Saturday, January 24, 2009

Do not worry. This article will not contain the same old blabla that most of the other Windows 7 toplist articles will mention. It will instead concentrate on five lesser known but powerful new features that increase productivity by a large margin.

You might want to check out our article about Windows 7 which has all the information you need to download the beta of the new Microsoft operating system. If you are not convinced yet that this is a good idea read on; You might be surprised:

1. Opening multiple Instances of the same program

Want to open multiple instances of the same program? Maybe a second command prompt or another application that can be opened in multiple instances? Instead of opening the program again the usual way you can simply press the SHIFT key and left-click on the first instance in the Windows Taskbar to open a second one.

2. Problem Steps Recorder

If you ever had to do phone support you know how hard it can be to understand what the user on the other end of the phone did and wants. The Problem Steps Recorder is a sweet little tool in Windows 7 that can be used by the user to record his steps.



All that the user needs to do is start the recorder by entering psr in the Start Menu box and click on Start Record in the program interface. Screenshots will be taken from user actions. It is possible to add comments at any time if the user feels so. The whole recording will be saved as a zip file containing a slideshow of the actions.

3. Pin Favorite Folders

Windows 7 introduces several new keyboard shortcuts for window management. Some useful ones are:

  • [Windows Shift Left Arrow] or [Windows Shift Right Arrow] to move windows from one computer monitor to another.
  • Windows Left Arrow] or [Windows Right Arrow] to dock windows to the left or right side
  • [Windows Up Arrow] to maximize a window
  • [Windows Down Arrow] to restore or minimize windows
  • [Windows Home] to minimize all windows but the active one


5. Shortcuts to start pinned taskbar items

Pressing [Win Number] will start a new instance of a pinned taskbar item. You should also note that the items can be dragged and dropped into different positions easily.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

SEH says that its new PS56 WLAN Print Server interface card will make your network printing more secure. Utilizing the highly secure WPA and WPA2 encryption standards, the IPv6-enabled PS56 will connect all HP output devices with an EIO port to a wireless 802.11g network. Because the WPA and WPA2 standards have not yet been cracked, offers SEH, they are regarded as the safest protection for WLANs.

To enhance security further, the PS56 also includes TLS/SSL encryption and several IEEE 802.1X authentication methods. The interface card simply slides into the respective slot on the printer unit and is easily configurable and manageable.

SEH
As the Ajax wave surges on, one of its well-known providers, WaveMaker, is adding new Ajax-related tools, such as Visual Ajax Studio 4.0. The product is an open-source development tool that “makes it easy to build visually stunning Web applications”. The company claims that “with just 15 mouse clicks and zero coding, a developer can build and deploy a sleek, Web-based application”.

The new 4.0 release offers faster development time, better-quality applications, the company’s own Live Layout data display, enhanced drag-and-drop capabilities and IDE-quality editing that exposes the source code and offers syntax highlighting. Visual Ajax Studio 4.0 supports Linux, Mac OS X 10.5 and Windows XP and Vista.

Wavemaker
The folks at Super Talent have added a new model, the Pico D, to its line of ultra-diminutive USB Flash drives. The Pico series of USB drives, measuring in at 1.4 inches, is an inch shorter than most USB drives on the market today, says the company. Other features include a pivoting lid that won’t get lost, shock and water resistance and transfer speeds up to 30MB/sec. Not to mention that the little guy is kinda cute too.

SuperTalent
Getting Samba Software On your Samba server, you’re going to need your distribution’s packages for Samba’s libraries; the Samba dæmons smbd, nmbd and winbindd; the Samba client commands smbclient, smbmount and so forth (which are useful even on servers for testing Samba configurations); and also the Web-based configuration tool SWAT (Figure 1). Naturally, nearly all these things are contained in packages whose names don’t correspond neatly with the names of their component dæmons, libraries and so forth, but I give some pointers on those shortly.

First, a word about SWAT, which requires a modest security trade-off for Ubuntu users. Although normally in Ubuntu the user root can’t log in directly, Samba requires this to be possible, so you need to set a root password on any Ubuntu box that runs SWAT. Like so much else about Samba, this is not something I recommend doing on any Internetfacing Ubuntu box. However, SWAT is such a useful and educational tool, I feel pretty confident in stating that in non-Internet-facing environments, the mistakes SWAT will help you avoid probably constitute a bigger threat to system security than SWAT does.

As I mentioned, Samba packages are included in all major Linux distributions. In Debian and its derivatives, such as Ubuntu, you’ll want to install the following deb packages: samba, samba-common, samba-doc, smbclient and swat (plus whatever packages you need to satisfy dependencies in any of these).

In SUSE, you’ll want to install samba, samba-client, samba-winbind and samba-doc. (SWAT is included with one of these, probably samba.)
In Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its derivatives, you need samba, samba-client, samba-common and samba-swat.

Installing these binary packages should involve installation scripts that put startup scripts, symbolic links and so forth in the correct places for everything to work (at least, after you configure Samba to serve something). Using SWAT is the best way to get up and running quickly—not because it does very much work for you, but because its excellent help system makes it super-convenient to summon the pertinent parts of Samba’s various man pages.

There are two SWAT quirks I should mention. First, SWAT must be run by an Internet super-server, such as the old Berkeley inetd or the newer xinetd. Ubuntu configures inetd automatically when you install the swat package, but if your distribution of choice does not, you need a line like this in /etc/inetd.conf:

swat stream tcp nowait.400 root /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/swat

Second, to get SWAT’s help links to work under SUSE 11.0, you may need to create the following symbolic links while logged in to a terminal window as root:

ln -s /usr/share/doc/packages/samba/htmldocs/manpages
-> /usr/share/samba/swat/help
ln -s /usr/share/doc/packages/samba/htmldocs/using_samba
-> /usr/share/samba/swat/help
ln -s /usr/share/doc/packages/samba/htmldocs/index.html
-> /usr/share/samba/swat/help
ln -s /usr/share/doc/packages/samba/htmldocs/manpages.html
-> /usr/share/samba/swat/help