I have recently been contacted by Henrik Erlandsson (founder of VisualCron) asking me if I would take a closer look at his program and report back with my thoughts. I thought why not, I always like taking a look a new software. Here is my review of VisualCron 5.

VisualCron is described as the following on their website – “VisualCron is an advanced Task Scheduler/automation tool for Windows.” It goes on to say the following – “VisualCron provides advanced file/script execution, file transfer (FTP/FTPS/SFTP/SSH/HTTP), email, archiving (ZIP/TAR/GZIP), XML handling, Active directory tasks, encryption (PGP), desktop macro recording, send/receive emails, system control (Hibernate,Standby,Restart,Logoff), SQL execution and monitoring are standard functions of VisualCron. Above all, the interface of VisualCron is very easy to use. No programming skills are needed. “ and comes in a 45 day, fully functional, demo.

I installed VisualCron on my Windows 7 RC (build 7100) virtual machine. It was a standard type of install that had 7 steps. The total time of the install was about three minutes so it’s very painless.

During the installation you have the choice to install Client and Server or Client only. This allows you to use one central computer as a server to control tasks on clients that connect to it. This would be great in a corporate environment where it’s always easier to manager things centrally rather than have to go to each PC and configure everything.

Once you have VisualCron installed you will see an icon in the System Tray that allows you to manage both the client and server (as I have both installed on my test machine).

There are so many things that you can do with this application. You can create simple file deletion jobs to clear out temporary files to complex backups and restore of remote servers. One of the simple tests that I set up was to check the desktop for a folder called “New Folder” and then delete it. It was configured to run every five minutes. This job only took me a few minutes to set up and was very straight forward and easy. This is a big plus given the complexity and granularity of the options available.

If you are a programmer and would like to create your own applications that interface with VisualCron, you can do so with their custom API. They even include a PDF with their API documentation and it is accessible through the Help menu.

When I write reviews of applications that are tailored for specific groups such as the more technical savvy and even system administrator types, I often have a hard time deciding if I should comment about the look and feel of the application. In a case like this, I think that the functionality is what will make or break the application’s usefulness but the user interface is quite nice none the less. VisualCron has the “new” windows application look (ribbon interface) which I feel makes it easier to use. Unfortunately I have not used older versions so I am unable to compare the two but from my experience with other applications it is most likely the case.

There are a couple quirks I think are worth noting. I was getting an error message that I was unable to write to the configuration file in the C:\Program Files\VisualCron. This was solved by adding Modify permissions (for the Users group) to that folder. This can also be accomplished by turning off UAC (User Account Control) in Windows but I don’t recommend that as it could be considered a security risk. I also noticed that the Pop-Up feature (a configurable part of a job) required me to click View the message on an Interactive Services Detection dialogue box. Upon further investigation Windows Help provided me with the following explanation: “Some devices and programs that are not fully compatible with Windows do not display their messages on your desktop, but might need your permission or other information to complete a task.”.

All in all, I think this application is very useful. Home users could use this program to create automated backups of web sites or important personal files. Because of the Windows Active Directory integration I could see this making the life of a Windows administrator much easier by helping keep Active Directory pruned . There are probably a thousand other ways that it could benefit anyone who manages Windows based systems. It is a great and very versatile program, I only wish I had the time and resources to test it more thoroughly in a corporate style environment as I think that is where it would excel!

VisualCron Website

I’ve never been one to worry about where my items are located on the taskbar and my philosophy has always been: “If there are too many times on your taskbar and you can’t find stuff you should probably close some applications.” But, since I’ve started working at my new job I’ve realized how this is not always an option for some people.

The users at my workplace require many applications open at the same time to work with various systems related to customer support, sales, and service. Most of these applications are actually web based so they have numerous browser windows open at the same time (we use both IE and Firefox). Because of the workflow of the various aspects of their job it’s good to be able to place items in the taskbar in a logical order where they can find things more easily.

This is where Taskbar Shuffle comes in to play. It’s a small application that runs in the system tray and uses only about 4mb of memory at any given time. It’s also very easy to configure. In fact, most of the time the default installation will provide you with all the settings needed to get you going.

Here is a screenshot of the settings screen with the default settings from a fresh installation:

This little utility is great for those people, like the ones at my workplace, who like to customize their work space. Our users don’t even have admin access to their computers but they can at least use this for some control.

Overall this is a very neat and functional utility and I recommend it for anyone who has the need (or want) to customize their taskbar items. The best part is that it’s completely free! For more information and to get the latest version visit the Taskbar Shuffle website.

A little over a year ago I wrote an article on a defragmentation utility called UltraDefrag. At that time it was in version 1.3.x and worked quite well. I wasn’t overly fond of JKDefrag at that time but since then I have been using JK off and on and it started to grow on me.

The thing I like the most about JKDefrag is that it’s small and is one simple executible file. You can put the file on a CD, USB stick or floppy disk and all you need to do is click it and let it run. It comes in x86 and x64 flavors and the souce is available in a package on the site too.

When you download and extract the files from the archive you will see that it contains four files. The first is the GUI version (JkDefrag.exe), the command-line version (JkDefragCmd.exe) and the files required to run it via a screensaver (JkDefragScreenSaver.scr + JkDefragScreenSaver.exe ).

If you are a regular user like me you will probably use the GUI version on an as-needed basis but the command-line version is great for folks who like to run things using the Task Scheduler or similar methods. If you move files around a lot you may want to try the screen saver to have it defrag when you aren’t using your computer.

One of the great things about JKDefrag are the options available to customize the way it runs. If you use the Run dialogue or a command prompt to load the program you can append some switches after the name of the executable to make it do certain things. A typical session for me looks something like this: jkdefrag -a 7 c: d: e: f:. The -a 7 switch tells JKDefrag to “Optimize by sorting all files by name (folder + filename)” and to do this on the specified drives.

You can, however, go much more in depth. There is an -e switch that allows you to exclude files by providing a mask and there is a -s swtich to tell JkDefrag to slow down by a certain percentage. Of course these are just a few examples of the many switches that can be found in the documentation.

These days I use JKDefrag as my primary utility to defragment and optimize my drives. I’ve yet to use the 2.x series of UltraDefrag but the last time I did try it there were issues running the 64bit version on Vista because of an unsigned driver. This issue does not exist with JKDefrag.

Here is a screenshot of JKDfrag in action. Althought the GUI is not overly appealing it’s how good it is at it’s job that makes it a great utility to have in your toolbox.

JKDefrag Home Page

JKDefrag in Action

I was browsing around on YouTube today and found the following video. It’s a clip of an episode of the Computer Chronicles series. This particular episode aired in 1985 and features the great Captain Crunch (aka John Draper) talking about software piracy.

I found it funny how the same problem is still affecting the software industry these days. It might be a bit worse now because of P2P software such as BitTorrent and LimeWire but it’s really the same thing. They go on to show how you can get information about cracking software from some BBS systems.

Enjoy the nostalgia!
~TheNerd

In my trek for a MAC OS X style dock for my Ubuntu PC, the other day, I happened upon a neat little app called Rocket Dock. This app is actually for Windows but I decided to try it out anyway (I’ve yet to find one for Ubuntu that I like).

I was pleasantly surprised. It was a fairly small download and was quick to install. So far I have been running it for 3 days and haven’t had any issues whatsoever.

One of my favorite things about this is the availability of custom icons, skins, docklets available to make your experience with it that much better. The icons are particularly useful because some applications don’t fare well with Rocket Dock’s method of rendering the icons. The one that sticks out in my mind is Internet Explorer.

If you are interested in such a tool I suggest giving rocket dock a try. You can get it from their official website at http://www.rocketdock.com/.

For those of you who have websites, you know that one of the most important tools you must have is your FTP client. This is the main way to get your files up to your site and when you make changes you use the FTP client to upload those too.

In this day and age there is no need to pay for this type of software. FileZilla does just about anything you would need and with their server software you can even run your own FTP site on your computer. You might ask what exactly FileZilla has to offer? Here are some of it’s main features (pulled directly from their website):

• Easy to use
• Supports FTP, FTP over SSL/TLS (FTPS) and SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)
• Cross-platform. Runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X and more
• IPv6 support
• Available in many languages
• Supports resume and transfer of large files >4GB
• Powerful Site Manager and transfer queue
• Drag & drop support
• Configurable Speed limits
• Filename filters
• Network configuration wizard
• Remote file editing
• Keep-alive
• HTTP/1.1, SOCKS5 and FTP-Proxy support

For me, the best feature about this is the price. FileZilla is absolutely free and open source so you could even edit the source code if you wanted. The other reason I really like this is that it runs on multiple platforms. I always have a Linux box set up among my Windows machines so to be able to use the same software on both platforms. Having to learn how to use different software on each platform you run is time consuming and hinders your productivity. FileZilla is also extremely stable and, at least for me, never crashes or causes any sort of problems.

If you are looking for an FTP client I suggest you seriously consider FileZilla, you might be pleasantly surprised.

FileZilla Website

Tom Merrit of cnet tv counts down the top 5 Firefox add-ons. Enjoy!

I’ve finally gotten around to upgrading from WordPress 2.3.3 to WordPress 2.6. The upgrade went surprisingly well with only two plugins that did not work properly.

The best part of the whole process was the automatic upgrading of the installed plugins. This made it very easy to get the newest versions of most of my plugins without having to go to each of their respective sites and downloading the archives.

One thing you must remember, if you are going to upgrade your WordPress, is that you really need to backup your files and database before doing the upgrade in case something happens you wont lose your data. You should also remember to disable all of your active plugins just in case there are some incompatibilities.

I wish you good luck if you decide to take this on yourself.

Cheers!
~TheNerd

For those of you who do not know, Lotus Symphony is a new, freely available, office suite from IBM. It is based on the OpenOffice.org project but has been re-branded to lotus and has been extended and modified. You can get it at symphony.lotus.com.

My test machine is Windows Vista running in a virtual machine (VMware) with 1GB of RAM. I know this isn’t much of a system but most applications that I test should run fine in such a machine. If this is not sufficient for an application then I may question whether or not I would use it.

The installation was a breeze. I was asked where to put the program files and whether or not I wanted to associate Open Office 2 and 1.1 documents with Symphony. All in all the whole installation took about 7 minutes on my Window Vista test machine (which is in VMware). This does not include the time it took to download the 192mb file from IBM’s website. I have never been fond of downloading things from IBM because they have the proprietary, Java based, download manager that never seems to work quite right. The good part is that if you wish you can download the file directly via HTTP, which actually went considerably faster.

When you first open the program you are presented with a landing page with three big icons in the middle. From left to right they read: Create a new Document, Create a New Presentation, and Create a new Spreadsheet. Below these icons you will see some text with links to the support forums, Lotus website, and plug-ins page. If you don’t want to use these huge icons you can click the “new” button near the top left corner and select your next move from there.

One of the first things I noticed, aside from the intrusion of icons, is that when you click on New > Web Browser you are presented with a built in browser window that brings you to the Lotus Symphony page. I checked the browser version, www.whatsmybrowser.com, and it shows that it’s using the IE 7 rendering engine (-1). I’ve never seen the point to build a browser into an application such as this because I will never use it (maybe I’m the only one?). I would rather it simply open an instance of my favorite browser (i.e Firefox).

One more little annoyance I noticed right off the bat is that, at a resolution 1024×768, there is still a scrollbar present for the main pane of the program. I can’t see why a program suck as this needs more resolution than 1024×768 to be displayed without a scrollbar.

I was dissapointed that the default installation of Lotus Symphony does not include any templates. The option exists to create a new document from a template (New > From Template > Document) but when choosen this produces an error saying that the program can’t find any templates. You must download and install these seperately.

One feature I am actually quite fond of is the tabs created when you have multiple windows open in the program. They are lined up very nicely at the top just to the right of the New button. This makes it easy to switch between documents, unlike MS Office where you have a new instance of the program open and you have to switch between documents by either using ALT + TAB or clicking the program on the Taskbar.

The Preferences screen is located un the File menu which seems a bit odd to me as it normally appears under the Edit or Options menu but once you find it it’s not hard to remember where it is. The preferences screen itself is a little gross looking. The left column is white and the font isn’t the greatest. I absolutely hate the little plus signs you have to click to expand the various sections. I would prefer a straight down list of items.

All in all, from the little time I’ve played with Symphony, it appears to be a half decent application. Most of the standard office suite functions appear to be there such as formatting, revision tracking, document protection, etc. One advantage that this product has over most others (at least I think so) is the ability to re-brand and customize the look to your liking. There are instructions on the Lotus Symphony on how to use a plug-in to change the logo, colors, and other branded items to your own. I think that is pretty neat.

In the end, I would have to say that I doubt that I would ever use it on a regular basis as I already have my needs satisfied with OpenOffice.org and, frankly, there’s nothing I see here that provides anything better than what I already have. If you don’t beleive me that’s ok, just download and try it for yourself, you might like it.

TheNerd

Secunia PSI (Personal Software Inspector) is a neat little application that scans your PC and informs you about outdated (only if it contains vulnerabilities), end-of-life and vulnerable software. Basically what it does is scans your PC (sort of like a virus scanner) and then creates a report of the software that needs attention.

When I first scanned my computer it was rated at 85% (the percentage of software that is “safe”). It took me a while, but in about three quarters of an hour I had all the software on my Windows XP install  updated and had my results up to 98% (I still have some software in Vista that needs updating).

The neat part is that it also provides you a direct link to downloads of new software versions  and if there aren’t any downloads it provides fairly detailed info on how to fix it if possible.

The current version is RC2 and it is free for personal use. Please be aware that this software stays in contact with a database at Secunia to provide up-to-date information about vulnerable and end-of-life software. If that concerns you then maybe you would want to stay away from this product.

If you are interested in giving it a try go to psi.secunia.com. I’ve include some screenshots of the applicaton below.

PS> I heard about this on Security Now…