How to remember everything during online meeting

by Dmitry Kirsanov 25. October 2021 08:01

Pandemic brought one thing that changed the way we go through our daily office lives. And that’s – endless online meetings. At some companies you may be lucky to have just one per day, personally I’ve got the worst possible experience, as far as online meetings go (or, at least, my imagination refuses to show how it could be any worse) – non-stop 9 to 5.

Yes, such experience would be a 100% fault of your employer, and it’s not what you should be going through. A day of such experience draws all energy out of you, and often you may remember only as much as there was written in your calendar and notes. But there is a light at the end of this tunnel. More...

Fixing yet another problem in Google Chrome

by Dmitry Kirsanov 10. June 2019 07:31

While digging into the problem with Chrome extension today, found that Chrome took around 700Mb of space for temporary files, which looked like CrashpadMetrics.pma~XXX.TMP. These files are 1Mb in size each, and there were literally over 700 of them.

Chrome creates these files to send to Google even if you disable this feature. Files aren’t sent, but created and never cleaned up.

I have a cleanup batch file on each computer, that executes every week, and it deals with drive(s) cleanup, synchronisation and stuff. I added this line:

ttl.exe "C:\Users\[my user name]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data" /subs /days:30 /mask:*.tmp

This uses my TTL application to delete files older than 30 days. I could simply write “del crash*.tmp”, but what if there is a temporary file that’s currently being written, or might be used. Hence the TTL and generous 30 days.

The first run freed 685Mb on system drive.

Handling Temporary Files, Best Practice

by Dmitry Kirsanov 9. October 2016 05:59

Each day I am creating so many temporary files that I can’t really give you a count. Sometimes it’s thousands. Opening attachments from e-mails and instant messengers, saving images from internet for a single use, opening archives, deploying software and many other tasks – they all create temporary files that may stay in a hard drive for years.

By temporary files I don’t mean the files created by applications to temporarily store data. I mean the actual user files you don’t intend to use in the future.

Another type of temporary files is log files. Usually we have them on servers. Web server logs, mail server, your own application that creates a set of log files each day – usually you don’t need to store these files for more than a few months. Especially if these files are stored on virtual machines, like Azure or Amazon, where you are paying for each megabyte of storage.

There are two aspects in temporary files that may justify doing something about them:

1. They take space or they are produced in numbers that decrease the performance of file system. The file doesn’t have to take all the space of the drive – it’s enough to have thousands of files in one directory to make Windows freeze every time it’s trying to find and list these files. For some directories we would prefer to have a threshold of a particular time after which these files should vanish.

2. They may contain sensitive information that you wouldn’t want to leave behind. Of financial, medical, business, political or any other nature – when the file has expired, there is no need to keep it, but some files may require special care in form of secure erase. More...

Using Notebook As a Web Server

by Dmitry Kirsanov 16. January 2012 14:35

notebooksThere are many reasons why people decide to host their web projects on notebooks. Either way, the question is not why, but how. Like everywhere else, there are pros and cons in hosting of your web application on notebook hardware, so we are going to discuss here how to do it properly and get most out of it.

Possible reasons to host your web server on a notebook

Usually people think about hosting on notebook, for one or many of these reasons:

  • The price of hosting is higher than expected revenue, or no profit is expected.
  • There are less than 1000 users expected to use this web project.
  • The web application is not consuming much of resources.
  • Notebook is powerful enough.
  • You can’t sell this old notebook, but also don’t want to refurbish it, as it is still working as designed. And now you have this web project of yours that needs cheap hosting.
  • Your internet connection is fast and reliable and you see no reason or have no resources to acquire new hardware and data center (DC) allocation.
  • You want to host the web application on-site but want to keep your electricity bill at minimum.
  • You have to make your server mobile.

More...

ExecuteAs utility

by Dmitry Kirsanov 27. October 2011 17:50

Well, yet another useful command line utility. This one is for system administrators in need to run some command on behalf of another user.

Why bother, if there is a command in Windows, called runas? Well, mainly because it doesn’t accept the password as command line parameter, and also because I wanted to add more features to such simple process.

This is the help text you get when running this program without parameters:

Syntax: executeas.exe /u:UserName /p:Password /x:Priority /d:Domain /a:Affinity /quiet /hide /noprofile /wait /t:60 [program name]
Where t is a timeout in seconds to wait for program completion.
The only required parameter is program name. You can place command line arguments after the program name.

As you can understand, UserName is the user name of target user without the domain name,
Password is his password,
Priority is the priority at which you want this program to be executed (1 – idle, 2 – below normal, 3 – normal, 4 – above normal, 5 – high),
Domain is the domain part of the user name, if needed,
Affinity is how many CPU cores you’d like to use,
Quiet won’t produce any output,
Hide will hide the target program, so it will not be displayed to user,
NoProfile means that profile of target user won’t be loaded,
Wait will wait until the target program will be completed – useful when running from batch file.

So, here it is and have fun!

As  always, .net framework is required for this program to run. This time it’s .net 3.5, which is installed by default on Windows 7 and is available as feature on Windows Server 2008.

ExecuteAs.zip (3.99 kb)

Windows Live is alive

by Dmitry Kirsanov 11. September 2011 19:10

Do you remember such thing as Outlook Express? A lightweight e-mail client from Microsoft which was the part of operating system since the stone age. It was separated from Windows for good, so unlike in Windows XP, we don’t have to cut it from the distribution DVD anymore. However, once separating some applications from the system, Microsoft added a few more tools to the Live family.

One of them is the one I am using at this particular moment – Windows Live Writer. The thing looks like a Microsoft Office 2010 product, something similar to FrontPage, but it’s about blogging. Whatever platform you are using for your blog, it can connect to it and you can use this wonderful editor without ever having to log into your blog. Styles, working with resources - everything is here. And it’s free.

Another one is irreplaceable for me and it is called Live Mesh. Once you’ve got your free 5Gb space at Windows Live, called SkyDrive, you can synchronize folders between your multiple computers. Like, for example, between home and work machine, so you can make sure that two folders on these machines are equal. Works perfectly for source code sharing for my notebooks and desktop, as having multiple versions of hundreds of files is a pain.
Another feature of Live Mesh is remote desktop, which works also through proxy and is just great when you want to log into your home computer but don’t want to set the remote desktop NAT rules. At some point it is more secure, as you won’t forget to switch off your rules later.

I know how hard it is to find a gem in a pile of software and services, so if you have a problem that any of these two programs solve, try them out!