Web review

This feature of Windows 7 (its correct name is “Aero Peek“) is often hated by users that want to be free moving the mouse anywhere in the screen, without that anything happens.
The new “show desktop” corner in the right is a really good idea and I use it everyday, but I also prefer to click on it – when I want to minimize everything: it’s really rare that I want only to take a little… preview of what is going on my desktop.

Disabling only the “mouse over” version is really simple: just click with the right mouse button on the Windows Taskbar and choose “properties”, then uncheck the option “Use Aero Peek to preview the desktop“. That’s all! Now you can click on the show desktop button, but hovering it will do nothing.

I already talked about my problems with the SCX-4200 printer, with Samsung drivers for Linux and Ubuntu 8.10. Now I discovered that the newer model I bought, the SCX-4300, has a disagreeable system to check the level of the ink in the toner, with a chip mounted on original toners from Samsung.
When the level is near to the end, the printer gives error and stops. In other words, it disallow you to use all the ink; in addiction of this, you can’t use compatible toners because they doesn’t have the chip, so the printer doesn’t restart even after you replace it.

Gabriele Piscitelli published the complete procedure to enter the service mode of your Samsung SCX-4300 printer, flash it and reset the ink counter. I translated the tutorial in english and I want to share it with you. leggi tutto »

A lot of Google Chrome users are experiencing problems with page scrolling in Windows, that is too fast with several devices (mouses and touchpads). It seems that there isn’t any “official” fix for this behaviour, but you can resolve this with a little freeware utility, KatMouse.

Just download it from the author’s site and install it. First of all, you’ve to open the Wheel Button tab and choose “None of the buttons” from the list (this feature isn’t useful and it can give you usability problems in Windows). Then, switch to “Classes” tab and start Google Chrome: drag and drop the KatMouse “target” icon to the main section of Chrome windows (the one where web sites are rendered); you’ll see a new item named “Chrome_RenderWidgetHostHWND” in the KatMouse list: double click it and choose “Custom scroll”, then set it to “1″ and confirm with OK.

That’s it!

The screenshot you see here on the left shows a Mac OS X (Leopard) window that pops up when a new usb keyboard is connected. It asks user to press the key on the right of (left) shift, to detect the correct international map. Yesterday I had a problem with the keyboard of a Mac Mini I have in my office network: “<>” and “\” keys were swapped.

In the italian keyboard, “<>” is the key on the right of left-shift, and “\” (the backslash) is above the TAB key. leggi tutto »

Today I fixed a new problem with my test installation of Windows 7 (first public beta): Avast! Free – my “default” antivirus, was causing random system crashes. After some tries, I understood that blue screen of death was occurring during internal network activity. To be more precise, the problem is located in the use of shared folders (aka “samba shares”, for Linux users) and it involves the tdx.sys file, that seems to be often a protagonist of BSODs. leggi tutto »

I’m currently testing the first public beta of Windows 7 on a desktop and a notebook, so I installed Live Messenger through the official Live installer provided from Microsoft as optional pack of the operating system. While there wasn’t problems on the notebook (connected to the LAN via Wi-fi), the desktop gived me 81000306 error trying to connect to Messenger service. After a lot of tests, including activation of uPNP on the router and forwarding the typical Messenger ports to the desktop’s IP, I finally discovered that the problem was in a feature of Windows 7 (also included in Windows Vista), the auto tuning of TCP stack. To disable this feature (that seems to be also the cause of network slowness on some LAN), you’ve to execute a simple command as Administrator:

• click on the Windows logo in the bottom-left corner of the screen (the old “start” menu);
• type CMD.EXE and wait a second: the cmd.exe program will appair in a list;
• right-click it and choose “Run as Administrator”, then confirm the action in the request that will appair;
• you’ll see a black window; type the following command: netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
• now just close the window and try to connect with Windows Live Messenger (it shouldn’t be necessary to restart the computer).

Note 1: I suspect that this problem is linked to my hardware (a Netgear DG834G router and a Atheros PCIE Gigabit LAN, on a ASUS M2A-MX motherboard).

Note 2: If you want to restore the auto tuning feature, you’ve to repeat the above process with the following command: netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal

WARNING: After some tests, it seems that Windows Live Messenger contact list have problems after change of email login. So do this at your risk.
This problem always plagued Windows Live (aka MSN) users: you signed up for a Microsoft Passport account since 2002  with a custom e-mail as login, then you changed the e-mail address but you can’t change your Live Messenger login (this was my case).

About a year ago I tried to directly ask Microsoft, but they answered me that this wasn’t possible; they suggested me to sign up for a new Live account.

Now I discovered that it’s possible to do it easily. leggi tutto »

Notice: This little tutorial assumes that you have some basic Linux knowledge, and that you know what SSH is.

Christmas is coming, and I’ll be out of office for a while.

I was a little worried because I could need some data from my main desktop PC… I’ll copy the most important documents on the laptop, but if I’ll forget something? I don’t want to leave my desktop turned on, nor to be obliged to pass the evening of 24th of December in my car to come back to the office.

So it’s time to activate Wake On LAN

Wake On LAN (aka WOL) is a feature of many PCs. It leaves the network port in standby mode, without turning off it completely. It requires very little power, and it allows you to activate a PC from your LAN. leggi tutto »

Today I upgraded the RAM of a Mac Mini Intel (1Gb to 2,5Gb). As usual, I googled for a while to find a good tutorial to correctly dismantle it. Even if I’m not a video-tutorial lover, the best one I discovered was on YouTube. I like it also because it’s speech-less (only subtitles), so it’s easy to understand the steps also for not native english-speaking users like me

Disclaimer:
This post doesn’t want to be an invite to hack websites. The admin pages linked by search engines in the “search suggestions” in the article are so easy to find that it’s, I think, exagerated to define this an “hack practice” (infact, many of them were already hacked and spammed by automatic bots ). On the contrary, it wants to be an advice to webmasters and sysadmins to double-check their installations and security measures.

Search engines scan the Web. The entire web, and they often discover something that nobody should see.

This is one of this cases: a webmaster forgets to password-protect the folder where a critical admin tool like phpMyAdmin is, a search engine reaches the folder and it puts in its search index the link.

At this point it’s easy for everyone to discover these security breaches: with a very simple search on a search engine like Yahoo! you’ll get 196 results (November, 7th 2008), they bring to the administrative home page of phpMyAdmin from several domains, with root privileges. leggi tutto »