Ages ago I started writing an article about things that Windows should blatantly steal for Windows 7.  I never actually finished it, which is why I’ve never published it here, but one of the list I’ve wanted for ages is Virtual Desktops, similar to Linux.

Well, there’s a small freeware (€10 for commercial use) application called “Dexpot” which pretty much does just that.  Almost exactly what it says on the tin, in fact.  It even lets you customise the desktop icons of the running programs too.  Pretty cool.

Oh and for those of you running Windows NT 4 or 2000 still (and why not - they still work), you’ll be glad to know that Dexpot is happy running on both those operating systems 

Originally started by Kevin Lawton, the bochs project - whose motto is “Think inside the bochs” - maintains the bochs emulator. Bochs aims to emulate - at a reasonable speed and with a fair degree of accuracy - an x86-based 32-bit PC with the AMD 64-bit extensions. It can run most operating systems inside it (as “guest operating systems”, if you prefer the VMWare term), such as Windows (3.1, 95, Vista…), Linux, Minix or one of the BSDs. (They even collect disk images as well). In addition, Bochs also runs on loads of operating systems as well - Windows, BeOS, OSX, Irix, Solaris… (more…)

Last night I had a hankering to watch the excellent Danny Kaye movie The Court Jester again. Hence the title: “Plan one,” says Basil Rathbone’s fiendish Ravenhurst: “The untimely demise of my lords Brockhurst, Finsdale, and Pertwee.” “Three for tonight,” Kaye replies, in his hypnotic state. “Proceed.”

Well, here’s my three for tonight: kind of in response to Cracked’s rather wonderful Tech Zombies: 6 technologies that don’t know they’re dead (and hey - I use the phonebook frequently), here’s three that ought to be dead.

dot Net

Java

Flash

So there you are - my opinion on why three widely-used technologies should be taken out the back and shot. What do you think?

Filezilla is pretty well known as an ftp client, but the project also includes an FTP server.

Currently available for Windows only, the server has a few advantages over the IIS ftp service:

• Security
  The Filezilla interface is not tied into the Active Directory structure. While this may make some Windows admins groan, this does eliminate one potential source of compromises and intrusions, as it means that guessing a password on the ftp service doesn’t automatically give you a password for the actual machine that it’s running on.

• Configuration
  Configuration using Filezilla’s GUI is a bit hard to do at first, but the groups method is powerful. For example, define a group whose home directory is c:\ftp\:u, and then just create a directory of the same name as the user inside the c:\ftp directory (e.g. c:\ftp\simon.collis) and you put the user in that group, and they have a bespoke home directory - and they can’t do “cd ..” to get to other people’s home directories either, which can happen with IIS if you’re not careful!

• Virtual file system
  Unlike IIS, aliases show up in directory listings by default. You can also add other directories and map them - using my C:\ftp alias as above, to create a directory called shared everyone can see, simply add it in somewhere else - let’s say its real location is d:\ftp_shared. Add that in - either to the user or the group - and alias it to c:\ftp\shared. Now that directory shows up in the listings, and can be used just as if it were real. This is my only gripe, actually - that aliases are real directory names, not virtual ones. Makes working out what the filing system will be a bit confusing.

• Bandwidth throttling
  Filezilla can limit the bandwidth used by everyone, by a group, or by a user, for upload and download. So you can have “normal” users with a smaller limit, premium users with higher limits, and an admin with no limit at all! Of course, in IIS bandwidth throttling affects your websites as well - not the way to go about it if you’re trying to hosts websites on a server where more than one person will need to ftp in and out. This won’t be an issue for everybody, of course, and I’m sure there are those IIS experts who will say “just edit the metabase and everything will be fine”. Of course it will - but there’s only one global limit for IIS, not the user-level granularity you can have with Filezilla.

Filezilla users dialog: not eye candy, just well thought-out

In conclusion, if you’re looking for an alternative to IIS’s ftp service, not only is Filezilla robust and secure (I know of at least one production site making heavy use of it on a daily basis), the price is right and the feature set is probably just what the doctor ordered!

(PS: I’m thinking about doing this every Friday - highlight a piece of free or open source software I think you’ll find useful or enjoyable. Is that a good idea or not? Let me know in the comments…)

If you’ll remember, a while ago I had a bad experience with Windows Vista Service Pack 1, release candidate 1.

Well, it certainly seems that Microsoft did quite a bit of work following that release candidate.

Since SP1 isn’t yet available via Windows Update, so I had to go through the standalone installer route (I’ll tell you where to get them later).  But first let me give you a little bit of background as to why I decided to give it another go.

Vista was starting to run really slowly.  REALLY slowly.  In fact, nearly a month after removing the release candidate of SP1, it was again unusable.  Fortunately for me, I’d backed the machine up with Norton Ghost (disclaimer: that’s an affiliate link, before you ask), so my first job was to back everything up to my external drive.

I then got out the old trusty Windows 98 bootdisk and wiped all the partitions except my clunky Vista install.  I then created a 32GB FAT32 partition and copied the Ghost image files to that.  Then I rolled back to a Vista backup from January 2008 (well, I’m skipping a step - I went back to XP for 24 hours.  I’ll tell you why I decided not to stay that way at a later date).

The installers took a long while to download, and the installation took about an hour.  It was fairly straightforward: next, next, next, next, ok, I agree, etc.  And even though it said not to run anything during installation, it didn’t complain about Spider Solitaire

So what’s the outcome?

Not much has changed, except I have a solid computer again.  It does feel slightly faster - not much, I have to admit: the short time I spent back on XP felt faster for a while - but it does feel more reliable.

Most of the actual improvements - UEFI support, cryptographic improvements,

But file copy performance?  Seems a bit quicker, but then I usually use Directory Opus anyway, and I suspect some of those improvements will be in Windows Explorer.

As for the numerous minor tweaks made, and delays they’ve removed, I suspect they all go towards a psychological feeling things are working quicker - and they certainly seem to be to me - so it’s all good.

So the verdict?  No marks for RC1, but for the full release - I’d say seven out of ten.  Maybe it didn’t have all the performance improvements they were touting, but it’s worth the time and effort.

If you want to get hold of the standalone installers yourself, you can download the five-language standalone installer for 32-bit or 64-bit Vista (they’re 434MB and 726MB respectively, and cover English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese), or the all language version, again available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions (these are 544MB and 873MB).  Alternatively, if you’ve got a lot of PCs in your firm that will need updating, you can get the installer discs - there’s a 544MB ISO image for 32-bit PCs, as well as a 1418MB DVD ISO for both 32 and 64 bit versions.