Last week Bob Cringely annouced he was going to launch the NerdTV show/network through a series of distributed servers. At the same time he annouced that he would begin providing his columns and the NerdTV shows in an audio podcast format as well. I’m interested to see how this works out. If the show takes off it could go a long way towards showing PBS that the internet is a viable distribution method for TV.

In related news be sure to check out the “This Week in Tech” (TWiT) podcast being produced by several ex-ZD/TechTV employees. You can get the latest episode at their site.

There’s a pun in that title somewhere. I often need to swap files with friends for projects that are just too big for email. I’d really like to use some sort of web based file locker system that allowed for both personal and group access to various files but it would be even better if there was a way to let users map that file locker to a drive or directory on their system (usually Win32 or OS X) for an even easier way to upload the files. After some research I’ve discovered that the best way to do this may be to use a webdav server (with software such as Plone) and the Novell NetDrive program which maps webdav space to a drive letter. Yet another option may be the Novell iFolder project. I don’t know if either solution is the right one or will let users have both public and private files (especially on a per user basis) which would be a really nice feature, but at least it’s a start.

It’s pretty common in the IT world to carry around a stack of 3.5″ floppy disks with a variety of bootable software on them for diagnostic and repair purposes (Symantec Ghost, DriveImage, DBAN Disk Eraser, Memtest86, HDD Diagnostics, etc.) At various employers I’ve spent some time trying to put all these tools on a bootable CD-ROM. Unfortunatly, it’s usually not a high priority and ends up being unfinished but the plan remains in my head. As floppy drives continue to become scarce in the corporate world this is going to get done sooner or later. The plan as it currently stands is something like this:

Use tools from Bart’s excellent site (especially BFD) to build a series of floppy disk images of the DOS based software (Ghost, Drive Image, HDD Diagnostics, etc.) via scripts to allow for easy updating. The Linux tools (DBAN and Memtest86) usually come supplied as FDD images so I’d just use those directly. Put all the onto a cd and use CDShell as the bootloader and menu program to select which image to start (CDShell also supports loading ISO cd images). I would probably build the cd with Bart’s BCD program which spits out an ISO file or burns directly to disc.

A project similar to this is availible at http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ but it doesn’t do things quite the way I want. It may work for you though. The time consuming part for me is to try and consolidate the Symantec Ghost boot disks for each different NIC into one big image that’s partially a floppy image and partially on CD (due to size) while still making it fit in 640k of DOS accessible RAM. I’m sure it can be done, I just haven’t had the time to spend on it recently.

Occasionally you need to boot into DOS when working on an older computer and it’s handy to recover files by saving them to a network server. Some time ago I found that this site does a good job of explaining the various methods of accessing and sharing files between DOS systems and CIFS/SMB (eg. Windows Filesharing) systems.

Another common problem when doing advanced things such as networking in DOS is that you’ll run out of the 640k of conventional memory DOS can access. This site is a good resource to look at when you need to squeeze a few more things into that space.

Once upon a time (ok, it was April) I needed to know how to enable and disable those little popup balloons you get in Windows XP when tou send a print job to a network printer. Eventually I found these two Microsoft KnowledgeBase articles explaining the process. This one does it with a checkbox which doesn’t always work and this one with a registry hack.