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Three Great Programs For IT Guys

If you’re in IT support, you’ve probably come across same issues over and over again. These three utilities can take some of the hard work off you and make your IT life a bit easier:

The Offline NT Password Editor – How many times have you gone to work on someone’s computer, only to find that they didn’t know their password because they had auto-login enabled? Or maybe they’ve logged in under their own account for so long that they’ve forgotten the local admin password? It’s not something that happens often, but when it does happen, this handy lil’ app is one of the few ways to reset a password. The Offline NT Password Editor comes as a bootable floppy or CD image; all you do is download the file, transfer it to a floppy or CD, then boot into the tiny Linux distribution that comes with the editor. Everything is driven by a command menu, so there’s no way you can screw this up… mostly. The editor doesn’t natively work on domain controllers (although it can be hacked to do so; I recommend this only at your own peril!). Also, follow the advice of the app’s author and only use the editor to reset the admin password to blank within the editor. Although the password editor has the ability to change a password to almost anything you choose, the author says that you will occasionally run into a problem with doing so. It’s much safer to simply change the password to nothing (i.e. blank) and change it from within Windows.

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Rose Byrne is as cute as a button!

Rose Byrne is an Australian actress. She’s interesting, in that I first remember seeing her on the new FX series Damages, but then she started appearing everywhere: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, 28 Weeks Later, and even the new sci-fi flick Sunshine. Here’s hoping we see more of her soon!

Rose Byrne

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Vista Is Broken…

Dear Microsoft:

For years, I’ve been one of your biggest fans. And why not? You’ve given me a career selling and supporting your products. You’ve put food on my table and countless trade show t-shirts on my back. It’s been a whole lot of fun, but that fun came to an end when you released Windows Vista. Why? Because Windows Vista is just broken.

My personal computer is an old Northwood Pentium 4 processor with HT. It’s got 2GB of RAM, an ATI Radeon x1300 pro video card and around 500Gb worth of space spread out among several hard drives. It’s pretty dated, to be sure. But it should be plenty powerful enough for a desktop operating system, right?

Apparently not. Here’s a short list of my woes with Vista:

Virtual PC: My Bittorrent setup wasn’t compatible with Vista, so I downloaded Virtual PC 2007. I installed Windows XP on a virtual machine and got everything set up just the way I like it: the OS stripped down as much as possible, autologin enabled, and a batch file that starts PeerGuardian and uTorrent at boot. The only problem? The virtual machine hogged up between 30-60% of my CPU cycles, even sitting at idle. That’s right, if the virtual machine is booted up, but not doing anything, it was using an average of 45% of my CPU cycles. When I went back to XP, I decided that it was simply easier to install Virtual PC 2007 and reuse the existing virtual machine (rather than install all the BT apps on my system). Under Windows XP, Virtual PC 2007 uses around 5-15% of my CPU cycles, with around 9% or 10% being the average. I hardly even notice that it’s there!

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Awwww crap!

Sorry, folks! The new “full-text” RSS feed has been disabled due to a bizarre problem… It seems that enabling the plug-in causes the “summary feed” to generate blank entries. Although the full-text feed works perfectly, not having the summary feed means that anyone that subscribed to this site via the original feed is getting new feed posts with nothing in them. And, as my Dad would say, “that dog won’t hunt”.

I’ve asked for help over at the plug-in author’s site, and hopefully I’ll be able to get this fixed soon!

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NOW AVAILABLE: Full-Text RSS Feeds!

Wow – that was a lot of work! Sometimes doing things in WordPress is just a couple of mouse clicks; other times it’s a crash course in editing PHP files! If you look at the “Meta” widget in the sidebar, you’ll now see three RSS feeds available: “RSS (Summary)”, “RSS (Full-Text)” and “RSS (Comments)”.

The “RSS (Summary)” feed is the standard WordPress RSS feed; it will give you the full text of most articles, but it will truncate longer entries with a “click here to read the rest of this post” link. “RSS (Full-Text)” will display the full text of all posts, but be advised that this feed is powered by a third-party plug-in, so it may (or may not) work properly. The “RSS (Comments)” feed is an RSS feed of all the comments this site gets; since that isn’t much, you’re not really missing anything.

If you’re getting this news via RSS, the URL for the new “full-text” feed is:

http://www.jimcofer.com/personal/?feed=rss2&dualfeed=2

Lastly, note that the Flash-based jimcofer.com audio player will only work on the website (it does not attach the mp3 files from “Songs I Love” posts to either RSS feed). This is by design. If you’re interested in one of these posts, you’ll have to use a web browser to listen to the tunes.

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Coming Soon: Dual RSS Feeds!

Back when I switched the site from FrontPage to WordPress, a few jimcofer.com readers expressed a desire for a “full post” RSS feed. This can’t be done by default in WordPress, since WordPress uses the “More” page break as a cutoff for the RSS feed. In other words, if you see a post with a “Click here to continue” link at the end of it, that’s where the RSS feed will break, and RSS users will see a “please click here to read the rest of the post” in their feed. My only other option would be to not use the “More” break, but a single long post could take up the entire front page, and I think you’ll agree that that’s simply not acceptable.

Yesterday, I learned of the existence of DualFeeds plug-in. This plug-in will allow me to have two RSS feeds – a “summary” version and a “full text” version. Those of you that wish to subscribe to the “full text” version will get the entire text of the posts. Those of you that subscribe to the “summary” version will get the same RSS feed you’ve been getting all along.

I’m hoping to get the new feed up and running in the next day or two. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes!

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SONGS I LOVE: “Faster Than Light”

Girls on FilmDuran Duran was my first favorite band. From 1981 to 1985, I listened to them almost constantly – and I’m sure it drove my family crazy.

Anyway, like most bands that have been around for a while, Duran Duran has had several “eras”, from the “international playboy” days of the Rio album to the “post-apocalyptic” look from the “Wild Boys” era. While I enjoyed them all, the one I liked most was the “New Romantic” look from their earliest days. They wore pirate shirts and leather pants… or cool-looking faux military uniforms. There was lots of makeup involved. Unlike bands that other kids liked (such as AC\DC), Duran Duran was all about style. And that was cool! Even better, the music was dancey and spacey. It was the perfect blend of pop and dance. There was minimal guitar action; instead there were synthesizers that sounded more like effects from a video game than the traditional sounds organs and keyboards had utilized before. There was a sort of futuristic flair to the whole thing that I simply could not resist. Early Duran Duran, in many ways, seemed like something out of Blade Runner.

And no song they ever did encapsulates this better than “Faster Than Light”, the b-side from the “Girls On Film” single. It’s funny – I used to hang out at this record store in my old hometown. This punk rock chick used to come in the store, and we’d talk music. I thought she was so hot – although to be honest, I thought pretty much every girl was hot back then. But this one actually talked to me! And one day she commented that “Faster Than Light” was her favorite Duran Duran song. And you just imagine the rest: as if straight from a movie, I rushed home and played the song over and over, thinking it was the greatest thing ever. Have a listen; maybe you’ll think the same thing too!

[audio:Duran.mp3]