if you do this you don't get a high-fidelity record of the packets that you captured.

sudo tcpdump -i en0 -s 0 -n -e -x -vvv

I saw an article about backing up your blog on a Google Blog. Kudos to the author! I'm going to reproduce the important stuff here. I've been desperately searching for a way to backup my data. It's extremely irritating to lose it. Although this doesn't make it any easier to restore the data, at least you will have a copy of it. Perhaps someone can come up with some useful utility for doing a backup properly.

If you have a blog hosted on Blogger and you've upgraded to the new version, there's an easy way to backup your blog.

This page lists the latest N posts from the blog:

http://blogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=N

Instead of N, type the number of posts. If your blog has less than 1000 posts, you can save this page:

http://blogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=1000

To download all the photos uploaded to your blog, DownThemAll comes to the rescue. The Firefox extension lets you download all the files with a certain extension from the current page, so it's a good way to download all the images from the previous listing.

There's also a way to get all the posts in an XML feed. This is a better format if you intend to import it in a database.

http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=1000

The number of posts can be easily obtained from the dashboard.

You can also backup the comments:

http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?max-results=1000