Several people have asked me how to download videos from Youtube and unfortunately KissYouTube is no longer working. However, GiveAway of The Day has Wondershare available for free (today only) that will allow you to do just this. Naturally this should only be used to download public domain content.
Month: November 2007
This is now the fifth (I think) Thanksgiving celebrated in the States. It’s a funny holiday as part of it is so traditional with the relatives around, Turkey dinner and the listing of things that we are thankful for (and the football game) . Kristen’s brothers and family are up for Thanksgiving which is cool, Brian’s daughters have been keeping us amused with Kate’s love of spaghetti and attempts at clicking her fingers and Mia’s pride in the pink cake we had last night and it was cute when she couldn’t wait to give me the pretzel they had brought from the mall (and waited patiently for her tip – a piece of Kristen’s pretzel). I’m really thankful for the 4 day break as I need some rest and a chance to recharge my batteries. No studying will be done this weekend.
We all know that you should have good secure passwords and you can enforce this in Active Directory, but it is the other applications on the network that might raise a concern.
I got a helpdesk ticket saying that the password for a Peachtree database was not the normal one….the password that was the same as the company name! After trying password, no password I then discovered that a google search for Peachtree password removers comes up with tons of hits but no free ones. The shareware ones were about 60 bucks for a corporate licence but about $30 for personal use. However, one of them would demonstrate that it could actually break the password by revealing the first two characters of the password. I thought this might give me and the user a clue as to what the password could be. When the first two characters were revealed to be 12 it didn’t take the user long to realise what the password was and they got it on the first attempt.
Sometimes it is really hard to demonstrate the reasons that passwords should be used and you would have thought that the importance of security and a good password for company financial data would be recognised…
I wonder what will happen if at the next Board meeting I do a demonstration of insecurity with LIVE data…..
It’s rather ironic when the laptop Blue Screens as I start to install the debug symbols in order to debug a blue screen on a server. I think the pc is having one of those days – much like my past two weeks (I think I’m still trying to catch up on having 4 days vacation in October – and yet I’ve got two more days off at the end of this week – can’t wait!)
Update Annoyingly, the pc reboots after the blue screen appears for about 2 seconds. I have turned off the restart on system failure option in My Computer properties. It occurs whenever I double click one of the symbol.exe files across the network.
Update2 After extracting the symbol files from a local version I was able to analyze the dump file and it told me that the problem was in ip_fw.sys – which at first glance looks like a firewall driver. Sure enough, a google search told me that it was from the wipfw openbsd firewall implementation on Windows. Removing the software means I can run the exe with no crashes. The strange thing is that I’ve never heard of wipfw before and I certainly didn’t install it (by itself) as I log all the programs that I install and that wasn’t one of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if it came with another program such as wireshark or bidiblah or something along those lines…more investigation to come.
Anyone recommend a good Exchange 2007 book, of particular relevance will be upgrading servers (from Exchange 5.5 no less!)
A while back I managed to loose the quick release clip for the camera to attach it to my tripod which meant that I couldn’t use the tripod. Seeing as though I will be having some indoor photo sessions in the near future with Christmas and the Columbus Flickr trip to the theatre, I decided to get it working again. I was debating getting a new tripod and the Opteka Tripod looked pretty good and cheap, but after a search on Google I tracked down a store that sold replacement quick release clips, so I’ve purchased one from Adorama. Hopefully the service will be good and the part is the right one!
A couple of people commented on my post about no ads with NBC on the web site stating that they got ads. I did a bit of testing tonight and with the NoScript firefox extension enabled, which should be used for safe browsing anyway, and doubleclick.net disabled, which should also be disabled for privacy reasons, then the adverts do not get displayed.
I know this is going to be doing the rounds, Kristen got it in a text message about 30 minutes after the game finished, but she couldn’t forward it. I found it at MotorCityBuckeyes
Evernote is available for free today. This is a pretty good note taker program that has been around for ages. If you are familiar with OneNote, then you will be fairly familiar with how this application works. If not, then go take a look at the main Evernote homepage
I’m now able to get Windows Photo Gallery working on the home pc – I no longer get the cryptic error message when I try to run the program. It is pretty similar to Picassa and I must admit I prefer the Picassa interface for most things. The one thing that I love in WPG though is the Panorama feature. All you have to do is select your photos and choose Make – Create panorama. The software then intelligently stitches all the photos together and saves you a very large file on your disk. Unfortunately the upload facility to Windows spaces only uploads a thumbnail, you don’t get the full benefit of the files. I’ve uploaded three panoramas to my spaces account. The best way to see them is to select the Full view icon on the right of the page, then click the gear icon at the bottom and then select pan and zoom. This gives a really good display of the Niagara Falls and the Scioto River panorama that I took fairly recently. However to see the full size, original photo you will have to go to my Panorama pictures on Zooomr and then click on the All sizes button.