I’ve been working on a project recently that uses avatars, while planning out this specific feature it occurred to me – why should we re-invent the wheel? There’s already at least one service that specializes in doing it right: Gravatar.
While building something as simple as avatar support takes a relatively small amount of time, when working against a tight deadline or a tight budget every minute counts. In the world of an ISV (especially a young one) the balance of user satisfaction and development time is critical. Using a service such as Gravatar is a great way to give the users what they want with minimal impact to the timeline.
With a super-simple implementation we were able to get it running within a few minutes – compare that to at least a few hours to build a custom system. Plus, reduced server load as we aren’t hosting the images and a cleaner, simpler interface as it’s one less option the user has to look through.
Looking for a bit of a speed boost? OpenDNS might just help. Using the OpenDNS network, instead of your ISP’s DNS servers seems to really boost the speed of the name resolution process (which is often the slowest part of connecting to another computer).
From what I’ve seen so far, there’s been a fairly significant speed boost on some sites, primarily those that include content from several domains. The boost isn’t that great when you look at the overall loading process, but it does reduce the annoying lag when the browser starts loading. So far, I’ve been happy with the service (which is free), and I really like that the offer various customizations and statistics (if you want to open an account, also free).
On top of the various options and statistics, they also offer spelling correction and anti-phishing features. It may just be DNS, but this is DNS the way it should be done. And if that’s not good enough, even Matt likes them. 
You mileage will obviously vary, but I think this is pretty cool.
While going through my (long) list of RSS-feeds that I monitor, I found this gem of an article: Vista Transformation Pack: Vista-ize your XP. The Vista Transformation Pack is a clever little application that moves your XP desktop several steps closer to the beauty that is Vista. While the ‘transformation’ doesn’t give you all of the new UI goodies that come with Vista, it does add a fair bit of eye candy.
I’m not typically one to promote UI tweaks like this, but after playing with the settings, I’ve now have a great looking setup without the instability that still goes with Vista.
While facing an interesting research challenge, digging into the inner working of Windows, I realized that I needed to change a registry value. That’s simple enough, I fire up RegEdit, make the change, then politely as RegEdit knows how, it told me that I couldn’t change the value! Being one that hates when my computer tells me I can’t do something, I had to find another option.
So after some research, I found my answer: sc. This is a great little utility (included with Windows), and made the task of running an application as SYSTEM* much easier. At this point some of you may be wondering why I didn’t just use RunAs instead, as it’s designed to allow execution as another user. Well, from all that I’ve found, there is no way to get RunAs to spawn a process as SYSTEM, one of the downsides of SYSTEM not being a true user.
Another option that I found (somewhat) attractive initially is RunAsEx, an open source, GUI based version of RunAs. This could be useful, but I found it to be more hassle than it was worth. Still might be useful for somethings, but with all the bugs I found in it, I knew there was a better way.
Now, back to the solution I chose: Using sc to create a service that will execute the application I’m after. This works because by default all services execute under the SYSTEM user context, so all we have to do is create a service to call the application we need. Surprisingly simple, and it works quite well.
Creating the service looks something like this:
SC CREATE AcDebugSvc binPath= "regedit.exe" type= own type= interact **
This creates the service, so that now all you have to do is start the service (SC START AcDebugSvc ***) and you’ll see your copy of RegEdit. If you check in Task Manager, you’ll be able to confirm that it is actually running as SYSTEM. This is an extremely powerful debugging tool, as it allows you to instantly execute any application as the most powerful user that Windows offers.
Once you are done with your work, just delete the service (SC DELETE AcDebugSvc) and call it a day, that simple. This can also easily be scripted if you tire of typing the commands so often, and it can also be used with most applications. Using this for the Command Prompt (binPath= "cmd.exe /K start") and for Task Manager (binPath= "taskmgr.exe") both strike me as being quite useful.
* WARNING: As I hope most of you know, System is a very powerful account, it’s almost limitless in what it can do. If you aren’t careful while working under this user context; you may end up with a rather expensive paperweight instead of a computer. You have been warned.
** Note: As odd as it is, the spaces after the equals and before the value of the parameters is quite important, the call will fail if you omit them.
*** Note: You’ll get an error message (“The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.“) when you call this, it’s nothing to worry about. The reason that it occurs is that to respond to the message it receives the target application must be designed to operate as a service. Since we are using this for other purposes we, we don’t really care.
Most people I know have issues with the CapsLock key; with feelings ranging from annoyance to sheer hatred. More often than not, I fall into the sheer hatred side of things. I’ve played with various ideas to solve the problem. Everything from a system tray notification when CapsLock is on, to physically removing the evil key itself. After all these attempts, I have found I like none of them.
Enter waNOCAPS (from the Winadmin tools project), a registry modification to quickly and cleanly remap the CapsLock to a third Ctrl key. This is nice in that it’s a simple registry change, not something as ugly as a background program to alter the CapsLock state or value as many CapsLock killers use.
This seems to be a clean, simple solution to an annoying “feature” – one I’ll certainly be using.
Update: It looks like the original page has been removed, but you can still access the files here.
Here’s a great little feature I just heard about to make the always useful though mostly featureless Notepad utility even more useful. If you create a new file and put “.LOG” (case-sensitive) as the first thing in the file, each time you open the file after that it will append a timestamp to the end of the file. While you could just press the “F5” button to insert the timestamp, this does have the advantage of added simplicity.
Microsoft has a knowledge base article on this feature, it indicates that the feature is supported on Windows 98 & Me, but my tests indicate it is also present in 2000 & XP.
This is a great feature if you need to keep manual logs, I think this just might come in handy.
