Microsoft | Technology Tales

Command line mapping of network drives

5^th September 2007

Mapping network drives on Windows usually involves shuffling through Explorer menus. There is another way that I consider to be neater: using the Windows command line ("DOS" to some). The basic command for creating a mapping goes like this:

net use w: \\yourserver.address

To ensure persistence of the mapping across different Windows sessions, use this:

net use w: \\yourserver.address /persistent:yes

Here's how to set up a mapping that logs in as a different user:

net use w: \\yourserver.address password /user:you

The above can include domain information as well, and in a number of different forms: domain\username is one.

To delete a mapping, try this:

net use w: /delete

List all existing mappings:

net use

This is a flavour of what is available, and Microsoft does provide documentation. Issuing the following command will bring some of that on the command line:

net help use

HAL.DLL: a roadblock on the resurrection of a poorly PC

2^nd August 2007

My PC is very poorly at the moment and Windows XP re-installation is the prescribed course of action. However, I have getting errors reporting missing or damaged HAL.DLL at the first reboot of the system during installation. I thought that there might be hard disk confusion and so unplugged all but the Windows boot drive. That only gave me an error about hard drives not being set up properly. Thankfully, a quick outing on Google turned up a few ideas. I should really have started with Microsoft, since they have an article on the problem. About.com has also got something to offer on the subject and seems to be a good resource on installing XP to boot: I had forgotten how to do a repair installation and couldn't find the place in the installation menus. In any event, a complete refresh should be a good thing in the long run, even if it will be a very disruptive process. While I did consider moving to Vista at that point, bringing XP back online seemed the quickest route to getting things back together again. Strangely, I feel like a fish out of water right now, but that'll soon change...

Update: It was, in fact, my boot.ini that was causing this and replacement of the existing contents with defaults resolved the problem...

Ditching PC Plus?

28^th June 2007

When I start to lose interest in the features in a magazine that I regularly buy, then it's a matter of time before I stop buying the magazine altogether. Such a predicament is facing PC Plus, a magazine that I have been buying every month over the last ten years. The fate has already befallen titles like Web Designer, Amateur Photographer and Trail, all of which I now buy sporadically.

Returning to PC Plus, I get the impression that it feels more of a lightweight these days. Over the last decade, Future Publishing has been adding titles to its portfolio that take actually from its long-established stalwart. Both Linux Format and .Net are two that come to mind, while there are titles covering Windows Vista and computer music as well. In short, there may be sense in having just a single title for all things computing.

Being a sucker for punishment, I did pick up this month's PC Plus, only for the issue to be as good an example of the malaise as any. Reviews, once a mainstay of the title, are now less prominent than they were. In place of comparison tests, we now find discussions of topics like hardware acceleration, with some reviews mixed in. Topics such as robotics and artificial intelligence do rear their heads in feature articles, when I cannot say that I have a great deal of time for such futurology. The section containing tutorials remains, even if it has been hived off into a separate mini-magazine, and seemingly fails to escape the lightweight revolution.

All this is leading me to dump PC Plus in favour of PC Pro from Dennis Publishing. This feels reassuringly more heavyweight and, while the basic format has remained unchanged over the years, it still managed to remain fresh. Reviews, of both software and hardware, are very much in evidence while it manages to have those value-adding feature articles; this month, digital photography and rip-off Britain come under the spotlight. Add the Real Word Computing section, and it all makes a good read in these times of behemoths like Microsoft, Apple and Adobe delivering new things on the technology front. While I don't know if I have changed, PC Pro does seem better than PC Plus these days.

IE6 and JavaScript performance

22^nd June 2007

Having been exposed to an application at work that uses a lot of JavaScript, I fully appreciate what some mean when they discuss IE6's inefficient handling of JavaScript. After seeing a web page taking an age to reload and your CPU taking a hammering because of JavaScript processing, the penny does tend to drop...

Needless to say, this very much impacts the world of AJAX-driven web applications with their heavy dependence on client-side JavaScript. While IE7 does come to the rescue, there remain plenty of IE6 users still out there, and this is reflected in website statistics. This demonstrates a certain level of inertia in the browser market that not only afflicts the uptake of IE7 but also the likes of Mozilla, Opera and Safari. It also means that anyone developing AJAX applications very much needs to continue testing in IE6, especially if the product of their labours is for wider public use.

An example of such an application is Zimbra, an open-source web application for messaging and collaboration, and the people behind it have generously shared the results of their browser performance benchmarking. They did comparisons of IE6 vs. IE7 and Firefox 2 vs. IE7. IE6 easily came out as the worst of these, while Firefox 2 was the best.

The next question to be asked could centre around the type of code that is processed inefficiently by IE6. While I wouldn't be at all surprised if a list emerged, here's one: using Microsoft's proprietary innerHTML object to update the DOM for a web page format. Having a quick trawl on Google, this came up for mention as a cause of memory leaks. It is also a Microsoft innovation that never got taken up by those overseeing web standards, hardly a surprise since a spot of DOM scripting achieves the same end. It may be faster to code than any alternatives, and it does have some support from other browsers, but it does seem to have got a bad name, so it should be avoided if possible. That said, it would be interesting to see a performance comparison between innerHTML and DOM methods in IE6.

Exploring AJAX

7^th June 2007

When I started it, my online photo gallery started out simply as a set of interlinked HTML pages. Over time, I discovered frames (yes, them!) and started to make use of JavaScript to make the slideshows slicker. In those days, I was working off free webspace provided by my ISP and client-side scripting was the only tool that I had for enhancing functionality. Having tired of the vagaries of client-side scripting while the browser wars were in full swing and incompatibilities reigned supreme, I went with paid hosting to get access to tools like Perl and PHP for server-side processing. Because their flexibility compared to JavaScript was a breath of fresh air to me, I am still a fan of the server-side approach.

The journey that I have just described is one that I now know was followed by many website builders around the same time. Nevertheless, I have still held on to JavaScript for some things, particularly for updating the DOM as part of making the pages more responsive to user interaction. In the last few years, a hybrid approach has been gaining currency: AJAX. This offers the ability to modify parts of a page without needing to reload the whole thing, generating a considerable amount of interest among web application developers.

The world of AJAX is evidently a complex one, though the underlying principle can be explained in simple terms. The essential idea is that you use JavaScript to call a server-side script, PHP is as good an example as any, that returns either text or XML that can be used to update part of a web page in situ without the need to reload it as per the traditional way of working. It has opened up so many possibilities from the interface design point of view that AJAX became a hot topic that still receives much attention today. One bugbear is efficiency because I have seen an AJAX application lock up a PC with a little help from IE6. There will always remain times when server-side processing is the best route, even if that needs to be balanced against the client-side approach.

Like its forbear DHTML, AJAX is really a development approach using a number of different technologies in combination. The DHTML elements such as (X)HTML, CSS, DOM and JavaScript are very much part of the AJAX world but server-side elements such as HTTP, PHP, MySQL and XML are also very much part of the fabric of the landscape. In fact, while AJAX can use plain text as the transfer format, XML is the one implied by the AJAX acronym and XSLT is used to transform XML into HTML. However, AJAX is not limited to the aforementioned technologies; for instance, I cannot see why Perl cannot play a role in place of PHP and ASP, both of which can be used for the same things.

Even in these standards-compliant days, browser support for AJAX remains diverse, to say the least, and it is akin to having MSIE in one corner and the rest in the other. Mind you, Microsoft did introduce the tools in the first place only for them to use ActiveX, while Mozilla created a new object type rather than continue this method of operation. Given that ActiveX is a Windows-only technology, I can see why Mozilla did what they did, and it is a sensible decision. In fact, IE7 appears to have picked up the Mozilla way of doing things.

Even with the apparent convergence, there will continue to be a need for the AJAX JavaScript libraries that are currently out there. Incidentally, Adobe has included one called Spry with Dreamweaver CS3. Nevertheless, I still like to find out how things work at the basic level and feel somewhat obstructed when I cannot do this. I remember perusing Wrox’s Professional AJAX and found the constant references to the associated function library rather grating; the writing style didn’t help either.

My taking a more granular approach has got me reading SAMS Teach Yourself AJAX in 10 Minutes as a means for getting my foot in the door. As with their Teach Yourself … in 24 Hours series, the title is a little misleading since there are 22 lessons of 10 minutes in duration (the 24 Hours moniker refers to there being 24 lessons, each of one hour in length). Anything composed of 10-minute lessons, even 22 of them, is never going to be comprehensive but, as a means for getting started, I have to say that the approach seems effective based on this volume. It has certainly whetted my appetite for giving AJAX a go, and it’ll be interesting to see how things progress from here.

Windows Sysinternals

5^th June 2007

In an earlier post, I wondered about command line management of Windows processes. Well, I have since located the sort of tools that I was after as part of the Windows Sysinternals toolkit. It began as an independent endeavour and continued as such until Microsoft acquired them in 2006. You can find out more about the process utilities here, and the whole Sysinternals suite can be downloaded in a single package.

Outdoors enthuasiasts blogging in the U.K.

10^th May 2007

What we call walking or hillwalking in the U.K. goes under the banners of hiking, tramping and yomping in other parts of the world. One term that we share with other parts is backpacking and this is much bigger in the U.S. than it is in the U.K. My hillwalking blog has come to the attention of members of the hillwalking and backpacking community and WordPress’s logging of who visited my blog has alerted me to this and allowed to find other similar blogs.

Why have I mentioned this here? The reason is that it has allowed me to see what blogging software others have been using. Blogger seems to be a very popular choice with a number using Windows Live Spaces, in the process making me aware that Microsoft has dipped its toes into the hosted blogs space. Other than this, I have also seen Typepad being used and one or two self-hosted operations to boot, mine included. Intriguingly, I have yet to encounter a fellow hillwalking fan in the U.K. using WordPress.com to host a hill blog, but I do know of a German backpacker having one. Video blogging is used by some, with the ever pervasive YouTube becoming a staple for this, at least for the ones that I have seen.

It’s an intriguing survey that leaves me to wonder how things develop…

Twin-pane Windows file managers

7^th May 2007

When Microsoft moved away from its two pane file manager with the advent of Windows 95, I was one of those who thought it to be a retrograde step. While two Windows Explorer instances can be tiled on a desktop, the old two-pane paradigm still has its uses and there are third party purveyors of such things. Salamander from ALTAP is one such option, as is SpeedProject's SpeedCommander. While I have been using the latter for most of a year now and would gladly pay for it but for the fact that SpeedProject's payment system isn't working. It's just as well that the demo continues to function fully following the expiry of its evaluation period. It even takes the twin pane paradigm further by adding sub-panes within each of these, but that isn't all to this major update to the Norton Commander concept. Recently, I downloaded the free version of Salamander to have a look and, though basic, it does a lot of what I ask of it, so I might continue to see how it performs and may even evaluate the commercial version to see how it goes.

More on Office 2007

31^st March 2007

Since today was to have been the last day of my Office 2007 trial, I headed over to Amazon.co.uk at the start of the week to bag both Office Home and Student 2007 and Outlook 2007. Both arrived yesterday, so I set to ridding my system of all things Office before adding the new software. So the 2007 trial had to go, as did Office XP and any reference to Office 97; Office XP was an upgrade. From this, you might think that I am on a five-year upgrade cycle for Office, and it certainly does appear that way though Office 95 was the first version that I had on a PC; it came with my then more than acceptable Dell Dimension XPS133 (Pentium 133, 16MB RAM, 1.6GB hard drive… it all looks so historical now).

Returning to the present, the 2007 installations went well and all was well with my system. Curiously, Microsoft seems to label the components of Office Home and Student “non-commercial use”. While I accept that the licence is that way inclined, they could be a little more subtle than to go emblazoning the application title bars with the said wording. Nevertheless, I suppose that it is a minor irritation when you consider that you are allowed a three machine licence for what are the full versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. It must be the presence of OpenOffice on the scene that is inducing such benevolence.

Curiously, Outlook isn’t included in Office Home and Student, hence my getting the full version of the application separately. That means that there is no nefarious wording about the purpose for which it should be used. While on the subject of Outlook, my purge of previous Office versions thankfully didn’t rid my system of the PST files that I was using with Outlook 2007’s predecessors. In fact, the new version just picked up where its predecessors had left off without any further ado. As I have been getting used to the new interface, changed from Outlook 2002 but not as dramatically as the likes of Word, Excel or PowerPoint, there is a certain amount of continuation from what has gone before in any case. The three-pane window is new to me as I never encountered Outlook 2003 and that may explain why it took a little time to find a few things. An example is that all calenders appear in the same place when I had expected the association between calenders and their PST files to be retained. Nevertheless, it is not at all a bad way to do things, but it does throw you when you first encounter it. Its RSS feed reader is a nice touch, as are the translucent pop-ups that appear when a new message arrives; that tells you the title and the sender so you can decide whether to read it without so much as having to look at it and interrupt what you are doing.

In a nutshell, all seems well with Office 2007 on my machine, and I am set up to go forward without the headache of an upgrade cycle since I have recommenced from a clean slate. Though I have heard of some problems with Office 2007 on Windows Vista, I am running Windows XP and I have had no problems so far. In fact, I plan to sit out the Vista saga for a while to see how things develop and, who knows, I might even not bother with Vista at all and go for Vienna, its replacement due in 2009/2010, since XP support is to continue for a good while yet.

Is Windows 2000 support finished?

30^th March 2007

At work, we still use Windows 2000 on our desktop and laptop PC’s. This may (or may not) surprise you, but the XP upgrade seems to have been thought a premature move, only for Vista to turn up later than might have been expected. Now that Microsoft is winding down support for Windows 2000, thoughts have started to turn to a Vista upgrade, but the realisation soon dawned that a move to Vista was a major one, and it now looks as if we will be on Windows 2000 for a little while yet, until 2008 at least.

I, too, have Windows 2000 lurking around at home as a testing platform, not a work copy I hasten to add, and software vendors increasingly are not supporting the operating system any more. Symantec is one of these, with the 2006 versions of its products being the last ones to support Windows 2000. Initially, I was left with the impression that Kaspersky was the same, but this does not seem to be the case. While the open-source community can continue their supply of productivity applications such as OpenOffice, the GIMP and so on, it is the security side that is of most concern as regards the future of Windows 2000. That said, its successors are not the prime targets for cracking, but shared code could mean that it falls foul of the same exploits.

I have yet to notice it with the hardware that I am using, but hardware advances may yet put paid to Windows 2000 like they did to members of the Windows 9x line, especially when you consider that the operating system dates from 1999. Then again, you may find that you don’t need the latest hardware, so this might not affect you. This is not all that unreasonable given that the pace of technological progress is less frenzied these days than it was in the nineties, when Windows 95 was more or less out of date by the turn of the millennium. Having the gold OEM version of Windows 95 as the basis for a Windows 9x upgrade treadmill meant that my move into the world of NT-based operating systems was a clean break with a full version of my new operating system and not its upgrade edition.

Nevertheless, there remains a feeling that Windows 2000 is being cut off prematurely and that it could last a while longer with a bit of support, even if there is a feel of the late nineties about the thing. After all, Windows 2000 probably still supports a lot of what people want to do and without the Big Brother tendencies of Vista too.

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