The knack gentlemen have of dressing badly and getting away with it is best illustrated by the story of the gentleman who was accosted by a friend walking along Piccadilly in clothes which were well below the best sartorial standards.

  'It does not matter how I dress in London,' he claimed. 'Nobody here knows me.'

  Later the same friend visited him in the country where his clothes were no better.

  'It does not matter how I dress here', he said, 'Everybody knows me.'

/misc | Oct 24, 2009

/misc | Oct 22, 2009

• Automatically avoid conflicts with mapped drive letters
• Reserve letters
• Assign drive letter based on user, drive type, connection type, USB port, volume label, size, and more
• Assign a letter to a specific USB drive by including an INI file on the drive

/windows | Oct 21, 2009

/misc | Oct 18, 2009

• giving local administrative rights in active directory environment
• Adding Domain user as local administrator of an XP machine
• Making domain user admin of local machine
• Insert domain user in local adm grp
• Unable to add domain account to local Administrator group

/windows | Oct 17, 2009

• Nvidia Drivers Break Remote Desktop
• bandom rastard's post on NVIDIA Forums
• Remote Desktop Disconnects at logon
• Yakelaen's post on Microsoft's Windows Home Server Forum. He adds: "Other posts on the nVidia forum above have reported that 32 MB didn't work for them but by increasing the size (Value data setting) of the sessionimagesize they overcame the problem. 00000020 = 32MB, 00000040 = 64MB, 00000060 = 96MB, 00000080 = 128MB"

/windows | Oct 17, 2009

• Unix Toolbox - "Collection of Unix/Linux/BSD commands and tasks which are useful for IT work or for advanced users... practical guide with concise explanations."
• Linux Command for Beginners - Examples of common commands with brief explanations
• Learn The DD Command - Massive list of dd examples
• Wikipedia's dd entry has a number of interesting usage examples
• The Unix Acronym List - Settle that dispute with a coworker over the meaning of dd.
• Quick and dirty stopwatch via the Mac Terminal - It's as simple as $ time cat to start and Ctrl+C to stop and display time.

/nix | Oct 11, 2009

"The default block size is 512 bytes, but we can specify anything we want using the bs= flag. We can copy 1 byte at a time, or we can copy 1GB at a time. Any value will work, but some values will give you better performance than others. Most disks read a minimum of 512 bytes at a time and can easily read more at the same time. Using a value that is too small is wasteful because the disk will need to be frequently read, and time will be wasted in the copying process. If you choose a value that is too large, you will waste time filling up the buffer in dd before the copy is performed. I have found that values in the 2KB to 8KB range work well."

/nix | Oct 11, 2009

1. File > Convert & Modify
2. Function: = Convert
3. In the left pane, browse to and select desired TIFs
4. In the right pane, browse to desired save location
5. Dest. Format = TIFF
6. Options... > Multi Page File
7. Click "Go"

/mac | Oct 11, 2009

$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
  #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
  0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *111.8 Gi   disk0
  1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk0s1
  2:                  Apple_HFS MacBook HD              111.5 Gi   disk0s2
/dev/disk1
  #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
  0:                            TEST                   *1.4 Mi     disk1

$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk1
dd: /dev/disk1: Resource busy

$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk1
dd: /dev/disk1: Operation not supported

$ diskutil unmount /dev/disk1
Volume TEST on disk1 unmounted
$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk1
dd: /dev/disk1: end of device
2881+0 records in
2880+0 records out
1474560 bytes transferred in 110.617912 secs (13330 bytes/sec)

$ diskutil secureErase 0 /dev/disk1
Started erase on disk1 TEST
Finished erase on disk1 TEST

$ diskutil unmount /dev/disk1 && diskutil secureErase 0 /dev/disk1

UPDATE: Rather than using /dev/disk1 (which is the block device, AKA buffered device or cooked device) I should've been using /dev/rdisk1 (the raw device). This made the dd process slightly faster than even diskutil when using block sizes of 1440k and 360k. Connected raw devices can be listed by issuing the ls /dev/rdisk? command. See Block device versus raw device performance for more information.

• Single Drive Wipe Protects Data
• Secure deletion: a single overwrite will do it
• Secure data deletion, "dd" and the Great Zero Challenge

/mac | Oct 10, 2009

/mac | Oct 07, 2009

/windows | Oct 05, 2009

/misc | Oct 04, 2009