Friday, June 16, 2006

Snipping tool

Just discovered a useful little tool in Vista, the snipping tool, and it kind of does what it says on the tin. When you launch it you get a cursor to highlight areas of the screen and the highlighted area is copied in much the same way as Print Screen shortcuts do, except it opens it in its own application and you get to choose the area you will save, not just active window or whole screen. You also have the option to snip a freeform shape too. When you have the area captured you can just save it as png, jpg, gif, or mht.



I know, its not something to get overly excited by, but it could come in useful on support calls for getting part screen shots from users.

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Internet Explorer 7 - Certificate Warning

If like me you have been playing around with Internet Explorer 7 there is an interesting and generally useful security feature where certificates are checked prior to loading the page and if there is a problem with the certificate it loads an intermediate page warning you of the problem that looks like this.

It does give you the option of carrying onto the page you are trying to get to such as this.  Notice the address bar is coloured red and it gives a clue why with the certificate error message to the right.  My situation was that I was using a different DNS name in the URL to make life easier for myself (lazy I know!), after a few days I got sick of doing this and tried to find a way around this issue.

Manual Solution

Well there is an entry in the advanced tab of Internet options in IE7 near the bottom of the list called ‘Warn about certificate address mismatch’, and by default this is checked.  If you uncheck it you can restart IE and go straight to the URL with no problems and no warnings on the Address bar giving you this.

Registry/GPO Solution

This can be useful for getting rid of the annoyance, but if you are willing to take this chance and you have Web Apps or Services that you have given ‘friendly’ names that aren’t on its certificate, and to stop users from worrying when they get this error then you can make an adm template to change the following registry key:-

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]
"WarnonBadCertRecving"=dword:00000000

The key is set to 1 by default, to turn the feature off set the key to 0.