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misc dropbox, live_writer, sync

I like Windows Live Writer and I use it for blogging. The problem is I start multiple posts at once, take some notes on them and save them as drafts. Sometimes when I’m on a different machine I want to add some notes on the existing drafts but (you guessed it) the drafts are saved locally on a different machine. I already have Dropbox installed almost on my machines so I decided to harness it to the task.

STEP 01: Delete the My Blog Posts folder in the destination machine. The local folder is created automatically under %UserProfile%\Documents\My Weblog Posts. Delete this folder. Make sure LiveWriter is closed before deleting it.

STEP 02: Create a directory junction A directory junction is a mapping to another folder. In Windows 7 you can use mklink command to create directory junctions (as well as symbolic and hard links)

mklink /D "%UserProfile%\Documents\My Weblog Posts" {PATH_TO_DROPBOX_ROOT}\My Weblog Posts"

Enter the correct path to your dropbox folder and that’s it. Now you can enjoy the ease of synchronized blog drafts.

security mfa

I learned a neat trick to force Windows check a USB device plugged in to be able to log on the system. The tool to use for that is syskey, an ancient tool introduced to Windows with Windows NT SP3. Here’s how to do it:

  1. Insert your USB drive. As syskey only supports floopy disk change the drive letter to A.
  1. Run syskey (From command prompt or by pressing WinKey + R then entering syskey)

  2. Select Store Startup Key on Floppy Disk

SysKey

After you restart the machine, Windows will check your “floppy” USB drive and if it is not there it will display the error message: “This computer is configured to use a floppy disk during startup. Please insert the disk and click OK”. After you insert the disk you can logon by entering your password.

dev jmeter, siege, chaos_monkey

Know thy limits! This is especially important when you’re developing a system that expects a high traffic. Moving systems onto the cloud makes it easier to adapt and scale out to match the load but you have to prepare for node failures and instant spikes in the traffic. Also you have to make sure that your system is responsive under long heavy load. Below I recommend 3 tools to test your system against such situations:

01. JMeter

Apache JMeter, is a Java-based open-source desktop application. I submitted a basic introduction to JMeter here. But it has many advanced feature which I’m planning to cover in a post in the near future.

02. Siege

Siege is an HTTP load testing tool. It’s not complex as JMeter but works the job well and it is very simple to use. It supports UNIX variants but not on Windows. It can obtained from here.

03. Chaos Monkey

Chaos Monkey

Originally developed by Netflix and open-sourced later. It is AWS specific tool. What is does is connect to your AWS system and terminate instances randomly. So that you can observe your system in such worst case scenarios. The good thing about it is, it selects its “victims” by looking at a tag you provide. So if you don’t want a single node such as a database server, you can easily exclude it. Source code can be downloaded from here.