Enable syntax highlighting for Vim editor
From time to time, you have to edit a file through the console on the server. Most of the time you probably use the Vim Editor
(“Vi IMproved”). I also use this editor on two servers and I am doing quite good in using it.
But on one server the syntax highlighting in the Vim editor is disabled. You can enable it by typing “:syntax enable” but this setting gets lost each time you close the editor. To activate the syntax highlighting permanently you have to edit the “vimrc” file. You can either use the file in your home directory or the system vimrc which is usually located at /etc/vim/vimrc. In that file you should find the following line:
"syntax on
The double quote comments the syntax command out. After removing the double quote, saving the vimrc file, the next time you open a file with source code, it should be highlighted automatically. In the Vim editor’s documentation you may find more useful tips on how to work with the editor.
I hope that this post was helpful for you. I always wanted to buy me a little book about the vi editor, but as it only has one chapter about the Vim editor, I am not sure if it will be helpful. So I put it on my wish list and maybe someone will buy it for me one day 
Start programs as administrator within user profiles
I am more a web developer than an administrator. But from time to time I have to take care of my colleagues PCs. A very common task is to install or update programs. As most of the users don’t have administrative rights I have to do these things as admin.
At the beginning of my admin career I used to sign of the users because I didn’t know how to start programs as admin. But now I learned to right click a program and choose “Run as…” to start an installation as administrator.
But there are some files like msi-Installers that don’t offer the “Run as…” in the context menu. And also the options in the control panel don’t have that option. In fact they have but you can only see it with the trick I learned yesterday.
Run control panel options as administrator
The trick is fairly easy. You just have to press the SHIFT key while doing a right click on the option. You will that be able to choose the “Run ass…” option from the context menu to run a program as any user including the admin user (I am sorry, but I don’t have a running XP System in English, so you have to imagine the screenshot would be English):
Sometimes the little things are the ones you enjoy the most. And that little trick will help me a lot doing my admin tasks.
And how about Windows Vista/7 users
If you administrate PCs with Windows Vista/7 you are probably familiar with starting each program as admin. But even for those users I’ve learned a nice shortcut yesterday. I usually start programs through the search of the start menu (again, sorry for the German screenshot):
Here you can easily right click any suggested program and start it as administrator. But I usually don’t want to wait for the suggestions to be able to click on them. And as an IT guy I try to accelerate things as much as possible. So to be able to launch the first program in the suggestion list as administrator, you just have to use this shortcut: STRG + SHIFT + ENTER.
And the best thing with this shortcut is the fact, that you can also use it for shortcuts on your desktop. Just select a shortcut and use the same combination. Or even more elegant, just hold down STRG + SHIFT while double clicking on a shortcut on your desktop to run it as administrator. For programs on your task bar use it with a single left click.
I hope that this trick will be useful for your daily tasks as an admin. If you know any additional useful trick for admins, please feel free to post a comment with that trick.
The Internet Explorer is dead. Long live the Internet Explorer!
Some time ago Google announced to discontinue the support of Internet Explorer 6.0 for most of his services. Now they have announced a date for that discontinue. The day we are waiting for is March 13, 2010. I couldn’t find out if users of Internet Explorer 6.0 will then be able to use the services.
As I mentioned in the post Internet Explorer 6 unter Windows 7 nutzen mit dem Windows XP Mode I still have a running Version of IE6 on my laptop. So as soon as the day has come, I’ll report about the usage of the services with IE6. On the YouTube home page users can find a notice about updating their browsers:
An interesting fact is that the order of the suggested browsers is randomly sorted on each update. That’s what they tried to force Microsoft to do with the browser choice on Windows 7.
But as not only Google announced to discontinue the support of IE6 and there have been many reports about security issues in the media, I hope that the Internet Explorer 6 will not survive 2010. Even the last admin should already have noticed that this aged browser has no future. And those companies that keep using the browsers because they use applications that have been designed for IE6 should ask themselves about the reliability of such a developing company as there are two following versions of the IE. There was enough time to update their applications for the new versions. Those of you who develop website will and spend the time of migrating a page from IE6 to IE7 will know that is isn’t a big issue. But optimizing a website for capability of IE6 is very hard and an unnecessary and time consuming job.
I my opinion the Internet Explorer 8 was a big step of Microsoft to the right way. Internet Explorer 9 is going to be a browser that can compete with other standard conform browsers. Let’s see how this goal will be kept in the future development of IE9. But migrating a website from IE7 to IE8 or later to IE9 will be much easier for web developers. And we can save a lot of time to do more interesting thing.
P.S. But enough of bashing the IE6. I have to announce that today I found the time to optimize the blog for IE6. All transparent PNGs have been converted to transparent GIFs. So all the IE6 users of my blog can now enjoy it in its whole beauty.
