Tag Archives: microsoft
Macs and MS Keyboards

Macs and MS Keyboards

by R.I. Pienaar on 12. Mar, 2008 in Apple

Previously I posted about my iMac 17″ that I got, that was January 2006 well I have now upgraded to a bigger mac, this time a 24″ iMac Core 2 Duo Extreme with 2GB RAM.


I still have the 17″ and will keep it, it’s replacing my really old AMD Linux Desktop on my desk but the 17″ has been getting a bit long in the tooth with Parallels, MS Office, and all sorts of other stuff that I have been doing on it as I am now working full time from home. 

Previously I bought at the bottom of the spectrum and the machine lasted well, but I was hoping to keep it as my primary machine for at least 3 years.  I guess my needs have increased though so this time I bought at the top end of the range and will upgrade it to 4GB RAM soon, just not from Apple as buying direct from Crucial will save me about 200 pounds.

What immediately annoyed me – to the point of cramps in my hands and general unhappyness – were this amazingly crap thinline keyboard that comes with the machines.  I soon started looking at other options and found no 3rd party Mac keyboards but did notice that Microsoft keyboards have a utility to configure the various additional keys etc so I took the plunge and got a MS Natural Ergonomic 400 keyboard to replace my very old MS Office keyboard.


I am extremely pleased with this keyboard, everything works as it should.  The configuration utility lets you configure every key on the keyboard and everything is mapped correctly as expected.  Even the function keys like ‘new’ works by sending ‘apple key-n’ etc right out of the box, this is the case with all the MS keyboards on the market today so I can happily recommend any MS keyboard to mac users.

The iMac itself is lovely, I am really happy with it.  Speed wise the Core 2 Duo Extreme chip has made a huge improvement, with Parallels running Windows the machine idles at about 2% while I have Firefox, Netnewswire, iTerm, several Terminal.app, Adium, Skype and all sorts of background stuff going, really cannot have asked for more from a desktop machine.

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Resizing XP Boot Partition – VMWare Saves The Day

by R.I. Pienaar on 07. Feb, 2007 in Usefull Things

I’m running a combination XP and OS X machines at home linked together using Synergy. I’ve been contemplating moving away from XP so thought I’ll give Ubuntu another go.
My drives are pretty full except my OS Boot drive, lots of space there so I thought I’ll resize it and put Ubuntu at the end in a small partition while I test things out. It sounded like a good idea at the time but it turned out to be pretty disastrous.
I used the GParted LiveCD to do the resizing after first running a defrag on the drive. On the surface everything went fine but the XP wouldn’t boot.
I admit not reading up enough about the process but it turns out after doing the resize with GParted you’ll need to force chkdsk the boot disk, the only way to do this involves using the XP Setup CD and it’s recovery console.
My machine has a SATA drive that isn’t directly supported by the XP Setup disk so I need to use a Floppy driver disk, I don’t even have a floppy drive anymore so I was pretty much stuck.
I installed Ubuntu 6.10 in the free space, it worked a charm and I soon had at least something back up to get going but still needed to chkdsk the XP partition. I knew the files were there – Ubuntu mounted it on the Desktop – so it was all good, except something small somewhere causing grief.
I was faced with either buying a Floppy drive and Floppy cables, and finding blank floppies somewhere or finding another solution. Solution came in the form of VMWare Server.
VMWare supports mounting RAW partitions into a VM, so in theory I should be able to create a virtual instance that boots my XP Partition, I tried this and ended up with a Blue Screen and immediate reboot. The problem being that my SATA drive shows up as a SCSI drive in XP under VMWare and my XP did not have the right drivers to load the drive and boot from it, so still I needed to chkdsk the drive.
I took my XP CD, downloaded the VMWare Server drivers and mounted that as a floppy into the VM, booted from the CD and loaded the drivers into the CD, ran the recovery console and got a C:\ prompt. Here I was able to chkdsk the stricken partition and eventually boot right into XP, problem solved.
I took this one step further by creating a new hardware profile in my XP box once it was running, loaded in the VMWare SCSI drivers and now I can boot my XP into fully working state under Ubuntu using VMWare.
So, the short of it, yes you can resize your XP Pro Boot disks, even NTFS ones using Open Source tools, but you need to be 100% sure you can get your recovery console up and running to run chkdsk afterwards, my machine is now happy again and booting Ubuntu and XP.
VMware Kicks Arse.

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Microsoft Vulnerabilities

by R.I. Pienaar on 13. Oct, 2004 in Front Page

Microsoft today again showed us all why we really should put all our eggs in their basket by releasing 10 new security bulletins:
Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer
Vulnerability in Windows Shell Could Allow Remote Code Execution
Vulnerability in NNTP Could Allow Code Execution
Vulnerability in SMTP Could Allow Remote Code Execution
Vulnerability in Compressed (zipped) Folders Could Allow Code Execution
Vulnerability in Microsoft Excel Could Allow Code Execution
Security Update for Microsoft Windows
Vulnerability in NetDDE Could Allow Remote Code Execution
Vulnerability in WebDav XML Message Handler Could Lead to a Denial of Service
Vulnerability in RPC Runtime Library Could Allow Information Disclosure and Denial of Service
7 of these are marked as critical while the NetDDE one – that allows remote code execution on 7 of their operating systems, including 2003 – only marked as important.
Of the 7 critical ones 5 affects Windows 2003 Server, their much hyped security in Windows 2003 is starting to look a bit like the much hyped Oracle 9i’s “Unbreakable” claims.

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XP SP2

by R.I. Pienaar on 09. Aug, 2004 in Front Page

Lots of fanfare today about the release of XP SP2, I think I will install it on one of my machines and see how that goes. I had a bit of hassle getting a proper url for downloading it, so here it is. It’s a 250Mb download so unless you have bandwidth to burn wait for the auto updates version to come available that is apparently highly optimised.

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MS Security Alerts via RSS

by R.I. Pienaar on 25. Apr, 2004 in Usefull Things

Microsoft is getting into the RSS thing it seems, they are providing a feed with their latest security alerts, you can subscribe to it here.

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Syncback

by R.I. Pienaar on 04. Apr, 2004 in Usefull Things

I bought 2 120Gb Seagate drives for some archival storage due to massive files being produced by the new camera and Photoshop. The 2 drives will be rsync’d so that I have a backup copy of the drives themselves but this left the problem of getting the Windows machine to easily copy its files to the server.
The difficult thing came in that the directory on my laptop will not be identical to that on the server since I do not intend to carry all my photos with me all the time, it is already almost 10Gb big so a simple copy of some sort wouldn’t work. I did some searching and came across SyncBack which is an awsome Windows Freeware tool for doing all sorts of complex syncing even supporting FTP servers as destination, has a scheduler and options for emailing reports etc. If you ever need to sync or backup a Windows box to somewhere else then this is the tool to use.

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MS Word Password Protection Bypass

by R.I. Pienaar on 26. Mar, 2004 in Front Page

Hooray for Microsoft, seems the much loved MS Word password protection is pretty lame (it’s not like anyone would trust this would they? The mind boggles)

Example 1
1) Open MS Word with a new/blank page
2) Now select “Insert” >> “File” >> browse for your password protected doc select “Insert” & “Insert” password protected doc into your new/blank doc
3) Now select “Tools” & Whey hey, voila, there’s no longer an “Unprotect document” … password vanished …

Read the full sad story here

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A Home User’s Security Checklist for Windows

by R.I. Pienaar on 17. Feb, 2004 in Usefull Things

I first noticed this via Roland Tanglao but I think he has a misshap with the link, some googling soon found the right url, it is a quick annotated checklist on how to run a secure windows machine at home, useful to give to some people who run ADSL connections on their windows machines and such.

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Microsoft critical font update

by R.I. Pienaar on 11. Feb, 2004 in Rantings

Today I noticed my Windows Updated is telling me to update my Bookshelf Symbol 7 font and that it is marked critical. Immediately interested to know what is so critical about a font I read the knowledge base article which says:

A critical update is available to remove unacceptable symbols from the Bookshelf Symbol 7 font that is included with Microsoft Office 2003. The Bookshelf Symbol 7 font is contained in the Bssym7.ttf file.

After some googling I came across the following statement from Microsoft:

Microsoft has learned of a mistake in the Bookshelf Symbol 7 font included in the Microsoft Office System client applications. Due to an unintentional oversight, we failed to identify, prior to the release, the presence of two swastikas within the font. We apologize for this and for any offense caused. Microsoft is taking immediate measures to remedy the issue for all customers.

Some further reading up about it got me across the following blog posting where someone points at legit use of swastika’s, I think the world should just get over it and move on, this kind of censoring is insane.

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XP SP2 – Developer view

by R.I. Pienaar on 13. Nov, 2003 in Front Page

I noticed on NT Bugtraq a overview of forthcoming changes to XP introduced by SP2. It contains preliminary information on changes made to better protect email, network, browsing and memory on XP machines, well worth reading.

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