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Software automation testing sometimes need to perform installation and un-installation of software products. One of the new things that I learned was that a user can un-install a certain application from the command line. To determine how to uninstall a certain product, open registry and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall. For the application that you want to uninstall look for the key "UninstallString". Copy and paste this string in the command line, hit on {ENTER} and it should uninstall the application for you. ~ts~

Maintaining the performance of a computer takes a lot of research and tinkering of the system. One of the tools that that I find really useful is Process Explorer formerly of Sys Internals which is now a part of Microsoft. It was originally and still is designed/maintained by Mark Russinovich, et al. One of the key features that I like with Process Explorer is that it shows a tree view of the running process in a system. And in addition to that it allows the user to search by process handle or a DLL substring. The best feature that I like with this tool is that it shows you the command line arguments used to run the application. If you think this is too good to be true, see for yourself. Head to http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx and download the file. ~ts~

"Packaging is the product itselft." This is the matra for most marketing folks. This is no different in designing user interfaces for customer use. Selecting a nice set of icons then becomes a serious issue if the product is for general public consumption. This complicates even more for small shops or one man team designing software solutions. Thanks to the current revolution in software development... open source, creative commons and the likes. Listed below are some icon set that are either LGPL, CCA or etc. Ximian icon sets License : LGPL The icons are being used in OpenOffice and Ximian Desktop 2 Silk Icon set License : Create Commons Attribution 2.5 License “Silk” is a smooth, free icon set, containing over 700 16-by-16 pixel icons in strokably-soft PNG format. Containing a large variety of icons, you're sure to find something that tickles your fancy. And all for a low low price of $0.00. You can't say fairer than that. ~ts~

I develop a short python script to display Microsft Corporation software that is installed on a system. This script can be modifed easily to check for all installed OS hotfixes if need be. See below for the script: <---code----- import _winreg import sys hkcu = _winreg . ConnectRegistry ( None , _winreg . HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE ) m_key = "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall" m_UnInstall = _winreg . OpenKey ( hkcu , r"SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall" ) _index = 0 while True :      try :          m_subkey = _winreg . EnumKey ( m_UnInstall , _index )          m_newkey = m_key + "\\" + m_subkey          m_RegistryKey = _winreg . OpenKey ( hkcu , m_newkey )          try :              if _winreg . QueryValueEx ( m_RegistryKey , r"Publisher" )[ 0 ] == r"Microsoft Corporation" :                                   print _winreg . QueryValueEx ( m_RegistryKey , r"DisplayNam

Command line completion is almost always expected of terminals on Linux systems. On Windows 2000 Professional, command line completion can be enabled by changing the following registry entry: KEY = HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor PARAMETER = CompletionChar Change the value from 0 to 9(TAB in HEX).

I have installed Python 2.5 from ActiveState on two machines now and each one was working pretty nice. But on one of my machines PythonWin refused to load, see below for the message: --------------------------- Python for Win32 --------------------------- The application can not locate win32ui.pyd (or Python) (126) The specified module could not be found. --------------------------- OK Searching in ASPN network I found out that this is an open issue, see 68141 . The good thing with this bug is that the workaround is quite simple if you have a working installation. Just copy pythoncom25.dll and pywintypes25.dll into c:\windows\system32 of the machine that PythonWin does not work. What if you don't have a working machine? Well, low and behold, I have it for you. Download it here . I'll be more than thankful if anyone can report to me that this issue is already fixed so that I can update this blog. Another work-around is to install pythonwin on top of currently installed vers

This file maybe useful for people installing Gentoo into their ECS A097. Highlighted text below is the make.conf that I use for my own A097. # These settings were set by the catalyst build script that automatically built this stage # Please consult /etc/make.conf.example for a more detailed example # CFLAGS="-O2 -mtune=i686 -pipe" # CHOST="i386-pc-linux-gnu" # CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}" CHOST="i586-pc-linux-gnu" CFLAGS="-march=i586 -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer" CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}" LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O1" MAKEOPTS="-j2" USE="-qt3 -qt4 -arts -kde -bindist gtk gnome hal avahi X tk bitmap-fonts truetype-fonts type1-fonts alsa nptl nptlonly" SYNC="rsync://rsync.asia.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://gentoo.gg3.net/ " INPUT_DEVICES="keyboard mouse" VIDEO_CARDS="sis" ALSA_CARDS="ali5451" ~yth