Solo Technology

The Essential Apps Page

Continuing on from the recent “Current Essential Apps” post, I’ve expanded it to a new Page titled “Essential Apps.” Check ‘em out and let me know what you think or if I’ve missed any great ones. I’ll likely be modifying that page over time as I recall the ones I forgot and discover and adopt new faves.

I’ve also retired the old “The Toolkit” page. It is still around so as not to break links, but I removed it from the site menu and got to use the word deprecated in a quick edit… yeah, I’m easily amused.

Join the Conversation

Public Service Announcement: FF 3.5 — Get It!

30.Jun.09 Leave a Comment

My initial experiences with the Firefox 3.5 betas were not positive. For whatever reasons, the betas didn’t like me or my computers. So when it was time to upgrade to the real 3.5 release today I was a bit nervous…

Don’t be. If you’re running Firefox, you want to go to the Help menu and hit “Check for Updates…” right now.

Seriously.

Been a while since I gushed about a browser release, but after using it for just 15 minutes I’m still giddy. It flies.

Speed isn’t the only thing going on here, but for me it is the big one for sure. Here’s the rest:

Firefox 3.5 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use. Some of the notable features are:

Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)

Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)

Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.

Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)

Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.

Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.

Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

Downloadable fonts and HTML5 are going to be interesting. Someday…

Start the Conversation

Comodo Internet Security

29.Jun.09 Leave a Comment

I recently mentioned that I was trying out the free Comodo Internet Security suite. I’m about done with the initial evaluation so I reckon I should share some initial impressions.

The free version touts firewall protection, antivirus and proactive security. It seems to do a pretty solid job at keeping an eye on what’s going on with your system and alerting you when things are changing.

The good:

Non-intrusive
Non-confusing
Always updated

I think they’ve hit the right level of pop-ups and warnings with this one. The warnings are clear and typically will give more details and often show how other users have responded (not that those users are always correct…).

If you’re getting too many warnings while installing a new application you can just throw the whole thing into “install” mode and it’ll assume you really know what you’re doing.

The bad:

Always updating
[arguably] resource intensive.

While it is great that the firewall and antivirus engines are always keeping current, the downside is that they’re… always updated. If you’re running an older machine, those updates can really slow you down. Especially since it seems to always want to update at boot up.

I’ve been testing on an older Centrino based laptop. Normal operations are just fine, but the impact on the startup times and slowdowns when the updates are going on finally caused me to give up on it today.

Once I get a more powerful / current laptop I’ll give it another shot though. I definitely liked it and the price – free! – is right.

Start the Conversation

JujuEdit — Edit Huge Files

20.Jun.09 Leave a Comment

I had an interesting challenge today: Needed to edit a large XML file (about 2 GB) to find and fix some bad data. I often use Notepad++ for quick and dirty editing, but not for this file. It told me the file was too big.

I tried a few other options and didn’t have much luck, so I asked for suggestions on Twitter. Mark responded:

I’d never heard of this one, but headed over to the JujuEdit page to have a look. I was hooked at the first feature:

Very Large File Support – edit files up to 2GB in size, and browse them instantly with special “Open From Disk” mode.

I downloaded and installed it and tried it with my 2GB file. Works great! And even better, it offers a binary mode which allowed me to spot the bad characters in that particular file.

I’m not sure if this will replace Notepad++ as my freebie of choice, but it definitely will be kept around for those times that I need to work on huge files.

[Addendum]

Just as I finished this article I happened to recall XML Notepad 2007. I’ll need to see how it does with huge XML files next…

Start the Conversation

Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta

17.Jun.09 Leave a Comment

Last week, Opera announced the latest beta version of their Mobile browser on the Windows Mobile platform. The Dev.Opera site has a nice breakdown of the latest features:

Opera Mobile

New rendering engine: Opera Mobile 9.7 uses our Opera Presto 2.2 rendering engine, which gives improved speed, 100/100 on the Acid 3 test, and many new standards support improvements, as you’ll see below

Improved support for Opera Widgets: Opera Mobile supports Opera Widgets, Opera’s self-contained, cross-device applications built using web standards. Browse to the Opera Widgets homepage using Opera Mobile 9.7 beta and try some out

Widget Manager: This release also features a new Widget Manager with improved usability and design, which runs independently from the browser

Opera Mobile 9.7 supports Opera Turbo: This is a simple but effective feature that, when turned on, compresses pages by up to 80%, giving you a faster browsing experience if you are in a low or patchy bandwidth area. It does not use the same compression technology as Opera Mini, but it is similar. You can read more about Opera Turbo on labs.opera.com

Google Gears support: Gears is an open source project that allows improved web applications with features such as offline storage and worker threads to help tired processors handle number crunching. Read more about it below

Those last two are interesting, especially the idea of Gears on a mobile device. Can’t get a signal but need to review an old email? I haven’t tested it yet, but might have to with Gmail.

In my limited testing so far, the new version does feel noticeably faster than the previous version – and I have yet to try the “turbo” mode.

Opera Turbo mode

Definitely worth a shot if you’re looking for a much better browsing experience than what comes from the default pocket IE browser. I just haven’t figured out the best way to compare it to the recently updated Skyfire browser…

Start the Conversation

Conficker Detection: Updated

14.Jun.09 Leave a Comment

A few months ago I shared some information about checking for Conficker with nmap. Unfortunately, it turns out that post was out of date pretty quickly. Whoops. How about some updates?

From the nmap changelog page:

New Conficker versions eliminate the loophole we were using to detect them with smb-check-vulns,nse, so we’ve added new methods which work with the newest variants. Here are the Conficker-related improvements since BETA7:

Added new p2p-conficker script which detects Conficker using its P2P update ports rather than MSRPC. This is based on some new research by Symantec. See http://nmap.org/nsedoc/scripts/p2p-conficker.html [Ron]

Since new Conficker variants prevent detection by our previous MSRPC check in smb-check-vulns, we’ve added a new check which still works. It involves calling netpathcanonicalize on “\” rather than “\..\” and checking for a different return value. It was discovered by Felix Leder and Tillmann Werner. [Ron]

Improved smb-check-vulns Conficker error message text to be more useful. [David]

smb-check-vulns now defaults to using basic login rather than extended logins as this seems to work better on some machines. [Ron]

Recommended command for a fast Conficker scan (combine into 1 line):
nmap -p139,445 --script p2p-conficker,smb-os-discovery,smb-check-vulns --script-args checkconficker=1,safe=1 -T4 [target networks]

Recommended command for a more comprehensive (but slower) scan:
nmap --script p2p-conficker,smb-os-discovery,smb-check-vulns -p- --script-args checkall=1,safe=1 -T4 [target networks]

The key commands are in those last two bullet points (bolded by me). You can just copy and paste one into a console or command prompt. Using Windows and Zenmap, the nifty GUI? Just as simple: