A colleague sent me an attachment today, a MindManager map file. MindManager is a tool that has become popular recently; it’s a program that allows you to build mindmaps. A lot of people here like it. I’m not intending to plug the program here, I use Notepad to make my mindmaps and it works well for me.

Of course, to view the actual MindManager map files, you need a viewer. So I went to their site and downloaded the free viewer, which turned out to be a whopping 76 megabytes of download. It included a full professional installation, that reverted back to a free viewer when the trial period expired. Good marketing, supposedly, but that was not what I was looking for.

And it integrates with the entire Office suite, install dictionaries and so on; unless you manually deactivate all those features – although I was unable to deactivate the installation of the German spell check library for some reason.

This is, I’m noticing, a trend.

• The latest Office suite, 2007, is beautiful, but appallingly heavy. Outlook is a nightmare in the load that it puts on the computer.
• Adobe Acrobat, Windows Media Player, RealAudio… all these applications almost take over the computer when they’re installed. They’re heavy, they install themselves everywhere, and they only bog down the computer for little gain. Even WinAmp belongs in this category now.
• The worst is when you click on the wrong icon and accidentally start BDS2006 or Adobe Photoshop. Go get some coffee while the program starts, then come back and close it.

More and more, I’m leaning towards Portable Applications. Portable applications are programs you can install onto a USB stick, that require no further installation or setup in terms of registry settings, COM registration or anything. It’s just a simple, portable program: Plug it into a computer, start it, and you’re on.

My favorite application in this category is Miranda IM. A complete Instant Messaging client that supports ICQ, MSN, IRC, Jabber, and several other protocols. No advertising, no graphics-heavy application that takes over your system. Just a clean, small program that does what it’s supposed to do.

Truly, small is beautiful.

So, the problem I faced was that I was trying to set up the IIS ftp service to handle multiple users. However, in its User Isolation mode and with using Local users, the IIS expects the folders to be named “LocalUser\username” within the ftp-root. It’s not difficult to set that up, if you have a clean installation.

The problem was that we had an existing infrastructure in place, where the folders were named c:\inetpub\user01, c:\inetpub\user02…, etc. So it was impossible to add a directory structure that the IIS would recognize as the users’ home folders.

We tried accomplishing that using Virtual Directories, but for some reason, IIS failed to recognize them when we tried to add two virtual folders in succession (one LocalUser virtual folder, and then “user01″, “user02″ virtual folders beneath that).

Ultimately, the solution we found was to use NTFS junctions, using the SysInternals junction utility.

By creating a folder “LocalUser” within the ftproot directory, and adding junction points under that, we were able to create a directory structure that accommodated our setup. It looks like this:

c:\\InetPub
   + ftproot
      + LocalUser
         - user01 -> ..\\..\\user01
         - user02 -> ..\\..\\user02
   - user01
   - user02

This means that users can be added to or deleted from the ftp service simply by using junctions. Moreover, it means that we don’t have to use the IIS administrator utility to do that, but can script it using conventional bat files (and without using the iisftp tool either).

Provided that using junctions doesn’t open the system up to any security vulnerabilities (which I haven’t found so far), this is (I think) a very neat setup.

In the beginning was cacls.exe. This little command-line utility could edit access control lists in the NT filesystem. It was deemed by some to be inefficient and underpowered.

So when Windows Server 2003 came along (and Vista, mind you), Microsoft shipped an updated version called icacls.exe which was more competent in some areas, and less competent in some areas.

Looking at the situation, Microsoft realized that icacls was insufficient, and wrote another tool called xcacls.exe. This was more competent, but also underpowered.

So they wrote another version, called xcacls.vbs, which finally – after four iterations – offers users the capability to remove inheritance on folders from the command prompt. The functionality has always been there in the GUI, though.

It makes me wonder if anyone – anyone – writes scripts for Windows. On the other hand, given the crappy cmd.exe, maybe it’s no surprise no-one does.

Tickle is a pretty fun website with tons of tests. If, for some unexplainable reason (yeah right) you have nothing to do on a Saturday night, it’s a fun way to goof off.

I took a “work quiz” and came upon this question.

At first, I didn’t understand the question. And then I had to laugh out loud.

I have never, ever, during my entire time (6+ years) at Vision, been without a huge backlog of projects in the pipeline.

Is that normal?

I found chart the other day, obviously humorously intended, depicting the average amount of time spent on different activities during web design.

It’s more accurate than you think. I’ve done a lot of time trying to build css-only sites, only to give up and fall back to good ol’ tables. Tables have a way of working that’s fundamentally accepted by every browser. And once to do some magic tricks with tables, such as using a little positioning adjustment, things just work.

CSS is nice, sweet, and powerful. But it’s just too much trouble.

I hereby officially retract my proposed changes for Skärhamn. I kinda like it the way it is.

Wish Delphi had it. (Yeah, the Win32 one, too.)

Jag bor vid havet, där vågors svall
Sköljer mot stranden till måsars kall
Där havsvinden blåser frisk och stark
Över klippor, ljung och mark -
I Skärhamn, i Skärhamn
På vackra Tjörn.

Nog blåser vinterns kuling hård
Från havet in runt hus och gård
Men solen vänder åter från allt grått
Och speglas klart i havet himmelsblått -
I Skärhamn, i Skärhamn
På vackra Tjörn.

Och när jag reser runt i världen
Dig jag ändå bär mig med på färden
Visst lockar mystik i fjärran länder
Jag längtar ändå hem till dina stränder -
Till Skärhamn, till Skärhamn
På vackra Tjörn.