miscellanea

1. recStuff was a small app I wrote in Visual Basic 6.0 to record radio broadcasts. It uses a timer, the FindWindow() API call to find applications with the given titles, and kills them. Something that can be done on Unix in a one-liner took a whole app on Windows.
2. What I did to my Windows 2000 Professional installation:
   0. Would you rather install Windows XP (eXtra craP)?
   1. Uninstall all the bundled crap.
   2. Install any old, really legacy software first. (don't do this)
   3. Windows Update (do this a few times, since each time it will discover new items to update)
   4. Application compatibility (à la Windows XP) support:
      • regsvr32 %systemroot%\apppatch\slayerui.dll
      Makes you wonder why this is not done by default! Note that unlike XP, to have the tab show up in the Compatiblity property page for an application, you must create a shortcut (.lnk) to the executable. On XP you are able to change Compatibility options gloablly for the executable; which probably means writing crap to the registry and slowing down intial execution anyway. I prefer the Windows 2000 approach.
   5. Command Prompt tab completion (à la Unix):
      • Edit HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor and change the completion character to 0x9 which is tab.
   6. Set up an IPSEC policy, like a firewall. See my unfinished article on Virus Experts.
3. At one time or another, I have used MS-DOS 5.0, MS-DOS 6.0, MS-DOS 6.22, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Linux 2.0, Linux 2.2, Linux 2.4, Linux 2.6, Novell Netware ('94), Solaris 7, FreeBSD 4.7, and FreeBSD 5.0. Latest version of MS-DOS is 7.10 (6.22 is the last boxed version). Some versions of Windows claim to have 8.00 (unconfirmed: WinME?) but I have no proof.
4. Compiling open-source packages:
   • vPopmail: ./configure --enable-passwd --enable-domainquotas
   • vQadmin: ./configure --enable-cgibindir=/usr/local/apache/cgi-bin --enable-passwd=y
   • qmailadmin: ./configure --enable-modify-spam --enable-modify-quota --enable-vpopmaildir=/home/vpopmail --enable-help --enable-domain-autofill --enable-htmldir=/usr/local/apache/htdocs --enable-cgibindir=/usr/local/apache/cgi-bin
   • php module: ./configure --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql --with-mysql-sock=/usr/local/mysql/var/mysqld.sock --with-xml --enable-xslt --with-xslt-sablot --with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs
   • php fastcgi: ./configure --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql --with-mysql-sock=/usr/local/mysql/var/mysqld.sock --with-xml --enable-xslt --with-xslt-sablot --enable-fastcgi --enable-force-cgi-redirect
   • Apache: ./configure --with-ssl --enable-rewrite --enable-so --enable-suexec --disable-info --with-suexec-caller=nobody --with-suexec-uidmin=1000 --with-suexec-gidmin=1000 --prefix=/usr/local/apache2 --enable-ssl --disable-status --disable-imap --disable-asis --with-mpm=prefork --enable-auth-digest --disable-include --with-module=mappers:security
   • pure-ftpd: ./configure --with-privsep --with-peruserlimits --with-virtualhosts --with-ftpwho --with-puredb --without-inetd --with-tls --with-virtualchroot --with-sysquotas
5. notes on how to generate md5 shadow passwords have been moved to Virus Experts
6. some notes on network device naming
7. some useful jabber admin commands
8. some noteworthy astronomical events
9. some other random notes (private)
10. an interesting paper on the Google File System (GFS) (PDF)
11. some interesting typography-related things:
    • en & em dashes, and hyphen usage
12. man pages are your friend, especially when you want to use something like awk for the first time to make an html page of images:
    ls -1 | awk '{ print "<img src=\"" $0 "\"><br>" }' > img.html
    Note that it is ls minus one, not 'l'. Basically, the rule is: awk '/pattern/ { command }' where the /pattern/ is optional. $0 will match the entire line if I'm not mistaken in my 2 minutes of experimenting with awk.
13. how to convert a .nrg image to an ISO image file:
    dd bs=1k skip=300 if=image.nrg of=image.iso
    This will causes dd to skip 300 bs-sized bytes (300 kb) before starting the data copy. In reality, the NeRo imaGe (nrg) file is just an ISO image with a 300kb header that is *not* part of the ISO filesystem image.

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