Now from home

In one of my computers, the simple action of creating a new folder or renaming a file was taking a lot of time. Windows Explorer seemed to freeze for a variable amount of time. Sometimes a few seconds sometimes as long a one minute!

Obviously some shell extension was the culprit, but which one? The idea of uninstalling one by one was discouraging, so I lived for a while with the problem until I found this little tool:

ShellExView

The ShellExView utility displays the details of shell extensions installed on your computer, and allows you to easily disable and enable each shell extension.

It literally save me a lot of time. You need to run this tool as an Administrator if you want to disable any shell extension.

It turns out that the shell extension that was causing the slow down was TortoiseSVN. For some reason it doesn’t seem to work well on my Windows 7 x64 computer. It does work ok on my laptop (W7 x86).

Time to update to the lastest version and review my settings.

Note: Installing TortoiseSVN’s latest version solved the problem, but I needed to run ShellExView again to enable it again.

I’ve had to disable the Skype add-on because pages with javascript were loading painfully slow. It took me a while to discover that the culprit was Skype, so I hope this post saves you some time.

Firefox v. 3.5.2

Skype Add-on v. 3.3.0.3789

Skype v. 4.1.0.141

A few weeks ago, I posted my intention to move to Gmail all my email accounts. However, there was a problem when sending emails from a non-Gmail domain. Some email clients, like Outlook, add the “on behalf of’” string to those emails.

Fortunately, the Gmail dev team have added the possibility to send those emails using their own SMTP server, so the problem is gone now.

So today I’m moving all my email to Gmail. The process is really simple:

• Sign up into Google Apps for your domain
• Create your email addresses in Google Apps
• Change the MX records for email (Dreamhost even has a button to update them for you)

Because I plan to not use Outlook at all, I need to upload all my existing email messages to Gmail. Google has a tool called Google Email Uploader to do so. It can take a while to upload the email.

Also note that emails bigger than 16 MB are not uploaded.

Everything is going just fine so far.

In Windows 7 (and probably on Windows Vista too), all the drivers must be signed. If not, the OS will refuse to install them. I think this is a good feature and it probably gets rid of 90% of the stability problems of Windows.

However, today I need to install an unsigned driver. I sometimes use com0com to test the serial communications code of one of my applications. This tool allows you to create virtual COM ports that are connected. Very useful.

However, installing the new ports requires to use their own unsigned drivers, and Windows 7 doesn’t allow that. In order to bypass this limitation, you’ll need to reboot your computer and press F8 to get to the Advanced Boot Options menu. There’s a boot option at the bottom to Disable Driver Signature Enforcement. This will allow you to install the ports just fine.

Because I plan to upgrade to Windows 7 as soon as possible, I’ve thought that maybe it’s time to finally leave Outlook behind and move to Gmail. I’m not totally convinced as there are many features in Outlook that I use extensively. All of them exists on the “Google online only” world but I want to be sure that they will fit perfectly in my workflow before doing a definitive move.

For example, there’s an issue when sending emails from different (not Google) accounts in Gmail.

Gmail allows you to receive emails from multiple POP3 accounts and you can also select from which account you send emails; but there’s a gotcha. When someone receives an email sent by Gmail using a different account, not the Gmail one, they receive something like this in the sender field:

account@gmail.com; on behalf of; Jose [jose@otherdomain.com]

This of course is not what I expect. Google is aware of this situation and they’re trying to fix the issue by sending the email through the original SMTP server instead of using their own. It seems that if they use their SMTP server using an email address from another domain, most emails will end up on the spam folders.

I know it’s annoying, and we’re working to fix this "On Behalf Of"

behavior as soon as we can. As we’ve mentioned in our Help Center [1],

the reason we include your address in the headers at all is to help

prevent your mail from being flagged as spam by your recipients’ email

services. For those who want the technical details, we use the

‘Sender’ field to be consistent with DomainKeys [2], a commonly used

email authentication mechanism. If we didn’t do this, your messages

may get sent to your recipients’ spam folders, which would be worse

than the annoyance the current implementation is causing.

The ideal (but non-trivial) fix is to enable you to send mail through

your own ISP, while still allowing you to use the Gmail user

interface. This is the feature I mentioned above, and the one we’re

working on now.

I’m looking forward to see this problem fixed. I’d really love to manage all my email accounts from a single “online” place.

There’s no upgrade option if you want to upgrade from Vista 32bit to Windows 7 64bit, so I’ll need to do a clean install. These are the apps and tools I’ll need to install:

• Visual Studio 2008
  • ReSharper
  • ViEmu
  • TestDriven.NET
  • Visual Studio Tools for Silverlight 3
    • Silverlight Toolkit
  • ASP.NET MVC 1.0
  • Xceed Components
  • Report Sharp Shooter
• SQL Server
  • SQL Server 2008
  • SQL Server 2005 Express
• Virtual PC 2007 (I have to check if I can use the Windows 7 Virtual PC)
• Subversion / TortoiseSVN
• Office 2007
• Mozilla Firefox 3.5 (or maybe version 3.0 or wait to 3.5.1)
• DBDesc
• Picassa 3
• Skype
• SlimTimer
• HP MediaSmart Connector
• TweetDeck
• vim
• Spotify
• Putty
• 7-Zip
• Windows Live Writer
• Paint.NET
• FoxIt Reader
• UltaVNC

On top of this I need to add the appropriate licenses and configure the apps. I’m afraid I’ll have to wait until the weekend…

I use Picasa as my photo management software. It’s a great application (Note to self: I should write a review).

It’s been working flawlessly for years, but it lost all my albums and photos today. I opened it and to my surprise, it only showed one folder. I checked Tools –> Folder Manager and the right folders where selected.

It seems that Picasa’s internal database sometimes gets corrupted. The solution Google offers in their FAQ is to rebuild the database. These are the steps to do it on Windows:

1. First, uninstall Picasa.
   1. Click on the Start menu on your computer taskbar.
   2. Select All Programs.
   3. Select Picasa 3.
   4. Select Uninstall.
   5. In the confirmation window that opens, click the Uninstall button.
   6. Click the Yes button to remove your database.
2. Once you’ve successfully uninstalled, you can download and reinstall Picasa by visiting http://www.picasa.google.com.

However I use another solution. I located the Picasa settings files stored in two folders:

C:\Users\Jose\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2
C:\Users\Jose\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2Albums

So I went to my Windows Home Server and opened the last backup. It mounted my backed up C:\ drive as a new drive and I simply copied those folders to my machine. Opened Picasa again and all my albums were there again. Cool!

So, if you happen to have a backup of your Windows user profile folder, you can easily solve this problem by  restoring the appropriate folders instead of uninstalling, installing and reconfiguring Picasa.

Today I needed to format an old hard drive to FAT32. I needed to connect this drive to my TV set and it only accepts FAT32 drives.

First I tried to right click the drive in Windows 7 and selected the Format option. Unfortunately it only let me choose NTFS and exFAT. Ummm, maybe exFAT is compatible with FAT32… IT IS NOT!

So I reboot to my old XP partition and tried it there. FAT32 was not there. Then I tried using the Disk management tool. No luck either, no trace of FAT32.

Switched to the command-line and typed:

format /?

And there it was. The switch /FS:FAT32 is what I was looking for. So I typed confident:

format H:/FS:FAT32

It started formatting the drive. After a while (an hour?) it end formatting and displayed the message:

Volume size too big.

What!?!?!

So I googled around and found a solution from a third-party app. I’d preferred not to install any app to just format a drive but I had already wasted enough time. Hope this post saves you some time.

The tool is called CompuApps SwissKnife v.3 (* Linked to a download site as their website seems to be offline). It enabled the full 80GB drive in FAT32

If you’re like me, you always carry a pen drive in your key chain. My pen drive contains some utilities, pictures and sometimes sensible business information. For example, sometimes I grab a database backup from a customer database to do some work. This database contains private medical data so if I loose my pen drive and someone exposes that data I could be in great trouble.

Fortunately, some time ago I discovered a great Open Source project called TrueCrypt. It creates a container, which is just a encrypted file, that can be mounted as a virtual drive. This way, once you’ve mounted the file, you access your files as usual from the new drive. It even allows other apps to work seamlessly. So for example if you open a video with Windows Media, the file is decrypted on the fly as WM requests more data.

Besides this, the best feature to me is that it doesn’t requires to be installed, so when you plug in your USB drive in an insecure computer, you can launch TrueCrypt from your pen drive, mount the file and start using it without installing anything in the computer. Truecrypt doesn’t writes temporal data to the hard drive, everything is done in RAM.

It has many more features like encrypting a whole drive, including the system drive, but I have not used them yet.