Rob Paller A blog about databases, business intelligence, and an outlet for my inner geek

Five Ways to Embrace your Geekness

Posted on July 13, 2009

Geek Edition

Today is officially the day were us geeks have a chance to celebrate being a geek. It is an opportunity to enjoy all of our gadgets and time spent in front of the computer. Here are few ways that you can spend your day. I have done several of these already and others are on my list of things to do.

  1. Turn your $60 router into a $500+ router with Tomato Firmware. Tomato is a easy to use replacement firmware for Linksys, Buffalo, and other Broadcom-based routers. It has a simple and easy to use GUI, ability to monitor bandwidth, advance QOS, multiple DynDNS services, and other advanced features.
  2. Turbocharge your DNS services and add advanced content control using OpenDNS. By simply replacing your DNS Servers from your ISP with OpenDNS's DNS servers you gain anti-phishing protection via PhishTank and improved speed by automatically resolving your DNS requests with the DNS server that is located closest to you. Advanced content control is available to you if you choose to open a free account with them. Automatically determine how wide or restricted you want your internet to be for the entire house. No software installation is required on any computer in your house. I could dedicate an entire blog post to using this service. For more information, check out their website. I can't speak highly enough about this service.
  3. Run multiple virtual environments. Want to run Windows 7 RC on your system but don't want to dedicate a physical partition on your machine? You may want to consider trying Sun's VirtualBox. VirtualBox is available under the GPL. It supports a large number of Guest OSes including Ubuntu, Windows 7 RC, SUSE, Fedora, and many others. The host OS can be Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and OpenSolaris. The latest release, 3.0.0, includes support of Direct 3D 8/9, OpenGL 2.0, and Guest SMP with up to 32 virtual CPUs.  What else were you planning to do with that 1 terabyte hard drive?
  4. Run a SSH Proxy using PuTTY that you can access anywhere to tunnel your web browsing for increased security. Chad Perrin has provided a nice write up on how to configure a SSH proxy using PuTTY. Sadly even as Microsoft prepares to release Windows 7 they have yet to figure out a way to provide a built in SSH client or daemon. However, once you have installed Tomato firmware you can configure your own SSH server and with Port Forwarding access it from anywhere you have internet access. By signing up for a dynamic DNS hostname you can access your SSH proxy without having to remember your dynamically assigned IP address. (You can sign up for free a dynamic DNS hostname using DynDNS. Don't forget to modify the Firefox setting to use your network proxy to resolve your DNS entries as well. (about:confg -> network.proxy.socks_remote_dns = true)
  5. Brush up your 100 essential skills as a geek. Anton Olsen over at GeekDad has comprised a list of 100 essential skills any self-respecting geek should be able to accomplish. These skills inlcude being able to open a Master combination padlock in under 10 minutes, being a Google search ninja, and knowing the answer to life, the universe and everything.

Bonus Material: Do you find that your spouse, girlfriend or parents just doesn't understand your inner geek? Well here is something you can share with them: The Nerd Handbook. While your reading the Nerd Handbook be sure you add Rands to your RSS feeds, he is a fantastic blogger worth following.

Bonus Material: Here are some well known geeks worth following on Twitter: Chris Hardwick (@nerdist), Adam Savage (@donttrythis), Grant Imahara (@grantmahara), and Levar Burton (@levarburton)

I may just take a few of these items listed above and blow them out into full blog posts to show how I am using some of these. I glossed over many of them for the sake of your attention span because I know you have Twitter open, four other tabs in your browser, and your iPhone next to you playing Pandora or Last.fm.

Do you have a secret project or geek skill that you are keeping close to the chest? Why not share it below in the comments with the other readers.

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Relocating the Users folder in Windows 7

Posted on May 14, 2009

Relocating your Home folder in Apple's OS/X is pretty straightforward. However, the ability to relocate the Users folder on Windows has never been a simple task. When I decided to install the Windows 7 RC I was determined to find a way to move the location of the Users folder from the Windows 7 system partition on my hard drive. There are several reasons for wanting to do this:

  1. You want to be able to restore the system from backup without having to affect the data contained in your Libraries.
  2. You have a large hard drive and have partitioned it leaving a partition for user data.
  3. You have a secondary hard drive and want to store your user data on it.

You can't simply open Windows Explorer and move the folder from the default location on the C:\ drive. The registry in Windows has numerous pointers to the location of you Users and the legacy Documents and Settings folders (yes it still exists in Windows 7 to support applications that are not Vista/Windows 7 compliant). Simply moving the folder will create countless headaches.

When I undertook this min-project, I did it with a fresh install of Windows 7. This way I didn't have any personal data to risk losing or numerous applications to install when things go awry. If you have been using Windows 7 for a while now it is best that you have a recent backup of your system before proceeding.  DriveImage XML is my current tool of choice when it comes to creating a system backup.

A search on Google yielded a blog post by Jean-Phillpe Steinmetz that explained step by step how to do this in Vista. Jean-Phillpe learned that by simply using xcopy that not all the files and settings were maintained properly and that using a backup tool like TruImage.  However, I needed to overcome the fact that I didn't have a suitable backup solution for Windows 7. Then I remembered that Microsoft had released a tool that just might do the trick. SyncToy 2.0 is intended to help users move data between two folders and keep the files synchronized. By using SyncToy I could relocate the entire Users folder from my system partition to a shared NTFS partition, then reboot to the command line delete and recreate the Users folder, and create the necessary NTFS junctions.

However, when I rebooted an attempted to login the after creating the NTFS junction it would not be able to load my profile. Instead Windows 7 loaded a temporary profile and desktop. Since I had done this with a fresh install of Windows 7 RC so I didn't have any data to worry about losing. So the next steps were easy.

  1. Open the Control Panel and selected Add or remove user accounts.
  2. Created a new adminstrator level account named root and set a strong password.
  3. Deleted the user I had created during the Windows 7 RC installation.
  4. Created a new standard user account for every day usage.
  5. Logged out of the temp user profile and logged in using my standard user account.

The nice thing about having a standard user account is that many (all?) actions that require admin access will prompt you to enter the password for the administrator account. This behavior is similar to that found in OS/X and Ubuntu.

The one thing that I would like to know is why I couldn't access my profile after moving it with SyncToy. Not a huge issue for me in this instance, but it could be a problem for someone who has a large amount of data in their User folder. Let me know if you have tried something similar in the comments.

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My Tweets

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  • Sweet! My books written by @rands and @williammcknight arrived! http://yfrog.com/0rlmwsxj - posted on 07/29/2010 18:08:49
  • @JAdP I prefer my tomatoes with salt on them. Will have to try them with sugar. - posted on 07/29/2010 16:32:01
  • Would be nice if Teradata BTEQ would resolve environment variables: .EXPORT REPORT FILE='$reporttmp/my_report.txt' Not just in .OS command - posted on 07/29/2010 15:28:51
  • "How should somebody teach themselves database and programming skills?" http://bit.ly/dot978 - Great suggestions! (via @CurtMonash) - posted on 07/29/2010 13:03:19
  • @peschkaj Would this do? http://bit.ly/btRuCy - posted on 07/29/2010 11:18:27

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