I recommend saying "format c: /q" near your new Vista machine

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 01:51:05 GMT

As reported by ZDnet, Microsoft has left a funny security hole in their new offering to the masses that allows an attacker - or just someone who is able to... you know...talk and stuff - to verbally execute commands through its speech recognition feature. One point that has been brought up is that someone could send an audio file that played the commands for your computer to follow. How about that! So for those of you who continue to use Windows and migrate to Vista, you might consider disabling leaving your microphone off unless you are actually using it. Also, before they get a patch out, you *have* to go play with it and let me know what you were able to actually do!

Here is the complete article which includes a confirmation response from Microsoft on the exploit.

Mounting drives in Windows... just like Linux!

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 22:13:59 GMT

Before continuing I must concede to the fact that I am *not* a fan of Windows. I use it where I have to, but by and large I feel that Linux, specifically Ubuntu, is just a more pleasant experience and is a better tool for the kind of jobs that *I* need a computer to do. I must also admit that I was Microsoft certified about 9 years ago (the NT4 track!), so what I "discovered" last night might not be entirely new to many people, but it was certainly new to me so I thought I would share. Plus, considering how rarely I have compliments for Windows, I feel obligated to share this so that my steadfast Microsoft fanboy friends will quit saying "Why do you hate Bill Gates?", which incidentally I do not.

Now that I have gotten that out, let me tell you about a cool feature I found within Windows last night. It actually does something the way that Linux does!

One of the Windows web servers that we interact with has its webroot on the D: drive, with a path D:\inetpub\wwwroot. At the time that this application was created, hard drives were not the size they are today and 8GB seemed like a reasonable partition for a data drive. However the application has grown, as has its need for hard drive consumption and it finally reached a level which needed to be addressed.

I originally set out to add a new drive (E:), then move the wwwroot over to the new drive, update all mappings in IIS, including virtual directories, and update any mappings within ColdFusion. This was not a very exciting prospect considering this is a live production server. However, this seemed like a fairly logical approach so I began.

First I added the new drive and initialized it in the Disk Manager. I now had this 80GB empty partition which I planned on turning into E: After choosing to to make it a "Primary Partition" and selecting the size, I got to the point for choosing the drive letter. This is where an option jumped out at me that I had never noticed before, which is a testament to both my lack of observance and to how fast I normally cruise through this section! I was presented with the following:

WHAT??? "Mount"???

The solution became abundantly clear immediately. Rather than have to re-map paths and risk blowing up whatever buried physical paths might lurk under the covers of this legacy application, I would simply mount the new drive as: d:\inetpub\wwwroot - just like Linux but with backwards slashes and the funny letter/colon thing on the front!

So, I renamed the existing wwwroot folder to wwwroot.old, mounted the drive to that position, and copied over all files from the old wwwroot to the new wwwroot. I restarted ColdFusion and IIS and the application picked up right where it had left off without a hitch!

So (get ready to write this down, because you won't hear it often from me).... YAY for Windows!

We have landed

Sun, 10 Jul 2005 05:00:00 GMT

Well, I have installed my blogging software. Time to play. :)

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I recommend saying "format c: /q" near your new Vista machine

Mounting drives in Windows... just like Linux!

We have landed