IT Should Just Work

How to make a USB Boot Disk

May 10, 2011 · 1 min read · microsoft · windows ·

Brief instructions on how to make a USB flash drive that can boot a computer into Windows 98 DOS mode. Useful for running things like Norton Ghost.

How many copies of my application are running?

May 6, 2011 · 1 min read · linux ·

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A quick line of code for displaying how many copies of an application are running on a Linux platform: 1ps -ef | grep myapplicationname | wc -l | awk ' { print $1-1 } '

Webpage to Monitor CPU usage on a linux box.

May 5, 2011 · 2 min read · linux ·

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This cgi script allows you to post a webpage on your multi-processor Linux server which shows the current CPU usage. Useful if you want to quickly and easily check the load on the system and see if multi-processor applications are spreading themselves across the available cores.

Updates for Fedora Core 2

May 3, 2011 · 1 min read · linux · fedora ·

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I have an old (virtual) server which, for various support and compatibility reasons, is still running Fedora Core 2 Linux, released back in 2005. Despite this being an old, unsupported, version of the OS I wanted it to be as up-to-date as possible, and this is how I went about it.

Can't open StickyKeys settings

Apr 21, 2011 · 1 min read · microsoft · windows ·

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By default on a Windows XP pressing the Shift Key 5 times in a row turns on StickyKeys and brings up the warning dialog. In normal operation this doesn’t happen very often, but if you’re bashing someone with your rifle in Call of Duty it can pull you out of the game to show this dialog.

Normally you click …

du for Windows

Apr 21, 2011 · 1 min read · microsoft · windows ·

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One of those UNIX commands that is oh-so-useful when working from the command line is du or “disk usage”. This command calculates the total size of all the files and subfolders within a folder.

Drives not mapping on Windows 7 but OK on XP?

Apr 20, 2011 · 1 min read · microsoft · windows ·

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A short puzzler here- I had a group policy script mapping a (DFS) network drive at user login. It had always worked fine on XP, but the same users logging in to a Windows 7 PC didn’t get the drive mapped.

Checking the current Fedora Version

Apr 14, 2011 · 1 min read · linux · fedora ·

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Logged into a Fedora linux box via a command line? Want to know what version of Fedora it’s running?

Outputting CSV from an ASP page

Mar 16, 2011 · 1 min read · microsoft · visualbasic · vb.net · excel · asp.net ·

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I’ve recently had the need to write an ASP page which reads a SQL database and outputs into Microsoft Excel- a user clicks on a link to this ASP page and Excel opens up with a new spreadsheet of the data. This is how I did it

Network Commands in VB.NET

Feb 28, 2011 · 1 min read · microsoft · visualbasic · vb.net ·

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A couple of useful network commands in Visual BASIC .NET (2005). These are the equivalents of doing ping and nslookup from the command prompt. The variable sIPAddress in these examples is a string containing the IP to test, i.e. "127.0.0.1"