Internet

How To: Shorten URL for emailing links

Posted by Rick on in Internet, Technology How To's 0 Comment

How To: Shorten URL for emailing links

With the rise of Javascript and other web based programing languages, links to certain webpages have grown downright unwieldy. Places like eBay, Amazon, and many online shopping programs are the worst cases. But these portals provide such a vast number of items that any flat file based system from the 90’s would require a team of people to update it 24 hours a day as prices change and stock comes and goes.

Enter a plethora of web sites that “shorten” a given URL and present it in a friendlier format.

Tinyurl is one of the oldest and most popular of such services. They even provide a link that can be dragged to the browser tool bar for on the fly URL shortening services.

For instance: http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FHeroes-Season-2-Jack-Coleman%2Fdp%2FB001B7CNZ6%3Fpf%5Frd%5Fp%3D294635701%26pf%5Frd%5Fs%3Dright-5%26pf%5Frd%5Ft%3D101%26pf%5Frd%5Fi%3D507846%26pf%5Frd%5Fm%3DATVPDKIKX0DER%26pf%5Frd%5Fr%3D06WM4R0ZBZMYJDY834NZ&tag=ricktech-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325

Becomes: http://tinyurl.com/5gvb4j

Minilink.org does the same thing, and even has a tools page that has a tool bar Javascript link just like Tinyurl. This site has one huge advantage over TinyURL though. Their links include the server name to keep people from inadvertently visiting the seedy parts of the Internet.

Thus the above link becomes: http://lnk.nu/amazon.com/n4m.html

While not every URL needs to be shortened, there are plenty that do. These two tools will certainly help in cases when it is needed. Email, IM’s, forum postings, etc would all benefit.

How To: Speed up Web Surfing

Posted by Rick on in Apple, Internet, Microsoft, Technology How To's 0 Comment

How To: Speed up Web Surfing

We would all like to surf the Internet a little faster. Unluckily Web Browsers, Network speed, and computer speed all conspire to make surfing the web as slow as possible.

Luckily each browser has a couple of tweaks that can be used to make things go faster.

Firefox
Firefox actually has the most options to affect network speeds. So many in fact that not only does Mozilla have a page about it, there are several blogs about it. These are very easy to access, simply type: about:config in your address bar.

Change the following settings:

  • network.http.pipelining, change the value from 4 to 8.
  • network.dns.disableIPv6, change value to true
  • network.http.proxy.pipelining, change to true

    • If those feel like to much trouble, there is a Firefox plugin that helps: chromedit

    Internet Explorer

    This first tip is Vista specific and is untested by me. I’ve heard that it works extremely well though but just like all these other settings your mileage may vary. http://www.wisebread.com/quick-vista-hack-to-get-you-browsing-at-high-speed-again

    The second tip is a bit more general. Using regedit we change the default number of connections from two to a larger number. Keep in mind that this will not always be reliable as some larger sites will limit the number of connections on their side.

  • Go to Start -> Run
  • Type “regedit”
  • Go to the value: HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionInternet Settings
  • On right side check for these two values: MaxConnectionsPerServer MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server
  • If they’re not present: right-click on the white region of Regedit’s right-hand column, click New, and then click DWORD Value.
  • Type: MaxConnectionsPerServer and hit enter
  • Right Click again and add the value: MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server
  • On each value, MaxConnectionsPerServer and MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server, click on decimal and change the number from 2 (or 0) to something like 6 or 8
  • Close Regedit, start Internet Explorer and enjoy

    • Safari
    Speeding up Safari is a bit different then the other browsers. You are actually SLOWING the browser down. Safari has a setting that changes the delay on the browser from one second to a slower integer. In Terminal (with Safari closed) type: defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitInitialTimedLayoutDelay 0.25

    The last number is time in seconds and can be anything between 0 and 1. So 0.34 or .81 are acceptable along with the more rounded 0.5 and 0.75.

    Another good hint is to clear the cache, favorites icons, addons, and removing the preference file. Macrumors put together a great page showing how to do that.

    Keep in mind that most of these will not drastically speed up your Internet, it’ll be a small but usually noticeable speed increase. Keeping your computer in top shape and virus free will also go a long ways towards helping speed up the your web surfing.

    How To: Budget Network Attached Raid 5 Fileserver, Part 1

    Posted by Rick on in FreeBSD, Internet, Technology How To's 3 Comments

    I recently came to the conclusion that I need three things.

    1. More Disk Space
    2. Reliable File Backup
    3. Centrally Available File Storage for multiple machines and operating systems

    There are multiple solutions to these three problems. Each can easily be tackled separately and there are a ton of good products that do each quite well. But I wanted something that provides all three. With the announcement of Apple’s Time Capsule a NAS or “Network Attached Storage” system suddenly sounded like a great idea. Unluckily Time Capsule does not have a firm ship date, and I’m not sure I wanted to invest in a new Airport Base Station too.

    Turning to Google provided hundreds of links to products that were limited to only two hard drives, USB 2.0 only, or didn’t support RAID 5 or higher. Or worse of all did what I wanted but cost way too much. So eying the spare hardware pile, I decided to save some money and build my own NAS server with Raid 5 and Gigabyte network. I figured I’d save several hundred dollars and have a system that was more upgradeable and more reliable.

    Tom’s Hardware Guide built one in August 2006. Looking over the list of parts used I wasn’t happy with purchasing a separate SATA RAID card as that would quickly add to the price. It would also significantly add to the complexity of the entire system, and reduce recoverability if the system went down and I had to put the hard drives into another system to recover their data. So a new requirement, Software Raid became quickly apparent.

    My Hardware Requirements were pretty basic:

    1. Motherboard
    2. CPU
    3. Memory
    4. 4 Hard Drives for the Raid
    5. 1 Hard Drive for Boot
    6. Case
    7. Power Supply
    8. CDRom (for software install only)

    Between various upgrades I was able to scrape together a decent older PC case the boot drive and two of the four drives for the Raid array.

    I’m a big fan of the LX-104 case. These were made by a no-name Chinese company for OEM builders. Despite that they were very good construction, thick steel, a working and easy to use snap together design, rounded corners and an attractive $75 retail price. Since their main competitor at the time was first generation Enlight cases this was all pretty attractive. Plus it has two hard drive slots and two 3 1/2 inch bays so that I could install 4 hard drives there.

    The original motherboard an Intel PII-233 capable Asus board would have worked well, but then I would have had to go back to a SATA Raid card of some sort. I decided to pick up the Asus M2A-VM board. Not only does it have four on board SATA slots, it had onboard Video and Gigabyte. All of which use fairly common chip sets and are thus supported by Linux and FreeBSD. It also has hardware RAID, but I didn’t want to use that for the reasons outlined above.

    I also needed to pick up a new power supply. I’m not an Antec fanatic like a lot of people, but I decided that quite was a definite plus. This machine would be effectively replacing an Apple G5 system which is dead quite. The Antec TP Trio 430w supply looked like it’d do what I need.

    Add in two more Western Digital 250gb hard drives, a single chip of DDR2 512mb memory, and a retail Athlon68 3800 cpu at 2.4ghz and I was under $400 total. If I didn’t have some of the other parts on hand the price would have been a lot more making something likeLacie’s Ethernet Disk Raid much more attractive.

    Of course, this would also be a great use for that previous generation PC sitting in the closet. With the addition of a couple of extra hard drives it’d be easy to build a budget NAS for under $200.

    The boot drive (a 40gb IDE Maxtor) went into a 5 1/4 inch to 3 1/2 inch bay adapter so that it could be master to the boot CD drive. The four SATA drives installed easily, and the entire machine booted perfectly fine.

    Next Step: Install Software and Configure

    Leopard: Print Sharing to Windows

    Posted by Rick on in Apple, Internet, Microsoft, Technology How To's, Windows 2 Comments

    Leopard: Print Sharing to Windows

    For those of us who run multiple different machines it can be a pain to share resources such as printers. Most of the how-to guides I’ve seen on the Internet tell how to share a Windows based printer to OS X. I’m going to show how to share an OS X based printer to Windows.

    The first step is to make sure your printer works in OS X. If you’re looking for a new printer, try here for Tiger (OS X 10.4) or here for Leopard (OS X 10.5). Any printer on this list is going to be Windows compatible. There are a lot more printers then this that will work, but be sure to check the manufacturers web site for updated OS X drivers. On the Windows box make sure to download and install the Windows drivers too. They might fail, but it’s easier to have the driver preinstalled.

    On the OSX Machine go to System Preferences then Sharing. Simply click on Printer Sharing and exit out of the screen.

    In Windows go to Start -> Control Panel (or All Programs, then Ctonrol Panel.) Click on Printers and Faxes, then “Add a Printer”. Choose Next then “A Network Printer,” next again and make sure Browse for a Printer is checked. A list of computers with shared resources will come up. Double Click on the one that is your OSX box and hit next yet again. The OS X name may be something like MAC00123456, this is the EtherNet card’s unique Mac address. A list of available printers should come up, highlight the one you want to install and hit next again.

    The next step is a bit complicated, when you see a message saying that the printer drive will install automatically and it could be a security risk, go ahead and say Yes to the message. The next message may says “The server for the printer does not have the correct printer driver installed.” Click Ok, as this is why the printer driver was already installed. If the printer driver isn’t on the list, then browse to the printer driver that you installed earlier. Hit OK, perhaps do a test page just to be safe, and enjoy printing!