I recently came accross this really rather nifty speed test tool made by some guy called Jack Dinn, it measures at set intervals the up and down speed of your broadband connection and display nice averages.

I have run it in the background for a little over a day on my work connection and the traffic differences are really notable. It is in an office with about 30 plus people in it and it a web dev company (with a shitty 2 meg leased line).

I am going to run it for a while at home on my 50 meg at home to see how it goes.

here is the resulting graph for work.

 викикониикони

So you have downloaded a shed load of mp3 albums and they are all sitting in a folder waiting for you to extract each and every rar or zip file by hand. How tedious!

Well I thought about this for a second and realized that good old 7zip has a command line interface and must be able to do this.

Low and behold you can, and really easily as well. I will show you how.

Windows 7 instructions (others may differ slightly but aren’t difficult to work out)

• Firstly install 7zip if you haven’t already
• It might not set itself up as an application is your system path, so unless you want to sort that out it is just as easy to drop the exe into the cmd prompt window.
• Ok run the command prompt by clicking on the start button and typing in cmd followed by return.
• Locate using explorer your 7zip installation and keep that window open
• Navigate in your cmd dos prompt to the location of all of your files. (some dos experience might be needed here but remember that ‘cd’ is change directory. ‘cd..’ goes up a directory.
• The other method for lazy people is to find the dir in another explorer window and drag the folder you want to change to into your dos window after you have typed the words ‘cd ‘ into the window. Pressing return should take you to the desired folder in dos.
• If all is good then go back to the 7zip installed folder and drag the 7zip.exe file into you cmd dos window that has the directory with all the files you want to extract located in it. (remember to ‘dir’ if you aren’t sure it’s got all the files first)
• This might look a bit garbeled but that’s ok.
• To test the program is going to run just press ‘return’ and it should print out a long list of switches. This is good.
• Now to save all that dragging and stuff just press up once on the arrow keys and you should have your command waiting for you to add the all important switches.
• The switch to extract each zip into its own folder (assuming the archive files were zipped as folders) is as follows:
• C:\The folder with my files>”C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe” x *.rar
• The first bit depends on where your files are of course and the second program files bit is the default locations for 7zip so that will probably be the same.
• ‘x’ is the extract with folder structure command
• ‘*.rar’ is the file archive type, it may be zips or other but 7zip does most of them

There you go, that should be it. My explanation is a little long winded to make more sense for everyone. The actual process is very simple.

You will then need to delete all the rar files as that simple command doesn’t remove the archive after successful extraction.

There are more advanced switches and I will add a few extra bits here when I have had time to try them out.

There is a quite useful guide to some of the 7zip switches here at dotnetperls

I often try to run a program that requires ownership of a port to work properly. One of these apps is the superb open source web based newsgroup download tool called SABnzbd. Without fiddling with settings SAB requires port 8080 open and available to work.

On the odd occasion I have started up SAB to find the error message that says 8080 is in use.

Finding what app is using what port can be a little difficult at times but i founda relativly simple way of doing it with just command prompt and task manager.

Firstly fire up the command prompt

The type 'netstat -aon' and press return

You should get a nice long list of ports and process id's. Look through this list till you find the offending port number and then find the process is for that port. This is reall the process id of the application using that port.

Next start up task manager and click on the processes tab. You should see a process id section but if not add it by selecting 'select columns from the view menu. It will be the top tick box item.

Now you will be able to find the application or process using that id (it's easier to sort but the process id column here) and once found you can kill the process in the usual manor.

Nifty trick

Often I find myself needing to know what is running on a web site, you know what CMS or server platform.
Luckily there are several good tools to help you find this out.
In Firefox there are 2 really handy plugins that show you most of the details you would need.
These are ServerSpy & Ghostery.

Server Spy adds some details in the bottom right corner of your browser and tells you what server,CMS and otherthings like jquery it is running.
Ghostery show in the top right of page (on load) the jquery type plugins the site is using.

There are also a few other good sites for digging a bit deeper to find out more.
WebMaswterCoffee.com digs really deep and analyses the struture of the site giving good results.
QuarkBase.com does similar things but also shows a wider range of info like what is happening in the social world.
Both very handy sites

Nice thought it is the Windows 7 login screen is a bit boring, help is at hand though as there are several tools out there already to change the image for something of your choosing.

I am not sure who has coded this particualr one up but it works well on my Win 7 install. Linky to Deviant Art page.

I use Firefox lots in my line of work and there are many really good addons out there for it.

I do however find myself forgetting the names of some and as I have several different machines I use on a daily basis, setting up individual addons can be a pain.

Mozilla have a while back, added a great collections thing to the addons site and I just deceided to join in and setup some sets of collections that I use.

The first is one I have named Site, Server & CMS Tools.

There are four really handy plugins for Firefox that allow you to locate where the page you are looking at is based and what server it is running on. It also shows you what CMS it is running if know and what type of js plugins it is running.

I will probably group together some more customisations I use in Firefox soon.

In my line of work i ofter find a need for tracing requests from web pages, and there are a few applications i use to do this.

Fiddler – https://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/

This is a great program which intergrates well with ie and firefox and shows all your page request and more.

Charles – http://www.charlesproxy.com/

Another great tool which allows a different view of the data flowing into your browsers. This seems to only work with IE but it may be an old version.ikoni