I was reminded boldly today that what I think everyone knows about computers, everyone DOES NOT KNOW. I was providing some support for an individual and was helping them navigate around in Windows and I was shocked at the amount of detail I had to provide to get my message across.

After my initial shock that a simple command like “right-clicking” wasn’t obvious to someone I realized I had to slow down and communicate as visually as possible to get my point across.
I then had to explain items like using the Start > Run command.
We then moved onto what to look …read more

I had a request asked of me the other day that confused me for a bit. Someone wanted me to email directions to someone else. Two thoughts came to my mind, the first of which was trying to determine at what point I was going to get around to doing that simple, little task. The second thought was why in the world did I need to be the one to complete the simple little task?

We’ve all heard the analogy of giving a man a fish or teaching him to fish. The same holds true for technology. I can keep doing …read more

I had a good conversation recently with someone and we were talking about a variety of things, but one of the general thoughts was that it’s interesting what we don’t think about in our areas of strengths. For instance, many people look at me as a the “computer geek” because of what I know about computers.

I on the other hand think about my computer skills and see all the other things I wish I knew how to do or just knew more about. More than general networking stuff? I think I’m clueless. Hard-core programming, LOADS of information to still digest …read more

SSH is one communication protocol that is used to access remote systems all the time. Short for “Secure Shell”, SSH provides a secure channel for data exchange, unlike Telnet and other insecure remote shells. Telnet, e.g., transmits all data including passwords in plain text.
For a system A to connect to a remote system B through SSH, A needs a SSH client (like PuTTY for Windows) and B needs a SSHD server running all the time so as to accept incoming connections.
SSH is a proprietary software offered by SSH Communications Security, and as an alternative the open source version OpenSSH is …read more

I use Launchy and so have no need for program launch icons, be it on the Desktop or Quick Launch or Windows Start. I don’t even use the Quick Launch toolbar and all I knew until recently was that you add a quick launch icon by dragging any program (or a shortcut pointing to that program) into the toolbar.\\r\\n\\r\\nToday, when I accidentally deleted one of the quick launch icons of a machine not belonging to me, I found the obscure location of the quick launch icons:\\r\\n
%APPDATA%\\\\Microsoft\\\\Internet Explorer\\\\Quick Launch
\\r\\n\\r\\n(APPDATA is an environment variable which can be found by typing echo %APPDATA% …read more

DOS has a few commands like find, findstr and sort which can be used to manipulate text. ($ help <cmd> shows the usage help for all these commands.) However, their usage is very different from those that a Unix user may be familiar with.
One of the best things about Cygwin is that these commands useful for “quick and dirty” work on large chunks of text data are easy to learn, are consistent across all Unix-based OSs, have a number of options, and are quite extensive. When used in combination, they can save a lot of programming.
($ <command> <option> <inputs> is …read more

Environment variables are a set of dynamic variables that can determine the environment in which a process runs. While they are more easily visible and often used in Unix-based OSs, they are equally essential on Windows. A little knowledge is especially important to write batch programs (.BAT).
The command env typed in your command prompt or Cygwin terminal will list the entire set of environment variables and their current values. My Computer –> Properties –> Advanced –> Environment Variables will also show you the Windows environment variables divided into two categories: System variables and User variables.

While on cmd each variable can …read more

Especially in systems that are part of an enterprise domain, you may have noticed a warning message after pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del and before the login window. It is called a Legal Notice. While it is irritating most of the times, there is a good reason why it exists.
Especially in labs, for instance, all systems have similar account usernames and passwords for convenience. It is not uncommon for someone to accidentally log into someone else’s system and proceed as though it were his or her own. If you are an administrator of a system which needs restricted access, you can create a …read more

find is an elaborate search program with a number of features. Unlike the Google Desktop Search and locate, it doesn’t index anything but processes the request on the fly. Thus it is slower.
find is one of the most useful commands when you also have to search within unknown files and make further operations on the result set. It does a recursive search, looking in all subdirectories.
The first set of arguments is always the paths where the search should initiate. $ find /home /tmp <remaining arguments> would search based on the remaining arguments in /home, /tmp and all their subdirectories. If …read more

Every once in a while, there is some file that you know you’ve saved but yet can’t find it. Windows Search comes handy at such times but is very slow. Windows Desktop Search, a new utility that is now being shipped with the Windows OSs and being given as an update works using indexing. I think it was started to beat the competition of Google Desktop Search.
IMHO, both Windows and Google Desktop Search consume too many resources.
e.g. Windows Desktop Search recommends Pentium 1 GHz Processor and 256 MB RAM, 500 MB of free hard disk space,… A process that starts …read more