garan.org

I've got a shortcut to PuTTY in the quick launch area of my Windows Vista toolbar. It's always asking me if it's okay to open the file as it comes from what Microsoft would say is an 'untrusted source'. Untrusted could be said to be another word for 'unwilling to pay Microsoft' if I was being cynical.

Anyway I digress... There's a tick box with the sentence 'Always ask before opening this file' that doesn't work. I've put up with it for a while but decided to Google for an answer today and came up with this link:

http://www.robertwoodward.com/index.php/5.html

Thanks Robert for working this barmy situation out:

..you must "Unblock" the application from it's original file location. By original file location I mean the location where you downloaded it to. If you move the file before unblocking, you will never be able to unblock the file unless you delete it and redownload the file. If the file you need to unblock came in a zip, you need to unblock the zip before extracting the contents.

It seems crazy but it works!

I'm a big fan of the Windows SSH client PuTTY. It's a small, single executable that doesn't need admin rights (I've used it in EasyNet cyber cafes before now where the security is pretty rigid) that simply works. The SSH tunnelling works well and gives me a lot more flexibility in 'corporate' environments.

But it's just gotton better!! The latest version (0.59) supports serial connections. This means that I can now throw away hyperterminal and use something that is more focused on Unix terminal emulation. Also a CRC checksum error bug that I was seeing when downloading large files through tunnels has gone away so now it's perfect. Heh.

Looking through the Change Log there are a couple of other new things that I've missed:

Ability to configure font quality on Windows (including antialiasing and ClearType).
Bug fix: 0.58 utterly failed to run on some installations of Windows XP. ROFLMAO!!! I love bugs like that!