On The Mark

Do you have an Intranet or a similar web site that requires the use of Integrated Windows Authentication? If so the default Firefox browser settings will always prompt you for a username and password first before accessing a site using Integrated Window Authentication.

Fortunately Firefox has the slick ability to easily modify it’s configuration to use Integrated Windows Authentication.

How to configure Firefox

1. Open Firefox
2. In the address bar type: about:config
   
3. Firefox3.x and later requires you to agree that you will proceed with caution.
4. After the config page loads, in the filter box type: network.automatic
5. * Modify network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris by double clicking the row and enter http://www.replacewithyoursite.com or http://your-intranet-server-name
   
6. * Multiple sites can be added by comma delimiting them such as http://www.replacewithyoursite.com, http://www.replacewithyourintranetsite.com

Package for Large Installs

If you are a network administrator that has a lot of installs to do, you can modify the Firefox installer.

1. Use a tool such as 7-zip to extract Firefox Setup 2.x.x.exe
2. Extract browser.xpi from the setup
3. Edit all.js contained in browser.xpi contained in binjreprefs
4. Modify the entries as in items 4 and 5 above
5. Re-package browser.xpi and use the extracted setup to install Firefox

* Special Notes

To specify all subdomains use .replacewithyoursite.com instead of www.replacewithyoursite.com, help.replacewithyoursite.com, pictures.replacewithyoursite.com

Updated March 5, 2010

 

When using remote desktop connection to connect to a server I recently encountered the “Because of a protocol error detected at the client (code 0×1104), this session will be disconnected.  Please try connecting to the remote computer again.” error. 

The error was encountered after:

• I had just logged into the the server the night before with no issues. 
• Able to login to another server and tried to roundtrip to server in question from another server.  Still the same error persisted.
• Rebooting of my machine did not change the errors.

How to fix:

In your RDP connection window, expand options if they are already not expanded and then select the Experience tab.  Unselect the Themes checkbox (Prior to Windows 7) or Visual Styles checkbox in Windows 7. 

Try logging in again.  The issue should be cleared.

Note: After one login, I was able to click Visual styles and login normal again. 

If you frequently find yourself installing Windows applications for friends, family that has wrecked their computer or because you’re a frequent Windows Beta tester there is a great tool for you.

Ninite

Simply go to the Ninite site and select from dozens of apps and then click Get Installer and Ninite builds you a Windows installer of all the apps you’ve selected.  Much like the simple process of selecting your apps, your installation runs smoothly with little or no prompts.

There are a couple of limitations to the installer – the applications must be on their list and the machine installing must have web access.  However, lucky for us the current selection has a large number of applications unlike Google Pack and it’s extremely limited selection.

The current selection of apps includes:

Web Browsers

• Chrome
• Safari
• Opera
• Firefox

Messaging

• Skype
• Messenger
• Pidgin
• Digsby
• Google Talk
• Thunderbird

Media

• iTunes
• Songbird
• Hulu
• VLC
• KMPlayer
• AIMP
• Audacity
• Spotify

Imaging

• Paint.NET
• Picasa
• GIMP
• IrfanView
• XnView

Documents

• Office (Trial)
• OpenOffice
• Adobe Reader
• Foxit Reader
• CutePDF

Anti-Virus

• Essentials
• Avast
• AVG

Runtimes

• Flash
• Flash (IE)
• Java
• .Net
• Silverlight

File Sharing

• uTorrent
• eMule

Other

• Dropbox
• Evernote
• BumpTop
• Steam
• Google Earth

Utilities

• ImgBurn
• CCleaner
• Launchy
• Revo
• Defraggler
• RealVNC
• CDBurnerXP
• Recuva

Compression

• 7-Zip
• WinRAR

Developer Tools

• Python
• FileZilla
• Notepad ++
• JDK
• WinSCP
• PuTTY
• Eclipse

Scenario

 

On machines where Vista/W7 is installed there appears to be an issue when checking to see if a user is in a role.  User Account Control (UAC) must be on to reproduce the issue.  The result is that the value returned is always FALSE even when the user does belong to the group.

 

Sample Code (UAC must be on to produce error)

 

If My.User.IsInRole(“My Domain\My Group”) Then

     Return True

Else

     Return False

End If

Workaround

 

To get around this I created a function using other .Net functions.

Public Function IsInUserRole(ByVal RoleToFind As String) As Boolean

    Dim id As WindowsIdentity = WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent
    Dim irc As IdentityReferenceCollection

    ‘ Gets a SID list of groups the user belongs to

    irc = id.Groups

    For Each ir As IdentityReference In irc

        ‘ Need to convert the SID to plain english

        Dim act As NTAccount = CType(ir.Translate(Type.GetType("System.Security.Principal.NTAccount")), NTAccount)

        If act.Value = RoleToFind Then

            Return True

        End If

    Next

    Return False

End Function

Have a shiny new Web 2.0 site where you are using just the stock busy / loading graphic (spinner.gif or waiting.gif)?  Why not go with a custom look for free. 

ajaxload.info is a new site that builds customized animated gifs for you.

Simple as 1-2-3!

1. Pick an indicator type from the Web 2.0 style drop down
2. Select your colors
3. Click Generate

Simple!  1 Site – 1 Page!

Next week I’ll be attending RailsConf 09 in Las Vegas, NV. Since I’m still pretty new to Rails I’m taking one of the tutorial classes “A-Z Intro to Rails Tutorial” and the presenter has already provided info from his site. Cool!

Background

Upon continuing a Ruby on Rails project after a few months delay, Aptana Studio’s RadRails editor installed some updates.  I suspect something that  changed in Rails itself (GEM update) caused the error I received.

Error Message

undefined method `include_root_in_json=’ for ActiveRecord::Base:Class (NoMethodError)

Solution

To fix this error rename the config/initializers/new_rails_defaults.rb to config/initializers/new_rails_defaults.rb.bak.

It appears that the old code placed in these files no longer works with ROR 2.0.2.

# These settings change the behavior of Rails 2 apps and will be defaults
# for Rails 3. You can remove this initializer when Rails 3 is released.

# Include Active Record class name as root for JSON serialized output.
ActiveRecord::Base.include_root_in_json = true

# Store the full class name (including module namespace) in STI type column.
ActiveRecord::Base.store_full_sti_class = true

# Use ISO 8601 format for JSON serialized times and dates.
ActiveSupport.use_standard_json_time_format = true

# Don’t escape HTML entities in JSON, leave that for the #json_escape helper.
# if you’re including raw json in an HTML page.
ActiveSupport.escape_html_entities_in_json = false

The file now created in a new project appears as follows:

# These settings change the behavior of Rails 2 apps and will be defaults
# for Rails 3. You can remove this initializer when Rails 3 is released.

if defined?(ActiveRecord)
# Include Active Record class name as root for JSON serialized output.
ActiveRecord::Base.include_root_in_json = true

# Store the full class name (including module namespace) in STI type column.
ActiveRecord::Base.store_full_sti_class = true
end

# Use ISO 8601 format for JSON serialized times and dates.
ActiveSupport.use_standard_json_time_format = true

# Don’t escape HTML entities in JSON, leave that for the #json_escape helper.
# if you’re including raw json in an HTML page.
ActiveSupport.escape_html_entities_in_json = false

Footnotes

See  http://www.hostingrails.com/1461/dbmigrate-undefined-method-include_root_in_json for more help with this error.

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