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Tag: Useful Software

  • ieSpell – a spell checker for Internet Explorer

    One of my favourite features in .Text (the blogging engine used by my Conchango Blog) is ieSpell – a spell checker for Internet Explorer.

    ieSpell is a free (for non-commercial use) Internet Explorer browser extension which can be used to check the spelling of text input boxes on a web page. Particularly useful for users who perform a lot of web-based text entry (e.g. web mails, forums, blogs, diaries), it is both fast (i.e. it runs client-side) and flexible, as its personal word list (custom dictionary) is the same for whichever site it is run against (cf. a server-side system, which would only work for one particular web application). I also like it because it has a UK English dictionary as well as the ubiquitous US English default dictionary.

    Once installed, ieSpell may be accessed in one of three ways:

    1. Using the Tools menu.
    2. Using the Toolbar button.
    3. Using a context-sensitive (right-click) menu.

    ieSpell is available for download from the ieSpell website.

  • Discovering unknown devices in Windows

    Whilst developing my unattended Windows XP build, I came across a number of devices that were not automatically detected by Windows.

    Sometimes, right-clicking the unknown device in Device Manager and selecting the Update driver… option allowed Windows Update to connect to the Internet and locate updated drivers (which in turn identified the device and allowed me to download and integrate the OEM drivers into the Windows XP installation source).

    On other occasions it was not so simple, and I needed to do some research to identify the device using the PCI device instance ID (found on the details page of the device properties).

    A couple of years back I was introduced to Craig Hart’s PCI and AGP bus sniffer. I could have just run the utility, but in this case I chose to search its companion file (pcidevs.txt) for the vendor and device PCI IDs. Using this technique, I was able to identify my unknown device as the Broadcom (vendor 14E4) BCM4306 802.11g Wireless NIC (device 4320), which is also known as a Dell Wireless 1350. Once I had that information, all that was required was to download the drivers for integration.

  • Microsoft error code lookup tool

    Today’s Windows IT Pro magazine network Windows Tips and Tricks Update, highlights Microsoft’s Error Code Lookup tool. The tool can be used to determine error values from decimal and hexadecimal error codes presented by Windows operating systems, looking up one or more values at a time and showing informational data associated with the value where it is available.

    (Note that although the Web page is called “Exchange Server Error Code Look-up” the tool actually handles Windows operating system error codes).

  • Burn CDs from the command line

    A few days back I downloaded and ran a fantastically useful tool for writing CDs from the command line – Alex Feinman’s CreateCD. It seems to work well, and appears fast, with plenty of functionality. In a recent Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine article, CreateCD was even discussed as a method for creating backups using CD-RW discs.

  • Microsoft launches Partner Pack for Windows

    Microsoft has released another add-on pack for Windows, but this time most of the software is supplied by partners. The Partner Pack for Windows is aimed at consumers and includes:

    • Games (Super Slyder and Serpentine).
    • Homestead Photosite (web photo publishing application).
    • Microsoft Time Zone (displays the time in multiple zones around the world).
    • Computer Associates eTrust (antivirus software).
    • Google Deskbar (desktop search tool).
    • Desktop Media Gallery (templates and images).
    • Onfolio Express (research tool which runs within Internet Explorer).
    • Post-it Software Notes (software version of a post-it note).
    • PayPal Payment Wizard (add PayPal payment buttons to e-mail).
    • Microsoft USB Flash Drive Manager (backup and restore files to/from USB flash drives).

    Some of this may be useful, some not, but it’s interesting to see Microsoft shipping Google Deskbar at the same time as developing their own desktop search capabilities.

  • Free network scanning tools

    Network scanning tools are a bit of a grey area. For those of us who need to keep systems secure, they are valuable tools. But for those who are unaware of their existence, they are a means for a would be attacker to scan your network in search of vulnerabilities.

    The eEye Digital Security website has a number of free utilities which may be of interest, in particular the nmapNT and LibnetNT utilities, which are Win32 ports of the similarly named Unix tools.

  • Creating ISO images from CDs

    Last night I wanted to create an ISO image of a CD I had previously produced. A few weeks back, Stuart Preston pointed me in the direction of the Lucersoft LC ISO Creator. As Stuart noted, it has such a simple interface that you can’t really go wrong (and it’s only 53Kb in size).

  • Open source FTP client

    In my post from a couple of weeks back, where I raved about the new Mozilla Firefox preview release, I admitted to becoming a bit of an open source fan of late. Last night I tried out another open source product – FileZilla.

    FileZilla is an FTP client for Windows (there is also a FileZilla Server product). It supports both FTP and SFTP, and includes a well thought-out interface with a local site view, a remote site view and details of currently queued files for upload/download.

    Using FileZilla, uploading a new version of my website took seconds, with FileZilla launching as many concurrent FTP sessions as my ISP would allow from a single upload request.

    It looks like this tool could be a big time saver.

  • Windows AutoPlay on a USB flash drive

    I’ve been looking at using the AutoPlay functionality in Windows to launch an HTML document each time I insert a USB flash drive. Controlled using a file called autorun.inf, AutoPlay is designed for CDs, but I see no reason why it should not work with other removable media.

    There is an excellent overview of the autorun.inf file on the Moon Valley Software website. Although autorun.inf files are easy to edit using a standard text editor such as Notepad, the Moon Valley Autorun.inf Editor is a free download from the Moon Valley Software website, which includes a particularly useful feature to locate and display icon resources within a .DLL.

    Using this, I soon had a file which changed the icon and name for the USB flash drive when I inserted it, but I could not get it to automatically launch an HTML document.

    After some searching (most notably a TechRepublic post), I discovered that the open command in autorun.inf only recognises programs. Windows 2000 and later recognise the shellexecute command to open other file types, for example:

    [autorun]shellexecute=index.html

    Once open= is replaced with shellexecute=, the context menu in Windows Explorer recognises index.html as the default action for the device, but for some reason it does not launch when I insert the USB flash drive into either of the PCs I’m using today. I checked out Microsoft knowledge base articles 155217 and 314855 but found the PCs were correctly configured to AutoPlay.

    Searching the ‘net brought up a host of utilities (some free, some not) which are designed to extend the AutoPlay functionality, but by far the most useful utility was autorun.exe (a free download from the Tarma Software Research website, not to be confused with Peter Harrison’s AutoRun from the imagespro.com website). I found that autorun.exe would execute the commands in my autorun.inf file, but still not automatically launch when the USB flash drive was inserted.

  • Mozilla Firefox – make the switch today!

    Alex Coles showed me the Firefox browser last week and ever since then I’ve been hooked! With the recent (and highly-publicised) run of flaws in Internet Explorer (IE) resulting in bodies such as US-CERT advising users to consider switching to an alternative browser, the browser marketplace has been opened up again, leading to IE’s market share slipping and the Mozilla website reporting 3,592,687 million downloads of the Firefox preview release as I write this (1.3 million of which were in the first week).

    So why is Firefox so great? Well, for a start it’s fast. It takes about the same time as IE to launch, but seems about 4 times faster to render popular websites (e.g. BBC, or The Register). Previously, I had thought it was my connection that was slow – not my browser! One of the major features is tabbed browsing – I wasn’t convinced as to the difference between multiple tabs in a single browser and multiple copies of a browser, but it just seems easier to work with! Installation is easy too – it’s compact (at 4.5Mb) and even imports my IE settings. Like the latest IE version, it has an integrated popup blocker; but it also includes integrated search tools for Google, Yahoo and others in its toolbar. It just seems more elegant.

    Actually (much to my own surprise) I’m becoming a bit of an open source fan. I use FeedReader as my RSS aggregator and now Firefox is my browser of choice. I’ll probably start looking at the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client too.

    Internet Explorer is not dead – it still holds more than 90% of the market, but as Firefox rises in popularity, perhaps Microsoft will look seriously at a full redesign, including a host of new features? We can but hope.

    Get Firefox!