Live Mesh is great if you want to sync entire folders across computers and devices but doesn’t allow you to sync individual files - it’s all or nothing. Or should I say it did, because you see where there’s a will, there’s a way. The way Rafael and I have come up with will allow individual files to be Meshed without any additional software or background processes. It’s not perfect but it works.

Please note the following tutorial involves modifying your file system and may result in catastrophic data loss or corruption. Now harden up and try this at home.

As a quick explanation, there is no getting around the current Live Mesh restriction of folders. So what we need to do is work around the problem locally. A feature of the NTFS file system is support for “hard links“. What “hard links” allow you to do is have multiple pointers to the same “physical” file in the file system. (Quick side note, this is different to symbolic links which does not work with Live Mesh).

What hard links means in reality is that you can have multiples of the same file in different location. So the first requirement is that you need to be using a NTFS file system. A consequence is that you can only create hard links for files on the same volume (ex. C:\).

On with the tutorial. The first step is to create a Live Mesh folder dedicated to storing hard links. I recommend putting it within easy reach but still out of sight. I created mine as “Live Mesh Files” under “%userprofile%“.

Next is to add this folder to your Mesh.

Now open a command prompt in administrator mode.

To create a hardink, use this syntax “fsutil hardlink create “. So for example,
fsutil hardlink create "%userprofile%\live mesh files\test.txt" "%userprofile%\desktop\test.txt"

Now your file should also exist in the Mesh folder.

And online. Tip, if you don’t necessary need these files available via online, right click the folders on the Live Desktop and disable syncing to it.

Before you pop the champagne cork, realize you’re only half way done, it’s not syncing to anywhere yet. We have to also setup the files on the other end to sync to where we want them to.

On your other Live Mesh PCs, double click on the newly created blue folder and point it to where you would like to hide the folder again.

Now open up command prompt in administrator mode and run the command but with one difference in the parameters. Remember to swap them. So if you want to place the newly Meshed file on your desktop, you would write,
fsutil hardlink create "%userprofile%\desktop\test.txt" "%userprofile%\live mesh files\test.txt"

Now you’re done. Rinse and repeat for other files.

To reiterate, there are a few consequences with “hard linked” files. Hard links will only work within one volume so if you want to sync individual files on multiple volumes, you will unfortunately have to set up multiple “Live Mesh Files” folders on each volume. Also, deleting the original file will not delete the one in the Mesh Files folder, you’ll have to do it manually.

One possible scenario where syncing individual files might be handy is setting up a synchronized Firefox profile. Whereas if you synced the entire profile (%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles) you’d be stuck with the caches too, but now you can just sync the important files such as bookmarks, passwords and form history across.

If the above is a little too tedious for you, Rafael is already in the process of making a lightweight application to automate much of the process.

Are there any other sync scenarios you can think of where individual files might come in handy?

The most important part of terminal emulation is how it displays information on the monitor. When you hear the phrase ‘‘text mode,’’ the last thing you’d think to worry about is graphics. However, even the most rudimentary dumb terminals supported some method of screen manipulation (such as clearing the screen and displaying text at a specific location on the screen).


Character sets
All terminals must display characters on the screen (otherwise, text mode would be pretty useless). The trick is in what characters to display, and what codes the Linux system needs to send to display them. A character set is a set of binary commands that the Linux system sends to a monitor to display characters. There are several character sets that are supported by various terminal emulation packages:

• ASCII The American Standard Code for Information Interchange. This character set contains the English characters stored using a 7-bit code, and consists of 128 English letters (both upper and lower case), numbers, and special symbols. This character set was adopted by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) as US-ASCII. You will often see it referred to in terminal emulators as the ANSI character set.

• ISO-8859-1 (commonly called Latin-1) An extension of the ASCII character set developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It uses an 8-bit code to support the standard ASCII characters as well as special foreign language characters for most Western European languages. The Latin-1 character set is popular in multinational terminal emulation packages.

• ISO-8859-2 ISO character set that supports Eastern European language characters.

• ISO-8859-6 ISO character set that supports Arabic language characters.

• ISO-8859-7 ISO character set that supports Greek language characters.

• ISO-8859-8 ISO character set that supports Hebrew language characters.

• ISO-10646 (commonly called Unicode) ISO 2-byte character set that contains codes for most English and non-English languages. This single character set contains all of the codes defined in all of the ISO-8859-x series of character sets. The Unicode character set is quickly becoming popular among open source applications.

By far the most common character set in use today in English-speaking countries is the Latin-1 character set. The Unicode character set is becoming more popular, and may very well one day become the new standard in character sets. Most popular terminal emulators allow you to select which character set to use in the terminal emulation.


Control codes
Besides being able to display characters, terminals must have the ability to control special features on the monitor and keyboard, such as the cursor location on the screen. They accomplish this using a system of control codes. A control code is a special code not used in the character set, which signals the terminal to perform a special, nonprintable operation.

Common control code functions are the carriage return (return the cursor to the beginning of the line), line feed (put the cursor on the next horizontal row), horizontal tab (shift the cursor over a preset number of spaces), arrow keys (up, down, left, and right), and the page up/page down keys. While these codes mainly emulate features that control where the cursor is placed on the monitor, there are also several other codes, such as clearing the entire screen, and even a bell ring (emulating the old typewriter end-of-carriage bell).

Control codes were also used in controlling the communication features of dumb terminals. Dumb terminals were connected to the computer system via some type of communication channel, often a serial communication cable. Sometimes data needed to be controlled on the communication channel, so developers devised special control codes just for data communication purposes. While these codes aren’t necessarily required in modern terminal emulators, most support these codes to maintain compatibility. The most common codes in this category are the XON and XOFF codes, which start and stop data transmission to the terminal, respectively.


Block mode graphics
As dumb terminals became more popular, manufacturers started experimenting with rudimentary graphics capabilities. By far the most popular type of ‘‘graphical’’ dumb terminal used in the Unix world was the DEC VT series of terminals. The turning point for dumb terminals came with the release of the DEC VT100 in 1978. The DEC VT100 terminal was the first terminal to support the complete ANSI character set, including block mode graphic characters.

The ANSI character set contains codes that not only allowed monitors to display text but also rudimentary graphics symbols, such as boxes, lines, and blocks. By far one of the most popular dumb terminals used in Unix operations during the 1980s was the VT102, an upgraded version of the VT100. Most terminal emulation programs emulate the operation of the VT102 display, supporting all of the ANSI codes for creating block mode graphics.


Vector graphics
The Tektronix company produced a popular series of terminals that used a display method called vector graphics. Vector graphics deviated from the DEC method of block mode graphics by making all screen images (including characters) a series of line segments (vectors). The Tektronix 4010 terminal was the most popular graphical dumb terminal produced. Many terminal emulation packages still emulate its capabilities.

The 4010 terminal displays images by drawing a series of vectors using an electron beam, much like drawing with a pencil. Since vector graphics doesn’t use dots to create lines, it has the ability to draw geometric shapes using higher precision than most dot-oriented graphics terminals. This was a popular feature among mathematicians and scientists.

Terminal emulators use software to emulate the vector graphics drawing capabilities of the Tektronix 4010 terminals. This is still a popular feature for people who need precise graphical drawings, or those who still run applications that used the vector graphics routines to draw complicated charts and diagrams.


Display buffering
A key to graphics displays is the ability of the terminal to buffer data. Buffering data requires having additional internal memory within the terminal itself to store characters not currently being displayed on the monitor.

The DEC VT series of terminals utilized two types of data buffering:

• Buffering data as it scrolled off of the main display window (called a history)

• Buffering a completely separate display window (called an alternate screen)

The first type of buffering is known as a scroll region. The scroll region is the amount of memory the terminal has that enables it to ‘‘remember’’ data as it scrolls off of the screen. A standard DEC VT102 terminal contained a viewing area for 25 lines of characters. As the terminal displays a new line of characters, the previous line is scrolled upward. When the terminal reaches the bottom line of the display, the next line causes the top line to scroll off the display.

The internal memory in the VT102 terminal allowed it to save the last 64 lines that had scrolled off of the display. Users had the ability to lock the current screen display and use arrow keys to scroll backward through the previous lines that had ‘‘scrolled off’’ of the display. Terminal emulation packages allow you to use either a side scrollbar or a mouse scroll button to scroll through the saved data without having to lock the display. Of course, for full emulation compatibility, most terminal emulation packages also allow you to lock the display and use arrow and page up/page down to scroll through the saved data.

The second type of buffering is known as an alternative screen. Normally, the terminal writes data directly to the normal display area on the monitor. A method was developed to crudely implement animation by using two screen areas to store data. Control codes were used to signal the terminal to write data to the alternative screen instead of the current display screen. That data was held in memory. Another control code would signal the terminal to switch the monitor display between the normal screen data and the data contained in the alternative screen almost instantaneously. By storing successive data pages in the alternative screen area, then displaying it, you could crudely simulate moving graphics. Terminals that emulate the VT00 series of terminals have the ability to support the alternative screen method.


Color
Even back in the black-and-white (or green) dumb terminal days, programmers were experimenting with different ways to present data. Most terminals supported special control codes to produce the following types of special text:

• Bold characters
• Underline characters
• Reverse video (black characters on white background)
• Blinking
• Combinations of all of the above features

Back in the old days, if you wanted to get someone’s attention, you used bold, blinking, reverse video text. Now there’s something that could hurt your eyes! As color terminals became available, programmers added special control codes to display text in various colors and shades. The ANSI character set includes control codes for specifying specific colors for both foreground text and the background color displayed on the monitor. Most terminal emulators support the ANSI color control codes.

Source of Information : Wiley Linux Command Line and Shell Scripting Bible

Amidst the AMD marketing spectacle announced today known as Fusion - and trust me your guess is as good as mine, AMD has also released a software download called the “AMD Fusion for gaming utility” as part of its wider campaign to promote the best possible PC gaming experience.

While it’s name is no help at all and the interface pretty much a gimmick, it is exactly what many Windows gamers have been asking for for years - a “gaming mode” that disables non-critical background services and optimizes the system for the best gaming performance. A good idea in theory but less applicable in practice.

The tool comes with three default presets, “Basic”, “Advanced” and “Expert” with respective aggressiveness towards how many optimizations are applied and background services disabled. For example, “Expert” disables Windows Updates whereas “Basic” does not. Of course you can make your own custom profiles and pick the particular services you wish to disable. After which activating and deactivating these profiles is as simple as clicking the shiny button and cue the sci-fi hyperspeed effect.

In addition, AMD has also bundled an interesting set of hardware optimizations including “AMD Boost”, “AMD OverDrive”, “ATI Catalyst Auto-Tune” and “Hard Drive Acceleration”. Before you begin to fantasize what magical secret sauce AMD is adding to make hardware faster, these are pretty generic optimizations with a flashier label. “Boost” for example disables power-saving features, “OverDrive” overclocks CPU, “Catalyst Auto-Tune” overclocks GPU and “Hard Drive Acceleration” enables Windows disk caching.

The application is, as expected, exclusive to AMD customers only via hardware detection. I’m sure it won’t take long before someone *cough*Rafael*cough* figures out how to remove that detection so all gamers can try out this handy tool. Update 2: Download the patched EXE to run on your non-AMD machines.

Speaking of which I’m going to take it for a test drive but I don’t expect much out of it. Will update with thoughts later. Update: At least on a med-high-end machine, these optimizations does not seem to make any substantial differences.

I had a problem with a small group of computers which I deployed in my organisation.
The computers were deployed through images which I created with DriveImage XML.
All went well but I forgot one small step which I will explain later. The computers didn't show up in WSUS but did get their updates from the wsus server I was puzzled.
Then it hit me I did nog give the computers a new sid!
This explained why they did get their updates but did not show up in wsus except for 1. On the systinternal site I grabbed the utility NewSID v4.10 and gave the computers a newsid.

However they still didn't showed up in WSUS. But I found the solution here Athif Khaleel's WSUS blog:

@echo off
Echo Save the batch file "AU_Clean_SID.cmd". This batch file will do the following:
Echo 1. Stops the wuauserv service
Echo 2. Deletes the AccountDomainSid registry key (if it exists)
Echo 3. Deletes the PingID registry key (if it exists)
Echo 4. Deletes the SusClientId registry key (if it exists)
Echo 5. Restarts the wuauserv service
Echo 6. Resets the Authorization Cookie
Echo 7. More information on http://msmvps.com/Athif
Pause
@echo on
net stop wuauserv
REG DELETE "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate" /v AccountDomainSid /f
REG DELETE "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate" /v PingID /f
REG DELETE "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate" /v SusClientId /f
net start wuauserv
wuauclt /resetauthorization /detectnow
Pause

And now your clients will show up in WSUS if they do not show up immediately don't worry allow for a 10 minute cycle.

Dating back to the years when AMD hit the market to serve an alternative processor for people who are wary of high-priced Intel or Celeron processors, it has really been surprising how this alternative processor is making waves in the market today. In fact, I remember one of the key problems that it was overheating, making it advisable to have auxiliary fans to go when you buy a CPU.

Years after this issue was announced, rumor has it that these problems were resolved. In fact, a user no longer needs the traditional auxiliary fans to make sure that proper ventilation will be around and to ensure that no chips will be fried. You can just imagine the problem it had then upon first boot. The chip is practically so hot you might even get a burn from trying to touch it. Then again, if you are not the seasoned PC technician, I don’t think you would dare touch it!

Today, aside from the much ballyhooed eco-friendly chips that they are tagging along to make it marketable, I still have my reservations as far as reliability is concerned. The ability of the AMD chip to provide the necessary support that normal computer processes would normally require.

But so far, the feedback on the demand for it is at a standstill. There is no telling if AMD technology has indeed grown beyond the overheating era. Surely there has been improvement but it may go as far as checking out your heat sink to see if there has been improvements to this line of processors.