While outside at our house today, I happened to notice a few little strips of paper being blown around by the wind. I didn't pay much attention to it until I started seeing a lot more. I finally found the culprit:

It appears that a bird was building a nest on a ladder that we had propped up against the back of the house. Along with the normal twigs and other natural materials birds normally use for nests, was strips of paper. And not just any random pieces of paper: someone's shredded financial documents. It's pretty obvious that the shredder used to do this job wasn't very effective, and the fact that the shreds were in a place were birds could easily carry them off is fail #2.

This just shows that it is very important to make sure you properly dispose of all important documents that you no longer want to keep. Sure, it would be a rather small chance of a bird building a nest using semi-shredded financial information, that from a couple of strips I found included images of checks, addresses, and I'm sure other personal information somewhere out there since a couple of the pieces had "IRS" on them, in the yard of someone that would use this information for nefarious purposes.

As anyone that has spent time deploying applications in an enterprise environment knows, sometimes software just doesn't work. I guess it's more that the software just doesn't work for non-admin users than anything. My personal thinking is that software should be written in a way that it works at no matter what user level you're running it at. Now, I understand that this isn't always possible, and I'm fine with that. But some applications I've run into in the past, some camera related software that will remain nameless (right, Kodak?), that will not even run under a non-admin user account. The user receives a message that you need to be a local admin in order to use the software, which then promptly closes when you click OK.

Enter LUA Buglight (LUA = Limited User Account). I found out about this handy application while listening to a podcast a few days ago and was really anxious to try it out. This utility allows you to run an application and will generate a log of operations that failed while running as a standard user, but succeeded as an administrator. Pretty slick. This is much better than my old method of running Filemon and Regmon (Processmon now, which will get a blog entry here at some point) and filtering out everything but the application I was testing.

The interface is very simple and easy to use. You begin by selecting the executable you want to test, enter any switches for that application, and then click Start.

When you click Start, you will be prompted to enter two sets of credentials: 1) an account with administrative rights 2) the standard user account you are logged in with. Buglight needs to be run under a standard user account in order to function properly. You will need to provide both sets of credentials so that it is able to run your executable as both an administrative and standard user.

Buglight will now launch the executable you entered in the field and will begin logging. You can stop the logging at any point by clicking on the Stop Logging button. Once you do this, you will be presented with the log of the application execution. This will detail the registry, file, and COM objects that the program tried accessing as a standard user, failed, and was then able to access as an administrator.

You can review the logs and follow the recommendation at the bottom of each tab in order to resolve the issues.

As I haven't had much time to try this out, I think this is definitely going to be a utility that will come in handy and will be very useful in installing and deploying new software packages. If anyone has any feedback or experience with Buglight, I would love to hear about it. Also, be sure to check out blog of the Buglight author, Aaron Margosis.

Remember to thank your SysAdmin on Friday July 31, 2009. This is the 10th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. ThinkGeek.com has some good stuff if you need help buying something nice for them :) .

For anyone that designs, creates, or maintains a website, the question that always seems to come up is "How do I get higher rankings on Google?" While there is not a simple magic bullet that will put your site at #1 overnight, there are numerous tools available from Google and other search engines as well, such as Yahoo to help you design your site to be search engine friendly and (hopefully) improve your search rankings. Here are a few of the tools I've used for a while and highly recommend:

Google Webmaster Central

Google Webmaster Central provides a lot of helpful advice and insight into how Google sees your sites, problems or errors the Googlebot finds when crawling your site, and general advice on how to improve your site. One document I would highly recommend everyone reading, especially those that are new to the idea of SEO is the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF). This guide gives a basic overview of how to design and organize your site and is very informative for beginners.

Google Webmaster Central Youtube Channel

I actually just found this today, which is why I'm writing this article. Matt Cutts is a software engineer at Google and is the star of the Webmaster Central Youtube videos. He responds to questions sent in by people all over the world regarding best practices for SEO and answers some questions about what Google looks for in your site.

Yahoo Site Explorer

I am not as familiar with this tool as I am with the Google Webmaster Central, but this provides basically the same service, except for Yahoo. Even though Google is the king of search engines right now, I would still recommend checking this tool out as well to see how you can improve on other search engine listings.

I'm a few days behind in updating the blog...okay, months behind in updating. I was just going to post that Microsoft released SP2 for Vista and Server 2008  last week. I have installed the SP on just a single Vista Business install so far, but have had no trouble from it. Actually, I think performance has improved just slightly since the service pack was installed.

Here are the download links for the updates:

Windows Vista and Server 2008 Service Pack 2 Download

If you're using Vista x64 and try to create an ODBC connection through the ODBC Administrator in Administrative Tools, you may be surprised to find no available ODBC drivers. The reason is that this particular ODBC Administrator is for use with 64-bit drivers. To access the 32-bit drivers, simply launch C:\Windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe. This will start the 32-bit ODBC Administrator and allow you to create those wonderful MS Access ODBC connections.

Props to Google Adsense for the placement of this ad:

In case you haven't been paying attention to the news lately, there has been a security flaw publicised that affects Internet Explorer versions 5.01, 6, 6 SP1, and 7. Microsoft even recommends patching IE 8 Beta 2. The flaw could allow remote code execution by visiting compromised websites.

More information can be found on the MS Security Bulletin page for this patch: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms08-078.mspx

It is recommended that everyone install this patch by running Windows Updates. If you have Automatic Updates enabled, you will automatically receive this patch.

The newly opened Pionen datacenter, run by the Swedish ISP Bahnhof, in Sweden that looks like it's straight from a Bond movie. It has been built in an old nuclear bunker inside a mountain. It looks like an awesome place to work.

Read the story here. You can also read about it directly from the Swedish ISP Bahnhof, though everything is in Swedish.

The first Google application we'll be looking at in this series is Google Reader. What is Google Reader? The best way I can describe Reader is a centralized location to receive content from all of your favorite websites. Now what does that mean? I'll try to explain.

If you've ever used RSS to keep up with your favorite websites, I think you will greatly appreciate Reader. If you're not familiar with RSS, to quickly explain, it is a format used to get a summary of content published to a website. This could be the latest news, weather, sports, blog posts, or any other type of content made available on a website. You may have even seen the icon for RSS on websites before, as shown to the right.
The benefits to using Reader are many. For one, I used to keep a lot of Live bookmarks in my Firefox browser both at work and at home. The problem I would run into is that if I found a new site to bookmark at home, I would always forget to add it on my other PCs, and vice versa. Reader provides a centralized location that you can access from anywhere if you have an Internet connection.
 

The Home page is displayed when you first log into Reader. It displays updated stories from each RSS feed that you're subscribed to. From here you can select to read all of the updated entries, or select a specific webpage at the bottom to view content from. There are also recommendations for other websites to subscribe to based on the content you are already subscribed to.
When you first start using Google Reader, you will not have any content to read. To subscribe to a site, just click on the Add Subscription link. This will

then display a field to enter the website address. You have multiple options from here: you can paste a direct link to a feed, you can just type in the domain name of the website, or you can enter search terms to display a list of sites with those terms. Once you have added a subscription, you can organize the site by putting them into your tags that you have created.
 

 
The All Items displays just that, all items. It is a conglomeration of stories from all of the different pages, sorted by date. As you scroll through the list, each item will be marked as read. As the stories are read you have the option to star the article, share it with other users, mark it unread, or add a tag to it. These options help you keep content easily available that you would like to view again in the future. There is also a search feature that allows you to search through all of the content received through your feeds. There are also options to change the sorting order and the view.
One interesting part is the Trends view. This will display statistics of the number of stories read per day, time of day and day of the week. This will also show how many pieces of content you have read for each subscription, the average number of posts per day of each subscription, the number of total Google Reader subscribers, and the keywords you have tagged your content with. While this may not seem like a very useful feature at first, it can be useful to see what sites you read the most content from, use it to trim down your reading list by removing sites that are no longer updating or you are no longer interested in. It's also interesting to see how many items you actually read.
 

 
There are many other features available in Reader including a Bookmark Button shortcut which allows you to drag a link to the toolbar button to automatically add it to Reader, Discovery of other content related to pages you're already subscribed to, a mobile version, and the ability to easily share and find your favorite content.
If you've been looking for a feed reader or have been using one for a while and you're looking for a new one, I would highly recommend Google Reader.
Let me know if you use Reader and what you think of it.