Wednesday, August 06, 2003

Ultimate Boot CD Google Search It If you need to boot from CD to a command prompt like in the old days when you booted from a floppy to DOS, then this is the tool for you: You need the Ultimate Boot CD if you want to: Run floppy-based diagnostic tools from CDROM drives. More and more PCs are shipped without floppy drives these days, and it is such a royal pain when you need to run diagnostic tools on them. Consolidate as many diagnostic tools as possible into one bootable CD. Wouldn't you like to avoid digging into the dusty box to look for the right floppy disk, but simply run them all from a single CD? Then the Ultimate Boot CD is for you! Also check out Build CD (BCD).  This software can create ISO's too. (Thanks to Ted Kekatos, founder of SysAdminDay for this info.) 4:58:52 PM   []    comment []

Warchalking Google Search It "Warchalking is the practice of marking a series of symbols on sidewalks and walls to indicate nearby wireless access. That way, other computer users can pop open their laptops and connect to the Internet wirelessly." I am very willing to open my Wireless LAN but my wireless router (D-Link 714) does not support allowing people to get onto the Internet but not onto the local LAN.  Interestingly enough, they do allow the opposite which seems kinda strange to me.  Anyway, how do people lock down their local LANs yet still enable public browsing of the Internet? (Thanks to Andy Michaelis for pointing this out.) 4:54:49 PM   []    comment []

Associating the C# language service with other extensions Google Search It Now that I have got Scripting with C# working I wanted to associate the .NCS files so that I could use VS.NET to edit them.  Anson Horton at Microsoft gave me the solution: "Go to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<version>\Languages\File Extensions, add a key with your extension name, and then copy the GUID from the “.cs” key to the new one" Thats it... and it works too. 2:54:51 PM   []    comment []

Scripting with C# Google Search It As part of a writing project I am involved in at the moment I was looking for a C# scripting tool that would allow me to execute C# as a script rather than compiling it.  I looked at 3 different options:  1) Alintex Script host 2) nsh and 3) NScript.  There are also two MSDN articles on this called Script Happens. After trying each one out I went with NScript.  Essentially this allowed me most easily to write a C# file that I could then save with an NCS extension and run from the command line.  The NCS extension automatically caused the script to launch.  I did make one modification and that was to have NScript.exe be associated with .NCS files rather than NScriptW.exe.  I did this since the majority of my test are command line.  One annoying restriction was that System.Console.ReadLine() is not supported.  The code for this is relatively simple so it could be added. 2:32:23 PM   []    comment []

Disabling the Shutdown Event Tracker in Windows 2003 Google Search It I spent some time running Windows 2003 on my laptop.  Probably the most frustrating part of this was the fact that every time I wanted to shutdown it asked me why?  This "feature" is part of the Shutdown Event Tracker (for MS description go here)I understand why this is perhaps a good feature for a real server but I wasn't using it as a real server.  Instructions for turning off the feature can be found here. 11:16:49 AM   []    comment []

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