Google Reader’s Demise: A Big Deal for being not that big a deal

At first I almost overlooked notice that Google Reader service was shutting down this summer.

Fortunately for me a wealth of articles burst forth on the Web and the noise couldn’t be missed.

• A second spring of cleaning - Google’s Official Blog
• Google announces Reader’s imminent demise - Ars Technica
• Google Reader Is Shutting Down; Here Are the Best Alternatives - LifeHacker
• Poll Technica: Where should we go when Google Reader is put out to pasture? - Ars Technica
• Google plans to execute Reader, among other apps - BetaNews
• End of an Era: Google shutting down Reader - Justinsomnia
• The End of Google Reader - NT Blog
• Google Reader Going Away - Standalone Sysadmin
• Users rally against Google's plans to shut down Reader - BetaNews
• R.I.P Reader: Google giveth, and Google taketh away - TechBlog
• Google Reader may very well rise again… as part of Google+ - Ars Technica
• Why We Mourn Google Reader - And Why It Matters – ReadWrite
• How to export and transfer your Google Reader feeds to another RSS service on iPhone and iPad - iMore.com
• Google Reader Alternatives - Caschys Blog (GTranstated)
• Google Reader: Feedly will allow seamless transition - Caschys Blog (GTranstated)
• Digg to Build RSS reader with 'Best of Google Reader's Features' - TheNextWeb
• Best Free Google Reader Alternatives For Web, Windows & Mac - Addictive Tips
• Three Reasons why Google Reader shutting down may not be such a bad thing - freewaregenius.com
• Why Google killed off Google Reader: It was self-defense — Gigaom
• More than 500,000 Google Reader users flock to Feedly in two days - The Verge
• Five Best Google Reader Alternatives - LifeHacker
• 5 iOS news app alternatives to Google Reader — Gigaom

I’ve enjoyed reading the perspective and comments left by users of RSS and Google Reader in most all of the above articles I’ve found.

As a very recent user of Google Reader, my perspective is a bit unusual.

Very early on, I realized the power and usefulness of RSS/Atom feeds to collect, centralize, and allow rapid mass monitoring of consumption of the wealth of material on the web.

Without RSS/Atom feeds that I subscribe to, I seriously doubt I could process the 90-120 sites I go to for news, tips, and areas of interest.  On any given day, they provide me between 300-400 articles to sift through.  And because of RSS/Atom feeds, I can usually complete that process in about 30 minutes or less.

There is no way I could do that by checking each site directly via bookmarked web-pages. I would miss tons of updated content and probably get loose hours of my time trying to do so.

For years I have relied upon Windows RSS feed reader clients running on my system.

First I used Sage which is an add-on for FIrefox. for a while development slowed and a few issues pushed me to the NewsFox add-on next. It worked very good.

I had flirted back in 2008 and did a RSS Reader Roundup…Valca Style. There were lots and lots of feature-rich RSS feed reader clients for Windows back then.  But I kept with reading my feeds in Firefox through the add-ons.

Eventually, however some of the peculiarities of running a RSS feed reader in your primary browser began to create issues.  It would run in a background tab session, but would “lock-up” the browser as it pulled feeds down during refreshing.

So in 2012, I revisited the search for a desktop Windows RSS feed client and eventually found that Omea Reader fit the bill for me a bit better than my runner-up choice, Feedreader.

Since I am using a local-client-based RSS feed reader, Google Reader was a service I was aware of but didn’t care about. When I found a new site to follow, I would subscribe directly in my client to the RSS/Atom feed and move on.  If you use RSS/Atom feed reading with this approach you too might overlook or care very little for the status of Google Reader.

But here is where the impending loss of Google Reader does matter to me, a lot; I got an iPhone.

This is the rub. While I am feed reading directly on my PC, my feed client does all the work pulling in and managing the individual feeds.

When I got my iPhone, I looked at the RSS iOS apps available and they all seemed to require some third-party back-end API to manage the feed subscriptions, and would then pull the article/feed information down and present it.

So I got my Google Reader set up by exporting my Omea Reader’s subscription pile as a single OPML file, imported it into Google Reader, downloaded Phantom Fish - Byline. Ironically, “Google Reader on the go” is their product tag-line.  Then I connected Byline to my Google Reader and away I went with my RSS feeds on the road.

While I can live without checking my RSS feeds during the day (as I survived just fine before my smartphone adoption), it does make the time spent at the end of the day on my local PC client reader that much faster since I come at it mostly caught up.

However, at this time Byline hasn’t seemed to offer any information about their plans to cope with the shut-down of Google Reader.  Reeder for iOS also looks pretty good, but it also can use Google Reader. Feedly is working on a back end API that hopefully will mimic Google Reader. I like the thought very much, but the iOS app itself is a bit too GUI/graphic intensive. I like the streamlined, more text-based format of Byline and Reeder. Is it possible to recreate a Byline/Reeder experience in Feedly?

There are lots and lots of RSS apps for iOS. However they all seem to leverage a back-end API to collect the feed subscriptions from.

What I really would like is to find a RSS iOS app that allows me to import my OPML file directly to it, and let it operate as a “standalone” RSS feed client directly in-app (like my desktop RSS feed reader) and not need to depend on a third-party API to pull the feeds down from.

I’m confident that other developers will step into the void, and as Samer Kurdi at freewaregenius posted, this might indeed turn out to be a good thing.

It’s just going to cause a fair amount of anxiety and chatter among hard-core RSS feed users until it sorts itself out.

At least we have until July 2013 to see who steps up and delivers, both for the RSS feed ecology in general and the iOS/smartphone app ecosystem in particular.

Until then I will keep on RSS-feeding with my desktop client with nary a worry, but obsess about a future without RSS feeding on my iPhone until a savior is found.

Cheers.

--Claus Valca

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Saturday Linkfest - Cold Pizza Edition

The other night on my way home from work, I was tired and exhausted. I didn’t feel like going grocery shopping for dinner so I punted.

I stopped by the pizza parlor, grabbed three large pies. We ate one for dinner, then have been snacking on cold-pizza leftovers for the past two days.

I’m almost out of slices so I guess it will be to the grocery store tomorrow for some real food again.

USB-based Windows System Install Options

The other day at work, a co-worker asked me for some feedback on a particular problem they had at home.

Seems that he had decided to upgrade (actually a fresh install) a laptop from Windows XP to Windows 7. Only problem was the CDROM drive was in pretty bad shape, and all he had was optical install disks. So how could he get the upgrade on.

Although I supposed he could find an external USB-based CD/DVD-ROM drive to use, that seemed like an unnecessary purchase. He did have a working Windows desktop system, however, so the solution seemed quite simple: create a bootable USB drive with the installation media present. Boot the laptop from the USB drive and install away!

So here are three methods to accomplish that task; full-hands on, Windows tool, and automated utilities.

If you are game and want to learn a bit of the structure of creating such a tool, then this TechRepublic post is perfect: How do I ... create an installation flash drive for Windows 7? I noticed it doesn’t have instructions to make the partition/device bootable via bootsect. BOOTSECT /NT60 <usb drive letter>    (Where <usb drive letter> equals your USB device).

Microsoft has a nice and simple tool to assist you with the process: Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool.  This guide How To Create Bootable Windows 7 USB To Install Windows 7 From USB Flash Drive (Using Windows 7 DVD/USB Tool) from Into Windows provides a nice walkthrough of the process.

Finally, there are some specialized utilities that give you a bit more control over the creation process. I particularly like these two:

• WinToFlash - Install Windows from usb - Home page
• Rufus - Create bootable USB drives

Piece of cake.

ForSec Bits

• EMET 3.5: The Value of Looking Through an Attacker's Eyes - ISC Diary - This was a fascinating post about the Microsoft Enhanced Mitigation Experience 3.5 toolkit and how it can leverage additional anti-malware protection on systems. I’m not sure a site-wide deployment would make a lot of sense, but for workbench systems and testing it might be a smart move to consider.
• Hunting Down and Killing Ransomware - Mark's Blog. Mark Russinovich provides an excellent technical review on dealing with scareware/ransomware infections on a system.
• A picture worth a 1000 barcodes? - ISC Diary - be careful what you post!
• Adobe Security Bulletins Posted - Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) Blog
• Microsoft and Adobe close almost 40 holes - The H Security: News and Features. Time to patch Windows and Adobe holes again!
• Carving Station – RAR Files - M-unition. Mary Singh has a highly in-depth post coving file-carving from unallocated disk space. Not exactly light reading, Mary provides some excellent coverage on this topic.
• Freeware Release: Redline 1.7 - M-unition. New version released. download page
• TeamViewer 8 - Forensic Artifacts - Useful information on system artifacts left by TeamViewer 8 usage.
• You down with LNK? - SpiderLabs Anterior

Installing Stuff

• How to install Ubuntu on Acer’s $199 C7 Chromebook - Ars Technica
• Installing Windows XP to SSD - TinyApps.org
• Repurpose PCs with Windows ThinPC - Anything about IT (via tip from TinyApps bloggist).  See also AnandTech - Windows Thin PC: Windows, Slimmed Down

Tips for Techs

• No sound from Google Chrome: Adobe Flash issue and workaround - MarkWilson.it
• Easily Fix Or Delete Broken Desktop & Start Menu Shortcuts - AddictiveTips. Uses NirSoft tool ShortcutsMan for housecleaning.
• Free e-books for Windows administrators (updated) - 4sysops
• 150 Best Windows Apps Of Year 2012 - AddictiveTips
• Standalone Sysadmin - blog.  TinyApps bloggist pointed me to Matt Simmon’s great website a while ago. In addition to the great posts, Matt also provides a super-handy List of Subscribed Feeds covering all kinds of tech/sysadmin/forsec goodness. If you are new to RSS feeds and need a great “seed list” to get started with, look no further. Matt also provides a more current OPML file for use. Whew!

Network Monitoring

• PCAP Files Are Great Arn't They?? - SpiderLabs Anterior - fantastic examples of tshark-fu and other tricks for extracting great data-points out of PCAP files.
• Filtering with Message Analyzer - MessageAnalyzer Blog. It’s been a while since we have seen much chatter regarding the replacement for Network Monitor. Paul E Long has some great tips for filtering in the new tool; especially useful for those used to filter use patterns in Network Monitor. More posts promised soon.
• Installing Wireshark 1.8.4 and WinPcap 4.1.2 on a Windows 8 System - Moon Support Weblog

Tools, Utilities, and Updates

• Updates: Autoruns v11.4, ProcDump v5.12, SDelete v1.61 - Sysinternals Site Discussion
• GMER 2.0 arrives - BetaNews review. Rootkit detection tool now adds support added for Windows 8 and x64 systems. GMER download pager
• JavaRa Definitions Updated - SingularLabs - Use these with JavaRa to help install/update/remove Java Runtime Environment installations on your systems.
• Dev Eject - version 1.0.26 beta - this is a fantastically clever tool that can not only help you eject removable devices from Windows, but it also can tell you specifically what is causing (locking) the device from ejection.
• Oracle VM VirtualBox - Now at version 4.2.6. Overview of significant changes: VirtualBox 4.2.6 delivers many fixes - BetaNews.
• TightVNC: What's New in TightVNC - Now at version 2.6.4. Download TightVNC
• DMDE (DM Disk Editor and Data Recovery Software) - free/$ versions - Interesting advanced file recovery tool. The free version is pretty limited but is a good place to start and play around with. Portable so no installation required. DMDE is a handy free data recovery tool for Windows experts - BetaNews review.

Firefox News

• Mozilla to Continue 64-Bit Windows Firefox Builds - Firefox Extension Guru's Blog
• Private windows coming to Firefox - Mozilla Links

Cheers!

--Claus Valca

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GSD Linkfest - a little bit of everything today

Quick collection of links gathered in this week.

• Data recovery tutorial - As discovered and described by TinyApps.org. Very nice guide covering a number of Linux-based tools and techniques. DataRecovery - Community Ubuntu Documentation
• Copy files from failing devices - Another great tippage from TinyApps bloggist. Check out safecopy
• Create a system recovery partition - Great finds from TinyApps must come in “threes” as a link to Steve Si’s Create a system recovery partition post is found. It’s a detailed walkthough on setting up a Windows system-restore partition…just in case bad things ever strike.
• Add to the file carving kit - TinyApps bonus links to POC for “Smart Carving” methods. Drop into the project’s SourceForge Documentation page to get the details.
• FreeRecover - Free file recovery app for NTFS drives. It’s pretty fast. You can select options to get file paths as well as check “file integrity” to evaluate recovery value.  At this moment you cannot seem to sort results by column headings. It’s a good start.
• Redo Backup and Recovery - BootCD format ISO file to handle system backups, recovery, partition editing, file recovery, and may more additional tools.
• | Free Security & Utilities software downloads at SourceForge.net
• The Case of the Veeerrry Slow Logons - Mark's Blog - Great post by the Windows Master Mark Russinovich. Covers a number of angles as well as the Windows login process in detail (and how it can be hampered). Good reading.
• Google Chrome Bookmarks Menu Extension - CybernetNews found a really refined and polished  Google Chrome Bookmarks Menu Extension. I had been using Atomic Bookmarks but this one is much better IMHO.
• Ads Are Coming to Google Chrome Extensions - TheNextWeb blog. Choose your extensions wisely now, my friends…
• Release: NewsFox 1.0.8.4 - My favorite in-Firefox RSS feed add-on has a new release. newsfox: NEWEST
• Filelist Creator - Free mini-app to create great lists of files/directories for indexing documentation. I have a few of these and this one is very, very nicely done. It’s been added to my carry-list.  Spotted and reviewed over at this Create Detailed File Lists In Various Formats With Filelist Creator AddictiveTips post.  Check out the big collection of other great utilities over at Stefan Trost Media. I grabbed more than a few!
• TED V3.0 : The TEDinator - New update to the super-duper “TED Downloaded”.  I really appreciate the detail and help this tools brings in allowing me to download a local file of favorite “TED” talks. See also the new TED Radio Hour : NPR.
• HexDive 0.3 - Hexacorn has just released a new version of HexDive which helps look for key strings in possible malware and other executable files. It’s CLI so it is really fast.
• Forensic Artifacts blog has been releasing a large list of posts detailing forensic-worthy artifact bits left over from many applications. I found the PsTools Artifacts post extra interesting since it is used by a lot of us SysAdmins.
• NTFS Tools collection - reboot.pro. Joakim Schicht has just announced an updated collection of NTFS tools he has been grinding away on.  After you read the overview on the first link, hop over to his Google Project hosting page mft2csv to check out:
• NTFS File Extractor which extracts systemfiles (metafiles) off an NTFS volume.
• mft2csv which takes a $MFT file and rip info from all the records and dump to CSV file.
• MFTRCRD is a cli file dumper to pull all info mft2csv can decode. can also dump the $MFT record of a specific file to console and detailed run information.
• SetMACE which is a timestamp fiddling tool.
  
  Note, Joakim doesn’t have them all bundled up in a single archive package so look at the Downloads page carefully to pick out the most recent versions of each of them. It isn’t hard but does take a moment to make sure you are grabbing the right file. Also be aware that these are compiled in “AutoIt” script. It’s very flexible and powerful but some AV apps might complain…  Joakim has done a great job with his documentation on each tool. Check out the Wiki for more details on each one.

Have fun!

--Claus V.

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RSS Feed Reader Upgrade - Hope through the storm (+more)

Over the last few weeks a perfect storm apparently conspired to take out productivity on my personal laptop.

First, I had woken up on a Saturday morning to find my smokin-hot laptop “Tatiana” would no longer boot. Four beeps of death and no BIOS boot screen. Coupled with that was a failing internet connection. Oh yeah, the cable-DVR box refused to output video signal.

Bad Things™ were afoot! Bad, man.

Between sporadic and brief periods of Nettage I was able to manage a download of Dell’s Studio 1558 Support doc with beep codes. Four beeps = RAM read/write failure. I breathed better after I had tried pulling out the two (new) Crucial 4GB Dimm sticks (total 8 GB RAM) and dropped back in the x2 2 GB OEM (Kingston) RAM that shipped with the system and it booted up normally again. Based on a super-kind investment from little-bro after I walked him through some dicey system issues a while back, I had upgraded Tatiana’s memory with two sweet 4 GB sticks of RAM from Crucial. With 8 GB on board, the system chews up the VM’s I’m running.

Through trial and error I was eventually able to locate which of the two Crucial sticks went bad. I left the good 4 GB Dimm stick in and supplemented it with a 2 GB Kingston stick to limp by with 6 GB.

Good news is that the Crucial gang have a generous warranty policy on their RAM and a week after I went through the RMA process, the replacement Dimm arrived today and is waiting installation. Yea Crucial! The entire process was a piece of cake and communications to me by Crucial were spot on! Customer service done right and one reason I return to them time-after-time for my RAM upgrades.

The spotty Intertubes issue was another thing. Due credit to my ISP help desk, they never gave me a hassle during the troubleshooting process (do you have lights on your modem?) and let me jump right to the gist when I identified myself as network dude (sure, let me do a signal test like you suggest and BTW here’s the packet data results we are seeing…). The first time I called they couldn’t test down to the router as their entire system was down also (bummer). The second time they reported lots of packet loss and sent an updated config file to it. That helped a bit, for a day. Then back to spotty connectivity. I had already done extensive troubleshooting on the Cat-6 hard-wiring between the cable modem and my WiFi modem; it was fine as was my WiFi modem connection itself. Another call, another confirmation of packet issues, another day of a working network before regular outages began. “Sir, do you have splitter in the modem’s line?” “Yes, your last tech put it there himself. We’ve been good for over two years since.”  They offered to send a line tech but I didn’t feel like taking a day off work just yet.

So last week after work I pulled my Dremel, put a wire polishing brush on the tip and from the outside of the house inward, unscrewed every coax connection, polished the threads and copper center wire, and reassembled…all the way back and including the cable modem box.  An hour or more later everything was bright/shiny and tight. And the connection was rock-solid again. Hurrah!

The DVR cable box was a surprising issue.  It is Cisco RNG200 HD-DVR box and I use an HDMI cable to output signal to the TV. First check was the cable itself. Attaching it to the (now working again) Tatiana resulted in great video signal display to the TV. Not the cable.

Maybe the box itself was failing?  For the past month we had noticed a trend where the video signal would go black suddenly for a few seconds before restoring again. Related perhaps?

After finally getting a cheery cable-tech on the line from our provider, he listened patiently as I explained all the troubleshooting work I had done already and the growing video output signal dropouts. Immediately he sent a major re-programming order to the system (not your normal box reauthorization signal mind you). About forty minutes later the software had been digested, applied, and assimilated. The box sprang to life and signal was restored again. And all our recorded shows were still on the drive! Since then, we haven’t had any issues with video dropout either. Not sure what happened, but I’m guessing the software/firmware refresh cleared it up.

Claus? What has this to do with RSS feeding?

I’m getting to that.

Amongst all this drama spread over a week or two getting resolved, Firefox 13 dropped, a significant Flash update dropped, and my Firefox/NewsFox combo for reading my almost 250 RSS feeds ground to a horrible stop.

See, I found that every time I attempted to use NewsFox to pull my RSS feeds, it would inevitably hit one that had some kind of Flash/Java/script something and lock Firefox up completely. I could get it going again by waiting forever for a “script stopped responding” dialog to appear which might eventually allow me to continue on. However I found just killing the plugin-container sub-process with Process Explorer did the trick faster. To compound issues, I wasn’t seeing the Flash Player sub-processes kick off underneath the "plugin-container”.

Something bad was happening and only by killing the plugin-container process could I get control back of Firefox.

I had previously experimented with dedicated client-based RSS feed readers, but have been a die-hard proponent of having my RSS feeds directly in my web-browser and NewsFox fit the need perfectly.

So I started the search to see if there was a client-based RSS feed reader that would allow me to break out of my browser for RSS feed reading in the meantime, but still be compatible with the process to support my blogging work.

After looking through the options on my (very) old post RSS Reader Roundup…Valca Style, checking out some newer apps, (including the slick new Mishra and Voyage readers) and picking though a ton of Google search results on the subject, I settled on two possible candidates; Feedreader and Omea Reader.

Feedreader was very nice and has become quite polished since I last toyed with it. I was able to import my sizeable OMPL list from NewsFox and with a few tweaks had a nicely sorted/displayed 3-column view. The text view is beautiful for the articles and the feed information and article link presented at the top of each displayed article header was stunningly perfect. Feed updating was fast and stable. It was almost a perfect match. Except that despite all my attempts, the process of getting the link out and into Firefox just didn’t quite work smoothly. Since I bookmark interesting links during the week until blogging time rolls around this was a real problem. I don’t use IE regularly, but still prefer to leave it as my default system browser. So clicking a link opened up IE, which I then had to copy the link and paste it into Firefox and then reload the page and then save my bookmark. The total package is beautiful and simple.

Omea Reader was brilliant and I’m using it full time now for my RSS needs.  Out of the box (as I posted originally back in 2008) it is very over-the-top feature rich. I was able to turn off features/tabs for contact management, favorites, HTML plugin, News plugin, Notes plugin, and pictures plugin.  Once disabled, all that I left running was the RSS plugin. I easily imported my OPML file and it raced through the feed updating rocket-fast.  It supports complex feed-view filtering as well as categorizations. I can set a ton of special filters and highlighting based on key-words.  The article text-view is nice (though not quite as polished as Feedreader). Some feed/links that NewsFox had issue with were no issue for Omea. It doesn’t have a launch at startup option (nor launch minimized) that I can tell, however I set it to launch as a scheduled task 5 minutes after login and that seems OK.  While running it seems to kill my Windows screen saver. Haven’t figured that out yet. In fact, my only complaint seems to be that the RSS article feed link is displayed at the very bottom of each post, rather than up in the header section like Feedreader. (Omea Team? Any tips to get the article link displayed in the header section?)  This means sometimes I need to scroll to the very bottom to open the link in a browser. Speaking of that, Omea is cool in that if I have Firefox running in the background and click a RSS feed link to view the full article in the browser, it sends it to Firefox as a new tab. From there I just deposit the page in my bookmark sidebar. That’s a Texas two-step dance I can live with. Sweet!

I’ve not given up yet on NewsFox and may return to it since I (below) sorted out the Firefox lockup issue I was plagued with, but I’ve clearly reached the tipping point.  The speed and feature set that Omea Reader bring me as a full featured, and semi-autonomous RSS reader have convinced me this was a wise way to go. I can update my feeds in the background without locking up my Firefox browsing.

Now, soon after I had started getting used to Omea Reader, I had to turn my attention back to the constant lockup issues with Firefox. I was super close to jumping to Chrome full time. The only thing that saved me was the (continued) lack of a bookmarks sidebar in Chrome like Firefox has.

The lockup issue ended up not being NewsFox add-on extension specific. It directly hurt the most because NewsFox was always open in the background and it seemed that anytime it or me hit a feed that had something going on triggering the event, Firefox would lock up.

I disabled NoScript. I disabled AdBlock. No fix. Eventually I was able to find some web-pages (outside of NewsFox) that would cause the page load to lock up Firefox but not IE or Chrome. I had material to work with and it was clearly outside of being just a NewsFox problem

Long story short, I eventually found through lengthy troubleshooting that the issue (in my case) was the Flash/Adobe/Shockwave plugins I had in my portable Firefox plugin folder; Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition Support | Installing Plugins. Basically, Firefox Portable (which I use) has a FirefoxPortable\Data\plugins directory where you can keep your plugin files if you run the app on a system that lacks them.

These here:

+ This

= Firefox lockups and no Flash sub-process execution!

Instead:

Nothing here:

+ This

= No Firefox lockup and the expected Flash sub-process executions!

Firefox 13 tamed.

Go figure.

Despite the fact that the files I had in here were the same ones from where they are also “installed” on my system, emptying out the files in this folder solved the lockup issue I was experiencing. 

Don’t know why that was an issue, but it was. With the portable plugin repository empty again, no more lockups since and Firefox seems just fine finding the appropriate browser plugins from their main installation location on my system.

So it was with interest today that I found the following in my RSS feeds.

• Firefox 13 tripped up by Flash patch -The H Security: News and Features.
  
  Quoting from that post:

A further option for remedying the problem is to deactivate Protected Mode. Under Windows 7 or Vista, this requires the addition of the line ProtectedMode=0 to the configuration file mms.cfg. Since Protected Mode is not used under Windows XP, this step is not necessary on that platform. In 64-bit editions of Windows 7 and Vista, mms.cfg is located in <%windir%\syswow64\macromed\flash>; in 32-bit versions the file is located in <%windir%\system32\macromed\flash>. Administrator privileges are required to modify these files. Detailed instructions can be found in Adobe's Protected Mode FAQ.

Some users have traced some of their crashes back to the fact that Firefox's out-of-process plugin protection has been disabled. A support article on the Mozilla web site explains how to reverse this change.

Adobe has gone even further and released instructions for downgrading Flash Player to a previous version. Users should on no account downgrade to build 11.2, however, as it is known to contain critical security vulnerabilities which are currently being actively exploited. Instead, users should install Flash Player 10.3, in which the vulnerabilities in question have been fixed in a similar way to version 11.3 since Adobe is continuing to supply enterprise customers with security patches for Flash 10.

I had considered that the new sandboxing features might have been causing the issue, but since I had been able to replicate the issue in a parallel run of Firefox 12 I ruled the Firefox version 13 itself as being the source of my particular issue.

I’m now turning my attention to picking through this detailed technical post in hopes it might help be understand what was going on:

• Inside Flash Player Protected Mode for Firefox - Adobe Secure Software Engineering Team (ASSET) Blog

All is well in my case, and having weathered a perfect storm of technology problems, I’m pleased to say Firefox 13 is running strong, I have a new “high-end” RSS feed reader that is increasing both my performance and feed consuming hunger brilliantly, the cable box video output is good as new, and thanks to Crucial, I’m back to 8 GB system RAM on my notebook again.

There is peace and harmony in the Valca home again.

Hopefully somewhere, something in all these travails and victories might help someone.

Cheers!

--Claus V.

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New and Improved Material

Just a pause to empty out the handy-dandy “to-be-blogged” folder.

Windows Tips and Tricks

• How To Block A Computer From Accessing To A Specific Wireless Network - Windows7hacker
• Speed Up Windows 7 Boot Time By Eliminating GUI During Start Up - Windows7hacker
• FREE: AD Info – User friendly Active Directory reporting tool - 4sysops
• Portable PowerShell - Live PowerShell with Karl Prosser
• Highlighter v1.1.2 Released - Mandiant
• Memory forensics on Windows 7 (x86 and x64) and Windows 2008 x64 - Mandiant Blog

Firefox Bits

I’ve been running the Nightly x64 builds of Firefox 4.0b13pre for some time now and it has been very stable.  The fact that there is a developer release version of FlashPlayer for x64 bits helps a lot in the usability factor.  Right now I am still split between using Chromium nightlies for “fun” surfing and Firefox 4.x for my daily web-work commuting.

One of the major challenges with both platforms is finding compatible extensions/add-ons for the new versions.  I’ve had to walk away from some old favorites as they just don’t work at all in the new Firefox 4 world.

That said, I’ve been successful enough to keep productivity and security intact and will post updated extension/add-on lists for both browsers in the near future.

• Firefox 4: recent changes in Firefox - Mozilla Hacks
• ProfileManager - Firefox Extension Guru’s Blog. Hot tip on an alternative tool now that built-in profile manager tool is disappearing in future Firefox builds.  From that post: ProfileManager 1.0_beta1
• mozdev.org - newsfox: installation - new release of NewsFox RSS reader Add-on.
• Firefox 4 Ditches the RSS Button, Here’s how to get it Back - Webmonkey  I can’t begin to share how frustrating it was in FF4 trying to figure out how to get that RSS feed button in FF3 back.  This brought peace to the Valca home and Firefox 4 browsing/feeding.

New Utilities

• CubicExplorer - version 0.90 release- You may recall back from this GSD post why CubicExplorer is still on my watch list.  New version is a bit more refined.  Related build CubicExplorer Portable.
• Windows AIK for Windows 7 SP1 Released - Michael Niehaus’s Windows and Office deployment ramblings blog has a roundup of new inclusions. Download details: The Windows® Automated Installation Kit (AIK) for Windows® 7 SP1 - Microsoft source link.
• Updates: ProcDump v3.02, Contig v1.6, TCPView v3.03 and a New Mark’s Blog Post - Sysinternals Site Discussion.
• OutlookAttachView now allows you to search Outlook attachments only in the selected folders - Nir’s Blog.
• New console versions for WirelessKeyView and AlternateStreamView utilities  - Nir’s Blog.  Get the new bits: AltStreamDump and WirelessKeyDump at NirSoft.
• New utility to view/change/delete drive letter assignments - Nir’s Blog. DriveLetterView
• New utility that shows the details of Firefox downloads - Nir’s Blog. FirefoxDownloadsView
• Also updated at NirSoft: ChromeCookiesView and WebBrowserPassView
• CamStudio - Free Screen Recording Software.  Really easy to use and worked great on my Win7 build.  Previously I have fiddled with Jing and also found it clever.
• tintii photo filter - It’s been a long time since I last went looking at this graphic image editing tool.  I was pleasantly surprised to see it updated. If you want to use it with Photoshop, it will cost a bit. However the “standalone” trial version requires no Photoshop installation and is free.  It works great and I find the new interface a great improvement.  Use to fiddle with color tinting of image files.

Piriform is one of a handful of software providers who I want “one-of-everything” when I visit.  Counted up there with Sysinternals and NirSoft as my go-to source for awesome software.  They haven’t been resting and have been hard at work on updates to what should be Windows-required utilities for all sysadmins.

• Piriform Blog - Defraggler v2.02
• Piriform Blog - CCleaner v3.04
• Piriform Blog - Recuva v1.39
• Piriform Blog - Speccy v1.09

Tip: In case you haven’t figured it out yet, once you go to the product download page, just scroll to the very bottom of the page at the Builds header and find the tiny “builds page” link to find the jump to the portable (zip) versions.

Cheers!

Claus V.

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This Week in Linkfest history…

Somehow I’m going to do it.  Even after spending precious energy and brain cells seriously updating the GSD blog.

…and it being my turn for the weekend “on call” duty worker coverage.

I’m going to drop a ton of linkage for you peeps.

More Network News

Fresh from the overwhelming Network Monitoring Madness: Poor Man’s Resources post come a few remaining items (there shall be stragglers in the ranks).

• Capsa Free - Network Analyzer -- (freeware) -- Just this weekend, Colasoft released a free-edition of their Network Analyzer tool.  It does have a few limitation but is yet another GUI-rich tool that can do packet capture and analysis, similar to Network Monitor, Wireshark, OmniPeek Personal, or even my new best friend, the fabulous free PRTG Traffic Grapher.
• Using High Performance Filtering -- Network Monitor Blogs -- even more tippage on how to get maximum capture performance under high-volume packet capture deployments.

More Remote Connection Management News

As we expand our ever-growing number of network analysis systems, the need for a unified way to access/manage them remotely is paramount.

To that end I’ve been personally favoring Microsoft’s RDCMan (Remote Desktop Connection Manager).  I’ve got (and continue to add) each of the remote systems to the side bar and can launch connections to them at will.

However a recent comment brought my attention to another recommended tool that is really featured so I’m relisting them all again here for reference.

• Microsoft’s RDCMan -- (freeware) -- My #1 pick for Windows RDP sessions.
• Avian Waves RD Tabs -- (freeware) -- A tabbed RD management tool that adds features such as (quoting) “…favorites with advanced editing, command line scripting, connection thumbnails, encrypted passwords, detached connection windows, remote desktop screen capture, remote terminal server information/management, RDP 6.0 support, and much more!”
• mRemote -- (freeware) -- Another muti-tab remote connection manager.
• Terminals -- (freeware) -- “Terminals is a secure, multi tab terminal services/remote desktop client. It uses Terminal Services ActiveX Client (mstscax.dll)”
• Royal TS -- (free/$) -- Recently updated. Free version limits number of remote connections “per file”.
• 2X Client Portable -- (freeware).
• chriscontrol -- (freeware) -- not really a multiple-connection manager but does provide a way to flexibly connect to remote systems in some cases.
• Remotely Enable Remote Desktop :: IntelliAdmin - (free tool) – Get the micro-file from this link: Enable Remote Desktop – Remotely (exe download-link from IntelliAdmin).  I tend to avoid direct links but the download link from their blog-post page actually points to their full-featured application, and not the standalone tool.

More Web Browser News | Mostly Firefox

Exciting news (to me at least) in the Firefox fronts:

• Newsfox NEWEST - version 1.0.6.1.2 is out.  Tip: download the .xpi to your local system then from Firefox, use the File menu to open/install it.  This version prepares the way for compatibility with the current 3.6.x builds as well as the 4.x builds.  Up to now, despite really enjoying the Firefox 4.0b2 – “Official” x64 Bit Editions I’ve really stayed away from regular usage as NewsFox, my RSS reader, wasn’t compatible.  So finding this new build this weekend was joyous.  Also, I’ve found that many of the NewsFox Tweaks and Tips still work so keep tweaking!
• The only thing holding me back from seriously “full-timing” use of Firefox 4.x x64 is the ongoing lack of Flash support in x64 browsers.
• I’m going to eventually get around loading up the TabCandy Dashboard in one of these Firefox packages I use: Tab Candy, tabbed browsing evolved (Mozilla Links), Tab Candy – A Firefox Tabs Addon You HAVE TO Get (makeuseof) both go over the highlights.
• I’ve had two weirdnesses happen this past week in web-browsing.  Yesterday it seemed like the majority of Google “extras” didn’t work in any of our browsers…drop down menus, finding more pages in the updated Google Images format.  That eventually sorted itself out so I guess it was an issue at Google’s end.  Also we are required to calculate mileage claims only based on “shortest distance” as calculated by Rand McNally.  Only it just so happened that the day our claim forms were due, the site was acting all zonky by only loading properly for IE6.  Not for Firefox, not for IE8, not for Opera, not for Chrome. Weird. So I ended up opening a Virtual PC tester that had IE6 to get the job done.
• In the process of working out that item I found the Utilu IE Collection - Utilu.com which is an installation package set that will load all versions of IE from 1.0 to 8.0 on your system.  Now, that said, I really don’t recommend doing so on any “production” system.  I’ve tried it out using a Virtual PC VHD I have for such things.  I’ve read around on this and some folks report uninstallation issues as well as freaky things happening with their (primary) IE browser when/after it is installed/uninstalled.  However it was so cool I couldn’t help but mention it here.  For another source of IE builds check out evolt.org’s - Browser Archive for IE platforms.
• 10 Browser Testing Tools: Roundup for Web Designers -- Bryan Connor has a list of additional tools that can be used to compare browser engine rendering.
• Microsoft releases final IE9 preview, beta due in September - ZDnet. also Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive.
• If You’re on a Firefox Beta, Get a NoScript Beta - hackademix - While you can always get stable versions of NoScript to use with your stable version releases of Firefox, if you are running beta/nightly builds of Firefox, bizarre things can happen.  So it is great to see hackademix pointing the way for us to his NoScript development build instead.

More Web Browser News | Strictly Chrome

I’m still nowhere near ready to jump ship from Firefox to Chrome full time, but I do find myself using the Chromium nightly versions in a portable version much more now.  It is a delightful browser to use

Here is the latest list of “add-ons” that I have found useful to load on it.

• Google Chrome Themes Gallery - gotta get a theme.  I prefer the more toned down Google Themes rather than the “Artist” line.
• AdBlock - Google Chrome extension gallery.
• Atomic Bookmarks - Google Chrome extension gallery.
• Browser Button for AdBlock - Google Chrome extension gallery.
• ChromeAccess - Google Chrome extension gallery.
• FlashBlock - Google Chrome extension gallery.
• Create Link- Google Chrome extension gallery. Tip: I add an extra %text% line for plain-text only copy formatting.
• Print - Google Chrome extension gallery.
• Trash Can - Google Chrome extension gallery.
• youtube-html5-chrome - Project Hosting on Google Code.

I’m running a portable version of Chrome built by Carsten “caschy” Knobloch that includes an multi-build supported updater in his Portable Chrome package: Portable Google Chrome 4.1.249.1059 (German site).  This has the latest full portable packages for download or you can simply unpack it and copy the single exe updater file to your existing portable Chrome package and use it from there.  It automates the process to check, download, unpack, and install the latest Chrome release versions into you portable Chrome folders.  Way too cool!  See this post Neue Version des Portable Chrome Updaters (German) for additional info on the updater proper.

Finally there is a new project that can update Chromium builds -- when installed on your system (not portable) -- Chromium Updater (via Google Operating System blog) project link: Chromium Updater.  For some other options see this Chromium Updater from mulder or my previous favorite tool Dirhael’s (portable) Chromium Nightly Updater.

System Building

It’s gonna be a while before I am able to upgrade my personal PC system.  I’m almost certain to go with some kind of a desktop-replacement class notebook.

However, it is still so much fun to read the exploits of high-end “home-brew” system builds.

Scott Hanselman (Computer Zen guru) has been on a tear on his on monster system.

• Ultimate Developer PC 2.0 - Part 3 - UPDATE on Building a WEI 7.9 and RFC for building a GOM (God&apos;s Own Machine)
• Ultimate Developer PC 2.0 - Part 2 - UPDATE and PODCAST on Building a WEI 7.9 and RFC for building a GOM (God's Own Machine)
• Ultimate Developer PC 2.0 - Part 1 - Building a WEI 7.9 and RFC for building a GOM (God's Own Machine)

Then Pete Brown also got working on his own Ultimate-PC build.

And even our local Dwight Silverman kicked things off in his Operation Switchback.

Tools, Utilities, and Tips

Like shells (or tar-balls) washed up on the coast, these keep rolling in with the breakers!

• Shotty -- (freeware) -- another simple screen shot tool. Spotted via Lifehacker.
• RBTray -- (freeware) -- Tired of some applications minimizing to the Task Bar? Put them into the system tray instead.  Spotted via CybernetNews.
• Gridy -- (freeware) -- tool to snap open windows to an invisible grid (also in portable version).  Like AeroSnap on steroids.  Spotted via Windows7hacker.
• Updates: TCPView v3.01, Disk2vhd v1.62, AdExplorer v1.42 - Sysinternals Site Blog.
• Bend - A modern text editor -- (freeware) -- a positively beautiful GUI with an almost zen-like quality.  Spotted via Tenniswood Blog.  Windows 7 only.  Stunning.
• FREE: TeraCopy – Increase copy speed - 4sysops (tip) -- I’ve use TeraCopy along with a few other speedy file-copy tools, but it never seemed as intuitive to me to use as I would like.  4sysop’s post helps get past that and get it quickly up and running.
• Regedit as offline Registry editor - 4sysops (tip) -- I’ve been mounting REG hives “offline” for a while now.  It was a bit awkward at first getting the hang of the process.  Michael’s walkthrough is direct.  See also: Edit the registry on a mounted WIM (Off Campus blog), and this SkullSecurity post as well if you need a few goes at it.
• lessmsi -- (freeware) -- seems to have found a new home over at Project Hosting on Google Code.  It is a great tool to unpack/examine MSI files.
• Dependency Walker (depends) -- (freeware) -- No not that Depends! -- Neat tool to scan any x32 or x64 Windows module and build a tree diagram of all dependent modules.  Really cool.  Related: How to debug application crash/hang in production environment? - MSDN Managed Newsgroup Support Team Blog

Finally, while I was off this past Wednesday as well, I spend a good part of the day remotely cleaning Dad’s PC from a rather painful Rouge Antivirus infection.  All was well and clean when I got done.  One of the tools I used, post-cleaning, to sweep things up a bit was CCleaner.

However I saw this week that a new “add-on” super-charges this already beefy tool:

• CCleaner Enhancer -- (site down currently).
• CCleanerEnhancer -- mirrored by ghacks. “Update: Website seems to be temporarily down, you can download the portable program from our servers instead. CCleanerEnhancer, and the current definitions file. Simply unzip that file into the CCleaner directory winapp2. The program cannot connect to the host right now, it seems to be using the website of the developer for downloading the signature file.”
• CCleaner Enhancer -- mirrored by How-To Geek News. “Update 2: The mirror copy won’t work either, since the site is down. What you’ll need to do is download this INI file from my test machine and put it into your CCleaner installation folder. Once you’ve restarted CCleaner, you’ll see the new items in the Applications tab.”

It seems to be simply an supercharged .ini file that the CCleaner tool supports.

• Add programs to winapp2.ini - Piriform Community Forums
• Winapp2.ini for CCleaner - Pastebin.com

Still cool.

Windows UAC Revisited

It’s funny, with Vista I had to do a number of things to tame UAC.  Under Windows 7, I don’t even notice it and haven’t made any adjustments to the default settings.  Looks like the work reported in TechBlog: Microsoft reworking the UAC for Windows 7 by MS paid off.

I last really commented on UAC back in fall 2008 in this Speak of the devil: Norton’s UAC Tool GSD post.

The only thing I’ve noticed with UAC in Windows 7 is that some shortcuts will launch with a UAC prompt and others will not.

There’s now a tool to tweak those shortcuts:

• UAC Trust Shortcut 1.0 -- (freeware) -- via IT Knowledge 24.  for x86 and x64 versions of Windows 7 and Vista.

Spotted via stadt-bremerhaven blog (German) as well as Technospot blog.

That reminded me of the TweakUAC utility I used to use on Vista (and you can for Win7 as well but why?).

Which reminded me then of Norton Labs and their Project "UAC Tool" which provided “whitelisting” for UAC control in Vista.

Which I also then spotted in the Labs this Project "Security Inspector" which audits your system for recommended security settings.  However the drawback is that it requires a copy of Norton Internet Security 2009 be installed locally.  Sorry.  And it does not support NIS 2010 yet either.  So now I’m wondering why I bothered noting this at all.  Oh well.

Maybe tomorrow I can post on some for/sec items that came up this week (with some super-cool finds btw) as well as a list of freeware tools I’ve been using to do DVD conversions (for our church-house produced DVD service recordings) and specifically Flash-format focused.

Cheers!

--Claus V.

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NewsFox XML Error in Firefox 3.5 b4 patched

Despite a rather involved search for an acceptable RSS feed reader (client or “embedded”) I’ve yet to find a RSS feed reader that surpasses the way the Firefox RSS Add-on NewsFox works for the way I surf/blog and read feeds.

NewsFox has been working fine with my RSS/Atom feed rendering up to and including the Firefox 3.1 beta 3 build I have been using.

Recently Firefox 3.5 beta 4 was released and NewsFox started throwing XML rendering issues on a number of feed posts.

Some RSS feeds would render correctly 100% of the time in NewsFox. Other RSS feeds would have some articles displayed properly and others did not.

Testing for a corrupt profile or Add-on cross-conflict didn’t resolve the issue so I assumed the issue had either to do with changes in the newer Firefox rendering engine code or the NewsFox parser wasn’t able interface with it correctly.

I’ve been using NewsFox version 1.0.5.RC1 with no issues (until now).

The developers of NewsFox have been on a much deserved vacation according to the NewsFox forum so I decided to just keep using Firefox 3.1 beta 3 until a newer version came up.

After about of week of periodic searches for others with a similar problem, I figured the NewsFox developers might not know what is going on so I posted a forum comment about my observations and error.

Amazingly I got a fast response from vaganyik wondering if it was related to Bug 20801.

Turns out it was.

R. Pruitt (a.k.a. wa84it) quickly posted this on the bug page:

The prior NewsFox strategy for displaying XML was

Atom and XML -> display XML
RSS -> try XML -> success: display as XML
           -> failure: display as HTML

Unfortunately with Gecko 1.9.1, the 'try XML' step generates fatal errors
unable to be caught.  At least it seems so from looking at it for 2 minutes.

Here is a version that does not do the 'try XML' step, and so should work fine
with FF3.5 and SM2.0.  Final solutions will await when I really start looking
at things which may be a week or two.  The only downside(ie why I bothered with
the 'try XML' step at all) is that SVG graphics and other XML goodies won't
display in RSS feeds, although they still will work in atom feeds.

Great background information on how NewsFox is working behind the scenes.

He also provides a CGI file there as well.

If you are running NewsFox, encounter the XML error on your feeds, and are using Firefox 3.5 beta 4 (tested in Windows (XP/Vista)) and want to be rid of them, then give the following “patch” a fix.

1. Download the no XML errors in Gecko 1.9.1 (id=5854) CGI file by clicking on the link provided. It should offer you the change to install software into your Firefox build.


2. Allow the install at the top notification bar.


3. You should then get the “Software Installation” pop-up to install “attachment.cgi”.


4. Don’t freak. The cgi file is like an XPI file.


5. Allow the installation to progress. (You might have to override any “maxVersion’ compatibility checking.)


6. You should then see NewsFox as listed being updated and Firefox needing a restart.


7. Allow the restart and then recheck your NewsFox RSS feeds. All should now be well.

NewsFox should now report (post patch) in as NewsFox version 1.0.5rc1_noXML

Please note that this is just a temporary patch until the NewsFox coding guru’s can get back to work and do a more elegant fix.

Besides showing just how awesome the NewsFox maintainer R. Pruitt is, this has also clarified for me another question.

Often when adding new feeds, I am presented with options for RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, or Atom feed formats.

I must admit that usually I just go with RSS 1.0 or 2.0 over Atom not really understanding the nuances between them.

However, it is clear that Atom format seems to be the preferred choice seeing how NewsFox renders the additional information they provide without errors. In comparison, NewsFox has to do additional handling steps when RSS feeds contain XML code.

For any NewsFox user who might be encountering this….

Cheers!

--Claus V.

P.S. This also fixes the same XML rendering error in the Firefox “nightly/Minefield” versions as well. However those builds have another issue with NewsFox in that the NewsFox area is reduced to approximately 3/4 of the tab area. Certainly functional but not the whole-tab coverage in the beta/final Firefox versions. I’m not complaining about that one as it’s one thing to have an error in a beta/RC version release and a whole different thing (IMHO) when you are using nightly developer builds. I wouldn’t want to waste the wa84it’s time focusing on alpha level browser build compatibility.

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