Archive for the ‘Tools & Utilities’ Category

Google maps Australia’s bushfires to help emergency services

Sunday, February 8th, 2009

Jason, one of our business analysts and senior programmers, moved back to Melbourne Australia in 2000 after spending 4 years with us. I was on an Instant Messenger chat with him today and we talked about the wild bush fires in his state of Victoria. The fires started a few days ago when the temperature in Melbourne reached 47.6C (116F). He said, “It was so hot and dry, everything just exploded.”

I asked him if they effected him and his family and he said that the “closest were about an hour ago [away] – we were booked to go to a weekend away in a place call Marysville in May, but the reports say that town has been wiped out.  All but 2 buildings left I hear, so not so good for the owners of that B&B.” Also one of his mates had one of the fires come as close as the mailbox. His mate’s father was in the thick of the fires and has not been heard from for a couple of days. Hopefully the father escaped and will be in touch as soon as he has a means of communication.

I was checking out Twitter and there was a tweet from Robert Scoble on how Google maps help the emergency services and the residents know the locate of the fires.  The fire map (Feb 08 09 22:00 EST) looks like this: 

Google maps Australian bushfires

Google maps Australian bushfires

More on the Google Victoria fire maps story is at Google Australian bushfire maps.

Posted in Blogging, Software Development, Tools & Utilities | No Comments »

IP:2:Loc – Mapping where the scam e-mails are coming from

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

One of the Twitter people – @mrhomegadgets, I’m following pointed to a site that shows you where an IP address is located. The site has a Google map on the world and a text box called ip:2:loc where you type in any IP address on the internet. It immediately pops up a red push pin on the geographical location of the IP address. I typed in my IP address and it produced the map below. It also correctly listed my ISP and the physical location of the ISP.

IP:2:Loc image

You can try for yourself at http://ip2loc.jerodsanto.net/

Posted in Network Security, Spam, Tools & Utilities | No Comments »

ScribeFire helps edit your blog, make you money and is free

Friday, January 30th, 2009

Firefox has many add-ons, but one of the best ones I’ve come across is ScribeFire Blog Editor. The current version is 3.1.6. Once you add it to Firefox, press F8 on any page within Firefox and the ScribeFire editor pops up in the lower half of the screen. It’s a simple and straight forward editor. You can add HTML code in line as well as add images and YouTube videos. Once you’ve setup the link to your blog site, it pickups your current list of categories and allows you to add tags to the post. More out of habit, I publish the post as a draft to my blog and finalize it within WordPress before publishing it to the blog.

You can include Technorati tags as well as as sharing the page on many of the social networking sites such as Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Newsvine and others. I’m experimenting with this post and sharing this page on Facebook.

Did I mention that you can make money with the ScribeFire Editor? You can sign up for ads for your blog in a fashion similar to Google’s AdSense. When people click on these ads, you get paid a small amount. You get paid on the 7th of the month following for your previous month’s earnings. ScribeFire pays on a minimumof $5.  AdSense waits until you’ve accumulated $100 before it pays out.

More info is available at the website here.

Posted in Blogging, Tools & Utilities | No Comments »

Network drives randomly disconnect issue solved

Monday, December 15th, 2008

The network drives on one of our workstations would periodically disconnect and then for no reason reconnect. This would only occur on this particular workstation. If this workstation was rebooted, the map to the other network drives would sometimes disappear. Sometimes repairing the connection in the network connections window would get them back. Other times rebooting that workstation would fix the problem. We would get a “An error occurred while reconnecting N: to \\computer name\shared-drive. : The network path was not found. This connection has not been restored.” error.

Some back ground here. The workstation in question was running Windows XP Pro SP3 with all patches up to date. This issue also occurred with XP Pro SP2. We have a peer-to-peer network and do not use a domain. This had been going on for a long time; maybe months. It was more of an annoyance than a problem. Francis, one of our technical associates spent some time on this, but couldn’t resolve it.

Finally I did a Google search and came up with the solution at Microsft Knowledge Base 903267.  It basically suggests deleting 2 registry entries if they exist. They did. I deleted them and rebooted the workstation. The network drives automatically reconnected. Another one solved,

Posted in Computer Integration, Network Security, Tools & Utilities | No Comments »

WinAudit – a utility to audit your PC’s hardware and software

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

I came across a useful tool to help diagnose problems with Windows PCs. It’s a self contained, under 1MB, utility that shows all hardware and software details in a given computer. And it’s very fast in getting this detail. You can also run it from USB flash drive. When you’re in a client’s office and there is a problem with a computer, run this utility from your flash drive and you can get a quick picture of the status of the machine. It runs on all versions of Windows from 3.1 to Vista and everything in between.

You can pick from over 25 categories to audit. You can print the results or save it to a variety of formats such as PDF, comma delimited, html, XML, etc. There is also built-in help. This is software that is built the way all software should be built – compact and fast with a lot of features. In the past, I used SIW to help diagnose computer problems, but this program is SIW on steroids.

It’s available at Create a Report of Installed Hardware and Software with WinAudit

Posted in Implementation, Network Security, Tools & Utilities | No Comments »