So Joe…

I have a site called ITsVISTA which explores all aspects of Microsoft’s Windows Vista. I noticed in Google’s Blog search an article that seemed very familiar. After visiting the site, I came to realize that not only had I written the article, the images were also being pulled from my site (hotlinking). Looking further at the site, I found many of my posts had been copied there. My posts are covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. This means they must give me credit (they didn’t) and they can’t make money off it (ads all over the site). So what’s a guy to do? Their’s no contact information on the site, so I can’t use my preferred method of simply asking them to comply or remove the content. Well, I found this great site, HTML Basix that has a form that will generate for you a .htaccess file. With this file, you can allow some sites, while blocking others from hotlinking to your images. Not only that, you can redirect any image requests to an image of your choice. BINGO! Visit the [site name removed since he disabled the graphics], and if they haven’t yet realized what’s going on, you’ll see I’ve messed up the site pretty well with a large image declaring their thieving ways, and advertising my site. I love it when a plan comes together! Read more…

After seeing a recent article called “How I’d Hack Your Weak Password” I thought about my own password situation. As an IT professional, and someone that uses web resources constantly, I have to know passwords to dozens of different services, and as a precaution, I use a different password for each of them. How do I remember them all? Here’s my secret for developing strong passwords, and remembering them. Read more…

I was just at Amazon looking at flash drives when I stumbled across this one:

Read more…

I noticed something this morning that I hadn’t seen before. On my blog ITsVISTA I use Google’s AdSense. In the sidebar I use a Link Unit, which displays four links to keywords related to the page they are on. It normally looks something like this:

At least that’s what it’s supposed to show. On one of my pages today I saw the following:

Is that an Ad Search Engine? I can now search for ads on any topic I choose? I only saw it that one time, and after many other pageviews and reloads can’t get it to reappear, so perhaps they are just testing it in a very limited trial. I have to wonder though, who would actually search for ads? This would be even less useful for me than the public service ads that periodically appear (at least those serve a public service).

Has anyone else seen this? Has it been around for a while and I just haven’t noticed? What is the purpose? Do they really believe people are interested in searching for ads? So many questions…

This is part of my series on How to Install Windows Applications Silently.

SketchUp, now owned by Google, is a great 3D modeling program that makes it very easy to throw your 3-dimensional ideas into a model. If you need to install it on many machines, it will save you time to automate the process, so you don’t have to click through the installer each time. Thankfully, the Google SketchUp 6 installer isn’t to difficult (once you figure it out). Their are multiple ways to do this, but this is the one that I’m currently using so I know it works. Keep in mind that my main goal is to simplify the process so I don’t have to click so much, and automate so I don’t miss any steps. Whether or not this works with a login script or SMS or other methods of install aren’t within the scope of this document. Read more…

Rape is certainly not a topic to make light of, but after my experiences with Hewlett Packard in recent times, it’s the word that comes to my mind. Perhaps ‘Fiscal Rape’ would be the best way to qualify it. It’s a nickle-and-diming attitude, but involves thousands of dollars. Here’s my story. Read more…

I got in to work today and was greeted by the following when trying to open my Gmail:

I’ve seen it before, not often though, and rarely for more than a minute or so. Today it’s been at least 30 minutes so far. I guess this is a good lead in to a post I’m going to do shortly about how to backup your Gmail account using Thunderbird. Looking at my backup, the last message was received a little over an hour ago. I sure hope I don’t need to test my Gmail restore procedure today!

I just looked at the website for Microsofts Windows Home Server. It has a character on screen that talks to you, much like my previously mentioned Ms. Dewey search engine (which is also a Microsoft product). Looks like Microsoft is leaning towards increasing the use of real characters that talk to you, a step up perhaps from Clip It, the paper clip character in Microsoft Office. Read more…

I was getting hit with spam pretty hard on this site, and my other site, ITsVISTA. I have Akismet installed, which does catch it all, but unfortunately it also catches many of my trackbacks. When you have a list of hundreds of spams in Akismet, it’s no longer practical to hunt through and find the false positives. What to do? Read more…

This is part of my series on How to Install Windows Applications Silently.

Microsoft’s .NET Framework 3.0 is now available. You’ll likely need it for compatibility with software that also needs to talk to Microsoft’s Windows Vista. If you deploy lots of applications, you’ll probably want a silent way to install it, which is what this article is about.
You’ll first need to download Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Redistributable Package from www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=10CC340B-F857-4A14-83F5-25634C3BF043&displaylang=en. The file is called dotnetfx3setup.exe, and has the following command line switches: Read more…