Josh Wieder

Its come to my attention that blog has way too much helpful technical information and not nearly enough bitching & complaining. With today's post, I hope to tip the scales a bit. During the course of the day, I use a variety of operating systems. Most of my desktop computers use Windows, most of my servers use some version of either linux or bsd, and a large number of my customers use Macs (which I know underneath the branding is also linux, but we are talking about UI stuff in this post, and in that department OS X qualifies as its own thing). Over the last 20 or so years I've alternated between which operating system I use most frequently, based on what kind of work I'm doing as well as what is inexpensive, secure and effective at the time. Lately I've had a series of Windows laptops that I've spent a fair amount of time working with. It is what it is, I don't want to get off topic. This isn't some mouth-breather-y attempt to measure the manhood be...

A lot of people connect to Linux machines from a Windows desktop computer. Despite the number of people that have to do this for one reason or another, there are hardly any SSH clients for Windows. Basically there's three - Bitvise , Dameware and PuTTY . I've almost always used PuTTY. There are problems with all of these clients, including PuTTY. One of the smaller issues with PuTTY that I've nonetheless always found annoying is that it is not quite as portable as it appears to be. Installing the client is usually as simple as downloading and running the EXE file, but vital information about saved sessions as well as seed data gets stored in the Windows registry, where it can be forgotten about. Or where someone else can grab it. That's not really the fault of the developer; if I was making PuTTY today I doubt I would do anything differently. Its a garbage collection thing. The problem is that PuTTY information can be valuable to attackers. Just about everyone who ...

When I'm not writing about computers for free on the internet, I actually work with computers (for money). Most of what I do involves doing stuff with computers directly, but sometimes I have to talk to people before I can start with the computer-stuff. That can involve convincing people that my colleagues and I actually know what we are doing or planning projects with other people. With both of these tasks I've found that drawing pictures can be very helpful. These are special types of pictures - called work flows or network typologies. Here's a really basic example: Tree Topology, by  Tsingha02 The idea is taking some very complicated ideas about the relationships between computers and applications and putting them into very basic visual representations. Particularly for projects involving large numbers of servers, this sort of visualization is critical to understand what is going on. Despite how critical this sort of thing is to working with computers, there is ...

A while back I worked for a small hosting firm that focused on Microsoft products. As part of my responsibilities I wrote a great deal of documentation for them for a variety of tasks - some basic, some more advanced and problematic. Anyway I was pleased to see today that these tutorials are still published on their site. Follow this link, for instance, to read an instructional guide on how to enable CLR with MSSQL 2005 .

Pidgin is a popular IM client. I've been using it for years, mostly because of its simplicity when used within alternate operating systems. I need a non-browser based IM client that I can use in Fedora and Windows with the ability to easily transfer log data between the two. My only complaint is that the log search function is not very great, and Pidgin does not provide you with the ability to locate or change the log file path within the application. For those of you who need to find Pidgin logs, here are the paths for both Linux and Windows. Installations include an actual  pidgeon. Rabies sold separately. Linux-based operating systems store log data within the root directory like so: ~/.purple/logs Windows XP stores your logs here:  C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\.purple\logs Windows Vista and Windows 7 store your logs here: C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\.purple\logs When running Pidgin within Windows, Pidgin uses the PURPLEHO...

So this is a weird one. I recently installed phpmyadmin 3.5.1 in a MySQL 5.1 / IIS 7.5 environment. Everything was going well until I realized that following the installation (which was fully functional) I could not login to MySQL (from the CLI) without referencing the hostname (-h flag). I figured that maybe the .sql script included with the installer messed with my grants, but a quick show grants revealed I still had the same permissions granted to root as when I started. So I figured that I would update the grants on root to what was displayed in show grants just in case. This produced an insufficient permissions error even though root had "full" privileges. To resolve this I added skip-grant-tables to my.ini, restarted the mysql service, logged in as root, flushed privileges, and again updated grants to what was displayed in "show grants". I then removed skip-grant-tables and restarted, and I was again able to login locally. I'm still not certain what caus...

Do you know who Tess Ferrandez is? If not, you are missing out on the author of what I consider the most lucid series of articles on the topic of debugging .NET. Check out her series of demos on how to fixxit all things .NET . The most useful post I have seen so far is her piece on how to capture dumps on 32 bit process within 64 bit systems  (without needing to DL procdump). +1 nerd points to Ms Ferrandez for making my job of learning all things Windows a bit less painful.