Some Secrets to my google-FU

Here are some of the secrets to my Google-FU

• Phrase search ("")
  By putting double quotes around a set of words, you are telling Google to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change. Google already uses the order and the fact that the words are together as a very strong signal and will stray from it only for a good reason, so quotes are usually unnecessary. By insisting on phrase search you might be missing good results accidentally. For example, a search for [ "Alexander Bell" ] (with quotes) will miss the pages that refer to Alexander G. Bell.
• Search within a specific website (site:)
  Google allows you to specify that your search results must come from a given website. For example, the query [ iraq site:nytimes.com ] will return pages about Iraq but only from nytimes.com. The simpler queries [ iraq nytimes.com ] or [ iraq New York Times ] will usually be just as good, though they might return results from other sites that mention the New York Times. You can also specify a whole class of sites, for example [ iraq site:.gov ] will return results only from a .gov domain and [ iraq site:.iq ] will return results only from Iraqi sites.
• Terms you want to exclude (-)
  Attaching a minus sign immediately before a word indicates that you do not want pages that contain this word to appear in your results. The minus sign should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space. For example, in the query [ anti-virus software ], the minus sign is used as a hyphen and will not be interpreted as an exclusion symbol; whereas the query[ anti-virus -software ] will search for the words 'anti-virus' but exclude references to software. You can exclude as many words as you want by using the - sign in front of all of them, for example[ jaguar -cars -football -os ]. The - sign can be used to exclude more than just words. For example, place a hyphen before the 'site:' operator (without a space) to exclude a specific site from your search results.
• Fill in the blanks (*)
  The *, or wildcard, is a little-known feature that can be very powerful. If you include * within a query, it tells Google to try to treat the star as a placeholder for any unknown term(s) and then find the best matches. For example, the search [ Google * ] will give you results about many of Google's products (go to next page and next page -- we have many products). The query[ Obama voted * on the * bill ] will give you stories about different votes on different bills. Note that the * operator works only on whole words, not parts of words.
• Search exactly as is (+)
  Google employs synonyms automatically, so that it finds pages that mention, for example, childcare for the query [ child care ] (with a space), or California history for the query [ ca history ]. But sometimes Google helps out a little too much and gives you a synonym when you don't really want it. By attaching a + immediately before a word (remember, don't add a space after the +), you are telling Google to match that word precisely as you typed it. Putting double quotes around a single word will do the same thing.
• The OR operator
  Google's default behavior is to consider all the words in a search. If you want to specifically allow eitherone of several words, you can use the OR operator (note that you have to type 'OR' in ALL CAPS). For example, [ San Francisco Giants 2004 OR 2005 ] will give you results about either one of these years, whereas [ San Francisco Giants 2004 2005 ] (without the OR) will show pages that include both years on the same page. The symbol | can be substituted for OR. (The AND operator, by the way, is the default, so it is not needed.)
• The date range syntax is as simple as typing daterange:startdate-enddate. The catch is that the date must be expressed as a Julian date (see below). So, for example, July 8, 2002, is Julian date 2452463.5 and May 22, 1968, is 2439998.5. Furthermore, Google isn't fond of decimals in its date range queries; use only integers: 2452463 or 2452464 (depending on whether you prefer to round up or down)
• Visit the Google Guide Advanced Operator Quick Reference and look for special operators of the formoperator:value.
• Fill in Google’s Advanced Search form. Then look at the search box on the results page; you may see that Google has added search operators to your query. For instance, if you fill in the Advanced Search page, asking Google to “find results with all of the words” [ detect plagiarism ] and to “return results where my terms occur: in the title of the page” your results page should look like the one shown here. Notice the allintitle: search operator that Google added before your query:
• http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html
• http://www.googleguide.com/print/adv_op_ref.pdf

Clean up Windows Update cache after Update issues

I ran into some trouble recently where the windows updates would keep coming back. same update after it was being applied (successfully from what was being reported)


Solution was simple to clear the cached updates and let it start over. had to look this up however.

1. open your command prompt (Start -> Run -> type cmd and then OK)
2. type "net stop wuauserv" at the prompt
3. type "cd /d %windir%"
4. Type "rd /s SoftwareDistribution"
5. type "net start wuauserv" to restart your windows updates.

TheOpenDisc

Some out there are horribly intimidated by Linux, there are a number of things to make it easy, however these guys have taken the Next step on that. What i have heard of this is that finding programs to replace/supplant what they already had found is often the reason people are most afraid of making the switch. Here is an answer to this.


http://www.theopendisc.com/


OpenDisc is a high quality collection of open source software (OSS) for the Microsoft Windows operating system.
The two main goals of the project are:
To provide a free alternative to costly software, with equal or often better quality equivalents to proprietary, shareware or freeware software for Microsoft Windows.
To educate users of Linux as an operating system for home, business and educational use.
The majority of programs featured on OpenDisc are also available on Linux.


In addition there is OpenEducationDisc


The OpenEducationDisc is a modification of the OpenDisc format by Teachers and Computer Specialists with a passion for education. The purpose of it is to provide students with the software that they need to complete school work at home. Most students don’t have jobs and it is unfair to ask for them or a parent/guardian to buy expensive software to get the best out of their education. Hence everything is free and we encourage you to make copies of this CD and lend it to you friends.

Linux power management

Linux has always been a lightweight operating system, and you can manually do a great number of things to dial in your settings, however when someone does allot of that work for you, and is willing to share I'm all for that. I have seen this nearly triple my beast of a laptop before.


http://www.jupiterapplet.org/


Jupiter is a light weight power and hardware control applet for Linux.  It is designed to improve battery life of a portable Linux computer by integrating with the operating system and changing parameters of the computer based on battery or powered connection.

Additionally, Jupiter provides quick access to some of the commonly needed hardware controls like screen output and resolution, WIFI, and bluetooth.

If you use Linux on a portable computer, let Jupiter take the effort out of going mobile.

Doing rude horrible and wonderful things to your disk partitions!

I will talk about a couple of Opensource tools i like here. One is Clonezilla. a great tool for disk to disk or disk to image cloning.


The other is Gparted, another wonderful tool that will do disk partition alteration and and editing.


This is a collection of information about Clonezilla.


What is Clonezilla:


Clonezilla is an open-source suite of cloning tools developed by Taiwan's National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) software lab under the GPL that works impeccably with Linux distributions. Clonezilla boasts high-performance cloning, simplified deployment and support for a multitude of system types (Windows, Linux and VMware), all of which make it a worthy competitor to its commercial counterparts.


This essentially means we have a tool that can replace an expensive purchase of Acronis True Image or Symantec's Ghost.


This matters, not just because it is platform agnostic, but it usually can talk to any Raid Controller that Linux can see and use (which is a large number) and it is free.


Supported Filesystems : (1) ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, (2) FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, (3) HFS+ of Mac OS, (4) UFS of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, and (5) VMFS of VMWare ESX. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux, MS windows, Intel-based Mac OS, and FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, no matter it's 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x86-64) OS. For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are saved and restored. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.


Image repository locations: NFS, SSH, SMB (Samba/Windows share), or Local Device (drive)


Local Live CD or network server compatible


Fast, i have seen full computer images (windows 7 with software) dropped from USB and Network locations to disk in 10 minuets.


But thats enough of an introduction have some hard links.


http://clonezilla.org/ - Main Website
http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live.php - Initial Live CD page, good information here.
http://clonezilla.org/downloads.php - Downloads page, you can get the latest version here
I strongly recommend the Alternative Stable Release, it is Ubuntu based and has the broadest hardware support
http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live-doc.php - documentation, how-to's etc. they are in order with pictures
http://clonezilla.org/general-live-use.php - useful, good intro on booting and getting ready to go.
Articles that i find regarding Clonezilla that i will be shareing over time.


http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10884 - Article from the Linux Journal






Gparted LiveCD - Opensource Disk partition manager!


http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php


If you have ever run across a need to alter the structure of a disk layout. perhaps you had multiple partitions that need to be combined. maybe you are looking to change your hard drive without reinstalling and need to adjust things. I have used this before, the exception to what I can access is definitely a Microsoft dynamic volume. it cannot alter that type of disk.


GPartEd stands for: Gnome Partition Editor


GParted is a free partition editor for graphically managing your disk partitions.


GParted is useful for tasks such as: creating space for new operating systems, restructuring disk space to separate user and operating system data, and copying partitions to enable upgrading to a larger hard disk drive.


Your hard disk drive or USB flash drive can be subdivided into one or more partitions. GParted enables you to reorganize your disk partitions while preserving the contents of these partitions.


Features


Create partition tables (e.g., msdos, gpt)
Perform actions with partitions such as: 


create or delete
resize or move
check
label
copy and paste
Manipulate file systems such as:
btrfs
ext2 / ext3 / ext4
fat16 / fat32
hfs / hfs+
linux-swap
ntfs
reiserfs / reiser4
ufs
xfs
For specific actions supported see detailed features.
Enable and disable partition flags (e.g., boot, hidden)
Align partitions to mebibyte (MiB) or cylinder boundaries
Attempt data rescue from lost partitions
Supports hardware RAID, motherboard BIOS RAID, and Linux software RAID.
Supports all sector sizes (e.g., 512, 1024, 2048, 4096 byte sectors)

Coolness for Mac users

Im not a huge fan of apple products. however i do need to interact with them, and a couple of really amazing things i have found are below

http://refit.sourceforge.net/

rEFIt is amazing, it is an EFI boot an enhancement that allows you a truly dynamic boot process so if you need to boot to CD it will find it and give you an option to boot there. Today i used it to do a windows 7 install into an empty partition. no bootcamp!

also amazing is Carbon Copy Cloner
http://www.bombich.com/

if you have someplace to put it it makes a copy of your mac install, if its a physical drive or partition it is a bootable install. so if you do anything development like you can save your original in a bootable state and then horribly wreck your install and come back to something usable.

the combination of these tools was able to give me 2 OSX partitions, one i can destroy if needed and a windows 7 install and a nice boot menu to switch tot he one i want.

Microsoft Driver Verifier (verifier.exe)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver_Verifier
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244617

Driver Verifier is a tool included in Microsoft Windows that replaces the default operating system subroutines with ones that are specifically developed to catch device driver bugs. Once enabled, it monitors and stresses drivers to detect illegal function calls or actions that may be causing system corruption.

Tired of windows XP built in themes?

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20061029/royale-noir/#downloadlink

This is actually something Microsoft created and embedded into windows XP Media Center edition. However it is part of windows XP as well. Just put it there and it works. As it is officially built and signed by Microsoft you don't need to tweak your system. (which is how this stuff should work anyhow.)

Tools for Talking to you Linux Server

There are 3 tools depending on what you want to do.

The first is pretty obvious to most people who run a Linux server, Being putty. it is the nicer of ssh clients i have used, and enables many of the features that a native ssh client has to offer.

Next is WinSCP This allows for a very nice and clean interface for SSH based transfers of files. all you need is an ssh login and open port. far more secure than having FTP open.

Then finally there is XMing what it does is drops an Xwindow Renderer on your desktop, when combined with putty gives you a full remote control of applications running on your home or work Linux machine with far more security and availability than anything i have seen so far.

These three tools are an amazing combination of tools. for remote administration and use of your Linux Server or Desktop

Note this does not change the security benefits or weaknesses of having Xwindows installed on a server, however for a project machine this is very useful. and can allow you to use resources that normally wouldn't be available.

Multiple Desktop Sharing with Synergy

Synergy is a fantastic tool It allows you to use a single Keyboard and mouse hosted to a machine to be interactively shared across multiple Machines and accessing their display.

So if you have 2 or more computers Side by side, and you don't mind the Screens being there, but you really hate having a swarm of Keyboards and Mice all over this is a graceful solution.

Start here, for windows only this is all you will need.
http://synergy-foss.org/

"Synergy is Free and Open Source Software that lets you easily share your mouse and keyboard between multiple computers, where each computer has it's own display. No special hardware is required, all you need is a local area network. Synergy is supported on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux."

If you have a Mac or Linux Desktop you would like to add to the mix, I strongly recommend QuickSynergy.
 http://code.google.com/p/quicksynergy/

How i did this with My Ubuntu and Windows XP Machines.

I installed the QuickSynergy application from the Ubuntu Repository (it installs at version 1.3.1), Then i downloaded the Most up to date Synergy package from the synergy project which is version 1.4.2 and installed it form the command line which updates the synergy binaries, but leaves the QuickSynergy interface in place! "sudo dpkg -i synergy-1.4.2-Linux-x86_64.deb".

From here its just a matter of configuration which is pretty simple. Pick on for the server, and then add clients to that machine, the server is the  computer that has the keyboard and mouse you want to use.

A quick rundown of setup from Linux Magazine

 Launch QuickSynergy on the machine that is going to be the server (or Share in QuickSynergy terminology) and type the hostname of the netbook you want to control in one of the four fields. Each field allows you to specify which border of the server's screen should act as a switch. For example, if you enter the hostname in the Right field, you can switch to your netbook by moving the mouse cursor to the right edge of the server's screen. The cursor then magically jumps to the netbook's screen, and you can use the mouse and the keyboard with your netbook. Note that you must enter the hostname not the netbook's IP address. To find out the exact hostname of your netbook, simply run the hostname name command on it. When you've entered the hostname, press the Execute button to start the server. Launch then QuickSynergy on your netbook, switch to the Use tab, and enter the IP address of the server in the Server hostname/IP address field. Press the Execute button and you can then use QuickSynergy to control your netbook.

ATA over Ethernet Raid

http://www.coraid.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_over_Ethernet

This is something i will have to look over later, very cool conceptually. very simple as well.

Windows (and Linux!) backups made dirt simple

This post is in progress, however as part of this I have been looking again at opensource software. specifically rsync.


The Cygwin Project made a beautiful version of rsync, i do recommended you take a look to see how much of the *nix world you can bring to your Windows computer!http://cygwin.org/


This specifically talk about using their implementation of rsync. as gathered by BackUP PC


their directions help you set up rsync as a service for a central machine to reach out and make a backup. you can set it to read only have it always run ect ect ect. this is great if you have a file server someplace. or simply want to make 2 machines nearly identical. This should be set for a time when your not logged in but the Machine is on.


However I expand on this with a more graceful and personal variation. Rsync can be used locally between 2 local filesystems (USB HDD anyone!) and a log-off script. basically when you shut down, or log off this thing fires off and makes the 2 locations the same. This gives you a backup of your needed data that can be referred to  when needed.


so once installed you can do a command similar to 
C:\opt\rsyncd\rsync.exe -uav "/cygdrive/c/docume~1/username" "/cygdrive/e/filesync/backup" >>cygdrive/e/rsync.log


This will backup your entire user profile in its entirety


How i used this. I created a folder called c:\opt and installed the binary in a folder there. I then created a folder on my destination drive to backup to (in this case an external Drive)


Here is where it gets interesting, create a back file with the desired rsync commands. save this, ( i used the handy c:\opt) then you can create a task, that every time you log off your computer it executes a batch file. this way you are not really logged in, so files normally being accessed (like outlook pst's and ost's) are not in use then it does a backup of files that have been changed (new version) every time you log off/shutdown/reboot. and the way rsync works it moves quite quickly.


This is the batch file i have run each time i log off the computer
It cleans up Google chrome and IE cache only. tidies up the log file and then runs my rsync.



@echo off
RunDll32.exe InetCpl.cpl,ClearMyTracksByProcess 8
del C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache\*.*
del e:\filesync\rsync.old.log
copy e:\filesync\rsync.log e:\filesync\rsync.old.log
del e:\filesync\rsync.log
C:\opt\rsyncd\rsync.exe -uacv "/cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/username" "/cygdrive/e/filesync/backup" > e:\filesync\rsync.log


E is the drive letter of the externally attached HDD i have.





Other things to try:

• -b (i.e. -avb) makes backup copies of any files at the destination, before updating.
• -u (i.e. -avu) updates - won't overwrite newer files.
• -S (i.e. -avS) is more efficient if you have sparse files.
• rsync -e ssh -av --delete "/cygdrive/d/" remote:/rsync/data1/d >>rsync.log will log the transfers to file rsync.log
• -z (i.e. -avz) is very useful if doing it by modem. This compresses the information before transport. Waste of time if on a fast network.
• -P (i.e. -avP) shows progress during transfers, and also keeps partially transferred files so that if the transfer is interrupted mid-file, the bit already transferred isn't wasted. Again, good if rsyncing by modem.
• The --exclude option is very useful to exclude swap files. You may also want to exclude things like netscape caches. For example:
  --exclude 'pagefile.sys' --exclude 'WIN386.SWP' --exclude 'Cache/'
• --backup-dir=PATH puts all old versions of files into the named directory, thus giving an incremental backup.
• Look at the rsync man page for more ideas.

NotePad++

http://notepad-plus-plus.org/

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.


So the official line aside, best note pad replacement i have found. Still dirt simple, Tabbed multiple documents, very nice Code formatting and code highlighting and a good structure management. in all very nice.


I use it most for digesting large log files and weirdly formatted logs. as well as writing SQL and shell scripts


it is well worth acquisition.

7zip - File Archiving

http://www.7-zip.org/

This one is first about 7zip. Its a basic File Archiver, and they even have their own format (.7z). The project is opensource so you can review the code and see what its doing. The interface is dirt simple and without clutter.

It supports more formats than most any archiver i have dealt with. and it also supports multi-threading, and you can select how many cores you want to use, and some very nice explorer contest menus as well.

I have been a big fan of WinRAR for a number of years, but this year 7zip with 32 and 64 bit versions has just made it irrelevant for me.