Are You Sure?

Like a true member of “old guard” I occasionally touch hosts file in order to do custom redirects. On Windows 7 it is annoying experience to edit this file. First you need to open it directly in program since it doesn’t have proper extension. After short edit you need to save it and, of course, it is protected file. So you need to open another instance of notepad, this time with administrative privileges…

Few weeks after you change this you might get dialog informing you of virus. True, it doesn’t say virus as such but it does look threatening. Warning message even has virus-like name. Only after careful reading it is obvious that two added lines caused this mess:

127.0.0.1	www.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1	ssl.google-analytics.com

Security essentials detected this as a thread and, if you use default disinfect command, it will restore order to your hosts file - by deleting one of those items. Redirecting www.google-analytics.com is a big threat but ssl.google-analytics.com is fair game…

Solution is simple, just select allow option and everything is good once more. At least for a month or so. Then, out of a blue, Security Essentials might warn you about something you did before and you already forgot all about it.

Hyper-V SP1

It took them a while but Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 is finally available for download.

Seobiseu

When I turn on my computer, I like for it to turn on fast. This usually means disabling unnecessary services with SQL Server being usually the one that slows startup the most. However, few of those services get used through out a day. Until now that meant dealing with services MMC snap-in and UAC prompts. Well, not any more.

Seobiseu is application that, once installed, allows starting and stopping services from user account. For that you have simple window interface and nice tray (“notification area”) menu.

The way it is done is via system service that proxies all requests from user land to service controller. While this does lower security a little, I deem it worthy compromise since service isn’t able to do anything other than start and stop operation.

P.S. Name is Korean translation of word service (phonetically read). It sounds nice to me and I do like quite a few things about South Korea so it seemed like perfect choice.

Crazy Feed

MSDN subscribers have two choices when it comes to getting new software. Either you will visit MSDN site every few days to see what is new or you will subscribe to their feed. Logic would dictate that MSDN feed should be preferred way of doing this - every time something new arrives you get notification in your RSS reader.

Because of some idiotic programming MSDN feed is worse than useless. For example today I had total of 370 of new items in my feed. Those are probably quite a same items that were available yesterday when I had around 200 items. Or day before that when another 200 ended up in my reader. Who knows, maybe there was some new software inside. I haven’t got a clue since I was too lazy to read everything.

I am not sure why this happens - I am too lazy to investigate thoroughly. And no, it is not a RSS reader’s fault since no other feed exhibits such behavior. My guess would be that missing GUID and pubDate that keeps on changing are one to blame. Without unique GUID for each item it is very difficult for any program to say what remains same and what is really different.

It would be easy for Microsoft to fix RSS feed but they haven’t in last three years so I am not holding my breath. After all, they never said that developer’s satisfaction is their priority.

P.S. As I wrote this, I noticed another 300+ waiting…

Azure Java

Another presentation is done. Materials can be accessed here. Do notice that PowerPoint slides are in Croatian. Fortunately, Java code is in English. :)

P.S. You will need your own Azure account to run HelloBlob project.

P.P.S. Applications are available here and here. Unfortunately, I only have few days on account left so don’t expect it being there forever.