Saturday, August 04, 2012

Windows 8 Linkage: Product Name “Something or Another”

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Umm…we’ll get back with you on that…

Glad I’m not the guy in charge of product branding and damage control over in Redmond at the moment!

If it wasn’t challenging enough trying to continue the positive spin on the forced Windows 8 Metro home page (?) interface, and convincing enterprises that this new GUI model will improve productivity and operational excellence with their employees over Windows XP/Window 7, now they have to do some major spin-control on the whole “it was really just a codename” for the Windows 8 look/feel.

Really?

Anyway…regardless…it’s time to clean out the Windows 8 link hopper and do a Grand Stream Dreams Windows 8 linkfest dump.

Please note references to the former Win8 interface have been struck through for amusement and accuracy.

Win8 - Start Here - Get It

Win8 - Related Products and Services

Win8 - Install It

Win8 - Under the Hood

Win8 - To Go

Win8 - Tweaks

Win8 - Deeper Insights

Win8 - DaRT

Win8 - Usage Tips

Win8 - Miscellanea, Rumors, & General Grumblings

Windows 8 - GSD Previously Posted

Cheers!

--Claus V.

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Sunday, July 08, 2012

GSD Linkfest - a little bit of everything today

Quick collection of links gathered in this week.

  • Data recovery tutorial - As discovered and described by TinyApps.org. Very nice guide covering a number of Linux-based tools and techniques. DataRecovery - Community Ubuntu Documentation
  • Copy files from failing devices - Another great tippage from TinyApps bloggist. Check out safecopy
  • Create a system recovery partition - Great finds from TinyApps must come in “threes” as a link to Steve Si’s Create a system recovery partition post is found. It’s a detailed walkthough on setting up a Windows system-restore partition…just in case bad things ever strike.
  • Add to the file carving kit - TinyApps bonus links to POC for “Smart Carving” methods. Drop into the project’s SourceForge Documentation page to get the details.
  • FreeRecover - Free file recovery app for NTFS drives. It’s pretty fast. You can select options to get file paths as well as check “file integrity” to evaluate recovery value.  At this moment you cannot seem to sort results by column headings. It’s a good start.
  • Redo Backup and Recovery - BootCD format ISO file to handle system backups, recovery, partition editing, file recovery, and may more additional tools.
  • | Free Security & Utilities software downloads at SourceForge.net
  • The Case of the Veeerrry Slow Logons - Mark's Blog - Great post by the Windows Master Mark Russinovich. Covers a number of angles as well as the Windows login process in detail (and how it can be hampered). Good reading.
  • Google Chrome Bookmarks Menu Extension - CybernetNews found a really refined and polished  Google Chrome Bookmarks Menu Extension. I had been using Atomic Bookmarks but this one is much better IMHO.
  • Ads Are Coming to Google Chrome Extensions - TheNextWeb blog. Choose your extensions wisely now, my friends…
  • Release: NewsFox 1.0.8.4 - My favorite in-Firefox RSS feed add-on has a new release. newsfox: NEWEST
  • Filelist Creator - Free mini-app to create great lists of files/directories for indexing documentation. I have a few of these and this one is very, very nicely done. It’s been added to my carry-list.  Spotted and reviewed over at this Create Detailed File Lists In Various Formats With Filelist Creator AddictiveTips post.  Check out the big collection of other great utilities over at Stefan Trost Media. I grabbed more than a few!
  • TED V3.0 : The TEDinator - New update to the super-duper “TED Downloaded”.  I really appreciate the detail and help this tools brings in allowing me to download a local file of favorite “TED” talks. See also the new TED Radio Hour : NPR.
  • HexDive 0.3 - Hexacorn has just released a new version of HexDive which helps look for key strings in possible malware and other executable files. It’s CLI so it is really fast.
  • Forensic Artifacts blog has been releasing a large list of posts detailing forensic-worthy artifact bits left over from many applications. I found the PsTools Artifacts post extra interesting since it is used by a lot of us SysAdmins.
  • NTFS Tools collection - reboot.pro. Joakim Schicht has just announced an updated collection of NTFS tools he has been grinding away on.  After you read the overview on the first link, hop over to his Google Project hosting page mft2csv to check out:
    • NTFS File Extractor which extracts systemfiles (metafiles) off an NTFS volume.
    • mft2csv which takes a $MFT file and rip info from all the records and dump to CSV file.
    • MFTRCRD is a cli file dumper to pull all info mft2csv can decode. can also dump the $MFT record of a specific file to console and detailed run information.
    • SetMACE which is a timestamp fiddling tool.

      Note, Joakim doesn’t have them all bundled up in a single archive package so look at the Downloads page carefully to pick out the most recent versions of each of them. It isn’t hard but does take a moment to make sure you are grabbing the right file. Also be aware that these are compiled in “AutoIt” script. It’s very flexible and powerful but some AV apps might complain…  Joakim has done a great job with his documentation on each tool. Check out the Wiki for more details on each one.

Have fun!

--Claus V.

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Saturday, July 07, 2012

Greased Monkey Business

It’s no secret that one of the major ways I manage to keep up with “goings-on” in the world of Technology and culture is with the use of a RSS feed reader.

Generally it goes something like this:

  • Launch Feed reader (Newsfox or Omea Reader),
  • Pull down article feeds,
  • Read, review and analyze,
  • Open feeds to be saved for later processing in web-browser, and
  • Bookmark article/link.

Later I might do some sorting of the saved bookmarks by subject or category or blog-post idea.

When it comes time to actually compose a post, I will open up Windows Live Writer on one side of my screen and my web-browser in the other.

Then I do a combo of composing the text body as well as some drag/drop action from the saved bookmark links.

That’s all well and good except for a tiny gotcha I figured out about a year ago.

See, many (but not all) of my RSS feeds actual open up to a page link that was seeded with some extra feed-tracking data code.

For instance:

This article appeared in my RSS feed list, was interesting, so I launched the full article in my browser and bookmarked it: Design and create with nanoCAD, a totally free CAD solution - freewaregenius.

However if you take a look at the actual URL provided by the RSS feed link in the browser was:

http://www.freewaregenius.com/2012/07/03/design-and-create-with-nanocad-a-totally-free-cad-solution/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Freewaregeniuscom+%28freewaregenius.com%29

…rather than the direct URL of:

http://www.freewaregenius.com/2012/07/03/design-and-create-with-nanocad-a-totally-free-cad-solution/

I added emphasis in the first link to show the extra sauce the RSS link path adds.

That’s not really a problem, but adds a bunch of extra code (and tracking data) that doesn’t really need need to be present in the blog links that everybody jumps from. I’m all for fair tracking and they get my “ding” when I view the full page the first time within my RSS feed reader.

So what I had been doing is cleaning up the link first in the bookmark properties before adding it to a post.

Only sometimes I forget.

Well, actually, many times I forget and it can be a lot of work cleaning them up.

Too bad I couldn’t automate cleaning up the bookmarks somehow.

Although I couldn’t figure a easy way to do that, I did eventually find a brilliant Greasemonkey script that did one better.

It actually intercepts the RSS feed-load in Firefox and cleans it up before loading in the tab. Sweet!

Removing UTM data from URLs automatically for cleaner bookmarks -Christian Heilmann. From his post page:

“I’ve come across lots of delicious bookmarks that still have all that campaign monitoring stuff in them, which is annoying. To work around that I’ve just written myself a tiny GreaseMonkey script:

Install un-UTM for GreaseMonkey

“If the browser now opens a link that has UTM data in it, it removes the information and reloads the page without it to make for a cleaner URL.”

Christian is clearly brilliant and his solution works perfectly. No more tracking data appending of URL’s to my saved bookmarks!

Related:

Mischief managed.

--Claus V.

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T-Bird Development Slows…and some options

Just in case you missed it, the Mozilla Thunderbird development team recently announced that they will be scaling back development on new features to this fan-favorite email client and primarily focus on stability and security work.

It some circles it might be called “hitting a plateau.”

So what does that mean if you use Thunderbird as your email client?  Well. Probably not very much.

Thunderbird is a very mature email client and already packs almost all the primary features that one could need into it already.  Toss on the Lightning calendaring plugin and you have a full-featured email and activity duo. There are more than many Add-ons for Thunderbird.  Myself--aside from Lightning--I only use the following additional extensions; Color Folders, Attachment Tree, Extra Folder Columns, and AttachmentExtractor. That’s it.

So I don’t really have any concerns or cares at the present moment regarding T-Birds slow-simmering.

However, just in case that ever does become an issue with me--or maybe you are looking for some new email client platform--I did some looking around and found the following free email clients that are in active development and could be considered worthy replacements for Thunderbird. I tossed them all on my Windows 8 system and took them for a whirl. Here’s my alternative preferences.

Windows Live Mail - Microsoft. Who knows what Redmond will call it next year as they kill off the “Windows Live” branding and repackage it as something Win8’ish. Doesn’t matter. This email application is the very first one I recommend to most all family and friends. It has a dead-simple interface. It has decent email message handling security and rules/filter capabilities. And setup of a new email account (or multiple ones) is a breeze.  There isn’t much not to like with this one.

eM Client Email Client - eM Client. I would be lying to say that I had heard of this email client before yesterday’s search. I had not. However the reviews and comment'-feedback were ridiculously good so I had to check it out. I am amazed. A review of the Features left me highly impressed.  It supports both web-based email servers as well as the more traditional email server connections. It contains a full-featured calendar along with event management, task lists, and contacts.  Yes, you can import those items from most all other email clients. They have a free edition (registration required) along with a more featured ($) version. Installation was a breeze and setup was a piece of cake. The interface is really, really well designed and (hard-to-admit) outshines Thunderbird. I had no problems getting it going and feeling instantly at home. If T-Bird ever gets its goose burnt, eM Client will probably be my replacement choice, hands-down. Check it out!

DreamMail Europe Community - This free email client was also very easy to get going and set up. Like eM Client the user GUI is very approachable. All the major features you would want in an email client are present.

Pegasus Mail - David Harris. - This is a free email client that is much more advanced. It doesn’t have the same degree of “wizard support” like Windows Live Mail, eM Client, or DreamMail to get your web-based email accounts going. You will need to know in advance some of the more technical bits of your email system such as the POP3 and STMP server names as well as any special ports and security settings connections to them require. The user interface is more detailed than the previous clients mentioned. All this to day it is a more technically advanced email client than average users would probably want or need. However if you want a lot of control regarding your email client and accounts, and the advanced configurations don’t concern you, it is worth checking out.

Sylpheed - Like Pegasus Mail, this email client requires a bit of detailed work getting things going.  The interface is more simple to navigate than Pegasus, but you will need to feed it some more technical details to get it configured. Once running, it is very direct to use and is something most average users shouldn’t have any issues with.

i.Scribe - Has a very nice and basic interface. Configuration will require the POP3 and STMP sever details of your host. However I did find it very easy to navigate around in and find all the critical things needed to get it up and going.  There are message filters and advanced security setting options. All in all a nice little application.

Microsoft Outlook 2010 - Microsoft - Yeah, I know, it is neither free nor a very “light” email client. That said, if you have it as part of an already installed MS Office suite load, it might be worthwhile to give it another look. I know many folks who are so used to using MS Office at work that they feel right at home running and using it for their personal email client needs at home.

This isn’t a list of the “only” email clients for Windows out there. There are more, many smaller and many “portable”.  However these were the ones I considered myself most likely to use after downloading, configuring to a POP3 “web-mail” account, and running on Windows 8.

Cheers.

Claus V.

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Sunday, July 01, 2012

Material Roundup: Linkfest

Been a semi-relaxing weekend.

Read with interest this TaoSecurity blog post Bejtlich's Thoughts on "Why Our Best Officers Are Leaving" as well as this one Whither United States Air Force Academy? both by Richard Bejtlich. I also noted that the USAFA was evacuated this week as cadets were heading in due to the area fires. These things still catch my attention as I had started the process to become a USAFA candidate my senior year of high-school before removing myself from the process for family reasons (my choice…no excuses). Still, I will always wonder about the path not taken.

Also, while IANAL, I was left scratching my head and heartbroken just a bit by the recent SCOTUS decision. The USNI blog had a post that resonated with my own feelings: The U.S. Supreme Court just diminished the significances of Military Valor [opinion].

Little bro was in town so he brought some pizza’s over, I grabbed some super-good local micro-brewed root beers and we had a party catching up, comparing life notes, and watching Act of Valor on this pre-July 4th weekend.

I wrapped things up yesterday with a viewing of Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Wikipedia) which covers the Chauvet Cave (Wikipedia). Very interesting and well filmed documentary. The cave-art is really fascinating…I just wish we could have learned more about the people behind it.

I guess if there was a theme it was reflecting on the importance of what remains of us, of our efforts, of the world around us.

Back to the shallows…

Sometimes I feel a bit guilty just dumping a super-post like this that is heavy-laden with linkage.

Some weeks are busier than others, however, and while I have more than a few posts still pending in the hopper that are deeper collections of “how-to”, personal reviews, or troubleshooting sessions, I hope that some find value in these “linkfests”.  Primarily they serve to help me quickly search and find material, tools, and techniques that I believe will either be useful, or are useful, when I am away from my desk and my USB dongle is at home rather than in hand. It’s challenging finding that right software or tip and maybe something here will be useful to others or pique their interest and send them in the right direction.

Security Bits

For Sec News

Network Resources

Tools and Utilities of Note

  • Updates: Autoruns v11.32, Process Explorer v15.21, Process Monitor v3.02 - Sysinternals. Stop, Drop, and Download now; the holy trinity of software tools just got updated again!
  • Monitor Any Folder Or Disk Drive For Changes In Real-Time, Even Across Networks - AddictiveTips blog post review of new NirSoft tool.
  • FolderChangesView - Monitor folder/drive changes - NirSoft
  • ExtremeCopy: Probably The Fastest File/Folder Move & Copy Utility - AddictiveTips blog review.
  • ExtremeCopy - Easersoft. I’m a dedicated TeraCopy fan but this one sounds intriguing. Will need to put it through the paces soon.
  • Remove Items from the Windows Explorer and IE Context Menus - CyberNet News.
  • MenuMaid - SD Software - software utility link
  • 4 Better Windows Console Tools Alternatives to Windows Built In Command Prompt -Windows7hacker - Kent has a really nice roundup. While the good-ole cmd.exe will do the job, I must say these “replacements” are quite nice. I’ve used “Console2” quite a bit and like the tab format and transparency/font/color tweaking options. PowerCMD surprised me with its feature set and I really can see myself using it more regularly. Check out the others as well.
  • GetFoldersize - Michael Thummerer Software Design - Super nice freeware tool to locate and understand just what is taking up space on your hard-drive. Was recently updated to version 2.5.10. I really like this tool.
  • SizeOnDisk Folder Size - new to me freeware tool found on CodePlex.  Another nice tool to find file/folder size hogs.
  • Folder Size - another freeware file/folder size tool.
  • SpaceSniffer - Uderzo Software - freeware tool that is amazingly fast and amazingly fun to use. While the previously mentioned tools excel at a tabular report, this one provides a super easy visual layout presentation of your space usage. You can drill down very easily. It gives you a easy-to-grasp picture on what is using up your hard-drive space..
  • SequoiaView - I keep this one around just because it is so beautiful. It does a great job even though it hasn’t been updated in quite a long time. It may have been one of the first to present space on disk usage in a “squarified” treemap format.
  • FolderSize - tiny little app (174 kb) from developer Jan Horn that is standalone and gives you a basic what-you-need-to-know report on drive/folder space usage.
  • DirectorySlicer - With giant (and cheap) USB sticks and network connections aplenty, splitting files and folders to specific sizes is become a rarified task. That said this CodePlex project is worth snagging in that it splits files of a folder into partitions of a specified size. So that super-folder you are trying to burn to CD doesn’t fit? Directory Slicer takes the work out of guessing by allowing you to set the size (or use a preset) then it divvies it up accordingly! Clever.
  • Unlock & Delete Empty Folders via Wildcard-Based Rules - AddictiveTips post review of…
  • Empty Folder Cleaner - 4dots Software
  • Reminded me of a previously GSD mentioned Empty Folder Nuker by Simon Wai.


For the Admins: Mostly from Microsoft

Cheers and happy pre-July 4th State-side well wishes to all.

Claus V.

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Sunday, June 17, 2012

Father’s Day Linkage - Tie Down Edition

cc image credit image by Fernando de Sousa on flickr

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Happy Father’s Day!

Here is a real varied collection of links. Enjoy!

Security Solids

Firefox Paisleys

In my last GSD post, I touched a bit on some issues I was having with Firefox 13 and Flash.  My issues may or may not have been related to these, however there are some serious headaches for Firefox 13 and Flash users.

Sysadmin Stripes

  • Malware Hunting with the Sysinternals Tools -  TechEd North America 2012 \ Channel 9 - A new presentation video from Mark Russinovich on using Sysinternals Tools to do some malware thumpin! Watch streaming or pick from one of two formats for direct downloading and viewing later. This presentation includes real-case reviews as well as a live analysis of a Stuxnet infection. Sweet!
  • Windows Exploratory Surgery with Process Hacker - SANS Windows Security Blog - Jason Fossen shares PDF version of his presentation primarily using the freeware tool "Process Hacker”.  It is a really great review of the different angles one can take with a limited tool-set.

    That got me thinking a bit. Process Hacker has matured quite a lot since I last downloaded a copy and the new one certainly has more polish on it. I went through my utility pile and offer below some other great freeware utility process-monitoring tools you may be interested in visiting again.
    • Process Explorer - Sysinternals - One ring to rule them all. Still the very first utility I place on my Windows systems and swap out the default Task-Manager with. It continues to be upgraded so if you haven’t got the latest version for a while, you are missing out!
    • System Explorer - This one also has grown up quite a bit from my last download a few years ago. I like the tabbed interface. The “Performance View” tab is very neat. Process Explorer’s graphs are still a bit more detailed looking but it doesn’t provide an all-in-one dashboard view like System Explorer offers.

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    • Daphne - Not as GUI pretty as the others, but what it lacks in pretty it more than makes up in back-to-basics tightness.
    • Process Viewer for Windows - This project hasn’t been updated in a while but again, the “latest” update was still fresher than the one I’ve been carrying around for quite a while. This one is a bit more feature basic. If you aren’t ready for the power of some of these other process utility tools, but need more detail than the default Windows Task Manager (at least in XP) then this may be a friendly choice.
    • ProcessActivityView and  ProcessThreadsView - These two application from NirSoft compliment each other nicely.
    • NoVirusThanks EXE Radar Pro - Provides process monitoring and alerting as well as to kill processes on demand.
    • ESET SysInspector - This is a complex, single-file-executable. It provides detailed information on running processes as well heuristics reporting on items found. I find it particularly helpful in assessing a system. It may not tell me exactly what is going on, but it often will help be refine my focus a bit.
  • WHITEPAPER: Windows PowerShell 3.0 and Server Manager Quick Reference Guides - Kurt Shintaku's Blog

I learned this week about a “honeypot” project that attempts to capture USB-seeking virus/malware by creating a virtual USB-drive honeypot. This is a cool project and I hope it continues to see success in development.

More interesting tips for admins…

Network Knitted

  • ARP Scans - A Ping Alternative - LoveMyTool blog video presentation by Tony Fortunato.What’s really going on the wire with Colasoft MAC Scanner Free.
  • Script to resolve hostnames to IP address - Computer Security Forum. Recently I was presented with a massive list of Hostnames for PC’s on our network. The assignment was quite simple, provide the associated IP addresses.  No problem, I could manually ping each one by hostname, copy the result (if alive) and paste into my spreadsheet. Well, no. I wanted to go home to my family that night. Instead I found and ran this nice simple script against a cleaned up text-file of the Hostnames. My success ratio for IP grabs was over 90%. The other 10% required some manual followup (systems turned off, shelved, etc.) but it made quick work. I wasn’t able to find a good free GUI-based alternative, but this did the job wonderfully.
  • Extracting DNS queries - NETRESEC Blog - Either by Tshark or NetworkMiner.

Utility Dotted

Foresensically Checked

Cheers!

--Claus V.

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Friday, June 15, 2012

RSS Feed Reader Upgrade - Hope through the storm (+more)

Over the last few weeks a perfect storm apparently conspired to take out productivity on my personal laptop.

First, I had woken up on a Saturday morning to find my smokin-hot laptop “Tatiana” would no longer boot. Four beeps of death and no BIOS boot screen. Coupled with that was a failing internet connection. Oh yeah, the cable-DVR box refused to output video signal.

Bad Things™ were afoot! Bad, man.

Between sporadic and brief periods of Nettage I was able to manage a download of Dell’s Studio 1558 Support doc with beep codes. Four beeps = RAM read/write failure. I breathed better after I had tried pulling out the two (new) Crucial 4GB Dimm sticks (total 8 GB RAM) and dropped back in the x2 2 GB OEM (Kingston) RAM that shipped with the system and it booted up normally again. Based on a super-kind investment from little-bro after I walked him through some dicey system issues a while back, I had upgraded Tatiana’s memory with two sweet 4 GB sticks of RAM from Crucial. With 8 GB on board, the system chews up the VM’s I’m running.

Through trial and error I was eventually able to locate which of the two Crucial sticks went bad. I left the good 4 GB Dimm stick in and supplemented it with a 2 GB Kingston stick to limp by with 6 GB.

Good news is that the Crucial gang have a generous warranty policy on their RAM and a week after I went through the RMA process, the replacement Dimm arrived today and is waiting installation. Yea Crucial! The entire process was a piece of cake and communications to me by Crucial were spot on! Customer service done right and one reason I return to them time-after-time for my RAM upgrades.

The spotty Intertubes issue was another thing. Due credit to my ISP help desk, they never gave me a hassle during the troubleshooting process (do you have lights on your modem?) and let me jump right to the gist when I identified myself as network dude (sure, let me do a signal test like you suggest and BTW here’s the packet data results we are seeing…). The first time I called they couldn’t test down to the router as their entire system was down also (bummer). The second time they reported lots of packet loss and sent an updated config file to it. That helped a bit, for a day. Then back to spotty connectivity. I had already done extensive troubleshooting on the Cat-6 hard-wiring between the cable modem and my WiFi modem; it was fine as was my WiFi modem connection itself. Another call, another confirmation of packet issues, another day of a working network before regular outages began. “Sir, do you have splitter in the modem’s line?” “Yes, your last tech put it there himself. We’ve been good for over two years since.”  They offered to send a line tech but I didn’t feel like taking a day off work just yet.

So last week after work I pulled my Dremel, put a wire polishing brush on the tip and from the outside of the house inward, unscrewed every coax connection, polished the threads and copper center wire, and reassembled…all the way back and including the cable modem box.  An hour or more later everything was bright/shiny and tight. And the connection was rock-solid again. Hurrah!

The DVR cable box was a surprising issue.  It is Cisco RNG200 HD-DVR box and I use an HDMI cable to output signal to the TV. First check was the cable itself. Attaching it to the (now working again) Tatiana resulted in great video signal display to the TV. Not the cable.

Maybe the box itself was failing?  For the past month we had noticed a trend where the video signal would go black suddenly for a few seconds before restoring again. Related perhaps?

After finally getting a cheery cable-tech on the line from our provider, he listened patiently as I explained all the troubleshooting work I had done already and the growing video output signal dropouts. Immediately he sent a major re-programming order to the system (not your normal box reauthorization signal mind you). About forty minutes later the software had been digested, applied, and assimilated. The box sprang to life and signal was restored again. And all our recorded shows were still on the drive! Since then, we haven’t had any issues with video dropout either. Not sure what happened, but I’m guessing the software/firmware refresh cleared it up.

Claus? What has this to do with RSS feeding?

I’m getting to that.

Amongst all this drama spread over a week or two getting resolved, Firefox 13 dropped, a significant Flash update dropped, and my Firefox/NewsFox combo for reading my almost 250 RSS feeds ground to a horrible stop.

See, I found that every time I attempted to use NewsFox to pull my RSS feeds, it would inevitably hit one that had some kind of Flash/Java/script something and lock Firefox up completely. I could get it going again by waiting forever for a “script stopped responding” dialog to appear which might eventually allow me to continue on. However I found just killing the plugin-container sub-process with Process Explorer did the trick faster. To compound issues, I wasn’t seeing the Flash Player sub-processes kick off underneath the "plugin-container”.

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Something bad was happening and only by killing the plugin-container process could I get control back of Firefox.

I had previously experimented with dedicated client-based RSS feed readers, but have been a die-hard proponent of having my RSS feeds directly in my web-browser and NewsFox fit the need perfectly.

So I started the search to see if there was a client-based RSS feed reader that would allow me to break out of my browser for RSS feed reading in the meantime, but still be compatible with the process to support my blogging work.

After looking through the options on my (very) old post RSS Reader Roundup…Valca Style, checking out some newer apps, (including the slick new Mishra and Voyage readers) and picking though a ton of Google search results on the subject, I settled on two possible candidates; Feedreader and Omea Reader.

Feedreader was very nice and has become quite polished since I last toyed with it. I was able to import my sizeable OMPL list from NewsFox and with a few tweaks had a nicely sorted/displayed 3-column view. The text view is beautiful for the articles and the feed information and article link presented at the top of each displayed article header was stunningly perfect. Feed updating was fast and stable. It was almost a perfect match. Except that despite all my attempts, the process of getting the link out and into Firefox just didn’t quite work smoothly. Since I bookmark interesting links during the week until blogging time rolls around this was a real problem. I don’t use IE regularly, but still prefer to leave it as my default system browser. So clicking a link opened up IE, which I then had to copy the link and paste it into Firefox and then reload the page and then save my bookmark. The total package is beautiful and simple.

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Omea Reader was brilliant and I’m using it full time now for my RSS needs.  Out of the box (as I posted originally back in 2008) it is very over-the-top feature rich. I was able to turn off features/tabs for contact management, favorites, HTML plugin, News plugin, Notes plugin, and pictures plugin.  Once disabled, all that I left running was the RSS plugin. I easily imported my OPML file and it raced through the feed updating rocket-fast.  It supports complex feed-view filtering as well as categorizations. I can set a ton of special filters and highlighting based on key-words.  The article text-view is nice (though not quite as polished as Feedreader). Some feed/links that NewsFox had issue with were no issue for Omea. It doesn’t have a launch at startup option (nor launch minimized) that I can tell, however I set it to launch as a scheduled task 5 minutes after login and that seems OK.  While running it seems to kill my Windows screen saver. Haven’t figured that out yet. In fact, my only complaint seems to be that the RSS article feed link is displayed at the very bottom of each post, rather than up in the header section like Feedreader. (Omea Team? Any tips to get the article link displayed in the header section?)  This means sometimes I need to scroll to the very bottom to open the link in a browser. Speaking of that, Omea is cool in that if I have Firefox running in the background and click a RSS feed link to view the full article in the browser, it sends it to Firefox as a new tab. From there I just deposit the page in my bookmark sidebar. That’s a Texas two-step dance I can live with. Sweet!

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I’ve not given up yet on NewsFox and may return to it since I (below) sorted out the Firefox lockup issue I was plagued with, but I’ve clearly reached the tipping point.  The speed and feature set that Omea Reader bring me as a full featured, and semi-autonomous RSS reader have convinced me this was a wise way to go. I can update my feeds in the background without locking up my Firefox browsing.

Now, soon after I had started getting used to Omea Reader, I had to turn my attention back to the constant lockup issues with Firefox. I was super close to jumping to Chrome full time. The only thing that saved me was the (continued) lack of a bookmarks sidebar in Chrome like Firefox has.

The lockup issue ended up not being NewsFox add-on extension specific. It directly hurt the most because NewsFox was always open in the background and it seemed that anytime it or me hit a feed that had something going on triggering the event, Firefox would lock up.

I disabled NoScript. I disabled AdBlock. No fix. Eventually I was able to find some web-pages (outside of NewsFox) that would cause the page load to lock up Firefox but not IE or Chrome. I had material to work with and it was clearly outside of being just a NewsFox problem

Long story short, I eventually found through lengthy troubleshooting that the issue (in my case) was the Flash/Adobe/Shockwave plugins I had in my portable Firefox plugin folder; Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition Support | Installing Plugins. Basically, Firefox Portable (which I use) has a FirefoxPortable\Data\plugins directory where you can keep your plugin files if you run the app on a system that lacks them.

These here:

m0zm2qw0.u1d

+ This

fkswe35k.x31

= Firefox lockups and no Flash sub-process execution!

Instead:

Nothing here:

nfdd0c40.tfk

+ This

lyxzhyj3.t0x

= No Firefox lockup and the expected Flash sub-process executions!

Firefox 13 tamed.

Go figure.

Despite the fact that the files I had in here were the same ones from where they are also “installed” on my system, emptying out the files in this folder solved the lockup issue I was experiencing. 

Don’t know why that was an issue, but it was. With the portable plugin repository empty again, no more lockups since and Firefox seems just fine finding the appropriate browser plugins from their main installation location on my system.

So it was with interest today that I found the following in my RSS feeds.

A further option for remedying the problem is to deactivate Protected Mode. Under Windows 7 or Vista, this requires the addition of the line ProtectedMode=0 to the configuration file mms.cfg. Since Protected Mode is not used under Windows XP, this step is not necessary on that platform. In 64-bit editions of Windows 7 and Vista, mms.cfg is located in <%windir%\syswow64\macromed\flash>; in 32-bit versions the file is located in <%windir%\system32\macromed\flash>. Administrator privileges are required to modify these files. Detailed instructions can be found in Adobe's Protected Mode FAQ.

Some users have traced some of their crashes back to the fact that Firefox's out-of-process plugin protection has been disabled. A support article on the Mozilla web site explains how to reverse this change.

Adobe has gone even further and released instructions for downgrading Flash Player to a previous version. Users should on no account downgrade to build 11.2, however, as it is known to contain critical security vulnerabilities which are currently being actively exploited. Instead, users should install Flash Player 10.3, in which the vulnerabilities in question have been fixed in a similar way to version 11.3 since Adobe is continuing to supply enterprise customers with security patches for Flash 10.

I had considered that the new sandboxing features might have been causing the issue, but since I had been able to replicate the issue in a parallel run of Firefox 12 I ruled the Firefox version 13 itself as being the source of my particular issue.

I’m now turning my attention to picking through this detailed technical post in hopes it might help be understand what was going on:

All is well in my case, and having weathered a perfect storm of technology problems, I’m pleased to say Firefox 13 is running strong, I have a new “high-end” RSS feed reader that is increasing both my performance and feed consuming hunger brilliantly, the cable box video output is good as new, and thanks to Crucial, I’m back to 8 GB system RAM on my notebook again.

There is peace and harmony in the Valca home again.

Hopefully somewhere, something in all these travails and victories might help someone.

Cheers!

--Claus V.

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