Laurent’s Blog

Impressive demo on what Citrix Receiver will be on iPad with the possibility to use your iPhone as a trackpad !

http://community.citrix.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=133005705

Mark Russinovich (one of the creators of sysinternals) posted on is blog 5 articles on different aspect of Windows performance.

They really technical and very detailed. Definately a MUST READ !

Pushing the Limits of Windows: Physical Memory
Pushing the Limits of Windows: Virtual Memory
Pushing the Limits of Windows: Paged and Nonpaged Pool
Pushing the Limits of Windows: Processes and Threads
Pushing the Limits of Windows: Handles

I was used to use robocopy to backup my XP machine to the Qnap NAS and I was really missing rsync’s speed …

Now I finally have a working solution based on rsync with a really nice GUI provided by DeltaCopy and, most important for me, special character support (accents and so on) !!!

Steps are :

1. Allow remote Rsync server to back up data to NAS on the Qnap’s Remote Replication menu
2. Install DeltaCopy on your Windows Machine and configure your backup task (plus you can receive a log by mail, schedule the task, add rsync parameters, …)
3. Replace the cygwin.dll located in the DeltaCopy folder with the one found on Okisoft’s website (with UTF-8 support)
4. It’s done

Enjoy fast and easy backup

From the author :

This major update to Process Monitor adds real-time TCP and UDP monitoring to its existing process, thread, DLL, file system and registry monitoring. You can now see the TCP and UDP activity processes performed, including the operation (e.g. connect, send, receive), local and remote IP addresses and DNS names, and operation transfer lengths. On Windows Vista, Process Monitor also collects thread stacks for network operations.

Very good tool when you need to troubleshoot file/registry access and now some netwoking issues !

Download it from http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/ProcessMonitor.zip

Or use it directly from http://live.sysinternals.com/Procmon.exe

I just used those two tips to :

1. Disable the scanning of any usb disk inserted asking what do you want to do :
   via policy or the TweakUi Powertoys for XP
2. Put and remove a shortcut of the drive automatically on the desktop (freeware) : Desk Drive

This is probably not new for a lot of you but I just found it

It was always a pain for me to remember the steps to create, request and assign a self signed certificate to a test iis server

I just found SelfSSL from the IIS6 toolkit which do everything in a secon with a simple command line.

It even adds the self-signed certificate to the local browser trusted certificates

You can find the IIS 6 Ressource Kit Tools : HERE

Brian Madden gives an excellent analyse of the new Terminal Services features of Windows 2008 versus Citrix XenApp.

• TS RemoteApp (a kind of seamless windows / application publishing)
• TS Web Access (a web front end for TS RemoteApps)
• TS Session Broker (a load balancer for incoming RDP sessions)
• TS Gateway (an SSL gateway for RDP)
• TS Easy Print (An XPS-based printing solution)
• Windows System Resource Manager (Performance Management)

You can read the whole article here :

Windows 2008 Terminal Services versus Citrix Presentation Server / XenApp: Citrix has nothing to worry about

It will be available through Windows Update on June 10 but the standalone version is already downlodable :

• Windows XP SP3 in English
• Windows XP SP3 en Français

Microsoft confirmed the date this monday. The commercial life of Windows XP will still end on the 30 of June but there will be two exceptions :

1. Small national shops will still be able to provide OEM versions of Windows XP until 30 January 2009
2. Lowcost laptops assemblers as Asus with the Eee PC will be allowed to sell laptops with Windows XP pre-installed until 30 June 2010

Source : Clubic

Edit 21:55
Uninstalled …
After speaking a while with a guest of the site, the history disappeared and was no more able to discuss …
I hope Google will, one day, provide a google talk client with all the features of the three clients …

Edit 19:15
Hmm after a bit testing, this “third” google talk client as some nice features long awaited for the gtalk client (group chat) but mis some others
Copy/paste, send file, talk and seems to use http to communicate rather than xmpp …
So this is a third gtalk client with once again not all the features requested

—————–

Finally a new version which runs out of a browser !

Find it here !

It has all the features of the Google Talk gadget (but runs outside a browser), plus it adds new desktop notifications that remind you of appointments and alert you the moment messages arrive. There are notifications for Google Calendar appointments, Orkut scraps, Gmail messages, and Talk chats (of course). My favorite part? The snooze feature on Calendar notifications! Now I can put off that reminder for a few extra minutes without worrying about forgetting the meeting.

Source : Official Google Talk Blog

New realease candidate of Windows XP SP3 is available since 06/03/08

You can download it here

You can find the realease notes of the SP3 here

New version of OpenVPN is now available for Windows, Linux and as source !!

The major new features of this version are :

* Windows Vista-ready on both x86 and x64.
* OpenVPN GUI is now packaged in the Windows installer.
* topology subnet feature, allowing intuitive tun-based VPN subnets having 1 IP address per client.
* TAP-Win32 adapter can now be opened from non-administrator mode.
* PKCS #11 features for usage of cryptographic tokens (“smart cards”).
* multihome feature to enable UDP-based multihoming of the server on multiple interfaces.
* port-share feature to allow OpenVPN and an HTTPS server to share TCP port 443.

You can find the full changelog HERE

Take care if you install the XP SP3 RC1 and use the Windows PPTP VPN Client !
You can connect to the server side but can’t do anything after.

This is only a reminder that XP SP3 RC1 v.3264
breaks PPTP by turning MPPC on regardless of the
“require software compression” setting.

More details HERE

I did it (yes I know I’m too crazy )

Installation took round 30 minutes and a reboot later the SP3 was installed flawlessly.

I didn’t noticed (yet) the 10% performance increase but I’ll test further.
you can see all the new features of this SP3 on the link below :

–> SP3 Release Notes Here <–

Edit : Updated the second PC at home and had no problem. The system “seems” more responsive but I don’t know if it’s only psychologic

If you need to view, modify or delete saved credentials in Windows, here is a neat article on TechRepublic

You can run the key manager with the followin command :

rundll32.exe keymgr.dll, KRShowKeyMgr

To disable the “Remember my password” checkbox in Internet Explorer : Microsoft Supporto to

If you need to view, modify or delete saved credentials in Windows, here is a neat article on TechRepublic

To disable the “Remember my password” checkbox when accessing shares :

Start
Control Panel
Administrative Tools
Local Security Policy
Local Policies
Security Options

Change “Network access: Do not allow storage of credentials or .net passports for network authentication” to Enabled.