OWA Dump

I always try to find a way to make my work more convenient. Recently my company decided to drop all employee blackberries and instead to provide us with allowance for our own phones. Everything would be great if not this one little problem with that. I get a lot of alerts and status updates on my work email and by a lot i mean A LOT. I wanted to have an ability to quickly check my work email when I wanted, with minimal impact to my phone configuration and battery life. The trick is that the only way to do that is either through Exchange Server or through Outlook Web Access (OWA). I started analyzing my options and finally settled on something that could dump my email list to a file in the cloud that I can easily view from anywhere, when I want, and without inconvenient login system. Then I realized that dumping a text file to my dropbox would be the best option.

At this point I needed something that could read emails by connecting to Exchange Server or by parsing emails from OWA. Exchange Server route seemed too complicated for my needs so I started working on OWA parsing script. I decided to use VBScript due to easy IE automation. At the end I had a script dumping all my emails to a text file. I set that text file to sync with my dropbox and scheduled the script to run on a short interval. Problem solved.

Check out the script here: http://mattstypa.com/owa-dump/

Batch Image Resizer 1.1 released

Batch Image Resizer 1.1 has been released.

This program allows you to easily resize large amount of images. While extremely powerful it is also lightning fast and lightweight.

Head over to Batch Image Resizer page for more information.

MBSA XML PARSER 1.0.0.0 released

MBSA XML PARSER 1.0.0.0 has been released.

This program helps with identification of missing Windows updates by parsing Microsoft Baseline Security Adviser(MBSA) XML report file. It has been specifically designed to analyze output of mbsacli.exe /xmlout.

Head over to MBSA XML PARSER page for more information.

Using MBSACLI.EXE

MBSACLI.EXE is a command line tool that allows you to scan a computer for missing Microsoft updates. It's extremely useful when you have a lot of computers to check. Unlike MBSA (Microsoft Baseline Security Advisor), it does not need to be installed on your target computer. Here's how to use MBSACLI.EXE

There are two files that you need to get from MBSA. MBSACLI.EXE and WUSSCAN.DLL. You can either copy them from a computer that has a full version of MBSA installed or extract them from the installation file.

Either way you need to download MBSA first. You can do so at the following URL:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=02be8aee-a3b6-4d94-b1c9-4b1989e0900c

If you have decided to install MBSA go ahead and execute the file you have downloaded and follow the instructions. If you have installed MBSA to the default directory, navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer 2\ and copy MBSACLI.EXE and WUSSCAN.DLL somewhere else.

If you don't want to install MBSA you can extract it using any good archiving software. One of the extracted files will be called DATA.CAB. You will need to extract that file once again. Inside you will find MBSACLI.EXE and WUSSCAN.DLL and just like before copy these files somewhere else.

There is one more file needed and it's called WSUSSCN2.CAB. This file contains information about all the updates available for Windows operating system. You can download this file from the following URL:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=76054

Save it to the directory you copied MBSACLI.EXE and WUSSCAN.DLL to.

At this point you are ready to scan your first computer. Copy the three files (MBSACLI.EXE, WUSSCAN.DLL, and WSUSSCN2.CAB) to the computer you would like to scan, and execute the following command on that computer:

mbsacli /xmlout /catalog wsusscn2.cab > results.xml

If everything worked correctly you will now have a new file called RESULTS.XML. This file contains information about missing updates on the computer you have just scanned.

At this point you can use MBSA XML PARSER to "translate" RESULTS.XML into English.

Switching to Chrome

I have been using Firefox since its first release back in 2004. It is an amazing browser. It's fast, it's secure, it has tons of add-ons and most of all it's open source. However, for some time now, I have been considering switching to Google Chrome. This browser has been shown to perform better then Firfox in numerous speed and compliance tests.

One of such tests is called ACID3, and it checks for browsers compliance with HTML, CSS, JavaScript etc. It's hard to believe that there are only 3 browsers for windows that pass this test, and it's beyond me how the newest, not even released yet, Internet Explorer 9 scored 55/100 while iPhone scored 100/100.

Compliance and Speed aside, I think that the most important feature of a browser is it's security. Fortunately there is a test for that as well, and it's called Pwn2Own. Actually it is a competition where experts try to compromise each browser. This year only Chrome remained un-hacked the first day. Of course it doesn't mean that it's 100% secure, it means that it is harder to brake then the rest. With that in mind I would strongly recommended that you consider switching as well.