In this case, I see lots of people using trial versions of WinZip or WinRAR. Why? It doesn’t make sense, not when there are good, free products out there that don’t have nag screens or trial periods.

My archive tool of choice is 7-Zip. It has a GUI tool, a command line interface, and a shell extension, so you can right click archives to extract them, or right click a bunch of files to archive them. All these are musts for me, and 7-Zip does a good job in all of them. It can also create self-extracting archives which is a plus if you want to compress in .7z format but aren’t sure if your friend has a tool that can open them.

The most interesting feature 7-Zip brings to the table is the 7-Zip file format. It boasts higher compression rates than ZIP. AFAIK, ZIP was originally intended for use with text files, so you get best compression rates with them. I don’t know much about .7z but it was probably designed for modern uses that ZIP is currently used for. At any rate, except for very small files or text files, .7z has always won out for compression ratio in my little tests.

It also supports extracting a number of archives. Unfortunately it can only create a small subset of these, including .7z, ZIP, .tar, .gz, and .bz2, which is still a useful enough assortment.

The only thing it really can’t do is generate RAR files, but fortunately there really is no reason to have to make them anymore… I’m not sure why you still see some around. I can only assume they get better compression ratios in some places than ZIP. However I haven’t needed to make any RAR files for as long as I’ve been using 7-Zip. Considering 7-Zip is a free tool and IIRC RAR creation support requires a paid license I can understand why there is no support.

I would recommend 7-Zip to anyone who is looking for a good desktop tool for extracting or creating archive files, or a good command line tool for the same.

While talking on IRC yesterday I decided to make a list of the major points of similarity. I’ll leave off the obvious things such as Indy making sure he doesn’t lose his hat and such.

Obviously this will be chock-full of spoilers for BOTH the movie and the game so be warned.

1. An ancient culture worships an alien (or alien race) from another dimension as a god and builds a structure to honor them.
2. A woman who believes in psychic powers is harmed near the end of the story by the aforementioned alien.
3. We only get to see the living, true form of this alien (or race) at the end of the story.
4. Some glimpses of it are offered before then in statues or dead bodies.
5. At the end the ancient structure collapses and Indy must rush out of it.
6. At some point Indy has to navigate shrinking platforms attached to an arcing wall over a large drop.
7. Indy rides a boat down waterways.
8. Dr. Jones is living his routine life until someone finds him to tell him his help is needed elsewhere, and then the adventure starts.
9. Indy is betrayed by someone he thought was an ally.
10. Near the end, the villain messes with alien technology in an ancient culture’s shrine in an attempt to gain power, and in doing so puts everyone at risk.
11. The Soviets are a prominent “bad guy”.
12. Indy is captured by the Soviets (at least) once, but escapes, beating them to their destination.

In addition the linked guide has you take actions which Microsoft believes violate your EULA. (See point 1 below.)

Now that I’ve got that out of the way: This sounds pretty cool. Some things to be aware of:

1. Changing your XP Home to XP Pro is a violation of your Windows EULA, or at least MS thinks so. Normally there are safeguards in place to prevent you from doing this which attempt to scare the user into not trying to change the registry setting that controls it. Using Last Known Configuration like in the article circumvents the safeguard by tricking Windows itself into changing the value. Note that this hack doesn’t appear to affect Windows Update or Windows Genuine Validation.
2. The XP Home -> Pro hack itself only changes your Windows’ reported version… you will be still missing some XP Pro components such as Group Policy Editor since those aren’t included in Home.
3. According to some comments the special termserv.dll apparently isn’t needed. It’s only needed if you want to allow remote and local connections at once, and is only useful if you have multiple user accounts (the local account will still lock workstation if you sign in remotely with the current active account. It only works if you use different accounts, which makes sense).
4. The blog post as-is will not work, and he claims the termserv.dll is a fix for a problem which the termserv.dll has no effect on. About halfway down the page is a comment by Mike about devcon which DOES fix the problem by installing the RDP driver. You can try using Add New Hardware wizard and selecting the machine.inf and installing the driver that way, but who knows if it’ll work like that. devcon.exe is probably the best way to do it.
5. It was written for SP2 but it works on SP3.
6. System Restore should cover all the things that you change by following the blog instructions, so set a restore point in case things break. You should be able to restore it later. Even still…
7. The guide has you make changes to your system which affect the OS, drivers, and of course the Terminal Services service. Be careful to follow the directions. If you are unsure what some of the modifications do you may want to go learn before trying or just skip it altogether.
8. One of the patches seems to enable autologon. After getting everything working, you can adjust autologon settings by doing Start > Run and typing “control userpasswords2″. The checkbox at the top controls autologon, if you uncheck it click OK and you’ll be prompted for autologon settings. You can check it to restore default Windows behavior.
9. Don’t try this on Vista. Just… don’t. I can’t say for sure with 100% certainty it won’t work, but given the way Vista is distributed compared to XP and the different setup and license processes, it probably won’t work. Terminal Services itself has received updates to support Aero Glass etc over Remote Desktop.

I made a bunch of changes that will allow it to be easily incorporated into my newest tool, which is a plugin-oriented system tray tool. Basically the idea is you can mix and match the modules you want to have easy access to through a system tray icon. Right now all I have is a processes menu for killing and process priority and a services menu for stopping, starting, etc. I plan to add a more complex plugin that will allow for you to group processes and services together into tasks… and you can start/stop them at whim. I would use it to start/stop the firewall, anti-virus, Apache + MySQL, UnrealIRCd + Anope, etc with a click for each “task”. I had a similar tool but it used a dialog and it had all the “tasks” hardcoded into the app. I think doing it again as a system tray icon would make it easier to use and more likely I’d use it.

That is all.

• Free Space: Depending on how many extra packages you’ve installed since installing Ubuntu originally, you may need 1.5gb free as I did for downloading. But the unpacking phase ended up taking 1gb more… and left me with as little as 70mb free at one point! I’ll need to expand my partition I guess and shrink my Windows’ partitions. But just be sure you have enough free space.
• Drive mounting: You will probably have to edit your /etc/fstab to fix drive /dev addresses. All /dev/hd* have been changed to /dev/sd*, bumping existing /dev/sd* up and out of the way. Also disc drives are now /dev/scd0, scd1, etc.
• If you use Truecrypt and you can’t mount drives after upgrading, do an apt-get remove truecrypt and then go to the official site and follow the download instructions. Extract the .deb file and do a dpkg -i on it to install it, and truecrypt should work again.
• Upgrading may destroy custom mouse and monitor configurations in xorg.conf. You did make a backup of all your important changes there, didn’t you? This is only a concern if you use multiple monitors (it doesn’t set them up right when upgrading) or if you have a mouse with more than three buttons, since both cases usually require a little surgery on this file to get working right.
• Compiz settings will revert. Use ccsm and set them back manually. ccsm is a bit easier to work with after the upgrade.
• Emerald themes won’t apply to compiz anymore unless you specifically use emerald as your window manager instead of compiz. Weird. Also emerald might hang when you run it… delete ~/.beryl and ~/.emerald/settings.ini, go back into Emerald Theme Manager and reapply your settings, then it should run fine. You probably want to put “emerald –replace” in your startup items under the “Sessions” Administrative thingy so your theme will work on startup.
• There doesn’t seem to be a Wine 0.9.60 build for Ubuntu yet. Maybe in a couple days.

This is from an SSH shell into this webserver. I’m not booted into Linux on my desktop machine at the moment so this will have to do.

[mzzt@server1 ~]$ uname -a
Linux server1.sorrowind.net 2.6.9-42.EL #1 Sat Aug 12 09:17:58 CDT 2006 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux
[mzzt@server1 ~]$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
149 cd
127 ls
56 rm
44 ln
42 exit
35 chmod
16 pico
11 mv
8 cp
3 put
[mzzt@server1 ~]$

The guy has the right motivation and mindset for making this sort of plugin (he hates spam and wanted to avoid false positives while quashing spam) and it has plenty of options and vectors through which it can try and figure out if a message is spam or not. And it was very simple to drop in with zero configuration, except the “N spam messages quashed” footer doesn’t seem to be working, I’ll fix it later. I should probably get a simpler and faster theme while I’m at it. What was I thinking.

In other news I seem to be running into some annoying bugs in Scribefire and Wordrpess.  When Scribefire “publishes” anything I try to post, it schedules it for 5 hours in the future… instead of publishing it.  When I try to publish it with Wordpress, it doesn’t work and it still shows up as scheduled.  I have to first change the scheduled time to some time in the past before it will let me change it to Published status.  Weird.

Update: It seems to be entirely Wordpress bugs from a little more research.

AppCompactor compresses programs by using UPX to compress binary files and 7-zip to recompress archives. Interestingly shortly before I released it or even announced it John Haller came out of the blue and released a similar tool. And after I announced and released mine he renamed his to match… I know he saw my comment about my tool, he replied to it… but I’ll let him use the name too since he’s a nice guy. Check out his stuff.

Oh yeah, both of my programs require .NET Framework 2.0 or greater. Windows Update should recommend it to you if you don’t have it already. Vista ships with it.

Speaking of Vista, I always knew it ran slow on my machine but it was really crawling like I never remembered. I installed SP1 and that seemed to improve it a little, but I’m not going to use it regularly just for pretty borders and annoying pop up dialogs. Between XP and Ubuntu I believe I’m covered. Windows 7 sounds like it could be more promising, but so did Vista before half the feature set was dropped, etc.

I’ve been playing far too much Team Fortress 2 lately. There should be an update in a week or so with new content including a new map/gamemode, upgrades and achievements for the Medic class, and a new “Meet the…” video.

For April Fools I stuck a copy of a domain squatter’s index on my front page and asked various people in IM chat and on IRC if they could access my site, claiming I couldn’t. I got a few people with that. Good fun. The search box even points to Google. I thought that was a good easter egg myself.

I upgraded to WordPress 2.5. I also approved and disapproved some comments. I probably will forget about comments and never check them ever again. Oh well. There are actually still a number of “borderline” spam comments but I stopped caring once I got rid of the obvious ones. Maybe I can tweak my WordPress install so it’ll break bots. It would only take a change of one POST variable, really…

Now to complete this blog post by having every category tag I’ve made apply to this single post, I’m gonna talk about Wii stuff. OK. So Wii homebrew has become possible thanks to a buffer overflow vulnerability in the Twilight Princess save game loader and there are more and more homebrew apps becoming available every week. Right now it’s just ports of GameCube homebrew since I guess the Wii uses a superset of the old GameCube API. But I have faith that soon we’ll see ScummVM with Wiimote support, etc.

And I just realized WordPress has both categories and tags, which makes no sense to me because categories act like tags. Weird.

Well I had a few more minor things, but I’ve covered enough topics for one post I think. Enjoy my programs.