PuTTY or one of its forks is a standard tool for administering Unix and Linux machines from Windows. It provides SSH connectivity for command line access, as well as keypair management for compatible programs like WinSCP. Unfortunately, PuTTY has some terrible defaults. For example, it limits itself to 200 lines of scrollback by default, which … Continue reading Set PuTTY defaults, permanently

Sometimes when my VPN connection to work goes down, certain applications that rely on intranet servers (e.g. Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime) become unable to reconnect to their servers even after I reconnect to VPN. This is due to the operating system's DNS lookup cache reusing the failed hostname lookup from when VPN was down rather … Continue reading Fix VPN hostname resolution by flushing your DNS cache

I had an exciting tax year (lots of RRSPs, bought a house), so I picked up a copy of TurboTax 2012 to help file my Canada income taxes. Unfortunately, TurboTax crashed on startup and running it as Administrator did not help. It turns out there is a known workaround involving copying some DLLs around.

I do some reporting in Excel. The reporting involves loading data via ODBC from a DB2 database. Excel is pretty zippy with its pivot tables once the data is loaded, but setting up the initial connection can be tricky. Windows 7 is the first Microsoft operating system where the expectation is that the consumers would … Continue reading ODBC and 32-bit Excel on Windows 7 x64

I'm setting up a new primary system and I thought I'd jot down some notes. Ninite is probably the quickest way to install all the necessary software (Chrome, 7-zip, Dropbox, iTunes, Picasa, etc). You click the checkboxes and it rolls you a custom, hands-off installer. They upsell to an auto-update service, but there are free … Continue reading Setting up a fresh Windows system

It's fairly straightforward to diff or compare different revisions of an Office document on Windows. The approach below applies to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, as well as to ones created by Lotus Symphony, OpenOffice.org, or LibreOffice. Download and install WinMerge. This is a free, open source utility. Download the xdocdiff plugin. Unzip it somewhere. … Continue reading How to diff Word documents

The look up table goes in months.bat: :: one record per line :: = is the delimiter @echo 1=jan @echo 2=feb @echo 3=mar @echo 4=apr @echo 5=may @echo 6=jun @echo 7=jul @echo 8=aug @echo 9=sep @echo 10=oct @echo 11=nov @echo 12=dec Given a month number, you can then look up the month abbreviation as follows: … Continue reading Batch file look-up table for month names

CCleaner is one of my favourite utilities for Windows. It does several things very well. One of them is removing the temporary files that various applications leave lying around. For example, the Windows temporary files directory gets filled up with various installers that have a tendency to never be removed as well as fragments of … Continue reading CCleaner utility for Windows

On Windows, my music player of choice is musikCube. It's fast, clean, elegant, and powerful. Oh, and it has an embedded SQL engine underlying its song library. It has conventional playlists, but it also has dynamic playlists based on queries of the underlying SQL database. For example, this query gives the Top 10 Most Played … Continue reading Dynamic playlists in MusikCube