Xobni oranizes your inbox

Xobni is inbox spelled backwards. Beside that it is a tool that allows you to organize your Outlook inbox within seconds.

Highlights are:

• Fast search of your inbox (and other mail folders).
• Organizes your contacts.
• Let you see lots of useless statistics on to whom and how you use your e-mail..
• Integrates with LinkedIn.

With fast local search - like Windows Indexing service, Copernic Desktop search and Google you can find anything you want within seconds as long as you know how to spell your search.

While Xobni only indexes your e-mail it seems to do a better job at letting you find your e-mails as you can search on contact and continue from there.

You can also se who knows who as it analyzes mail headers and build social networks based on this information.

From one day of usage I really like this program. This is a tool that you will not live without. But Xobni has to mature first - it crashed Outlook three times for me before I decided to uninstall it.

PRTG traffic grapher

Have you ever needed to make graphs out of your interfaces in one way or another. I guess you are familiar with MRTG, a Unix tool written in Perl that polls all your SNMP devices and makes good looking charts out of them.

If you are a Windows user and do not know how to configure Apache and MRTG then I have the solution for you.

PRTG - a tool from a German company is exactly this. A replacement for MRTG, running on Windows and with it's own web server.

PRTG is not free of charge as MRTG. But the cost is relatively low and it is good value.

From a Windows application you can configure everything you need to monitor and later on just watch everything from a web browser.

Cool PDF Reader

Do you

• Think Adobe Acrobat is slow?
• Adobe Acrobat takes time to install?
• Do you need a simple tool to view PDF files on several computers?

If you do - the solution is just one click away. I found a a company called CoolPDF Software that gives me just what I want.

Their Cool PDF Reader is currently a 655KB download and does not require any installation before use.

I have tried it on lots of my recent .pdf downloads - and it works most of the time. I had some problems with big documents, but most of the it works as a charm.

I do miss some features though;

• U3 installer.
• Keyboard shortcuts to navigate through a page. (To move up and down.)

Scripting in Windows

You have to love Microsoft script language - cmd.exe. You can do lot with it if you just learn how to do so.

Here is one example that extracts date and time from norwegain locale and puts it into the variables %dato% and %tid%.

for /f "delims=. tokens=1-3" %%a in ("%date%") do set dato=%%c%%b%%a
for /f "delims=: tokens=1-2" %%a in ("%time%") do set tid=%%b%%a

Cool, eh?

Looking into HTTP traffic with Internet Explorer

I work a lot with web applications and from time to time I need to look in to the HTTP session - what headers are sent back and forth and what web page elements takes time to load.

I have found two products that does this well. I will cover these in details below.

HttpWatch

HttpWatch from Simtec Limited. This product seems to be the most mature of these two. It have cool features, the most important one is beeing able to show you what the web client spends it time on; DNS lookup, TCP session setup, or the data transfer.

You can look into HTTPS traffic.

The major drawback is the price. It cost $295 for a one user license. As a result I did not test this product any further.

IE Inspector

IE Inspector from IEInspector Software is a nice application. It works much like HttpWatch above, but is much cheaper. It lacks the capability to show what a page spends it time on doing; you just get the end result.

You can look in to the HTTP headers sent to the web server and what HTTP headers are received. You can see detailed cache information about Internet Explorer cached elements.

You can also purchase a module that analyzes other applications that uses HTTP. This is nice if you want to test other applications communicating over HTTP.

You can look into HTTPS traffic only if you use the Internet Explorer integrated decoder.

If you buy both modules as a non-commercial license you end up with US$99. If you happen to be commercial the price is $129. Either way it is much cheaper than HttpWatch.

Ethereal

Ethereal is the Swiss army knife of packet decoding. You can't live without it. The tools mentioned above presents HTTP traffic in an easy way. But Ethereal gives you a lot more - if you learn how to use it.

It is open source. And we can't dislike open source!

Vista wireless and lag

Have you noticed that Vista and wireless often looses connection to the Internet (and corporate network). This is often seen with games and real-time applications like VoIP products.

Windows Vista doesn't works with the optimal wireless setinngs. Some of this settings are causing 1,5sec dropouts with many wireless cards, which are appearing every 30-60sec. This dropouts are very hated in the gaming community and if users are using voice over IP applications or other realtime protocols.

Here you can find a solution for your problem.

Mozy easter eggs

Some people find it fun to place jokes within their applications. We have all seen easter eggs placed within applications from time to time.

Mozy have taken this kind of joke a step further. You don't have to look deep to find a joke.

But it's not always clear what the joke mean. P=NP is an unsolved question computer science.

It is generally agreed to be the most important such unsolved problem. It is also generally agreed to be one of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics; the Clay Mathematics Institute has offered a $1 million US prize for the first correct proof.

If you read their terms you'll find DO NOT TAUNT HAPPY FUN BALL. This is a reference to Saturday Night Live. For people like me it is not easy to understand all of this.

Thanks to davidrothman for pointing this out.

Wink video capture

I just wrote about codecs and screen scaptures. When I was finished with the article I found a cool program called Wink from Debugmode.

Wink is a screen video capture program that allows you to edit it - add annotations, balloons, text and so forth.

Highlights are freeware, easy to use and optimized outputs.

Have a look yourself at the Wink product page.

Screen capture codecs and tools

I have been looking into codec's for capturing the screen into videos. The reason for doing this is to produce videos from the screen wich are both small in size and with the best possible quality. Codecs for movies do not have the optimal characteristics for screen videos.

You can search your self with Google.

Codec	Comment
MSU Screen Capture Lossless Codec	Codec that produces the smallest files possible without loosing quality.
FM Screen Capture codec	Codec from the producers of ScreenVirtuoso. Outputs are about twice as big as with MSU.
TechSmith Screen Capture Codec (TSCC)	This codec can only be used to encode movies when you have a valid license for Camtasia Studio. You can download this codec free of charge to decode movies.

Capture programs

To use the codec's you need a program to capture the screen to a movie. Google can help out here as well.

Program	Comment
SnagIt	Good to capture still images. With videos you can only capture it, not manipulate it. Read my review here. You can encode with any installed codec.
ScreenVirtuoso	Capture tool with some options. Captures  media output as well. (DVD's, media player etc.)
ALLcapture	Another capture tool. They seem to have their own codec. And their own tool TurboDemo to create something useful out of the capture.

Good luck!

Capture with SnagIt and Camtasia

Screen capture and video capture of the screen? Is it possible and how do I do it?

TechSmith have two programs to do just that. There are of course others, but today I will focus on TechSmith.

SnagIt 8	Camtasia Studio 4
Capture still images and records video.	Captures video with own optimized codec. Still images if you purchase SnagIt bundle.
Very good options for editing your images.	Created to capture video and make movies of output.
Outputs to all common image formats, and .AVI for videos. You can choose codec for output.	Final output includes MPEG, AVI, Flash, RealMedia, QuickTime and executable. You have full control of output settings.

SnagIt - $39.95

SnagIt is a world known and reputable screen capture program. I love it - in addition to capture images (as you can do with alt+print screen) you can do lots to the final image. You can change perspective, add edge effects, highlight text, add arrows, add callouts and more.

If you send screen dumps in emails or make user documentation this a must-have tool.

Camtasia Studio 4 - $299

Charged with good hope after using SnagIt I downloaded Camtasia and decided to try it out.

I expected to find a tool to make videos as easy as SnagIt makes screen shots. But no, I did not manage to do anything usable with Camtasia. I can zoom and pan, but did not manage to do anything else with it.

If you want to make something out of a capture - look into Photodex ProShow first. I have already blogged about it.

ntfs.sys and blue screen

This weekend did not start out any good.

 

After hibernating my Windows XP laptop it did not want to wake up again. It went right into the infamous blue screen of death.

 

Windows did not boot and I found no way to force Windows into doing a chkdsk /f. Even when I booted the recovery console from my XP CD I got a blue screen.

 

I turned up nothing when searching Google for anything of use.

 

In the end, I had to go to the Linux community to get help. The Linux-NFTS project got a tool called ntfsfix that do something to the filesystem. From their documentation:

ntfsfix is a utility that fixes some common NTFS problems. ntfsfix is NOT a Linux version of chkdsk. It only repairs some fundamental NTFS inconsistencies, resets the NTFS journal file and schedules an NTFS consistency check for the first boot into Windows.

To run this tool on my laptop I found a GNU/Linux distro called Trinity Rescue Kit. This tool saved my day.