Here’s how to stop javascript from taking control of your window size in firefox….

Firstly, Select “Preferences” from the “Edit” menu.

Click the advanced button…

And uncheck the “Move or resize existing windows” option.

Job Done!

The following will overlay overlay.png on top of output.png

mogrify -draw "image SrcOver 0,0 0,0 'overlay.png'" output.png

While this one will overlay overlay.png on top of input.png and save it as output.png

convert input.png -draw "image SrcOver 0,0 0,0 'overlay.png'" output.png

You can download imagemagick from http://www.imagemagick.org/

You can download imagemagick from http://www.imagemagick.org/

The following will replace all red (#FF0000) pixels with blue (#0000FF)

convert sourceimage.png -fill "#FF0000" -opaque "#0000FF" destimage.png

The following will allow you dto do this from a command prompt:

FOR /F "tokens=*" %G IN ('DIR /B /AD /S .svn') DO RMDIR /S /Q %G

Remember, if you’re doing it from a batch file, you’ll need to double up the percent signs, thus:

FOR /F "tokens=*" %%G IN ('DIR /B /AD /S .svn') DO RMDIR /S /Q %%G

Easy…

First, create a new user which you will log in as.
Make sure this user is explicitly denied access to all files and folders on the system.
Now, add the following ‘special’ permissions to the directory you wish to make write only..

It turns out that the plugin makes a huge difference.

Resource usage comparison over two (highlighted) tests. Cache is OFF on the left, ON on the right.

I kept increasing the rate of requests until the Disk IO rate was the same for both tests. With the cache turned off, CPU usage went through the roof to 400% of my allocation while still only serving up pages at five megabits per second. With the cache enabled, CPU usage settled at 20% and the data rate peaked at over 45 Megabit/sec.

I’m very impressed with the results… It seems that with a moderate spec server, you’ll hit your disk and/or network limit before you run out of CPU or RAM.

This is the first major revision of DateTimeUTC where you can now add or subtract from the current date. This is very useful if you want yesterday’s date.

Get the latest version from here: DateTimeUTC

The main usage of the application is:

datetimeutc [-options]

Options:
-fFORMAT Set output format
-z Set output time to Local Time (Not UTC)
-help View full online help

Example formats:
yyyyMMddTHHmmssZ 20081121T100227Z
“yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss UTC” 2008-11-21 10:02:27 UTC
“dd MMMM yyyy” 21 November 2008
ddd Fri
dddd Friday
fff (Milliseconds)

Use double quotes when the format includes a space
Use backslashes to escape reserved character

Now, to add or subtract from the time, the format of the option is:
-[timeunit][value]
[timeunit] is one of YMdHms for Year, Month, Day, hour, Minute or Second
[value] is an integer and can be positive or negative

The following will print the UTC time one day ago:
datetimeutc -fyyyyMMddTHHmmssZ -d-1

Do get the output into a batch file, try this:
for /f “usebackq” %%a in (`datetimeUTC.exe -fyyyyMMddTHHmmssZ`) do (set UTCdts=%%a%)
echo %UTCdts%

Job done

It’s only supplied as source which isn’t too helpful for windows users.

Enca is particularly useful at guessing the encoding of text files where the language is known.

Here is version 1.12 compiled into a native windows binary: enca_1-12.zip
(I’ve compiled this from a downloaded source, so no responsibility is taken for it’s suitability for use, being free from viruses, etc. In other words, use it at your own risk)

It turns out that if you set the firewall to allow “FTP”, the passive port range will be ignored and the default passive port range will be used. To solve it, you’ll need to manually add port 21 and the ports defined in the passive port range… Strange but true.

If you’ve been following along in my blog, I’ve recently had to reinstall Windows onto my server as it turned out that I couldn’t resize (grow) the RAID array.

Things are almost completely back to normal now. One problem I had was getting FTP under IIS 6.0 to work properly through my firewall.

Overview of the FTP protocol
In terms of Internet protocol (TCP), FTP is a strange one. It uses port 21 as a control port and then other (sometimes) random ports for down/up loading. This effectively means that when you request to download a file, your FTP client connects to the server on port 21, sending through your username, password and changing to the correct directory.

Under old-school (Active, or Non-Passive) FTP, as soon as a file is requested for download (Using the command RETR), the server will tell the client to get ready to receive the data on a particular port. The main thing to note being that the Server Connects to the Client to send/receive files. This creates numerous problems for users behind firewalls.

I now introduce Passive FTP. The main difference is that the Client Connects to the Server to send/receive files. When Passive FTP is used, the client sends the server the command PASV which commands the server to supply a port number, but then wait for the client to connect to it.

Why this is a problem
Passive mode becomes a problem when the server is behind a firewall. When this is the case, the range of ports to be used needs to be known in advance and in almost all cases, allowed to pass through the firewall to the server.

IIS 6.0 by default uses the port range of 5000-65535. To open all these ports on a firewall would be a massive security risk. To limit this risk, you can set a smaller range of ports to be used.

To set the range of ports to be used in IIS, it’s a fairly trivial task…
1. Open IIS manager, right click the root (local computer) and select properties.
2. Select “Enable Direct Metabase Edit” (see image below)

3. OK all the way out of IIS.

Enabling direct metabase edit means that you can use command line tools to edit IIS settings.

Once this is done, the following, if run from a command line, will enable the port range 6000-6100

cscript C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts\adsutil.vbs set /MSFTPSVC/PassivePortRange "6000-6100"


And the following, if run from a command line, will enable the range 6000-6100 through the firewall

FOR /L %%I IN (6000,1,6100) DO NETSH FIREWALL add PORTOPENING TCP %%I FTPPort%%I


Now, simply reset IIS and you “should” be on your way

IISRESET


Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case….

I was finding that while the windows firewall was disabled, the selected port range would work, but as soon as I enabled the firewall, the range went back to the default. The solution to this bug is surprisingly simple.

Open the windows firewall and click the advanced tab:

Select your network connect and click [settings]. In this list, if you have “FTP Server” selected, deselect it and click OK. Do this for all network interfaces you have.

Now, back in the main firewall screen, select the Exceptions tab, and click the Add Port button. Give your new exception a meaningful name, enter port 21 and select TCP.

Strangely this will work with your Passive Port Range while the program exception on a Network connection basis will not. I spent hours trying to work this out so hopefully someone else will find it useful.

Nokia Software Updater has attempted to connect to the internet but has failed three times. This could be because of a poor-quality, slow or intermitent internet connection, or restrictions due to a firewall.

If requested by your firewall, Nokia Software updater needs the following applications to gain access to the internet:
nsl_host_process.exe
nsu_ui_client.exe

Try setting your default browser to Internet Explorer.

If you still have trouble, open Internet Explorer and make sure that “Work Offline” is NOT ticked.

All should work fine after this…