Jack Richins' Blog

I've been amazed recently at the number of people, even that work at Microsoft, that don't know what the Windows Key can do. So when I saw this video, I thought I'd pass it along. Link to instructables : Hidden powers of the "Windows" key on your keyboard...

How to get 2 second resume on Vista - by disabling all those device drivers you never use that are slowing you down :). Link to JVert's Space: Fast Resume, 6 years later

Sad. I think not knowing is perhaps worse than knowing what happened. I'll miss going to his presentations - he was always entertaining and charismatic. Neither we nor the Coast Guard can come up with a surface search plan that is likely to find either...

Is this the first commercial quantum computer? And how soon before someone tries to use it to find private keys :). By the end of the year, however, D-Wave will have a 32-qubit system. It plans to begin to rent out time on its computers to corporate customers...

I love this feature. To access it, type "Performance Information and Tools" in the search box on the start menu and press enter. On the left, under tasks, click "Advanced Tools". Under Performance Issues, if there are problems with a device driver slowing...

Found this helpful, so I thought I'd post this. If you download a program (a .exe file) using IE it marks it as suspect. This isn't that bad the first time you get prompted to execute the program. But when it's a tool you use regularly, it gets annoying...

Bruce Schneier linked to this clever use of Google to search for SQL Injection vulnerable websites . All I can say is wow! 11.3% web sites. I would hope these are largely abandoned web sites, but they probably aren't. If you are using SQL Server, check...

There is a thread on security related removals in the next version of SQL Server in the MSDN SQL Security Forums and I thought I'd post it here as well to broaden reach. We are planning on removing group related stored procedures: sp_addgroup, sp_dropgroup...

I searched all over for a simple code snippet that showed how to connect to SQL Server from PowerShell . I eventually figured it out, and as I expected, it was very easy. Just in case this helps someone else: $cn2 = new - object system.data.SqlClient...