www.apture.com provides a simple way to embed information from other sites into your webpage. It is useful to link multimedia files, Wikipedia lookups etc., without requiring the user to leave the context of your web page.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Cleaning up your Start menu
Most of the times when you install a new application, shortcuts (*.lnk files) are created as well to help you to launch the application faster. Desktop, start menu and user’s document are the common location where you can find the shortcuts. The shortcuts are useful as long as the applications are not uninstalled from your system. Once the shortcuts are broken, it could become a problem to your Windows.
Most of the cases, shortcuts become broken when you remove or uninstall programs that have shortcuts using the Add/Remove Program in the Control Panel. The un-installation is never clean, leaving leftovers behind e.g. broken shortcuts. These shortcuts are no longer needed; therefore need to be removed from your Windows.
To find all the broken and invalid shortcuts on your system can be a tedious and time-wasting job to you. Instead of doing it manually, you should try Orphans Remover. Orphans Remover is a freeware Windows application that searches and deletes broken shortcuts (*.lnk files) on your Windows desktop, start menu, recent documents and more. On the main window of Orphans Remover, you can specify the folders that you want to scan for broken shortcuts. Orphans Remover can search for broken shortcuts in Windows start menu, desktop, favorites, history, recent documents, temp directory, program files and application data. You also can expand broken shortcuts scanning to include files on removable drivers, a network, CD-ROM drives and RAM disks. Besides, Orphans Remover supports for user defined folder where you can scan others directories for broken shortcuts other than the available locations.
After specifying the locations for scanning, click the “Start Scan” button to scan for broken shortcuts. After a successful scanning process, all the broken shortcuts are displayed. To delete the broken shortcuts, click on the “Delete Orphans” button.
Monday, January 05, 2009
Creating a IPv6 subnet at home
With multiple computers at home, I want to setup all with IPv6 addresses. For that need to get some questions answered:
1. Who will assign me a set of global unicast IPv6 addresses that I can use?
2. How will IPv6 traffic get routed between these computers to other IPv6 computers?
Since my ISP (Hansanet Alice) does appear to support native IPv6, I must use a IPv6 tunnel over IPv4. I will use the Freenet6 (Go6.Net) service with Hexago Gateway6 client.
After a lot of reading, the actual setup turned out to be surprisingly easy.
Setup
Windows XP (Gateway6 client and router) – Install the Gateway client. First verify it is working and then set it in router mode. Here are the steps I used - In the Gateway6 client application, click the Advanced tab. At the bottom, select the “Enable Routing Advertisements”. Select the LAN or wireless interface that is your local network. (IMPORTANT: If you don’t select a valid interface, netsh crashes when you try to connect).
Windows Vista (automatic IPv6 configuration) – Ensure the Vista machine is connected to that network. Restart the machine or simply disable and re-enable the network adapter. (Start Run “ncpa.cpl” and disable / enable the LAN or wireless connection).
Windows XP (automatic IPv6 configuration) – Check if IPv6 is installed (From the command line, ipconfig /all. IPv6 is installed if there are any fe80:* addresses. Install it with “ipv6 install”.) Restart the machine or simply disable and re-enable the network adapter. (Start Run “ncpa.cpl” and disable / enable the LAN or wireless connection).
In both cases, you can use “ping –6 ipv6.l.google.com” to verify that you are connected to the IPv6 internet.
The real test is to check if your machines can be reached from outside by other IPv6 machines.
Useful commands
ipv6 if 1 -- See ipv6 details of the interface. Change the number 1 to other numbers to see other interfaces.
netsh interface ipv6 show address – See all ipv6 addresses assigned on your machine.
netsh interface ipv6 show route – See route on your machine.
VMware virtual machines
The above setup worked with VMware virtual machines with two caveats. The network adapter should be in “bridged” mode and it should be connected to an ethernet interface (VMware does not support IPv6 when you bridge to a wireless card -- forum bug report post).
Nice links
Microsoft’s introduction to TCP/IP
Friday, January 02, 2009
Getting on to the IPv6 bandwagon
While waiting idly for a download to complete, I decided to see what would it require to move to IPv6 on my home network. A quick search indicated that my ancient Netgear WG834GB does not support IPv6. I got a bit distracted by Jonathan’s pages on installing OpenWRT on WG834G. The WG834GB runs a Linux variant and you can telnet into the machine and look around. However I don’t have an alternate wireless router so I did not take the risk of installing OpenWRT.
After reading more about IPv6, I decided to go ahead and take a plunge. Hexago had a nice article on how to go about with IPv6 over IPv4. Microsoft gives a good overview on home setup of IPv6.
I went to go6.net and got registered as cs905s. Downloaded and installed Hexago’s Gateway6 client from go6.net. Start up the client and enter the broker address (broker.freenet6.net) and your user/password. It connected and provided me an IPv6 address (2001:05c0:1000:000b:0000:0000:0000:1b5d) and a brokered address
Later I used another broker - broker.aarnet.net.au. I created another cs905s account – the server sent a random password back. This broker is based on Hexago – so I could use the Gateway6 client with it too. Unlike the freenet6 broker, it did not provide me with a brokered address
Firefox did not like ipv6.l.google.com but Internet Explorer v7 had no problems connecting to the site.
The http://www.sixxs.net/tools/ipv6calc/ site provides some quick information about your IPv6 link. It also provides some fun links, like Virgin Radio.
My conclusions (not verified). Use IPV6 to give unique addresses to all PCs even those behind the NAT. There are two ways to do this, Teredo tunneling and native IPv6. Use the Hexago client and server at this point to get IPv6 addresses for existing machines. I’ll have to look into the native Win2008 and Vista support for ipv6. An alternative to Hexago’s client is AICCU at SixXS. I had to upgrade remote desktop to support IPv6, since the XP version doesn’t support it.
In IPv6 classes no longer exist (Class A, B, C…). Infact even in IPv4 they are dead. The replacement is CIDR which allows variable length network prefixes. This link lets you calculate your CIDR.
“A subnet mask is a bitmask that encodes the prefix length in a form similar to an IP address: 32 bits, starting with a number of 1 bits equal to the prefix length, ending with 0 bits, and encoded in four-part dotted-decimal format. A subnet mask encodes the same information as a prefix length, but predates the advent of CIDR.
CIDR uses variable-length subnet masks (VLSM) to allocate IP addresses to subnets according to individual need, rather than some general network-wide rule. Thus the network/host division can occur at any bit boundary in the address. The process can be recursive, with a portion of the address space being further divided into even smaller portions, through the use of masks which cover more bits.”
The Microsoft site has a very good introduction on TCP/IP . If you are deploying in the office, look at this PDF (link)
Unrelated – Teracopy - good tool for copying files http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php
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