Techblog

Websites like bankofamerica and pandora use Flash Application Data to remmeber the system. This is why even after you clear your cookies bankofamerica will no longer ask for a computer to be approved by you as a trusted private system. It is also the same way that Pandora knows that this system has exceeded the 40 hour useage limit in a month.

Most of the time application data is good to keep around and can be used by web developers for a multitude of purposes, but every so often a problem occurs that can easily be fixed by simply removing the application data. A good example was a clientless VPN that used flash instead of java application data. The flash application data was unable to access the resources properly because of the way the application data saved information prior to a updated and was incompatible with the updated version. Clearing the flash app data fixed the issue right away.

Using the following locations you can locate and delete any websites application data for flash. You can also use these folders to recreate user’s history, but that is a totally seperate topic. Simply find the website you are having trouble with and delete the folder that matches the website. You can also just delete the entire folder and it will auto-recreate. Do remember that when you delete this data you often times will delete the personal settings you had for the website.

WINDOWS XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects

AND

C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\macromedia.com\support\flashplayer\sys

VISTA:
C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects

AND

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Macromedia\Flash Player\macromedia.com\support\flashplayer\sys

Mac OS X:
Library > Preferences > Macromedia > Flash Player > #SharedObjects

Strict replication is a registry control introduced by Microsoft to stop ‘lingering objects’.  More specifically this is a way to block replication for older DNS objects. 

HOW:

  KEY Name: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NTDS\Parameters

  Registry Entry: Strict Replication Consistency

  Value: 1 (enabled), 0 (disabled)

  Type: REG_DWORD

NOTE: This needs to be done to all DNS servers in the forest.

WHAT:

By doing this you will stop replication to anything that that exceeds the TSL, tomb stone life.  By default the TSL is set for 180 days in windows 2003, but can be changed.

WHY:

In older environments it is common to find objects exceeding the TSL to be replicated in DNS.  If a network is properly managed than cleaning up of DNS should be part of the process to add, remove, modify.  This is not always true and old DNS entries can create problems with performance or even be responsible for some types of outages where a resource is unavailable.  Setting strict replication will prevent replication of older objects while you clean up DNS.

NOTE:  laptops that are joined to the network  but never connect to the network, such as remote workers, are at high risk of not being replicated and if you expect a device to be out of the network for more than your TSL you may want to not run strict replication all the time.  Just enable it during maintenances to ensure proper cleanup of DNS.

Nearly everytime I ask someone to run pathping I feel like it is the 1st time they have ever ran the command.

You can find more about the command:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc958876.aspx

Pathping is a tracert that runs a ping command at every node. This isn’t a command that does anything new, but it does save a process step when troubleshooting problems. Especially problems where partial packet loss is the issue and not total packet loss.

A good thing to note is that windows has not added support for pathping on ipv6.

For a couple weeks now I have been testing Server 2008 R2(x86) and during that time I noticed that on average Server 2008 R2 is running at 40x more processor and 16x more memory than a Fedora 12 server. As a point of reference the Fedora 12 server is a lightly loaded web/email server and the 2008 R2 is a fresh install with only telnet installed.

In comparision to a 2003 x86 server usually only averages 10-15x more processor and 3-5x more memory. That is still about half of the 2008 R2 overhead.

Hopefully Server 2011 will be more like Windows 7 and reduce the overhead.

2010 Sharepoint Designer x64
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=eeda9ab1-ac53-4870-9e1c-38940343d677&displaylang=en

Also do not forget that if you need 2007 Designer that the final release version is free:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=BAA3AD86-BFC1-4BD4-9812-D9E710D44F42&displaylang=en

http://www.microsoft.com/Office/2010/en/faqs/default.aspx

The entire 2010 Office Suite:
• Microsoft® Excel® 2010
• Microsoft® Outlook® 2010 with Business Contact Manager
• Microsoft® PowerPoint® 2010
• Microsoft® Word 2010
• Microsoft® Access® 2010
• Microsoft® InfoPath® 2010
• Microsoft® Communicator
• Microsoft® Publisher 2010
• Microsoft® OneNote® 2010
• Microsoft® SharePoint® Workspace 2010
• Microsoft® Office Web Apps

I also wanted to take a moment to remind everyone about some FREE alternatives to MS Office.

OpenOffice Writer = Word
OpenOffice Calc = Excel
OpenOffice Impress = PowerPoint
OpenOffice Base = Access
OpenOffice Draw = Visio
Scribus = Publisher

Also, if you are looking for a replacement for project you can try:
OpenWorkBench = Project

Recently I gave OpenOffice to my fience. As a means of being fair her technical level is moderate for an end user. Her first response to seeing the installed product was happy. She quickly was able to navigate the menus and perform basic actions and said she “the layout and usability was easier”.
In the past several months she has reported 2 problems to me. The first was when she tried to open a Microsoft Excel document (xls/xlsb) with Writer, the MS Word equivalent. She was not aware of the other 4 programs OpenOffice provided. Using Calc resolved her issue. The second issue was when she sent a document to a friend and the friend could not open it with Word.
NOTE: the default save format is NOT microsoft formats.
Once she was made aware that OpenOffice was compatible with more than just mirosoft products and was given instructions on how to select what to save as and how to set default save formats the issue was resolved. She resaved and resent the documents to her friend without any problems. Something to take note on is that with both of these issues she reverted to “I guess we have to install microsoft office”, but once the issue was resolved I asked her if she wanted me to install microsoft office. In both situations she said “no” and that she liked OpenOffice, but didn’t know it could do that. If OpenOffice was deployed in a real office environment I think this mentality would be common and the process should be approached expecting users who do report problems to assume that the issue is with the product and not with their knowledge. Just remember that the users not reporting problems are likely to have the same issue and need to be provided the information.

One of the best ways to do this is to have a “tip of the day/week” that gives instructions on how to perform various tasks within these products.

For those of you who want to know how to change default save formats:
1) Launch any OpenOffice.org application such as OpenOffice Writer.
2) Click on Tools and then Options.
3) Expand the Load/Save section in the left pane by clicking the + (plus sign).
4) Click on General under the Load/Save section.
5) In the area labeled as “Default file format” near the bottom of the dialog window, select the type of document you want, for example, Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP, in the Document Type drop-down list.

For those not aware I recently migrated my servers to a different hosting company. I had been with my previous company since 2005, but they didn’t offer me solutions to meet my growing demands. In the process I began to reflect on my journey and I thought about how technology changes over time.

So much has changed in the past 10 years. 10 years ago the buzz word for web design was Flash. Adobe flash was exploding in the market and people were designing entire websites in flash. Including this geek. People could visit an entire website and navigate for hours between content without ever leaving the first loading page they landed on.
Flash presented a couple great advantages:
1) Faster loading speed vs each page content being loaded seperately. Flash maintains a central library of graphics and compresses them in just the right way to keep their file size small and sharing the bulk to the user during loading cycles. Great since people lacked the internet speeds we have today.
2) Don’t know java or basic? With Flash you could have stylish graphics that users could interact with.
3) Need to develop a web form? This was only a couple click and drags away in Flash. Compared to other web development software available at the time flash changed how people looked at web design.

Visitors to your website only had 1 problem. Refresh. When your entire website is based on a limited number of flash designs you ran into the problem where browsers couldn’t identify where you were in your session and thus has no reference point to bring you back to. Often users would drop sessions and then complain.

Fortunately, flash has found it’s place in our world. Today flash is still used to stream media, navigate websites, games, and so much more. People have even found ways to insert cookies into a browser from flash programs.

If one lesson could be learned from flash it could be that we should use technology appropriately. Just because a butter knife can unscrew a bolt doesn’t mean it should be used for that purpose. In the same way that you can build a website out of flash doesn’t mean that you should.

I find many companies improperly using technology. Virtualization may be the networking buzz word for today. Everyone is so excited about the benefits of virtualization that they don’t properly weigh the risks. I am definitly looking forward to seeing where virtualization takes us and to see where virtualization fails to meet market demands. I will definitly be talking about virtualization, but right now everyone is talking about the good points for virtualization. I don’t want to be hasty when writing down my pros and cons review for it.

How often have you told someone to defrag their system, or been told to defrag your system? How many times has anyone ever explains what it is or why we do it?

=- THE NON TECHNICAL ANSWER -=
Imagine having 4 buckets. A green one, a blue one, a red one, and a yellow one. All of these buckets are inside of a brown cardboard box. This is a representation of your hard drive, the brown cardboard box, and 4 programs, the buckets, that you have installed.

Each bucket is filled with marbles which represents the data associated with the 4 programs and just like the buckets the marbles are colored green, blue, red, and yellow.

Overtime marbles get into the wrong buckets. Defragmentation takes all the marbles and puts them together in the matching colored buckets. What this does is it makes it faster for you to find all the data for a program, aka marbles.

In a real world scenario you might have hundreds or thousands of buckets. The less organized they are the longer it will take your computer to go find all the pieces of the program so you can use it.

-= Light Technical Detail =-
Data is written to a drive in the order is it recieved. Your hard drive is recieving input from multiple sources at the same time during an installation and in todays world can even be installed fragmented. It is important to note that defragmentation is putting data in the order that it will be called. System defragmentation is what is generally called defragmentation, but it is not the only type of defragmentation.

GEEK NOTE: this does NOT mean that data has to be placed physically on the drive as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc as is commonly depicted in graphical representations of defragmentation. To be more accurate we would have to discuss drive formating, speeds, etc. Some drives will read every X space-distance so while they are in order based on drive read cycles they are not physically next to each other without data between them.

Non-System Defragmentation?
Most people only think of system defragmentation when talking about defragmentation, but that is not the only defragmentation you can do. Most databases can and should be defragged as part of a maintenance cycle. Exchange databases not being defragmented is one of the most common causes for exchange problems.

GEEK NOTE: even though things like a swap file and system registry are apart of the system they are considered “immovable” by the system defragmentation software. Thus they are not defraged when you run most defrag programs. In order to defragment these you need to use additional tools. One of the most common tools used for windows is PageDefrag . Sadly this tool is starting to become outdated and unless it is updated it will may not work with new OS

UPDATE: Jan 12, 2009
Someone asked me what doesn’t get defragmented from windows disk dedragmentation program. According to wikipedia the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_Defragmenter_(Windows)

In Windows 2000 and later operating systems, Disk Defragmenter has the following limitations:

It does not defragment files residing in the Recycle Bin or files that are in use.[9] In particular, this includes the registry, page file and hibernation file.
Only one volume can be analyzed or defragmented at a time and only one instance can run.[10]
Only local volumes can be defragmented, network volumes are not supported.[10]
The GUI version prior to Windows Vista cannot be scheduled, however the command line utility since Windows XP and later can be scheduled.
Unlike previous versions, the GUI version in Windows Vista does not display a map of disk fragmentation, nor does it display progress during defragmentation.
In addition, the Windows 2000 version has the following limitations which were removed in Windows XP:[10]

Defragmenting NTFS volumes with cluster sizes larger than 4 kilobytes (KB) is not possible.
It is not possible to perform fine-grained movement of uncompressed NTFS file data in Windows 2000. Moving a single file cluster also moves the 4 KB part of the file that contains the cluster.
EFS encrypted files are not defragmented.
NTFS metadata, such as the Master File Table (MFT), or metadata that describes a directory’s contents is not defragmented.

For those who are looking for an alternative solution I recommend trying MyDefrag. This is open source software and used to be called JkDefrag.