Monthly Archive for July, 2008

What’s on your flash drive?

Published on July 12, 2008 in Free Windows Software. 0 Comments Tags: .

Thumb DriveIt’s a question I have been getting into a lot lately and people seem to think that it’s magic still to have a portable version of a program on your flash drive. Now it isn’t magic, it’s programming glory in it’s finest, it is also a way to minimize disk writes as well to prevent premature hardware failure. Since I keep getting asked what it is that I have on my flash drive I figure that I will appeal to the masses and tell everyone what it is that I personally have and use.

  • 7 zip – Some people still are unaware that there are other compression tecniques other than .zip
  • Foobar – Just a small audio player that takes up under 400K of ram
  • Photoshop – It’s photoshop, like there isn’t a reason to have it
  • Angry IP Scanner – Just for when you want to know where things are and what ports are open
  • Audacity – A full fledged audio editing program
  • Bonkenc – Just a small reencoding engine to convert audio files
  • CCleaner – Just to clean up the remnants of bad registry entries and other garbage left by spyware
  • Portable CMD – CMD when for some reason you can’t get CMD to open
  • CPU-Z – Aways nice to know what the speed and model of the processor inside the machine is
  • Eraser – For when writing over a disk has absolutely got to be done 27 times
  • Filezilla – A free, open source FTP client
  • Infra Recorder – A Nero like burning ROM far superior to the ATAPI engine in Windows
  • Keypass – an encrypted database that stores your website information
  • Magic Jelly Bean Key Finder – To find the key for many different installed programs effortlessly
  • Breakout 2 – A small breakout game
  • Midnight Commander for Windows – MC is my homeboy, what else is there to say
  • MSCONFIG – good to have when you come accross an infected PC that MSCONFIG has been deleted.
  • Firefox- How can anyone live without firefox now that we have been spoiled?
    • Ad Block Plus
    • Filterset G Updater
    • Down Them All – Sometimes slows firefox down
    • Foxmarks
    • Stop Or Reload
  • Thunderbird- Of course email is good to have as well, works best on an IMAP server.
    • Lightning
    • Enigmail
    • Contact Side Bar
    • Addressbooks Synchronizer
  • Notepad2 – Good for programming as it has syntax highlighting
  • Open Office – Office soution similar to Microsoft Office, only less antichrist
  • PDFtk Builder – When isn’t editing a PDF a bad idea?
  • Pidgin – Chat on AIM, YIM, MSN, MYSPACE, ICQ, IRC, and plenty of others.
  • Pnotes – Good for when you just need a quick reminder
  • Poker TH – Sometimes Jack doesn’t want to be a dull boy
  • Putty – The only SSH/telnet client that I use, this thing is great.
  • Revo Uninstaller – Great tool for people that have tons of programs that are worthless
  • True Crypt – Allows for me to carry personal information on my flash in an encrypted state
  • Umit – Network security work
  • uTorrent – Yeah sometimes you just need to get something
  • Virtualdub – And after you CPU-Z it why not encode a movie real quick?
  • VLC Media Player – Go on and get your lazy on, watch a movie on someone elses time
  • VNC Viewer – When you need to log into another computer remotely
  • Winamp – Music player that is just classic
  • winDirStat – Just in case you need to see visually where everything is stored and what’s taking up all that space
  • WinMD5Sum – Check file integrity with this program to make certain you got what was sent
  • Win Merge – Good for editing to see the difference between files
  • WinSCP – When you have to transfer files over a network with FTP but want security

Well that does it, now you all should have a good idea of what you can have on your flash drive, I would like to add onto that Wireshark but since you can’t do anything with WinPCAP needing administrator rights it makes it really useless to use unless you are an admin. Some of us, much like myself, are not administrators and we go through great pains to circumvent the security that has been put in place for us by the Network Admins. Once we find a way we will get into the system and install that program that we need without the IT departments help.

Working for the man

Published on July 6, 2008 in Personal. 0 Comments

So my internship started on the 19th of June and so far so good. I am making some money and learning some new things about working in the IT department for the state. I will say that it is nothing like what I expected at all, they use software that is 10 years old on machines that are 4 years old. So it’s not like things are that slow but it’s more or less that the transition in software seems to be more or less nonexistent. For instance they are still using Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer 6, Office 97 to office 2000, and just finished deploying Windows XP Service Pack 2. Now from the amount of explanation that I got I see why it takes so long to get anything done. The licensing issues that are associated with things are what slow things down and when you put in a request it could take up to 9 months to a year to get a reply back. When you have to wait that long either you will forget what the problem was in the first place or you will find another way to get the job done entirely.

When it comes to service packs and security patches I know that they must be deployed sometime long before 4 full years have passed. For instance, Service Pack 2 came out over the summer of 2004 giving Albany a very long time to test and wait for things to work themselves out before deploying to a network of thousands if not 10’s of thousands of computers. Now I can understand being a little weary and not wanting to create an IT nightmare but at the same time 2004 and 2005 where the worst years in history of virus and malware production. Now if 2004 and 2005 where the worst years for infections wouldn’t you think that the upgrades would have been pushed down from above before there was any chance that something could get lost or stolen? Well the more that I pondered this it started to dawn on me how ridiculous the state really is.

When you need to fill out a form to order more forms you know that the there might be something wrong with the current system you are using. There are many more things that are very similar to that, that I have found but will stop at that.

It is amazing what the IT department really does and I am honestly shocked the way that they are done. There is no new technology, there is no experimentation, there is no forward thinking, it is all just do then adjust permissions then do again.

Now not to say that I am really complaining here but there are some shortcomings of the IT departments, there are some things that need to be worked on at a state level that will help to ensure that personal data doesn’t get released to outside sources. There are some existing plans to prevent the loss of data but I feel that there are better ways to implement these new ideas and these new protocols.

So all in all I am working at least and I am getting things done. I have been working on a database program for the last week and a day getting their inventory database all updated from DOS 2.6 to at least Office 1997, there have been some problems here and there as I don’t know about Office 97 too well but at least most of the features from Office 03 are there so I am making some progress now, actually I am getting pretty close to being done, they did provide me with a database to use as a template of sorts that I pretty much completely rewrote from scratch to get things working properly. The problem with using other peoples designs is that there are never enough comments anyplace for you to go on so you must actually use the thing for a little bit and debug to see where and when things are written within the database. Needless to say I am looking very forward to this project being done since I have had some issues starting up with it. I will be happy to get it done and to say that I have accomplished something this summer that people will actually be using in the production system.

Thankfully this is a paid internship and will last me through the summer. So to anyone out there, be nice to your IT working interns, you might just be using something that we fixed from some other sort of mess someone else handed to us, and remember that we can forget to debug things before we ship them….. so don’t make me program in more bugs if you know what is good for you.