Wes' Puzzling Blog

... trying to solve the puzzles of .NET

  • What do you use to analyze your IIS log files?

    Currently I'm using awstats which is a very nice free log analyzer. It has a lot of nice statistics. One stat is the referrers however I would like to see which page that the referrer linked too. It is also nice that you can see the search phrases used to get to your site, but I would also like to know which page is associated with a particular search phrase. As far as I can tell these are not available in awstats.

  • Mounting ISO files as non-admin

    Well a long time ago I posted about using Virtual CDRom Control Panel to create a Virtual CDRom Drive (i.e. mount ISO files). I use this quite often however now that I have switched to being a non-administrator on my system I can't use it anymore. I keep getting the error message "Cannot Open SCM : Access is denied". I tried to figure out how to setup the correct permissions and got as far as attempting to change the Security Descriptor via the sc command, but no luck. Eventually I gave up and looked for another way to mount ISO files.

  • Running as non-admin

    After setting up my new domain recently I decided I would finally try to run as non-admin. Currently I'm a normal user.

  • Re-associating Compressed Folders with .zip files

    Once upon a time I installed WinZip and so the .zip file association got switched to WinZip. I really like selecting files and then right clicking and selecting Send To > Compressed (zipped) Folder in XP/2003. However you cannot do that unless Compressed Folder is the program associated with .zip files. It will usually ask you "Do you want to designate Compressed (zipped) Folders as the application for handling ZIP files?" and I always click yes but it never re-associates. Anyways I found a registry fix on Doug Knox's page Windows XP File Association Fixes. If you import the ZIP Folder Association Fix into the registry it will restore the default .zip file association. Now I can use the Send To > Compressed Folder again. Thanks Doug.

  • Creative Commons License

    Today my advisor pointed me to Creative Commons to create a license for my Thesis work. I never knew about this. You can very easily create licenses for anything by answering a few questions. It gives you an icon (like the one below) to put on your website or text to put into text files (i.e. source code files). I hate trying to figure out licensing stuff so this will make it very easy to license my stuff.