Friday, September 25, 2015

The iOS9 Podcast app is totally broken

Usually I hate and hence avoid to slam an app or service like this, but the podcast player in iOS9 really sucks. At least for video on an iPad.

No full screen video anymore, too much white space, and even with all that unused space, the controls are too small

Exhibit A:

Please Apple, we need an urgent update to fix/revert this.

Sunday, September 13, 2015

How to hide a userid from Windows login screen

With DB2 on my home PC[1] I have a service account for the DB2 instance, makes life a lot easier than trying to map it to you actual user(s).

However, regular Windows (Home) setup has 2 defaults that are annoying:
a. password and account expiry for this user.
b. the userid appears on the Windows login/lock screen, although nobody is supposed to sign in with it.

Create a maintenance free user
The first issue I fixed a couple of month ago, because that was really annoying. Because DB2 just would not start. And the first two times this happened I had to work through db2diag.log to find out what happened.
So, make sure the account actually never expires (that's separate from the password). With admin privileges run
  net user db2admin [2]
to check if the user account expires.
If it does, then run a
  net user db2admin /expires:never
to fix this.

The password expiration is trickier, since it cannot be done with the net user command.
To make the password everlasting, run
  WMIC USERACCOUNT WHERE "Name='db2admin'" SET PasswordExpires=FALSE

I found this thanks to the folks at StackExchange.

Hide the service account from the login screen
I wanted to do this on Windows 7 already, but never found the time or cared enough. Now with the move to Window 10 I thought of it again and fixed it.
So this can be done with group policies and stuff, but not on a standalone Windows Home edition.

Registry and Microsoft Technet to the rescue:

Create an entry under
  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList and list the db2admin user with a dword (32) of 0 to hide it. Remove the entry or set it to 1 to show the user again.

Voilà.

--
[1] Ha, now that I no longer work for Oracle, I can again freely admit it... Not that I really held back on this in the past 5 years.
[2] replace db2admin with the userid you need this for

Saturday, September 12, 2015

Windows 10 installed

While I finally made it to a Mac (MacBook Air 13) at work, I gave in and let Microsoft install Windows 10 over my Windows 7 on my home PC.

It went surprisingly smooth and without any problems.
Except that my Tomcat did successfully start under Window 10, because for some weird reasons Redmond decided to install and activate the Internet Information Services (which I previously did not have), and those blocked port 80 of course.
Simple de-install of those features, reboot and everything was running fine again. All apps and services I had running (or those I could think of within 30minutes) are running fine again.
Amazingly even my DB2 instance did not create any problems at all.

Now I only have to get used to the new UI, but even that seems easier than I thought.... well, as long as I have the keyboard.