W32Dasm is a Windows 32-bit (Win32) disassembler. What it does is display the programs routines in assembly code, which makes it easier for you to trace what the software is doing.

I like to use this software every once in a while, but recently I found there were no decent sources for this software.

However, I soon located a copy that I had on my computer from a while back, in a directory named “w32ds893″.

The help file details a website which appears to be down, but there is an archived version.

http://www.expage.com/page/w32dasm

This takes you to another now defunct site, which is also archived:

members.home.net/w32dasm/

As you can see from that page you can download w32dasm v8.7 as w32ds87.zip, but not the latest version.

I’ve uploaded w32ds893.zip for you. This contains “W32DSM89.EXE“, which is the latest version.

I don’t know where this was originally sourced from, but I know it works fine.

Note: If you have any questions or know of any updates, please feel free to add a comment below. Thanks.

Quite a few months back I was looking for an application that could sit on my desktop and tell me instantly if any of my servers had stopped responding by ping.

There’s probably hundreds of ways of monitoring services, including paid for web services such as Pingdom, and open source software that runs on your web server such as Nagios. None of them really hit the spot for the services I wanted to monitor, or they were expensive.

A quick and easy way to monitor services that was fairly non-intrusive was what I wanted. Enough detail to tell you that a server was unreachable by ping and when it happened.

Pingotron seemed ideal…

Pingotron is a computer program for controlling and monitoring network devices, such as computers, network printers, routers and other devices, on TCP/IP networks. The program has two versions: Pingotron (basic) and Pingotron PRO.

A list of desired hosts that you wish to control are entered into the program.

The program sends ICMP “echo request” packets to each host and listens for ICMP “echo response” replies. Various properties (ping interval, size of packet, time-out request) can be configured for each host. The program can notify an administrator when a problem arises with any host with an alert sound, e-mail, blinking tray notification and/or network notification. The PRO version has an alarm history log feature, alarm statistics, and ping history and ping statistics for all hosts, in addition, it has a multi-user mode.

I started to use it, however, straight away I came across an odd issue which seemed to only affect the DG834 series routers.

The software reported the ping response from these routers as an “unknown response”, while in windows regular ping, they responded just fine.

It was clear that the software seemed to think that the response was malformed, perhaps it wass, however regular windows ping does not.

I emailed the details over to the author via the support email address. I got a response the same day.

Anatoly Dobrinin fixed the bug, provided me with the latest PRO version download and a valid serial number to register it as a full version.

What a great author! I was impressed. Sure I would never have paid for this software, as there were clearly free solutions, so this was great!

This was last year in 2008. This year, I find that if you visit Pingotron.com you find yourself at some kind of ad filled domain parking page. Fortunately you can still find an archived copy of Pingotron.com in the web archive.

Update: As Pingotron appears to be no more I have decided to share my resources…

Hello,

Thank you for your message.

This bug has been fixed today.

Please download and install the program again.

You can download the program here:

http://www.pingotron.com/setup_pro.zip

You can use this registration code to register  the pro version:

EET4-3EZS-VTK0-M0U7

Best regards,
Anatoly Dobrinin

Note: If Anatoly would like me to remove this, feel free to contact me.

A copy of setup_pro.zip can be found on megaupload.

Further Update: I had another issue that I tried to report, but since pingotron.com is unreachable, nothing can be done about it.

It wasn’t a major issue. The issue was that sometimes when explorer crashes, the Pingotron icon does not reappear in the system tray.

There was no way to recover the icon or window, without killing the “Pingotron.exe” and restarting it. Running “Pingotron.exe” again would only give you the error “The program is already running!”.

I solved this by writing a script using AutoIT which would Check if the Pingotron window exists, restore it, otherwise run “Pingotron.exe”. I called it Start Pingotron.

Anyway, since Pingotron is clearly no longer in active development, I am wondering is there’s anything else to use instead. Any ideas? Let me know.

Perhaps I’ll just end up writing my own service instead…

However, you may soon find yourself with a font overload. The problem is that once you get over about 1000 fonts in your Windows directory (usually “C:\Windows\Fonts\”) you’ll find that windows becomes very slow, particularly at startup.

To get around this, you don’t add the fonts to Windows, instead you add them into Photoshop, which is able to handle many more fonts than simply loading them into Windows.

The trick is to put them into the Adobe common fonts folder under program files (usually “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Fonts\”).

You can get to this directory by going to Start > Run and issuing the following:

%ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Adobe\Fonts

This should bring you to a directory called “fonts”, place your fonts in here and they will be loaded when Photoshop loads.

The more fonts you put in here, the longer Adobe Photoshop will take to load, however, Windows will perform a lot better overall this way.

If you’re downloading fonts from dafont.com like me, you’ll find that you’ll need to extract them from the zip file before you place them into this directory, although to most people that should be obvious.

You don’t have to reload Photoshop for the new font to start working, it should appear in the drop down menu straight away.

I had to do this the other day for the first time in ages on a new machine I had setup Adobe Photoshop CS3 on. I realised that I had forgotten the details! Once I had reminded myself I figured I would write it up here for future reference.

This should work on any version of Photoshop above 5.5, including Photoshop 6, 7, CS, CS2, CS3 and CS4.

Hope this helps!

It started when I helped improve an article on “Icon Editors“, but because it lacked notability on its own, it was merged with the parent “Computer icon” article.

The list of “Icon Editor Software” then became a “List of icon software“.

So far, the list contains: @icon sushi, Axialis IconWorkshop, Greenfish Icon Editor Pro, IcoFX, IconBuilder, IconEdit2, Microangelo Toolset and RealWorld Icon Editor.

My favorite icon software for Windows is Microangelo Toolset, but since this is expensive, I’d probably likely use a freeware alternative such as IcoFX, since there’s no decent open source alternative yet. However, I have yet to try out @icon sushi and many of the others.

I am looking to expand the list, so if you know anything about icon software and can provide notability (such as a professional written review or tutorial) for it, that would be very useful.

The best reference for icon software I could find was an article called “Create your own icons” written by Karl Hodge (who often writes for one of my favorite magazines – .net magazine).

Although contributing to Wikipedia is satisfying, I can’t help but think that I’ve wasted far too much time on this, and I wouldn’t like to think my efforts are totally futile so perhaps one day an online magazine such as SmashingMagazine will use it as a base to review of all the popular icon software out there or perhaps even credit me for the content suggestion and it will have all been worth while.

Your feedback is welcomed.

When installing a new application, they sometimes require you to restart for them to work, often just restarting the Windows explorer shell will be sufficient for it to work as expected.

Normally most people just kill it via Task Manager, but this can have adverse effects on your system (such as data loss), so here’s how to do it properly:

1. Go to Start -> “Turn Off Computer”
2. At the “Turn off computer” window, hold down CTRL+ALT+SHIFT and click on “Cancel”.
   • When this is done, explorer should cleanly exit and your start menu will have gone.
3. Hit CTRL+SHIFT+ESC to open Task Manager.
4. Go to File -> “New Task (Run…)”.
5. Enter: “explorer” in the “Open” box, and press OK.
   • If your start menu appears, explorer has restarted successfully, otherwise try again or reboot.

Enjoy!

It’s not a major problem for me as an individual because I never use WIN32 PHP in production, but for development and for the purpose of wide distribution it can raise an issue.

Apparently the lack of support in win32 is due to the lack of “res_search” in “bindlib_w32″, I’m surprised this hasn’t been fixed already.

The official PHP.net documentation for the getmxrr() function states:

Note: This function is not implemented on Windows platforms. Try the » PEAR class » Net_DNS.

However, there are problems with this suggestion…

1. Some users don’t have access to install the required PEAR module.
2. pear/Net_DNS requires PHP extension “mhash” – some users may not have this installed.
3. The Net_DNS class does not have a direct equivalent to getmxrr() so results may not be as expected.
4. It’s not a portable solution, especially if some users experience the above issues.

This isn’t going to be a realistic option for many users.

So, what are the alternatives? Do they have any issues?

1. Use exec() in conjunction with “nslookup.exe“.
   • When safe mode is enabled, you can only execute files within the safe_mode_exec_dir. For practical reasons, it is currently not allowed to have .. components in the path to the executable.
   • “nslookup.exe” may not exist on the system.
   • PHP may not have permission to run “nslookup.exe”.
2. Write your own class/function to fsockopen() via UDP to a name server and parse the returned information.
   • Long and overly complex.
   • Requires understanding of the DNS related RFCs.
   • Reinventing the wheel, as Net_DNS already handles this.
   • Results may not be as expected.
3. Fix the implementation problem in PHP core.
   • Not very simple to implement.
   • May be a complex issue.
   • Not backwards compatible.

I think the obvious option here is to run with the first option of using “nslookup” and hope for the best.

With any luck you will find the “getmxrr() support for Windows” function in on the getmxrr() manual page (find the latest here).

NEWS FLASH!

As I write this, and go over the article again, check my links, I see an update on the PHP Bug #5311 tracker:

As a new year present, all DNS functions are now available on windows,
5.3 and 6 (head).

This is good news, all that remains is for PHP_Compat to catch up and use the above suggestions

Good luck.

Update: I am now helping the PHP_Compat team. View the getmxrr() support for windows feature request.

Update2: I have now decided to support checkdnsrr() as well. Download checkdnsrr() support for windows.

Update3: I have now decided to support dns_get_record() as well. Coming soon.

I went ahead and backed up the entire machine onto my external USB hard drive, no problems.

However when it came to restore to a new vista machine I found myself with the following error:

The restore did not finish successfully. Error code:
The backup file could not be found. Check your hardware configuration or restore from a different backup (0×8100001A).

Through the wonders of the internet I discovered the Microsoft Knowledgebase article appropreately titled “Error message when you use the Restore Files option to restore a backup file on a Windows Vista-based computer: “The restore did not finish successfully. Error code: 0×8100001A”“.

As it turns out I must have deleted the “what seems to be unimportant file” Mediaid.bin which the backup utility places in the root of the backup drive, with no reason or explanation.

I soon learned the importance of this file as usefully (sarcasm) the article says:

If the backup location is inaccessible, or if the Mediaid.bin file is corrupted, contact Microsoft Customer Support Services (CSS) for help rebuilding the Mediaid.bin file.

Great, I’m really not going to be calling them, there must be another way…

Fortunately there was, and so to rebuild the “Mediaid.bin” file these are the steps to take:

1. Download and unzip “sdutil.zip” and rename the containing “sdutil.ex_” to “sdutil.exe”.
2. MOVE “sdutil.exe” to your backup drive. (eg: G:\)
3. Right click on “sdutil.exe” and click “Properties”, click on the “Compatibility” tab at the top, and tick “Run as administrator”, follow the instructions. (If you don’t do this you’ll see “Access is denied. (0×80070005)“)
4. Find the “Catalogs” directory and COPY the “GlobalCatalog.wbcat” to your backup drive (eg: G:\)
5. Go to Start > “Start Search” and enter: cmd, click on the “cmd” program from the list.
6. In the black command prompt window enter your backup drive (eg: G:), press enter, and the prompt will change to “G:\>”
7. Now in that same window type: sdutil mediaid GlobalCatalog.wbcat [backup drive (eg: G:\)]and press enter.

A Mediaid.bin file should now appear on the backup drive and you should be able to continue with your restore as normal.

Note: “sdutil.exe” only runs on Windows Vista, it will not run on Windows XP.

source.

I often find tracking IP addresses to be a difficult task if they do not have a static IP address.

So what can be done to keep track of an IP address?

Generally if I have no reliable solution setup their end, I end up asking them to visit one of the many “what is my IP” websites, and get them to read “the big number”. More often than not they end up on Google some how, and give me a Google IP instead of their own.

Not very reliable.

An idea I came up with was to provide a user with a simple script that would display their IP address in a dialogue window. I made this using a script provided by Microsoft entitled “List the Contents of a Web Page“.

url=”http://whatismyip.akamai.com/”
Set objHTTP = CreateObject(“MSXML2.XMLHTTP”)
Call objHTTP.Open(“GET”, url, FALSE)
objHTTP.Send
WScript.Echo(objHTTP.ResponseText)

Simply place this code into a file named myip.vbs and hand it over to your user. When they run it, it will display their IP address on their screen in a little dialogue box.

You will notice that I have used “whatismyip.akamai.com” as it is probably a lot more reliable than these other “what is my IP address” sites. After all Akamai is a content delivery provider for Microsoft, so you know it’s not going anywhere soon.

These days many broadband ISPs offer the ability to change your IP address to a static one for free of charge, or at least the ones I recommend do.

If they don’t, or if you prefer using a dynamic IP address many routers, (especially the netgear range) are compatible with the DynDNS service.

DynDNS will give you a hostname (eg: you.dnsalias.com) which you can use to match up to your IP address, and update it accordingly each time your IP changes.

Of course DynDNS isn’t the only service of this kind, there’s plenty of other Dynamic DNS services out there. CJB.net, No-IP and ZoneEdit are all well established and reliable services.

The CJB.net dynIP page even offers a list of programs to automatically update your CJB.NET address when your IP address changes.

A similar script to the above can be used to update Dynamic DNS services…

‘ Uncomment this line to use with CJB.net
‘ url=”http://www.cjb.net/cgi-bin/dynip.cgi?username=[username]&password=[password]”
‘ Uncomment this line to use with DynDNS.org
‘ url=”http://[username]:[password]@members.dyndns.org/nic/update?hostname=[yourhostname]”
Set objHTTP = CreateObject(“MSXML2.XMLHTTP”)
Call objHTTP.Open(“GET”, url, FALSE)
objHTTP.Send
‘ Uncomment this line to display the response (debug only)
‘ WScript.Echo(objHTTP.ResponseText)

As you can see you have a choice whether you wish to use cjb.net’s URL or dyndns’s URL, or you can specify your own. You will also notice that the “echo” is commented out so that the update is silent, however you may wish to use this if you’re having problems getting it working so you can display the error response.

Now you can set this script in your scheduler to run every few hours to ensure the IP is up-to-date.

You can adopt these scripting principle to any scripting language, including mIRC.

In the past I have used software such as DynSite, however I can’t justify paying for something that is so simple to do for free.

Outlook Express won’t print.

I log in and take a look. Everything seems normal, and normal documents appear to print.

However, when I click the print button or go to File > Print nothing happens. Strange.

They are running Windows XP Professional SP2, with IE6.

All you have to do is go to Start > Run and issue the following commands:

regsvr32 vbscript.dll
regsvr32 jscript.dll

Once this is done, restart Outlook Express/Internet Explorer, and go ahead and print.

This isn’t the first time i’ve seen this issue, so I thought I’d note it down for next time.

Source

The problem is the moment that I use another application the focus is taken away from the Firefox window and it goes into the background. This is no good as I can no longer see the video.

I decided to investigate a solution that could keep the Mozilla Firefox window “Always on Top”…

Like most people my first port of call was the Mozilla Firefox community, I made a post called “Always on top“, which asked if there was javascript or a plugin somewhere that can force the window to always be on top.

I quickly discovered that there wasn’t going to be any kind of easy way to achieve this using Firefox alone.

What I needed was a third party application, ideally something freeware, or even better open source.

Here’s a short list of what I found:

• Actual Window Manager – $49.95
  • Seems rather expensive for something that should be free.
• Keep On Top – Freeware
  • Very basic, doesn’t really offer anything special
• AbstractPath PowerMenu – Freeware
  • Gives you context menus that offer: Always On Top, Transparency and Minimize To Tray.
• RBTray – Open Source
  • Offers the context menus: My Size, Always On Top, and Minimize To Tray
• WinPin – Open Source
  • Gives you a little pin to the left of your “Minimise” button that will “pin” the window on top.

All in all, I’d say WinPin does the job just fine, if you also want to Minimise to Tray too, try RBTray.