This is just a quick tip for anyone that uses VNC, expecially on Linux.  This works in TightVNC and maybe others too, it might be a VNC standard.  When using the VNC viewer or client on Windows, you can right click on the title bar of the window to get some extra options, like sending Ctrl-Alt-Del to the host to log into a Windows box.  When using this on Linux, right clicking on the title bar had no effect.  Uh oh, how was I going to login to my Windows box?  Well, I found that F8 will bring up the menu and allow you to do various things, including sending keystrokes to the host you are connected to.  So, there you have it.  When in doubt, try F8 when using the VNC viewer.

I wanted to share something that I observed recently on my own PC.  I am running Vista Home Premium, it came on my Alienware box.  I had some directories shared so I could hit them from some of my other PC’s, and the share names had underscores (_) in them.  Well, I recently installed Vista’s SP1 and afterwards, I noticed that my network shares were not working.  Hmm, that’s strange.  Skip ahead and what I found out was that after the SP1 install, my share names were renamed to the same thing, only without the underscore.  Well now, how about that?  So I had something like share_name, and then it became sharename without me changing it.  Not that big of a deal, but I thought I would share just in case anyone else was having the same troubles.

It appears that if you are running Windows XP Service Pack 3 and using ZoneAlarm firewall software, when you install patch KB951748 (MS08-037) that came out yesterday’s “patch Tuesday” bunch, it breaks ZoneAlarm. You cannot access the Internet until you either uninstall the patch or turn off ZoneAlarm. This patch is related to the DNS poisoning exploit that came out recently, so it should be applied. What to do? Well, one suggested workaround (other than the two mentioned above) was to lower the security settings to medium in ZoneAlarm. At least then you don’t have to disable it entirely. Another suggested fix has been to leave ZoneAlarm at High and set the Internet Security Zone to Custom and add the following rule “Allow outgoing TCP Ports:80,443″. I cannot verify that these fixes work, I don’t use ZoneAlarm myself, but others hit by this problem have had success with them.

Here is the Microsoft link with information about the patch:

http://www.microsoft.com/ … /ms08-037.mspx

Here is the official link from ZoneAlarm about the problem:

http://download.zonealarm.com/ … /LossOfInternetAccessIssue.html

I have been checking out ways to do things easier and faster, plus just plain get around faster in Windows. I have been putting together a list of shortcuts that are handy to have and I thought I would share them with everyone! As I find more I’ll be adding to the list, so check it now and then. For now I have a pretty good start I think, so go take a look …

Have you ever wanted to add an option to that ornery right click context menu so you could open whatever file you just clicked on with whatever the heck you please? I know I have, and here is a quick tip to do just that! Whether it’s your favorite text editor, or another app that you want for some reason, you can easily add an Open With option to the context menu by modifying and then importing this registry file.

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Here is a tip that may help some of you out there that are working with Windows and Internet Explorer, which can get kind of quirky at times. I don’t know about any of you, but I have found it rather annoying that I can’t download Internet Explorer 6 from Microsoft’s website, other than the online installer that downloads as part of the install. Well, here is a way to use that installer to download the source files so you can perform an off-line installation, which has been useful for me sometimes.

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