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Oct 12 / 2:32am

Update the Search Behaviour of the Firefox Address Bar

After having used Chrome for so long on my Mac (in the dev channel via the very useful Chromium Updater), switching back to Firefox reveals an interesting habit - searching via the address bar. In Chrome, you can type your search directly in the address bar and you'll get redirected to Google for your search results, however in Firefox it reacts slightly differently - it will carry out a Google "I'm feeling lucky" search which will direct you to the first result Google returns.

You can customise this behavior in the 'about:config' page within Firefox. Type 'about:config' into the address bar, and then update the 'keyword.URL' field to your chosen search engine. For example, if you wanted to use Scroogle instead, you would type:

By the way, If you are not already using Scroogle, it's a simple way to anonymise your search requests.

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Filed under  //  linux   mac   windows  

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Oct 10 / 6:18am

Installing and Uninstalling Software in Windows Safe Mode

It's quite common that you need to remove some software when running in Safe Mode, particularly when you find your system is unusable when running normally. However, by default, the key service required to manage installed software is not running, and cannot be started (the Windows Installer Service, aka MSIServer).

Here is a quick way around this issue - by adding the registry entry below, you'll then be able to start the service and remove / install the software you require.

reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SafeBoot\Minimal\MSIServer" /VE /T REG_SZ /F /D "Service"
sc start msiserver

Once this change is made, it will remain permanent, and you won't need to re-apply it in the future, although you'll still need to start the msiserver service when required.
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Sep 30 / 5:23am

Customising the Command Prompt

If you don't currently follow the Command line Kung Fu blog, I highly suggest you do! Originally started back in February this year by Paul Asadoorian (of PaulDotCom), Ed Skoudis and Hal Pomeranz, each week they publish solutions to challenges posed to each other, using only the command line utilities included on a default installation of Windows, Linux and Mac OS - many of the published solutions contain really useful snippets of code to include in your own scripts.

Something that was covered in Episodes #28, #49 and #52 was customising the command prompt in various ways. On my own Windows systems I now include the following command prompt customisation by default:

30/09/2009 13:30:34.98 C:\>

Why? The biggest benefit is knowing when commands were started, and when they completed. Many tools don't provide feedback with time and dates, and so by the nature of the date and time being printed on screen each time a prompt is provided, you get a quick and dirty way to see how long a command took to execute.

Setting the prompt temporarily can be done with the 'prompt' command (or 'set prompt'), while making the change permanently can be done by adding an entry to the registry - both can be seen below.


In addition, my prompt also displays how many paths are on the pushd and popd stack, as also seen above.
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Sep 28 / 6:14am

Indisposable Tools - Notepad++, a Notepad Replacement for Windows

Microsoft Notepad is probably (and unintentionally) one of my most used utilities, for example, when when stripping text formatting from content cut/copied from Word or Internet Explorer, or editing batch, vb, or <insert language here> scripts.

It's very quick to bring up Notepad (Windows + R, notepad <return>) as quick dumping ground for the clipboard, and uses very little resources, however it does have it's limitations - Unix carriage returns, no regular expression support to name but a few.

A highly recommended tool open-source replacement, which has now become one of my indisposable tools, is Notepad++.

"Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License."

"Based on a powerful editing component Scintilla, Notepad++ is written in C++ and uses pure Win32 API and STL which ensures a higher execution speed and smaller program size. By optimizing as many routines as possible without losing user friendliness, Notepad++ is trying to reduce the world carbon dioxide emissions. When using less CPU power, the PC can throttle down and reduce power consumption, resulting in a greener environment."

Some of the key benefits, for me anyway, include:
  • Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding for various languages (including XML, HTML, Perl, Python, VB/VBS, Batch etc)
  • Multi-Document and Multi-View allowing you to view multiple documents and have multiple views between them, or in the same document
  • Regular expression Search/Replace is fully supported
  • File status Auto-detection, which is particularly useful when working on live files, such as logs etc

There are also a large number of plugins, which extend Notepad++ even further.

Installation is straight forward - just download the latest installer (or the .zip file), and accept all the defaults. I can also highly recommend installing the Notepad++ launcher, which will allow you to replace Notepad completely:
  1. Backup your original Notepad.exe
  2. Copy notepad.exe which comes with this package into 4 directories (in given order) :
    - c:\windows\servicepackfiles\i386
    - c:\windows\system32\dllcache
    - c:\windows\system32
    - c:\windows
  3. When you replace notepad.exe in c:\windows\system32 and c:\windows, a "Windows File Protection" message box appears, click Cancel. Then another message box appears, click OK.
  4. Modify you registry (if you use installer to install your Notepad++, you don't need to do this step): Create key \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Notepad++, then add your Notepad++ full path as the default value of this key. In my case, it's C:\Program Files\Notepad++.
If you need any further information, check out the NpWiki++.
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Filed under  //  indisposable   windows  

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Mar 13 / 4:34pm

Citrix Web Interface and the Fatal Execution Engine Error

Having recently been focused on a Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 migration, I took some time out to build a development 64-bit environment just to become familiar with any 'gotchas'... This was a single, stand-alone Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard SP2 64-bit operating system, with the 64-bit Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 Enterprise Edition installed, running inside XenServer 4.1 RC7 XenServer 4.1 - I chose to install .NET Framework 3.5 (which includes the required .NET Framework 2.0) and JRE 1.5.0_09.

Additionally, I installed the following components onto the same box:

The following hotfixes were then applied to CPS:

  • Citrix Hotfix Rollup Pack PSE450W2K3X64R01.msp
  • Citrix Hotfix PSE450R01W2K3X64003.msp
  • Citrix Hotfix PSE450R01W2K3X64004.msp
  • Citrix Hotfix PSE450R01W2K3X64005.msp
  • Citrix Hotfix PSE450R01W2K3X64012.msp
  • Citrix Hotfix PSE450R01W2K3X64014.msp
  • Citrix Hotfix PSE450R01W2K3X64016.msp
  • Citrix Hotfix PSE450R01W2K3X64019.msp
  • Citrix Hotfix PSE450R01W2K3X64020.msp
  • Citrix Hotfix PSE450R01W2K3X64023.msp

As a side note, I had installation errors on the rollup, and hotfix 005, but all seems to be working ok... anyway, at some point post-installation the Web Interface decided to stop working. The following error was recorded in the application event log:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: .NET Runtime
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1023
Date: 13/03/2008
Time: 13:05:20
User: N/A
Computer: VM4
Description:
.NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.1433 - Fatal Execution Engine Error (79FFEE24) (80131506)

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.>

Server reboots / iisresets had no effect, and after lots of Googling, it looked like there might be a specific .NET hotfix to address the issue (KB913384), however it was only applicable to an older version of the .NET Framework 2.0 - it is supposed to be included / resolved in SP1 (build 1433). Another google confirmed this. After much frustration from a lack of solutions on the Citrix forums / knowledge base, I ended up uninstalling .NET Framework completely (you have to uninstall 3.5, then 3.0 SP1, then 2.0 SP1 in that specific order), then reinstalling the .NET Framework 2.0 RTM (build 42).

Once I then re-installed Web Interface 4.6 (enabling 32-bit mode in the process, as prompted) and then deleted and re-added the existing site within the Access Management Console, it all sprang back into life. I've not yet re-patched .NET to see if it remains functional...

Update 1

The error has occured again:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: .NET Runtime
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1023
Date: 14/03/2008
Time: 08:18:27
User: N/A
Computer: VM4
Description:
.NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.42 - Fatal Execution Engine Error (7A05E2B3) (80131506)

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.>

This time, the only change I've made is to install the latest Citrix XenCenter console 4.1 RC7, which itself is .NET application. I ended up having to install the KB913384 fix, which this time was appliable to the version of .NET I had installed. I am going to do a bit more testing to see what is causing it to re-fail.

Update 2

And again...

Event Type: Error
Event Source: .NET Runtime
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1023
Date: 17/03/2008
Time: 10:55:32
User: N/A
Computer: VM4
Description:
.NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.63 - Fatal Execution Engine Error (7A05F093) (80131506)

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.>

This time I had installed and uninstalled Office 2007.

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Filed under  //  windows  

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