Tips and Tools

I sometimes need all occurrences of a search string in the files of a directory. OK, that’s easy. Here’s the difficult part: I need search results displayed with context around the matching lines. In other words: I need to know what is in the lines above and/or below the results. None of the text editors and IDEs I am using regularly seem to be able to do display search results with context lines. Enter AstroGrep.

This article explains how to get started with Total Commander, one of those few magical tools that can boost your productivity as an IT pro significantly. It not only replaces File Explorer; it does so in a way that makes you wonder how you suffered Explorer for such a long time. It has keyboard shortcuts for everything and is super-configurable, fast and efficient. On top of that, it can probably replace half a dozen tools in addition to File Explorer.

I prepend every document I save to disk with the year, month, and day. While I do that manually for individual files, sometimes I encounter larger numbers of files with an “incorrect” naming scheme. Here is how to quickly rename many files with the help of the versatile Total Commander.

Many web meeting services have a recording functionality. Most recordings are provided as MP4 files with the video encoded in H.264 because that offers the most universal compatibility. However, it also needs a lot of disk space. H.264 has a successor, H.265, which only requires half the space for the same visual quality. This post shows how to use StaxRip, a free tool, to re-encode H.264 video into H.265 quickly by making use of GPU hardware encoding.

Total Commander’s custom start menu is a great place to quickly launch all kinds of tools and programs that are otherwise hard to get to. However, TC’s start menu is not limited to external tools. It can be used to run internal TC commands, too. In this article, I am using that capability to build a simple solution for saving and restoring sets of Total Commander tabs to and from files.

Podio is a superb tool for team collaboration, structured information handling and even business process management. However, it is not perfect. There are some astonishing gaps in functionality. One of those is the lack of support for checklists and recurring processes. Here is how to work around that.

When it comes to copying files, Windows Explorer may probably be called reliable, but fast it is not. After the rewrite of the copy routines in Vista had caused much customer dissatisfaction, Microsoft rewrote the copy dialog again for Windows 7. But still, especially copying many small files takes ages.

Here are some pretty cool ways to work with the Windows registry. Regedit Multiple Instances Start multiple instances of Regedit by appending the command-line parameter -m, e.g.: regedit -m. Multiple instances of RegeditExporting/Importing Favorites Regedit’s favorites are a handy way to get to keys you often need. The list of favorites is stored in the registry (where else?): HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Applets\Regedit\Favorites. Exporting the favorites to a .REG file can easily be automated with reg.exe (see below).

As before this is mainly a condensed and beautified version of my twitter postings. You can get them unfiltered and without delay by following me. Office 2010 Here is a nice overview of the new Office suite by Mark Wilson. By the way: Although available as 32-bit and 64-bit versions, the 32-bit version is the default and recommended by Microsoft for the time being.

Windows General Good info for troubleshooting DFS-Namespaces in the MS KB: Storage locations, inconsistencies and how to deal with them. Complex passwords and security guidelines for end users? No, thank you, says MS researcher. I agree.

Windows Beginning with Vista, when formatting a drive the entire disk is overwritten with zeroes. While this is good for end users who like to wipe all data prior to selling or throwing away a disk drive, SAN-based volumes should not be formatted like this. Perform a quick format instead. But if you want to make sure the data is really gone - no need for “secure erase” programs any more! The need for multiple overwrites is a myth.

Bugs and Annoyances ICA connections initiated over the ICA client object (ICO) SDK fail because 128-bit encryption cannot be enabled. Apparently, setting EncryptionLevelSession does not work. Annoyingly, this bug is more than a year old, was fixed in the ICA client 10.2 and reappeared in the current version 11.0. Bugs like this one are bad for the entire Citrix ecosystem, because they break cool tools like Citrix Quick Launch, xConnect and others I may not even know about. [Update 2009-09-30: this bug has been fixed in ICA client 11.2.]

Why does Windows 7 feel faster than Vista, although really it is not? Improvements to the graphics driver model (WDDM got upgraded to version 1.1) certainly add to this feeling and reduce the memory footprint of the desktop windows manager (DWM) process. Microsoft describes the changes in its Graphics Guide for Windows 7.

Jim Moyle recently started a blog on desktop and application delivery. While reading his first two posts I thought “yes, that’s so right”. Regretfully, people like him, who disregard the current hype and cut through the marketing BS, are scarce. More of the same, please!

I just had the “pleasure” of having to copy the contents of a terabyte USB disk to another similar USB drive. At first, I did not give this simple task much thought. I plugged the USB cables in and made my faithful Total Commander do the work. It did not take me long, though, to notice a strange phenomenon: the copy speed would oscillate between 8 and 24 MB/s.

In case you have (un?)wittingly been juggling around with multiple EFS certificates like me, you may feel a strong urge to clean up the mess. Which mess? It can happen quite easily that different files are encrypted with different keys. In addition to that, directories that are marked for encryption have EFS certificates associated with them, and there is no UI to manipulate that. In order to straighten this out, once the proper certificate is in place each file and directory needs to be “touched” in order to update their encryption keys.

On file servers in corporate environments one typically does not want users to change permissions, even on their own files. It might seem that it would be sufficient to simply grant change permissions instead of full control, but unfortunately that is not the case. The problem is that whenever a new file gets created, the user creating the file will be its owner. And owners can always change permissions, regardless of the contents of the DACL.