Burning multi-session disc: Mac vs Windows

I didn’t know burning multi-session disc in Mac OS is still so stone age.  Even Snow Leopard doesn’t make is any easier.  In Windows, you only need to select the files to burn and press the burn button.  A dialog will appear in which the default settings do exactly what you want.  In Mac OS X… you search the web and you come across this: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=DiskUtility/11.5/en/7074.html.  What it describes doesn’t quite match the Disk Utility in Snow Leopard.  But the page doesn’t say which version of Mac OS X it’s for.  So it should be the current version, right?  I decided to follow it anyway.  The Disk Utility presented me with 4 different disc image formats to choose from.  Which one do I choose?  Should I toss a coin (two times) or try to make an educated guess?  The description of the image formats doesn’t really help at all.  The first try didn’t work: the option I chose would not create a multi-session disc.  Good thing, I realized it before actually burning the disc.  The second try… didn’t succeed either!  What the hell does the Disk Utility want from me?

Every attempt costs me 10 minutes to create the disc image before I can burn it.  Should I try two other options and spend another 20 minutes or is there an easier solution?  I give up.  I guess I’ll just wait till the size of my folder grows to match the size of the blank DVD, so I can burn it in one shot.

Update: finally I found this page: http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/4836/os-x-how-to-burn-a-multisession-cd-or-dvd/.  It describes exactly what I was doing.  Except, I didn’t get the choice to check the “Leave disc appendable” box.  It was always grayed out.  Is the problem that I was trying to burn a double layer DVD?  Is it not supported for multi-session burning?

Good free Mac OS X blogging tools?

Recently I wanted to find a good blogging tool for Mac.  Since I have a Mac I want to do all I can without resorting to other operating systems.  So I spent some time looking around for a good tool and I found some.  But all of them are buy-only.  On Windows I use Live Writer (still not renamed to Bing Writer?)  I couldn’t find anything as good a Live Writer and free for Mac.  They all wanted me to pay from 25 to 50 bucks depending on the program.  Oh well, I’m just going to use Live Writer from the virtual machine.

Where are KDE 4 wallpapers?

Good luck searching for KDE 4 Air wallpaper on Google.  I spent an hour trying to find it.  Finally a post on some obscure message board led me to the KDE SVN repository.  So here’s the link to all KDE wallpapers: http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/wallpapers/

Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage

What?  I was trying to access my bank’s web page but instead of the page I was presented with this message.  Is the web site down?  Nope, doesn’t seem to be.  It pings with no problem.  I’m firing up the Firefox, and voila – the web page appears before my eyes.  Is something wrong with the IE?  Did I unknowingly install a rogue browser extension, spyware or adware?  The fact that it’s a bank’s site made me suspicious.

Or is it just IE8?  I’m trying compatibility mode – nope, the same result.  Trying IE8 from another machine.  Works like a charm!  This is starting to look very troubling.  OK, it’s time for serious investigation.

Perhaps Autoruns can tell me what’s going on?  It’s a Sysinternals tool.  I’m looking through IE BHO’s, Winsock providers, other stuff that’s in there.  Nothing stands out.  Everything looks normal.

Perhaps it’s the anti-virus?  Or Vmware network services?  Shutting everything down.  Still nothing.

OK, let’s take a look at what happens at the network level.  Launching the Wireshark.  Capturing some network packets and what am I seeing?  IE8 sends a DNS query for the bank’s site.  The query resolves OK.  Then it establishes the connection: SYN, SYN+ACK, ACK – so far so good.  Then it sends HTTP GET.  And the very next packet it receives from the site is RST.  No wonder it can’t display the web page!  The site just drops the connection.

I’m relieved.  At least it’s not a spyware.

But why the hell it drops the connection on IE8 whereas Firefox works just fine?  It must be something with the User Agent string.  I’m looking at the string and I can’t believe how long it is.  There’s all sorts of crap in there:

User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Origami Experience 1.1; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; Zune 3.0; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3

In fact, it’s so long the IE doesn’t even send the whole string.

Time to fix it.  I quickly find the user agent in the registry:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent]

Delete everything leaving just a single entry for CLR 2 and CLR 3.  Restart the IE.  And… Tada!  The web page displays correctly.

So the user agent string was too long for the web server to handle.  Maybe it thought I was trying to DoS it?  Or better yet, it was running into a buffer overflow.  I don’t know.  But it certainly looks like a bad piece of software that site runs on.

Collaborate over the Internet with OneNote and Office Live : Matt Ranlett's SharePoint and Office blog

As a OneNote enthusiast I always wanted to know if it’s possible to collaborate and share your notes over the internet.  OneNote requires a SharePoint web site for shared notebooks which is usually a hassle to setup.  But it turns out there is an easy way to do it with the Office Live Small Business account.  Check out the following blog entry for details:

Collaborate over the Internet with OneNote and Office Live : Matt Ranlett's SharePoint and Office blog

Bookmarks are becoming a thing of the past

I collected my web bookmarks for 8 years or so.  I cherished them and carefully transfered them from one computer to another.  But I rarely bothered to look what I actually collected.  Random bookmark folders and various links of temporary importance dominated in my bookmarks.  Today I decided to sort them out, because it was clearly started to become just a huge mess.  It turned out I didn’t really need many of them.  Many bookmarks were just useless because I can find the same information in Google faster than in my bookmark folders.  I went from more than 700 bookmarks down to about 250, restoring some order in my favorites.  After this excercise, it became clear to me that if I need to find something I would first search Google than again… search Google and only then search my bookmarks.  The need to use bookmarks is significantly reduced.  I decided that I will collect only rare information of a special meaning to me, the information that I had a hard time finding on the internet.

Vista performance score of Lenovo S10

I bought this little nice netbook for Christmas.  It came with Windows XP and loaded with a lot of OEM installed craplets.  When I booted it, it wasn’t super fast, but it was OK.  There are some reviews that say Vista will run like molasses on these kind of machines.  I wanted to check if it’s true, so I installed Vista.  It turns out Vista is actually pretty fast on S10.  I got the performance score of 2.7 which is limitted by “gaming graphics.”  This is not surprising.  Next is Intel Atom processor with the score of 3.0 and the rest are actually above 4.0 which is pretty good.  In fact Vista doesn’t need a fast processor so much as it needs memory and a fast disk.

Here is the whole picture (click for larger view):