Once again, this is not an official release from portableapps, it’s a custom, “home-made” package. Here you go:

VLC 1.1.2 portable for Windows

Once again, this is not an official release from portableapps, it’s a custom, “home-made” package. Here you go:

VLC 1.1.1 portable for Windows

Edit: link fixed. Sorry for the downtime, usually this file host (demo.ovh.com) is more reliable…

PortableApps released a portable version of the latest stable 7-Zip version, 4.65, released in February 2009. Since then, a lot of development has been made but only betas were released yet, thus PortableApps didn’t make new versions. So, as usual, I made a “home-made” package using PortableApps’s current launcher combined with the latest 7-Zip version, and here it is, 7-Zip 9.15 beta portable, as a zip so you’re not screwed if your network blocks EXEs and you can open it simply with Windows Explorer if you don’t have better.

The main interest of the 9.x beta series is the new compression algorithm LZMA2, which compresses quite faster than LZMA if heavily multithreaded, and which generates close to zero overhead when used on uncompressible data.

Once again, this is not an official release from portableapps, it’s a custom, “home-made” package. Here you go:

VLC 1.1.0 portable for Windows

General tip: to find what dependencies are missing for a particular program:
1. launch it from the terminal, so you’ll get verbose error messages (when you launch a program from the GUI usually you just see nothing if it fails)
2. when you see missing files, use RPM Find to find out what package contains the file you need.

AVG is one from this quite old trio of big free anti-virus software. The others being AntiVir/Avira (my current antivirus) and Avast!. I tried them all a long while ago, by the time of version 5-6 of AntiVir and AVG, and from this period I remembered how heavy AVG and Avast! were (plus they used to require a registration on their website) while AntiVir felt so light, with a rather miserable GUI that I liked but which used to repulse “basic” users. And I stuck with it until now, even though they “upgraded” the interface to something shiny but heavy like hell, notably because Avast! was still heavier and heavier and because AVG got pretty poor ratings from anti-virus tests during a large period.

But it wasn’t all brilliant. AntiVir saved my @$$, well, I don’t remember of a single time actually. Probably it caught a few highly suspicious files that I was going to check myself anyway, but that remained highly rare. During the same time, it gave me tons and tons of false positives, notably on a lot of things I programmed myself and packed using UPX, and on a lot of trainers (I used quite many of them for Wiki4Games…). It also failed to register that I don’t want it to detect that Abel & Cain installation file which has been sleeping on my PC for ages (and suddenly got detected forever after some update). And finally, it totally missed Buzus, which I only caught thanks to RegRun. When I caught the files and sent them to online scanners (Virustotal and VirSCAN), I noticed that:

1. as usual, Kaspersky pwned
2. only a few scanners detected the virus (3/41=7% or 5/36=14%)
3. and AVG was amongst those!

After all I’d heard and seen in tests about AVG, I was rather amazed. But considering how I was disappointed with my AntiVir experience, I eventually decided to give it another chance.

First impression: bloody hard to find on avg.com: I ended up searching for AVG free on Google…
Second impression: omfg it’s huge: the installer is more than twice as big as AntiVir: 84 MiB vs 40 MiB (Avast: is 46 MiB)
The installer is ok, it seems to do weird things at the beginning but it turns out to be a good, normal installer with the usual options. No restart needed at the end, the first run update is fast, too. The installed program is, despite the bigger installer, smaller than AntiVir (around 55 MiB, maybe there’s stuff elsewhere though?).
I start by scanning the folder where I had isolated the infected files. They’re all detected and… deleted. Ow, not cool, the default configuration is to slay the infected files. Gladly, I found them in quarantine (they call this the Virus Vault ), and there are options to disable this “I act without asking you first” behavior. Then I scan the whole infected Windows partition… gosh it takes ages… but it does find what AntiVir hadn’t found.
I finish cleaning and finally can get back to my primary Windows XP installation. There I promptly replace AntiVir with AVG. It detects a keygen on the desktop (bloody false +, hey…) but the whitelist does work and is not limited in size to a ridiculous value like AntiVir. The Cain & Abel installer isn’t detected, too.

So, to summarize:

• kind of heavy, but not more than AntiVir after all, notably faster interface than AntiVir
• seems to have a good detection rate. OK, that’s just one sample, but on this random one he’s in the top 10% already…
• false positives on trainers and such, but working white-list system and no detection of unarmed malware like the Cain & Abel installer.

Looks like AVG is definitely back in the race. At least it’s back on my computer now

As you can guess from my previous posts, I’m a heavy user of portable applications. This allows for use of much more up-to-date software than our understaffed IT team can provide. I like using portableapps.com as my source of portable applications, but the only problem with them is that they usually take ages to release updated versions. I understand that this is because they take great care to release perfectly tested and stable things, but come on, waiting a few weeks after a major release to get the portable version is just… very frustrating. So, I usually “do some stuff” with the current portableapps.com launcher and an updated install I make at home or the program auto-updater (particularly for Firefox and Minefield).

This time I tried with OpenOffice, because the 3.2.1 version launches so much faster than the 3.1.1 I currently use at work (I heard there was some serious bugs with 3.2 so I didn’t test it much, but it seems as slow as 3.1.1). What I did was I took the portable installation of OpenOffice 3.2 from PortableApps, grabbed an installation of OpenOffice 3.2.1 and used it to write over the files of OpenOffice 3.2 portable. Finally, while I was at it I also packed in Java 1.6.0_20. That’s the first time ever I try to include Java in a portable install of OpenOffice, so just, you know, beware

I then tested this on a Windows XP installation without OpenOffice installed but with Java installed. And it seemed to work fine on this particular setting. So, before I finally give you the download link, remember:

1. this is not AT ALL a tested and stable release (I’ll test it tomorrow at work, I really need an updated OpenOffice there!)
2. this is not AT ALL a PortableApps release (but I did use their OpenOffice 3.2 launcher, which is NOT supposed to be appropriate for OOo 3.2.1, exactly as is)

All clear? Well, here’s the link (7-Zip archive, 105 MiB): OpenOffice 3.2.1 portable.
Edit: ok, I just tested it at work, and it doesn’t work. My best guess is that my Java version there is too outdated (1.4.2 update 9, FFS…) so I’m leaving the download link available, but know that it probably won’t work for you either.
Edit 2: if you try it, please leave a comment saying if it works or not (and in both case, what version, if any, of Java you had installed on the PC where you tested the app).

cd /home/wiki4games
wget http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.15/mediawiki-1.15.4.tar.gz
tar xf mediawiki-1.15.4.tar.gz
mv wwwOLD wwwOLD2
mv mediawiki-1.15.4 wwwNEW

echo "All done. You can also delete wwwOLD2, www/config and www/docs"

Of course, to apply it to your own MediaWiki installation, you’ll need to do some customization. Let’s give some explanations:

cd /home/wiki4games
We move to the directory just higher than where MediaWiki is installed.

wget http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.15/mediawiki-1.15.4.tar.gz
tar xf mediawiki-1.15.4.tar.gz
We download and uncompress MediaWiki 1.15.4.

mv wwwOLD wwwOLD2
wwwOLD is a folder where I keep the previous version, so we move it to wwwOLD2 to free the wwwOLD name (that’s where we’ll move the current installation). wwwOLD2 can be deleted manually at the end of the process. I chose not to place any kind of rm -r command in this script, which is why I don’t delete wwwOLD but rename it instead.

mv mediawiki-1.15.4 wwwNEW
We move MediaWiki to a folder with a more friendly name.

echo "Cleaning up wwwNEW (removing extensions and images folders)"
rm wwwNEW/images/README
rm wwwNEW/images
rm wwwNEW/extensions/README
rm wwwNEW/extensions
We remove the extensions and images folders from the standard installation, so that we can later move our own extensions and images folder in their place)

mv www/.htaccess www/.temphtaccess
cp sd/down/.downhtaccess www/.htaccess
Here I replace the production .htaccess file with a maintenance one. Our maintenance .htaccess file redirects all trafic to down.wiki4games.com/maintenance.htm, but you can use one which just denies all access (order allow, deny; deny from all). The important thing here is that noone loads the wiki during the sensitive moves (this will result in a very short down time, hardly noone will notice it, it’s just the time needed to move some folders around… plus to apply the database patches, which might be a bit longer from a major version to another).

mv www/00files wwwNEW
mv www/0custom wwwNEW
mv www/extensions wwwNEW
mv www/images wwwNEW
mv www/skins/0custom wwwNEW/skins
cp www/404.php wwwNEW
cp www/AdminSettings.php wwwNEW
cp www/LocalSettings.php wwwNEW
cp www/.temphtaccess wwwNEW
We move the big things and copy the small individual files.

mv www wwwOLD
mv wwwNEW www
The current MediaWiki becomes OLD, the NEW one becomes current.

cd www/maintenance
php update.php
We run the maintenance database update script. On a large wiki, this may take a while (unless there is no database scheme change).

cd ../..
rm www/.htaccess
mv www/.temphtaccess www/.htaccess
And we restore the original .htaccess, the new wiki is opened If you got no error message during the script, it’s probably up and working. If you did get error messages, you can still check if it works but you’ll probably need to do some fixing.

echo "All done. You can also delete wwwOLD2, www/config and www/docs"
Those are useless folders, but I didn’t place a removal command for them in the script because I didn’t want to use rm -r.

• Firefox Portable: Data/plugins
• Opera USB: program/plugins
• Iron Portable: Iron/plugins
• Chrome Portable: get Iron you freak! :p

Note that this is not an official release from Adobe, it’s a custom, “home-made” package.
Also, note that Flash is not 100% portable: some sites will leave Local Shared Objects (LSO) on the computer where you use it. To remove them, you can either use the BetterPrivacy Firefox extension or Adobe’s Global Storage Settings panel (to disable future storing of LSOs) and Adobe’s Website Storage Settings panel (to delete already stored LSOs).

Flash 10.1 final for portable browsers

If you don’t want to grab 7-Zip portable, here are the same Flash files but in a ZIP archive.

As requested in a comment, here are the SHA 512 checksums:
SHA512 of file: NPSWF32.dll
dcdf4dccb5359a36 607a85c3034ef6f0 7a3597c0af00d42f bebee5c12af534fa
39ff83f8a3bc9f15 802cb3d18a138d44 41292b8f9032e758 73ef55d530ea1400

SHA512 of file: flashplayer.xpt
494146bb31cf0e11 5a6e1c632a8ed560 8046f5a8b2bbc900 832befb07b8f1425
81483c222067e440 5fc2755b5acf722d 576ac04b2b6d9f79 6e5a872fd5c7ddc9

A couple of weeks ago I posted about installing Flash on portable Firefox, Opera and Iron. By that time I was too lazy to mirror the necessary files myself and pointed you to third-party websites to grab the ready-to-unpack Flash files. Well, I recently tried the sixth release candidate of Flash 10.1, and couldn’t find a portable-ready version, so this time I uploaded mine.
Here it is: Flash 10.1 RC6 – NPSWF32.dll + flashplayer.xpt.

The instructions to use this are the same as with the previous versions (see for Firefox Portable / Opera-USB or Chrome and Iron Portable).
You can always find the latest Flash prerelease version at Adobe Labs (not portable-ready as far as Windows is concerned – the Linux version is portable).

Update: Flash 10.1 RC 7

The seventh release candidate was published today. Here’s the portable version of it: Flash 10.1 RC7 – NPSWF32.dll + flashplayer.xpt. It will test as version 10,1,53,64.
On a side note, as of version 10.1 Flash installs itself in C:\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash (at least in Windows XP).