I am writing an automated test for an active X control, the IE information bar become a very boring problem: it require some manual operation to make the web page continue…and the worst is, IE will report the web page has loaded when those information bar show up and wait for your input!

Though it’s possible to turn off some security check for the active X controls, another boring information bar will tell you "Your current security setting put your computer at risk...", you can’t get rid of the information bar after all!!!

Found some people are already talking this, unfortunately most of them are not work on IE7. (maybe they are for IE 6)

Finally I found a solution that worked!!!

from: http://jazzman93612.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!47FA5B6D04A2E0A3!1352.entry

How to get rid of the Annoying Information Bar in IE7

This tutorial is written for those experienced computer users who understand how to configure Internet Explorer Security Settings, and what all the settings mean. Internet Explorer 7 DOES improve security, however, for IT professionals who know what they are doing, IE7’s “improved security” is annoying and we can do without the idiotic “bloop” sounds and frustrating information bar popups

Windows XP Pro: Go to Start->Run->gpedit.msc

Double-click the “Turn off the Security Settings Check Feature” entry and choose “Enable

Explanation: This policy setting turns off the Security Settings Check feature, which checks Internet Explorer security settings to determine when the settings put Internet Explorer at risk. ( NOTE: this means that the annoying bar will not pop up) NO MORE ANNOYING INFORMATION BAR!!! If you enable this policy setting, the security settings check will not be performed. If you disable or do not configure this policy setting, the security settings check will be performed.

Please note that, this only disable the information bar of the check of security setting, it will not remove the information bar of the active x’s warnings, so you still need to set the custom security level in the Internet Options to disable those Active X related information bars.

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VPN is great for working from home or working remotely, however the VPN remote access in Windows XP (or maybe vista) will switch all traffic trough the VPN connection once VPN connection established, that sometimes create some trouble: Internet surf will be much slower, some corporate network setting may not allow access to Internet so normal Internet surf may not work.

This problem can be easily solved by config the route table by yourself. To get a help of “route” simply type “route”:

C:> route

To make things simple, you can dump the route table before connect to VPN:

C:>route print

And dump it again after VPN connection established, from the two route table, you will find out the differents. Here is an example after VPN established:

Active Routes:
Network Destination        Netmask          Gateway       Interface  Metric
          0.0.0.0          0.0.0.0    172.19.xxx.xx   172.19.xxx.xx       1
          0.0.0.0          0.0.0.0    192.168.1.126    192.168.1.19       21

… … 

Please notice the first two lines, the metric number will decide the priority of the route selection. (smaller is higer priority)

My only VPN usage is connect to my working computer and using remote desktop, and I have no other requirement to connect to other computers inside the VPN directly. What I did is, add a new route entry for my working PC and make all other destination go through my home router:

c:> route add  65.xx.xxx.xx mask 255.255.255.255 172.19.xxx.xx 

c:> route change 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 192.168.1.126

65.xx.xx.xx is my working PC IP address, 172.19.xxx.xx is the default gateway of the VPN connection, 192.168.1.126 is my home router local address.

It can be done by a BAT script:

rasdial /disconnect
rasdial “My VPN Connection” “MYDOMAIN\myusername” *
route add  65.xx.xxx.xx mask 255.255.255.255 172.19.xxx.xx  

route change 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 192.168.1.126

It’s always easy to change the route table as you wish to make the online line much easier, enjoying VPN without having to break the normal Intenet connection.

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Found a video tour in CNET to let you turn a laptop to a hot spot. Actually I did this before at least 3 years ago.

Basicly, use Windows XP’s connection sharing, and make the wireless network working on ad hoc mode. Other laptop use “ad hoc” mode to join the ad hoc network and share the same Internet connection.  (The computers in a ad-hoc wifi network is just like computers connected to a hub)

From the video tour it seemed that with Windows Vista and Mac OSX, it will be much easier.

Though it worked, believe me, it’s much better to buy a Apple Airport Express, its user expereince is much much better.

Popularity: 13% [?]

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Via Cedong

pretty useful batch script.  Copy & paste it in to a file named “clean.bat”, run it to delete all temp files.

@echo off

echo Deleting IE temp files…
del /f /s /q “%userprofile%\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\*.*”
del /f /s /q “%userprofile%\Local Settings\Temp\*.*”

echo Deleting *.tmp *._tmp *.log *.chk *.old…
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*.tmp
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*._mp
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*.log
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*.gid
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*.chk
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*.old

echo Deleting recycle bin, temp dir, etc…
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\recycled\*.*
del /f /s /q %windir%\*.bak
del /f /s /q %windir%\prefetch\*.*
rd /s /q %windir%\temp & md %windir%\temp

echo Clean system disk…
%windir%\system32\sfc.exe /purgecache

echo Defrag system drive…
%windir%\system32\defrag.exe %systemdrive% -b

echo Finished！

echo. & pause

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A windows live writer image upload test.

It’s very strange that one of my blog (robertmao.com) can’t upload image anymore for unknown reason, but all others seemed work well. They are exactly same blog hosted in one WPMU system. And that blog account was ok before.

every time it tell “image[n].png” can’t be uploaded…and post failed.

I deleted that blog account from live writer and import again, still same error.

But all other accounts work well… :(  Hope anyone can help…

Popularity: 8% [?]

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I met a very strange problem these days on my PC: When I plug  any kind of USB storage device into my PC (Moveable HD, USB flash disk, USB Card reader etc.),  the drive never show up in my PC. But it seemed the USB device works pretty well, when I open the “computer management/disk management”, it also seemed that everything is fine.

From “disk management” I found some problem, the Driver Letter assigned to the new disk is the same as the Jungle Disk’s !  For some reason, Jungle disk did not notify the system that it has used that driver letter, and that caused the problem  After I shutdown Jungle Disk, everything become ok.

I have removed Jungle Disk, the S3 virtual disk,   I have a couple of reasons:

* Caused the driver letter conflict (what I said in this post)

* Jungle disk use its own directly structure, so it create very strange directory/file names in your S3 space, so you can’t simple give out a s3 URL to share the file, I really dislike this, one advantage of using a network disk is make the file sharing much easier, with Jungle Disk, S3 become less functional.

I am using S3Fox to manage my S3 files, and I am still looking a better software which can provide similar feature as Jungle Disk does.

Popularity: 8% [?]

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I love many things in Unix, the “symbolic link” is one of them, fortunately from Windows 2000, NTFS support “juction” which is similar to “symbolic link” in Unix.  Unfortunately,  there is no default command and nor GUI menu to let you do that, all we can do is download a small software:

Junction

Create Win2K NTFS symbolic links

There are also many other cool stuff in System Internals:

 

The Sysinternals web site was created in 1996 by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell to host their advanced system utilities and technical information. Microsoft acquired Sysinternals in July, 2006. Whether you’re an IT Pro or a developer, you’ll find Sysinternals utilities to help you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications. If you have a question about a tool or how to use them, please visit the Sysinternals Forum for answers and help from other users and our moderators.

Popularity: 14% [?]

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