Remove language packs from Windows 7

I often have to install different languages/locales on Windows 7 to perform testing in different languages, unfortuately adding all of them into a single installation can take a lot of space, particularly when using a virtual machine.

Using the usual method to ‘remove installed software’ will remove updates, but leaves the languages in place, to completely remove them you must open a command prompt and execute the following:


LPKSETUP

Select the languages you wish to remove, and click continue… it will take a while, but the languages will be removed one at a time.

REFERENCES:

Remove Guest Account in Ubuntu

While the Guest session can be useful for some people, I’ve generally considered it to be security vulnerability as unauthorized users could gain physical access to some areas of your system that are not secured as well as they “should” be.

Additionally, the default behavior that allows for the username(s) to be stored and listed on the login screen are less than ideal.

Here we remove both!

  1. Create the config folder:
    sudo mkdir -p /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d
  2. Create a new config file:
    sudo vi /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/10-ubuntu.conf
  3. Add the following:

    [SeatDefaults]
    user-session=ubuntu
    greeter-show-manual-login=true
    greeter-hide-users=true
    allow-guest=false
  4. Reboot

REFERENCES:

Force cleaning of workspace during automated Maven builds

I’ve been using Maven for years, but once in a while forget to ‘clean‘ before building, resulting in old artifacts being included in the output. This can be problematic when refactoring for security items. Thankfully, it is very easy to add a ‘clean‘ step to your pom.xml to force clean each build.

BONUS – the plugin has some additional capabilities, specifically you can specify files outside of ‘target’ to be removed. This can be useful for any custom reporting or logging that you might create.

The Maven clean plug-in can be added to the pom.xml as such:

<build>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-clean-plugin</artifactId>
<version>${maven-clean-plugin.version}</version>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>auto-clean</id>
<phase>initialize</phase>
<goals>
<goal>clean</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>

REFERENCES:

Linux/Windows file cleanup

If you make heavy (or even typical) use of your computer, you’ll often notice that it just doesn’t seem as fast as it once was. For a slight increase in performance, disk space and to generally remove some of the ‘temporary’ files/cruft that are routinely written to disk you have a few options.

Here are a few of my current favorites for doing ‘Spring Cleaning’ on my computers… BleachBit and CCleaner

BleachBit is available on all major platforms (Windows, OS/X, Linux).

Windows file cleanup/housekeeping

Since I routinely run WAMP servers (see previous article) and develop primarily on Windows machines, I find that a lot of garbage remains on these machines. Often these files are created temporarily and not deleted and/or are created for some perceiver performance gains. Additionally, its often nice to schedule cleanup operations for times when you are not using the machine…. here’s a few common items to consider.

@echo off echo ======= DELETES =========
del /q %windir%*.log
del /q %windir%*.tmp
del /q %windir%securitylogs*.*
del /q %windir%SoftwareDistributionDataStoreLogs*.*
del /q %windir%msdownld.tmp*.*
del /q %windir%$hf_mig$*.*
del /q %TEMP%msdownld.tmp*.*
del /q %TEMP%*.dat
del /q %TEMP%*.log
del /q %TEMP%*.tmp
del /q %TEMP%*.xpi
del /q %TEMP%sess_*.*
del /q %TEMP%logs*.*
del /q c:*.log
del /q c:logs*.*
del /q /s %USERPROFILE%*.dmp
del /q /s %USERPROFILE%SIDisttemp*.*"
echo ======= Prefetch ==========
del /q %windir%Prefetch*.*
echo ======== DEFRAG ===========
%windir%system32defrag.exe c: -f -v >%TEMP%batch_defrag.txt
echo ========= done ============

Options….

echo ======== ANALOG ===========
cd c:analog6.0 analog +glocalhost.cfg
echo ========== IP =============
%windir%system32ipconfig.exe /all > %TEMP%batch_ip.txt
echo ======== NETSTAT ==========
%windir%system32netstat.exe -a > %TEMP%batch_netstat.txt

NOTE: this entry will be updated occasionally!