View Source with something else than Notepad in Internet Explorer

I'm doing some web development at the time, and since Internet Explorer is the customer's and their customers' preferred web browser, it is a good idea to check how the pages look even in IE (of course, Mozilla Firefox is my own open source preference).

If you want to check the source the browser is actually reading, the IE7's Page-View Source menu item will take you to a Notepad window with the source. I want to look at it in my favorite plain text editor, Notepad++ though, where I can view the code color highlighted. I might even want to clean up what I see so that the source is indented in a readable format, using the TextFX with HTML Tidy option.

So - to my business: How do I change the View Source option to run the text editor I want? Simply by a small registry hack:

------------8<----------------8<------------------
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\View Source Editor\Editor Name]
@="\"C:\\Program Files\\Notepad++\\notepad++.exe\""
------------8<----------------8<------------------

Cut and paste this into a .reg file and import to registry (if you are uncertain of how to do that, don't even try - messing with the registry is not for you). Of course, if you want to use another text editor, just change the file path accordingly. If you need to undo this hack, just delete the "View Source Editor" registry key with its full contents.

This is actually just a copy of another blog I found googling for a solution: The Thea Burger's Blog and Will's blog - Thanks for helping me out!

How to talk to a remote device that only talks to local network devices

I was asked to find out how to spare an engineer the trip to his customer abroad only to do a five minute's upload job to a device that was talking TCP/IP. The device was on a subnet that had a VPN site-to-site connection to his office, however, the device did not have a routing entry making it aware of the subnet on the other side of the VPN tunnel.

Because of limitations to the device, configuring the needed routing entry into the device was not an option, even if we were able to telnet into the device from a Remote Desktop session on a Windows computer on the same subnet.

Solution: The solution was to create a simple PPTP VPN dial-in access on that Windows computer, so that the engineer's computer could receive an IP from the same IP pool as the device he wanted to control. Yes, it meant creating a PPTP VPN tunnel back through the established site-to-site VPN tunnel, but it would work.

Caveat: Only trouble was, it didn't. Setting up a simple Routing and Remote Access server in Windows Server 2003 is a simple task, still, it just did not work. What I found after scratching my head pretty sore was that the firewall in the site-to-site VPN device on my side (the one responsible for the "outer" tunnel) was blocking all traffic that did not originate from my subnet. The PPTP GRE protocol packets from the remote site did not look like they were talking to established traffic from my side, and hence was blocked, effectively blocking the creation of the PPTP tunnel within the site-to-site tunnel. To make it work, I had to open the firewall on the site-to-site device to allow full traffic flow while running the PPTP tunnel.

After that it worked, but was quite slow, probably due to the double encrypted, double tunneled packets.

Slow Windows login (Gone in 60 seconds)

I decided that today was going to be the day I solved why my Windows XP always takes excactly 1 minute to "think" after clicking the login button and until it shows my Windows desktop and starts to load traybar applications etc..

First try was to minimize the profile size. If I were using a roaming profile this would certainly have helped, because the size of my profile folders were around 800 megs. I moved out the Thunderbird mail profile and sqeezed some more unnecessary bits out of it and came down to around 150 megs. Still a bit much, but the change in login speed should be noticeable. Result: Nada. Still took a minute to think it all over before letting me in.

The solution was right under my nose the whole time - actually letting me know upon each login that "some network drives could not reconnect". Of course not - I use my laptop on different places and I am not always connected to those network drives. I just find it convenient to have them all ready for use in explorer. No longer. I disconnected them and did a login, and the whole minute's wait was gone.

The login was no longer "Gone in 60 seconds" - the 60 seconds were gone. :)

I just wonder where I can find the time to fetch my coffee now...