About Left 4 Dead 2
Set in the zombie apocalypse, Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2) is the highly anticipated sequel to the award-winning Left 4 Dead, the #1 co-op game of 2008. This co-operative action horror FPS takes you and your friends through the cities, swamps and cemeteries of the Deep South, from Savannah to New Orleans across five expansive campaigns.

You’ll play as one of four new survivors armed with a wide and devastating array of classic and upgraded weapons. In addition to firearms, you’ll also get a chance to take out some aggression on infected with a variety of carnage-creating melee weapons, from chainsaws to axes and even the deadly frying pan. You’ll be putting these weapons to the test against (or playing as in Versus) three horrific and formidable new Special Infected. You’ll also encounter five new “uncommon” common infected, including the terrifying Mudmen.

Continue reading on how to participate in this L4D2 game giveaway…

There are cheaters in every giveaway and I want this L4D2 game to go to someone that is a gamer and wants to play this game very badly. Not to someone that just wants it because it’s free so he can resell it or stop playing after a week because he/she is not interested in playing games. As you can see at the screenshot below, my friend’s STEAM account has 3 Left 4 Dead 2 as gifts yet to be given away.

So to be eligible for the draw, you need to fulfill 2 requirements:

1. You must be a subscriber of Raymond.CC newsletter
2. Have a Steam account with Left 4 Dead 1 game in your account.

If you fulfill both requirements, leave a comment together with your Steam account name. If possible, take a screenshot of your STEAM “My games” tab as a proof that your STEAM account has L4D1, upload it to www.imageshack.us and post the link to the comment box.

To install Left 4 Dead 2, you will need to download 7GB of files. This contest will close 48 hours from now and the 3 lucky winners will be announced at this page.

Technorati Tags: left4dead2, l4d2, steam, zombie, game

Last month I’ve written an article on executing any file when application crashed or stopped running. All I need is a small portable software that monitors for a process availability. When the process crashed, the monitoring software will automatically run a batch file containing a few more commands to run. A game server with intensive mod can cause daily random crashes and it’s important to make sure that it auto restarts the game server when that happens. So far everything is working as expected except it’d have been better if I can include an email or SMS notification when the server crashes.

In order to do that, I found a small portable tool called Blat which can send an email using command line. Blat is a Win32 command line utility that sends eMail using SMTP or post to usenet using NNTP. Command line application is very different from graphical user interface (GUI). In programs with GUI, there are buttons and boxes for you to enter the details but for command line, everything must be typed out in a single line. It’s not so user friendly but very flexible.

To use Blat to send email, you will definitely need to refer to the syntax manual. Below is an example for a normal SMTP server that requires authentication. You can also use IP:Port for -server syntax. By default Blat uses port 25 but if your SMTP server uses a different port, then you can change it.

blat.exe -f from@email.com -to recipient@email.com -subject ThisIsTheSubject -body ThisIsTheBody -server smtp.server.com:25 -u SMTPUserLogin -pw SMTPUserPass

Using the command line above, I will receive an email notification alert whenever the server goes down. If I want to receive it in a form of SMS on my mobile, I will need subscribe “email to SMS” service from Clickatell, World-Text or any other provider that offers such service.

There hasn’t been any updates on Blat for more than 2 years but I can verify that it works without any problems on my webhosting SMTP server. However I don’t think you can use Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo SMTP to send out email because this 3 email service requires SSL and I can’t find this option in Blat. You can try SendEmail which supports TLS but you will first need to install the Net::SSLeay and IO::Socket::SSL perl modules on Windows.

[ Visit Blat Official Homepage ]

Technorati Tags: blat, email, smtp, command, spam

I am using Windows Remote Desktop to connect and remotely manage one of my Windows server. I understand that there are many other better remote control software such as VNC but I try to minimize the installation of third party software on the Windows Server 2008. If you don’t know what is Remote Desktop, it is a protocol developed by Microsoft, which allows you to view the display and control the mouse and keyboard of another computer at different location, as if you were sitting in front of the computer.

I never had any problems with Remote Desktop, except for only one annoyance which is if I leave it idle for a few minutes, it auto logs off and I had to re-enter the password to login again. This is very annoying whenever I am reading the log files or the console messages that is displayed on screen. Fortunately I’ve found the setting on how to disable remote desktop auto logoff on idle.

I actually spent a few days to find the solution because I misunderstood the problem at the first place. I thought I was being auto logged out when idle but it turns out that it was the screen that was locked. No wonder setting “Never” for idle session limit in RDP Properties didn’t work.

By default Windows Server 2008 activates the screen saver if computer has been idle for 10 minutes and the setting “On resume, display logon screen” will also be checked. So if Windows detects no activity for 10 minutes, the screen saver will be activated and when we get back to the Remote Desktop Connection, the screen saver is removed and then prompts to login. To solve this problem, you can either disable the screen saver or remove the logon screen on resume.

To disable the logon screen when idle, here’s what you need to do:
1. Right click Desktop and select Personalized
2. Click Screen Saver
3. Uncheck “On Resume, display logon screen” and click OK.

Now you can remain idle on the remote desktop connection as long as you want and you won’t be locked out.

Technorati Tags: remote, password, locked, idle, rdp

I’ve been using two service (Feedburner and Feedblit) as email subscription for this blog site. Actually both of it does the same thing which is to email my subscribers whenever I posted something for the day but I can’t really remember how did I ended up with two. All this while Feedblitz has one advantage over Feedburner that is to use the article’s topic as the email subject and it is enabled by default. However for Feedburner, I can only set a static subject which is “The Latest from Raymond.CC Blog”.

Feedburner is something that I set and forget so I don’t really log in to check what’s new. Thanks to PrinceOfAndalus, he informed me that I can now configure my Feedburner account to use today’s topic as the subject. This is certainly a good news to over 80,000 subscribers who has been putting up with the crappy subject for years.

I remembered emailing to Feedburner many years ago requesting them to improve the subject on the newsletter but they wasn’t able to do it. Then Google bought over Feedburner and slowly improved until we can now insert our latest post’s title into the Subject/Title of email.

To make the changes, here’s what you need to do:

1. Login to your Feedburner account.
2. Click on the Feed Title to access the Feed Stats Dashboard
3. Click the Publicize tab
4. Click the Email Subscriptions
5. Click Email Branding
6. At the Email Subject/Title, use the tag ${latestItemTitle}. Do take note that there are no spaces in between the 3 words. You can insert anything before and after the tag.

7. Click Save button.

I posted an article yesterday regarding the free PC Tools File Recover license and got an email an hour later with the subject “Raymond.CC Blog – Free File Recover 7.5 License Key To Restore Deleted Files Worth $29.95″.

Good job Google!

Technorati Tags: feedburner, title, subject, latestItemTitle, subscribe

Last year I’ve posted a promotion for PC Tools File Recover but it is for version 6.1 and the license update subscription last only for 4 months. If you didn’t know, all of PC Tools software are subscription based, meaning that your license is still valid and not expired, you are entitled to all new versions, unlimited smart updates and customer support for a year. When your license has expired, so is all the benefits above but you can still continue using the software without limitations.

Today I’ve just discovered a new method to obtain a free 1 year license for the latest version of PC Tools File Recover 7.5. This version of File Recover incorporates a number of enhancements if compared to the previous v6. It has significant speed improvements in searching & recovery of deleted files and enhanced file recovery quality & support for more file types. Continue reading on how to obtain your free 1 year PC Tools File Recover license key worth $29.95.

PC Tools File Recover graphical user interface (GUI) looks exactly the same as the previous version other than the new logo located at the bottom left.

This is what you need to do to get your free PC Tools File Recovery 7.5 license key:

1. You will need to use a UK proxy/vpn and then visit the link below.
http://www.pctools.com/file-recover/free/promo/PCADVISOR0110/

2. Fill up the form and make sure you entered a valid working email address because that is where the license key is going to be sent to.

3. If you got it right, you should see a page saying “Thank you for requesting your FREE license for File Recover v7.5. Your free license code will be e-mailed to you shortly”.

4. Now check your email and note down the name and license key.

5. Download File Recover v7.5 and install.

6. Run File Recover and enter the registration code to license the program.

At the main page for File Recover, it is said to be designed for Windows 2000, XP Pro, XP Home, Vista Basic, Vista Ultimate (32-bit and 64-bit) and Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit) but when I click the About button and then go to System Information, it shows that my operating system is Windows Vista when I am actually using Windows 7 Ultimate. Not really a big deal, maybe the developer has forgotten to update the signature to detect Windows 7 OS in System Information. I’ve tried deleting a file and was able to easily find & recover the deleted file using File Recover 7.5.

If you kept on getting the message “The promotion you are attempting to access is not valid in your country”, that means the UK proxy/vpn you are using is not really working. Sometimes it will even show you the page to purchase the license instead of the form to request for free license. There is also a restriction that one IP address can only request once. I’m sure some people that find this too much a hassle will simply use “PCTools.File.Recover.v7.0.0.38.Incl.KeyMaker-DVT”. Do leave a comment if you are NOT from UK and is able to access the promotional page without using a UK proxy/vpn.

Technorati Tags: pctools, recovery, restore, deleted, data

Two is better than one. Well that’s not always the case when you have two wives or antivirus. Most computer experts would not recommend you to have more than 1 antivirus because they are not built to work with each other as antivirus nowadays are very sophisticated because they need to protect themselves real time from being disabled by viruses. If your computer have no problems in running two or more antivirus, then I’d say that you’re lucky and I pray that you won’t end up not able to boot up Windows one day.

However, some antivirus are made with multiple antivirus engines which will not conflict with each other. Most of the time the antivirus company will only say they use “multiple” engine but never say which antivirus engine. As far as I know, F-Secure, GData, eScan and TrustPort uses multiple engines. Using multiple antivirus engine can surely catch more virus but also reports higher false positives. Maybe using a multiple antivirus engine to protect your computer real time isn’t such a good idea but it’s a whole different story if you use a multi AV engine BootCD to scan a computer infected by virus.

If you have a computer that is infected by virus and it is causing Windows to run very slowly or even if Windows is unbootable, you can try using G Data BootCD to scan and clean the virus. Good thing about using G Data BootCD is it has two antivirus engines which is Avast and Bitdefender. Although they never say what engine, but I know when I checked the ISO image and there are avast and bdav folder in a dbase folder.

This GData BootCD is based on the latest G Data Antivirus 2010. It supports updating of the virus signatures and I suggest that you always try to update first before scanning because the latest version of this BootCD contains BitDefender definition dated on 14 January 2009 and Avast on 30 July 2008. Unfortunately the database cannot be retained and had to be redownloaded again the next time.

You can also get to configure some of the options by clicking the Options button at the top right of the program. There is a selection on which antivirus engine to use, the action to take when a virus is found, file types to scan, enable/disable heuristic, check for archives, check system area, and also setting the maximum size of files and archives to ignore scanning.

On my desktop computer running Intel Pentium D 2.8GHz with 2GB of RAM and a 200GB 7200RPM hard drive, it took 53 minutes 42 seconds to scan 88307 items. It’s pretty slow but I am sure it is very effective in detecting virus.

[ Download G Data BootCD 2010 ]

Technorati Tags: gdata, multiple, engine, antivirus, rescue

I like the network connection icon for XP that is in your notification area compared to Vista or 7 because it’s very clear and visible whenever you have network activity. The connection icon for Vista and 7 has improved with nicer and smoother looks but I personally felt that the “blink” is not bright/visible enough to know if there are incoming/outgoing traffic.

All keyboards has LED so you can easily tell you if you have Numlock, Capslock and ScrollLock enabled/disabled. I found a small tool called Network Lights which really doesn’t do much except giving you a nice little indication on your network traffic by blinking your keyboard LEDs whenever you have outgoing or incoming packets on network interface.

This utility is a standalone executable. Run the program, you’ll see a new system tray icon. Now you can monitor your network traffic using the ScrollLock and NumLock LEDs on your keyboard. You can use the system tray icon (click the mouse) to customize program settings. If you have an older motherboard and your keyboard LED doesn’t blink when there are network traffic, try going to Settings and enable “Force Keyboard Capture” option.

Network Lights is only 96KB in size and takes only 1MB of memory when it is running. Lasted updated on June 2006 but I’ve tested it on Windows XP and Windows 7, both seems to work without problems. I am not sure which network connection it will indicate if you have more than 1 network connection. I bet this program will make your keyboard looks cool especially at night when all lights are turned off.

[ Download Network Lights ]

Technorati Tags: network, lights, LED, keyboard, traffic