Free Computer Based VOIP

I’ve used a variety of computer based VOIP over the years. My current preference in this space is Skype as it’s free for computer-to-computer calls and even allows calls to and from regular phones (at a fee).

Video and text chat are also provided, as is ‘white-boarding’ with additional plugins.

Skype is available for most platforms, even mobile phones… I’ve found that while the Windows beta versions has some additional features, the Linux release is rock-solid.

http://www.skype.com/

There are also several hardware based solutions, like Vonage, available to replace your traditional phone service… perhaps we’ll cover that later.

Skype me!

Open Source FTP Client (and Server)

At one time, FTP was the only means available to move large files, times have changed but the need still exists, especially for developers like myself.

For years I’ve happily used FileZilla for my FTP needs, the client is available on most platforms. There is also a server available for Windows as most Linux variants already provide FTP.

Happy file transfers!

MySQL (Windows) service startup error 1067

I’ve installed and managed dozens of MySQL installations for several years, occasionally it seems that an install just doesn’t run like it has in the past.

Recently I had a problem where the service would not start (Error 1067) on Windows Server 2003 (R2)… which is running under VMWare. After checking the obvious places and turning up nothing I started down the list of potential solutions exposed by Google search.

The ultimate solution it seems is that the ‘my.ini’ file needed to include the specific path information required by the service…. without it the service would not start.

Here’s my current file (c:\windows\my.ini) for reference:

[WinMySQLAdmin]
Server=C:/mysql40/bin/mysqld-nt.exe
[mysqld]
basedir=c:/mysql40
datadir=c:/mysql40/data

For the really observant readers of this entry… you will notice that this is for MySQL 4.0 (which is no longer officially supported). It’s mostly used as it is widely compatible across various host systems that are sometimes problematic with newer releases.

Cheers.

Apache Native Client

If you do any development or even production testing with Apache Tomcat, you may have seen the following message in your logs.

“The Apache Tomcat Native library which allows optimal performance in production environments was not found on the java.library.path”

Here’s a quick solution that will leave you with greatly improved performance.

  1. Go to the following URI’s:
  2. Download the appropriate version of tcnative-1.dll
  3. For Windows, place that file in c:\windows\system32\ 
  4. Restart your Tomcat server
  5. You are done!

Cheers

Free Antivirus Software

So, a family member has recently approached me about virus scan products for Windows. It seems that, while he runs a commercial product, it’s a little dated and he does not keep up on the frequent updates, unfortunately this has put him into a position where his computer was infected and has become almost unusable. Using the same commercial products he’s unable to clean up the mess and has already lost many files.

I’ve been a convert to Avast for several years and even run it on my servers to scan for malicious content, it’s both free for non-commercial use and updates automatically.

Other products worth considering:

For Windows:

Unix/Linux:

Mac OS/X:

Cheers!

Windows Tools for reading NTFS and Linux partitions

I’ve had to do my share of hard-drive recoveries over the years and have found the tools provided by DiskInternals to be invaluable in several occurances.

I’d previously used their NTFS Reader software to recover files from bad partitions after multi-booting to an older Windows operating system drive on the same machine.

Now I’ve found that they offer an EXT2/EXT3 Reader to allow Windows to access Linux partitions.

This is great for less-technical users that experience fatal errors in their operating systems as there’s now a relatively simple way to access the ‘familiar’ Windows tooling to recover files on the ‘bad’ partition. For the power-user, this affords a means for people making the switch to Linux a means in which to access their files in Windows in the off chance that they have to use software not usable under WINE.

Product Pages:

NOTE: Similar tooling exists to read Mac HPFS partitions, that topic saved for a later post!

Cheers!

WINE Is Not an Emulator

I post a lot about open source applications, WINE is another notable contender as it gives users an option to run many mainstream Window applications on a Linux (even Apple’s OS/X variant) platform by providing access to the Windows API’s to those host operating systems.

http://www.winehq.org/
http://appdb.winehq.org/ – List of applications supported

Ah, for those of you still running IBM’s OS/2 platform, you too can run Win32 applications with Odin:
http://odin.netlabs.org/

Cheers!

Windows Registration Key Finder

If you’re like me, you’ve probably got more than one computer configured. The problem comes when you want to re-image one of them, but don’t have an accurate idea of which software license key’s are used by individual machines. Windows makes this difficult to recover as it doesn’t store them in a logical manner where any human could find and read them.

Additionally, it’s not until late in the installation process of Windows that you even have the option to enter a key, at which time you have to call Microsoft if the key was used by a different machine. (There’s some funny logic around this related to hardware configuration changes too).

Magical Jelly Bean KeyFinder searches and displays the keys on any post Windows-95 installation:
http://www.magicaljellybean.com/keyfinder.shtml

NOTE: This not only displays the Windows key, but also other installed software like Office and even many games.

Cheers!

Free Windows Defragmentation Software

Windows, due to it’s MS-DOS heritage has a lot of problems due to disk fragmentation.  To maintain optimal disk read speed, it is advised to “defrag” on a regular basis.   Whether or not LINUX has similar problems remains a subject of debate.

I’ve used many different defrag utilities over the years,  my current choices are Diskkeeper Lite and Defraggler.

Most of these vendors are free or provide free trials of their software, I’ve noted the versions I’m familiar with.

Here’s the run-down:

  • Windows Defrag – installed with Windows.
    •  this is provided with (I believe) all versions since Windows 98.
  • Diskeeper – retail
    • – this is the commercial version that was licenced to Microsoft for use with Windows.
    • Search for the older free “Diskeeper Lite 7.0.418”
  • Pirisoft Defraggler – free
  • O&O Defrag – retail, search for older version 4 which was free.
  • Norton Speed Disk – retail

I have not used the following, but they appear to be worth a look:

WARNING – if you use hard-drive encryption, defragging may cause your drive to become unreadable.  Defrag with caution.

Happy Defragging!

Browser Rendering Engines

This is knowledge that is generally “tribal” by nature, reserved to only the nerdiest web developers, recently I was asked to name these and failed. Here’s the bounty of my research.

Gecko is generally considered to be the second most-popular layout engine on the Web, after Trident (used by Internet Explorer for Windows since version 4), and followed by WebCore (used by Safari) and Presto (used by Opera).

Gecko is the open source, free software web browser layout engine used in all Mozilla-branded software and its derivatives, including later Netscape browser releases. Written in C++ and licensed under MPL/GPL/LGPL triple license, Gecko is designed to support open Internet standards. Originally created by Netscape Communications Corporation, its development is now overseen by the Mozilla Foundation.

Trident (also known as MSHTML) is the name of the layout engine for the Microsoft Windows version of Internet Explorer. It was first introduced with the release of Internet Explorer version 4 in October 1997, has been steadily upgraded and remains in use today. For version 7 of Internet Explorer, Microsoft made significant changes to the Trident layout engine to improve compliance with web standards and add support for new technologies. Despite these changes, Trident remains significantly less compliant than competing layout engines Gecko, Presto and WebCore.

Presto is the name of the current (Opera 9 series) layout engine for the Opera web browser developed by Opera Software. It was first released (following several public betas and technical previews) on January 28, 2003 in Opera 7.0 for Windows. Presto replaced the Elektra engine used in versions 4–6 of Opera. Presto differs from Elektra in that it is dynamic: the page or parts of it can be re-rendered in response to DOM and script events. The Presto layout engine is only available as a part of Opera browser or related products. The source or binary (DLL) forms of the engine are not publicly available. Subsequent releases have seen a number of bugs fixed and optimizations to improve the speed of the ECMAScript (“JavaScript“) engine.

Tasman is the name of the layout engine introduced with version 5 of Internet Explorer for Mac. Tasman was an attempt to improve support for web standards, as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium. At the time of its release, Tasman was seen as the layout engine with the best support for web standards such as HTML and CSS. Unfortunately, MSIE for Mac is no longer supported, but newer versions of Tasman are incorporated in some other current Microsoft products.

Cheers!