Whaley’s Place

All of us geeky folks like to see what our machines are doing, right? Well for those with a Mac, I think I’ve got a winner for you.  iStat Menus. This set of utilities will allow you to monitor your machine realtime from the Mac menu bar. Not sure how it does with older Macs, but for Intel Based Macs it is a keeper! You’ll have to install the Intel drivers for your Mac to enable iStat to get fan speeds, temps and such. No worry in finding them though. You are prompted on install of the application to download and install them.

They’ve got a widget also with the same functionality, but I like being able to see the information right at the top of the screen.

Happy Monitoring!

With a little more reading, I ran across this in Microsoft’s Knowledgebase: The article is for Windows Vista, but it applies to Windows 7 as well. Basically, Microsoft throttles network trafffic to give better network performance to Multimedia apps…i.e. streaming video, etc. Read the article and then make the twek as you see fit. I set mine to 70 with no issues. Very noticable network performance changes.  No reboot needed, but with Windows, it never hurts!

Before:

After:

Was doing some huge file transfers here on my home network (Windows 7 / Windows 2003 Server) and noticed that things were not as fast as I’d expect. When I installed Windows 7 on my wife’s Dell XPS 410, I didn’t do much tweaking with it. Well, in looking at what kind of throughput I was getting(Network Performance Monitor / DuMeter), it was what I’d expect on a 100MB Network. Being that I have Gigabit throughout the house I figured I’d do some looking. Moral of the story here…don’t settle with allowing your network adapter to Auto Negotiate! You’d think it would figure things out, but in this case it didn’t. See below to get a visual of what I’m talking about. Happy Networking!

Well, with the release of Windows 7, I really wanted to see how it would perform running in BootCamp 3.0 on my Mac Pro. I had already been running the release candidate in a VM and it ran fine…I guess the geek in me wants to see it stand alone. 

As I figured, it screamed on the hardware with 12 GB RAM and Dual 2.66 Ghz Xeon processors. I’m still going to run in it a VM though… It is just too much of a pain to reboot into one operating system and then into another.

Ran across this and it is a great find. It is an updated version of JkDefrag. Take a look at it here. The price is right!

First off, as far as OS search tools go…Apple did get Spotlight right this time around in Leopard. Well, I ended up corrupting some of the permissions on my drive and in the course of things broke Spotllight. After fixing the permission issues on my machine, I still had an incomplete index…. Here is how to rebuild the indexes…

1. Open System Preferences
2. Open Spotlight Prefs
3. Click the Privacy Tab
4. Click the + and add your drive to re-index
5. Wait about 30 seconds and then delete it from the Privacy list. This will force Spotlight to reindex the target drive again.

Spotlight index

Decided to finish up a page on securing your home wireless router (DGL-4500). One of the items I wanted to highlight though was the use of UPnP settings in your router. This is not a good thing for the security conscious as it can allow a program to poke an unauthenticated hole in your rules… Take a look at this article on one example telling you how to do it. It shows you some specifics about doing it in Windows.

This was an eye opening must read for the techy folks out there who want to stay up on things. Talk about stirring some thought!

http://philosecurity.org/2009/01/12/interview-with-an-adware-author

I’ve had some ups and downs with the Windows 7 Beta, but have it running now. At first I attempted to upgrade over Vista SP1, but it would never complete the upgrade. This just confirms…Always do a clean install. After installing clean (to a VM on my Mac of course), things seem to be operating okay. Not many issues…yet. I’m really curious to see how it performs connecting to my servers where transfers are concerned. Stay tuned for updates.

The template for word press distorts the image somewhat… right click and select view image to see full size (In Firefox at least…)

Windows 7

On business trips, we all usually bring a laptop for working in the hotel room. Talk about a hostile environment. Geez… tonight after powering up my laptop here in the room just to get set up and going, my software firewall (Zone Alarm Pro) was logging a massive port scan of my machine. It was an address inside of the hotel, but nevertheless, I don’t really appreciate it. Thanks goodness for my software firewall. I can’t help but wonder how many people come into a hotel unprepared for someone hitting their machine with all they can…obviously hoping that the machine is not patched /updated.

A few tips for the hotel laptop user:

1. Make sure that your laptop has all of its patches and security updates before you leave home!
2. While  you are getting your patches, make sure that  your antivirus is up to date as well.
3. If you don’t use a third party software firewall, (Zone Alarm Pro, Sunbelt Personal Firewall, Norton Personal Firewall, etc.) make sure at a minimum you at least enable the Windows firewall. I personally don’t rely on it in a hotel, but it is better than nothing.

Stay prepared! You never know what you may run into away from home.