Another program from my ‘Must Have’ folder. KeePass stores all my privata logins in a safe, secure encrypted file. It’s open-source, so it’s free as well. The features I love the most are the quick search text box as well as the macro play-back. For example I simply need to navigate to my VSS entry on KeePass and press Ctrl+V to have it run a macro that starts VSS Admin and logs me into the server. This is how the macro looks:
Auto-Type:@r{DELAY 500}{APPACTIVATE Run}{URL}{ENTER}{DELAY 1000}{APPACTIVATE Log On To Visual SourceSafe Database}{PASSWORD}{ENTER}
KeePass is very secure, even when the data is loaded into memory it is kept encrypted. Read all about it and get it from here.
Have I been living under a rock? This is one heck of a tool. No more XML Spy for me.
- Incremental search (CTRL+I) in both tree and text views, so that as you type it navigates to the most matched node.
- Cut/copy/paste with full namespace support in a simple interoperable XML format.
- Drag/drop support for easy manipulation of the tree, even across different instances of XML Notepad and from the file system.
- Infinite undo/redo for all edit operations.
- In-place, pop-up, multi-line editing of large text node values and IntelliSense based on expected elements and attributes.
- Configurable fonts and colors via the options dialog.
- Full find/replace dialog with support for regex and XPath expressions.
- Good performance on large XML documents (loading a 3 MB document in about one second).
- Instant XML schema validation while you edit with errors and warnings shown in the task list window.
- Support for custom editors for date, dateTime, time, and color datatypes.
- HTML viewer for displaying XSLT transformation results.
- Built-in XML Diff tool.
[Article] [Download]
Or just two on this occassion. But man what a tool, Filemon and Regmon have been mashed-up into one. Better yet not just a mashup it has been written from the ground up and includes a number of enhancements.
One less .exe on my Must Have program folder under SysInternals.
Download Process Monitor from here.
Google has released Gmail Mobile, a new cell phone client application, for everyone’s favorite web-based email service, Gmail.
In general the new Gmail Mobile promises to let you do nearly everything with Gmail that you can do from your computer. To install Gmail Mobile, direct your mobile web browser to www.gmail.com/app. [TechCrunch]
So I got into office early today and was greeted with this error when I fired out Outlook: Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window. The set of folders cannot be opened. The file D:\Merill\Mail\Personal Folders.pst cannot be opened.
The only promising link from searching (hmm.. I wanted to write googled, but since I used Live Search what should I say ‘lived’) around on the internet was this. But trying to start up in safe mode didn’t work.
I then fired up FileMon, made a filter to show only ‘outlook’ and then ran Outlook as expected the error occured again. I then went into FileMon to figure out what exactly was happening and there it was an Open request to D:\Merill\Mail\~Personal Folders.pst was returning a ‘Sharing Violation’.
Now having to figure out which process was holding on to this file I started up Process Explorer and did a search for the processes holding a handle to ‘personal folders’ and there it was, a rogue Outlook.exe (must have crashed earlier). So I killed of the outlook.exe process and got my Outlook running back again.
So what does this all prove. If you have any problems with files not being accessible first try restarting Windows.
from Lifehacker: Lyrics Plugin is a piece of software tailored for music fans. To put it simply – it is an add-on to view lyrics in WinAmp or Windows Media Player. No more searching for lyrics. Just start listening to your favourite songs and lyrics will be displayed automatically. Oh, and if lyrics is not found, you can add it yourself 
[Download]
If you want to spruce up your desktop, one decision you need to make upfront is whether to stick to themes supported by Microsoft or be more riskier and install unsupported ones.
Royale Theme
Unfortunately the only supported theme that was released and then pulled out by Microsoft is the one that comes with Windows Media Center called the Royale or Energy Blue Theme. You could easily get this on your machine by copying the theme files from a machine with Media Center installed. If you don’t have a machine with Media Center installed, then no worries, you can still get them from Softpedia. [Download]
Universal Vista Inspirat Brico Pack
Now for the adventerous lot, you can either go for the Vista Inspirat Brico Pack by CrystalXP or the Vista Transformation Pack by WindowsX. Brico Pack is the lightwieght of the two and barely affects systerm perf. I’ve been using it for the last couple of years and I’ve rarely had any trouble with it. The Aero theme uses a very thin taskbar which increases productivity by giving me more screen real estate. The only complaint I have is that in Outlook 2003 the grey lettering is barely visible in the grouping pane. [Download]
Vista Transformation Pack
This was one of the first packs that I used way back sometime ago. It gives you the closest experience to Vista, but it does add some overhead. I haven’t tried out the newest version yet. [Download]
Sofpedia has a more detailed comparison between the two packs.
Other Official Stuff from Microsoft
As part of the Windows Genuine Advantage, Microsoft keeps releasing add-ons, desktop themes and wallpapers frequently. Again unfortunately they don’t all show up on the same place.
Google Reader got a fresh update today and the experience is nearly as good as my favorite offline reader, RssBandit. It even works on my slow dial-up line from home. Bloglines and Newsgator on the other hand choked and fell flat on the floor!
By the way, I’m blogging this from Word 2007 and it feels super good, what the spell and grammar checking and the natural feel to writing documents. I love it.
Configuring it was pretty straight-forward. If you’re using dasBlog just make sure that the url is set to http://<site url>/blogger.aspx.
If your a geek (or not so much a geek but) with Rs. 1000/- to spare a year, then owning your own domain has become so cheap now that there’s not much of an excuse as to why you shouldn’t own one for yourself.
The annual cost of purchasing a domain is more or less the same as it was in the last couple of years (typically $10 per year) but what makes them attractive now is that Google (Google Apps) and Microsoft (Windows Live Custom Domains) (Yahoo would be joining soon I guess) are competing to host your email for you for FREE. In my opinion Google holds the upper hand right now since in addition to creating any number of 2GB mail addresses for your domain you also get other utilities like Google Pages for hosting your website, Google Calendar and Google Talk. What sealed the deal for me though is the POP access. I now have my system setup so that Gmail archives all my incoming and outgoing mail as a backup on their server and I have my own local copy of all the mails on a .pst file.
So to get started, head over to a domain registrar of your preference (I use domains.yahoo.com, but I hear that godaddy.com is better) and purchase your domain. Then head over to either Google Apps or Windows Live and set them up to host your email. You typically should be all set within a couple of hours.
Go Daddy is holding a special promotion where your first year’s domain subscription costs only Rs. 200/- ($2) if your a new customer. Yahoo had one for the last six months or so but stopped it recently. One word of caution on reading the fine print on these promotions, you could sometimes end up not being able to transfer the domain if you decide to switch registrars.
Note that Google Apps is in beta and the free service is available only if your accepted into the beta but continues to be free even after the beta for those lucky enough to get in.
With dasBlog 1.9 being released today I made a quick jump and got the site upgraded to the latest version. I also joined the dasBlog mailing list to see if I could make some type of contribution back to the community.
Plus, I finally moved away from the default dasBlog theme and switched over to Mads Kristensen‘s clean and simple theme.
In the process of upgrading the site I got a chance to use Scooter Software’s Beyond Compare, which I must say is a truly awesome work of art and a must have for anyone who works with a site hosted on FTP. If only I had known about this when doing my painful dasBlog upgrades in the past.
