To accomplish this task without losing all your Windows data you need 3 things.

1. Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
2. An HFS+ Mac-formatted external drive
3. Winclone
   

To decrease the size of your Windows partition use the following steps.

1. Make a backup of your Boot Camp partition from Windows. (optional)
2. Run Winclone.
3. In the “Tools” drop down click “Shrink Windows (NTFS) file system.”
4. Follow the onscreen instructions.
5. Wait… it takes awhile.
   
6. In Winclone create an “Image” to your Mac-formatted external hard drive.
7. Use Boot Camp Assistant to return your drive to a 100% Mac-formatted partition.
8. Use Boot Camp Assistant to make a new Boot Camp partition larger than the file size of your “shrunk” Windows partition image, but smaller than your original Boot Camp partition size.
   
9. When it asks for Windows disk, quit Boot Camp Assistant.
10. Run Winclone again and “Restore” your Windows image to the new partition.

To increase the size of your Windows partition use the following steps.

1. Make a backup of your Boot Camp partition from Windows. (optional)
2. Run Winclone.
3. In Winclone create an “Image” to your Mac-formatted external hard drive.
4. Use Boot Camp Assistant to return your drive to a 100% Mac-formatted partition.
5. Use Boot Camp Assistant to make new Boot Camp partition larger than your original partition size.
   
6. When it asks for Windows disk, quit Boot Camp Assistant.
7. Run Winclone again and “Restore” your Windows image to the new partition.

Kind of a pain, but it’s doable. I’ve altered my Boot Camp partition numerous times using the methods above.

We’ve been out of Brian’s original sticker print-run for awhile now, but today I got a new batch in the mail! Big thanks go out to Stephen Gutknecht for fronting the money to purchase the stickers.

If you’d like a sticker let me know at Jelly. They cost $2 a piece to print. Not so coincidently, we’ll be accepting donations of $2 per sticker.

Alternatively you can hop on Mikons.com and create all kinds of schwag using the Jelly icon and have it shipped straight to your door.

I had a little trouble with the checkout process at Mikons, but Mark was fantastic about helping me, and it turned out to be an over the top customer experience.

So, you heard about a great event on Twitter? Hit “cntrl” + “;” type in the event and you’re done. I love it!

If you use Google Calendar you need to know about the “Quick Add” feature. It’s by far the easiest way I’ve ever seen to enter an event into a calendar. Somehow it can magically parse dates, times, locations, and even repeating events out of a one line description. It understands things like “every Friday,” “next Tue.,” and “noon – 3″ Check it out in this short video demo to get the idea.

Unfortunately, as of this blog post, the Google Calendar “Quick Add” Firefox Add-on isn’t compatible with FirexFox 3 beta.

But hey, surely Microsoft has some mechanism to get me back in the game right? Not after 6:00pm! Nope. I have to write them a pleasant email and kick back and wait for a response in the next 24 hours. Of course this should be fine. It’s not like I shelled out $300 big ones for the privilege of running Windows Vista Business. And hey, who uses Vista Business for business right? And even if it was for business purposes, who works after 6pm? Yes, a 24 hour turnaround email is the PERFECT solution. *That’s sarcasm Microsoft!*

I must admit, I was able to “chat” with a Microsoft rep. He was a tremendous help providing me with a link to the webpage I initiated the “chat” from, that also contained the support email address. He also ensured me Microsoft would respond to my email within the next 24 hours and he informed me that the email support is absolutely FREE! Can you believe it!? Bless my lucky stars, it’s FREE! *That’s sarcasm again Microsoft!* Free… humph. Give me a break. I should be billing Microsoft my time spent dealing with WGA.

If it wasn’t for Visual Studio Microsoft would have one less developer. Hell, maybe I’ll migrate over to Mono and run Linux and OSX.

In an attempt to fix this problem I set out to make a domain research tool that people can trust. My solution? Use an open source whois script and give the web users directory browsing rights to the site. This way the users can verify that their searches are not being monitored by looking through the source code.

Check it out here at http://www.overtwhois.com/

The add-on is also fairly configurable. You can choose between PNG and JPEG file formats. You can also scale the size of the screen capture and select a default filename pattern. Other handy options include a keyboard shortcut, including or excluding the browser’s menus, and capturing the entire page or only the visible portion.

I tried TextPad out for the first time the other day. It’s awesome! It can open ENORMOUS files with relative ease. It allowed me to open a 200meg XML file to verify that it was properly formatted without killing my machine. Granted I have 1gig of memory, but performing the same task in Notepad is essentially impossible.

On top of being able to handle such large files it is feature packed without being bulk-ware. Installed it takes up a whopping 4megs of disk space.

I must admit, I am a new user to TextPad and I haven’t fully explored the applications potential. But some great features I’ve noticed include macros, spell checking, character maps, find and replace using regular expressions, file compare, sorting, and tabbed open files. There is also support to compile and run Java code from the editor, though I haven’t tried this feature.

TextPad is free to try with all of its features enabled. If you like it, a single user license is $28.70US. They also have license packs.

If you need to do serious raw text manipulation for HTML, Java, CSV or otherwise, check this tool out.

References:
TextPad – The Editor for Windows

The down fall to this nifty website is that every campaign entry has its own custom HTML page. That means that every time we add a new campaign, guess who gets to write the HTML and make the client revisions. Yep, that’s my hand in the air.

The solution to my dilemma was to create an administration page so our account executives can add and modify campaign entries themselves. The problem with this is that account executives are not trained in writing HTML. Enter FCKeditor, “the text editor for Internet.”

FCKeditor is a small JavaScript web application that provides your users with a textbox input field with a WYSIWYG editor anchored to the top of the input box, thus giving your users the ability format their text. Essentially the FCKeditor is generating HTML for your users on the fly. It’s compatible with IE 5.5+, Firefox 1.0+, Mozilla 1.3+, and Netscape 7+. And it has hooks to plug-in into your existing ASP.Net, ASP, PHP, ColdFusion, Java, and Perl web applications. Plus it’s Open Source to boot.

This bad boy is feature packed. You can add custom templates, tables, and form input fields. It has an interface to add special characters, and the ability to upload images, and Flash files. You can even toggle from the formatted view to the raw HTML view.

For my administration page I used the FCKeditor C# wrapper class and simply dropped the FCKeditor into my project as a Control. I then bound the HTML value of the FCKeditor input field to my database and I was up and running. Adding the wrapper class to your ASP.Net project is simple. Just reference your project to the dll. As a bonus the source code for the wrapper is also Open Source, so customizations to the control are possible.

The only problem I’ve had with FCKeditor is getting the image upload feature to work on a remote web server. I blame it on my not investing enough time on the issue.

All in all, I highly recommend the FCKeditor it’s a great way to enhance your users input experience. Now I’m not the only one in the office who knows how to update the campaign information page.

References:
FCKeditor – The text editor for Internet

After I cleaned the poop from my pants, I remembered that hard drives store data magnetically in binary, and when you delete or reformat, your computer doesn’t take the time to go back over your old files and put random binary on top of them. It alters your drives state table which tells your system “hey it’s ok to write over this old data.” So there was hope I could recover from this awful blunder.

I stopped all activity on my coworkers now reformatted drive for fear that any modifications to the drive, like writing files, would corrupt its lost files. I quickly did some extensive Google searching and happened to find a company called R-Tools Technology Inc. They have kick ass piece of software called R-Studio. This software is used to recover data in situations just like mine. I downloaded the demo and let it scan my hosed drive for files. In a little under an hour I was looking at a Windows Explorer style view of all my lost files! The demo is limited to restoring files smaller than 64KB. So after I successfully restored a few small files using the demo, I purchased the software online for a very reasonable $80. I was able to start restoring my coworker’s hard drive the same night I nuked it. How’s that for service.

R-Studio works on all types of files types and OS’s, and the GUI is very intuitive. One thing you should note though. You absolutely can NOT restore your nuked files on the same drive that you’re recovering from. If you do this you are risking corrupting the rest of the files you’re trying to restore by writing over them. You have to restore to a completely different drive. This could be a problem if you’re trying to restore large chunks of data and you have limited free disk to restore to. Unfortunately, this is the nature of the beast.

The next day I told my coworker what had happened. After his initial response of shocking disbelief, he was soothed by the news that all of his data had been recovered. Not only was I able to save face, I was also able to download the data as I had originally planned. Thanks to R-Tools Technology Inc. and R-Studio!

References:
R-Tools Technology Inc.
R-Studio Data Recovery Software