Nirsoft released an utility to search for files  in Windows. The tools is very powerful as it offers many options as shown on the screenshot below: 

Alternative to Windows Search For Files   Duplicates Search via kwout

Here is an extract from the description: 

SearchMyFiles is an alternative to the standard “Search For Files And Folders” module of Windows. It allows you to easily search files in your system by wildcard, by last modified/created/last accessed time, by file attributes, by file content (text or binary search), and by the file size. SearchMyFiles allows you to make a very accurate search that cannot be done with Windows search. For Example: You can search all files created in the last 10 minutes with size between 500 and 700 bytes. 
After you made a search, you can select one or more files, and save the list into text/html/csv/xml file, or copy the list to the clipboard.

Found via ghacks.

I just came accross ScribeFire a Firefox extension that allows to blog when browsing a web Page. This is very convenient. For instance, now i’m browsing the Getting Starting Page while I’m writing this post.

ScribeFire: Fire up your blogging via kwout

Powered by ScribeFire.

There are several ways to debug and analyze web applications. The first approach is to use network sniffers like wireshark. The problem with sniffers is that they are not so easy to use, and by default they capture all the network traffic. If the interest is only HTTP streams, it is required to add filters to remove all the information not relevant. Another drawback of sniffer, is that they are useless if the interest is the capture of a HTTPS stream: The sniffer captures the network stream but in crypt ed format. So it is useless. In such situation, a debugging proxy is a more relevant tool: They capture directly the HTTP streams and display directly the captured data without any filtering. Moreover most of them are able to decode HTTPS streams. I use the 3 debugging proxy below:

• WebScarab:  "WebScarab is a framework for analyzing applications that communicate using the HTTP and HTTPS protocols. It is written in Java, and is thus portable to many platforms. WebScarab has several modes of operation, implemented by a number of plugins. In its most common usage, WebScarab operates as an intercepting proxy, allowing the operator to review and modify requests created by the browser before they are sent to the server, and to review and modify responses returned from the server before they are received by the browser. WebScarab is able to intercept both HTTP and HTTPS communication. The operator can also review the conversations (requests and responses) that have passed through WebScarab."
• Burp Proxy: "Burp proxy is an interactive HTTP/S proxy server for attacking and debugging web-enabled applications. It operates as a man-in-the-middle between the end browser and the target web server, and allows the user to intercept, inspect and modify the raw traffic passing in both directions." Burp Proxy is also written in Java.
• Fiddler: "Fiddler is a HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP Traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language."

On windows XP, the process SVCHOST.EXE is a mystery for most people. If you check your task manager, you may have several instances of this process running. On my XP home edition I have actually 7 of this processes. Microsoft describes SVCHOST.EXE on this document by the following sentences:

“At startup, Svchost.exe checks the services part of the registry to construct a list of services that it must load. Multiple instances of Svchost.exe can run at the same time. Each Svchost.exe session can contain a grouping of services. Therefore, separate services can run, depending on how and where Svchost.exe is started. This grouping of services permits better control and easier debugging. ”

In the document referenced above Microsoft show how to use the command TASKLIST /SVC in a command box to print information regarding the running SVCHOST.EXE. Fortunately, there are some other way to get information regarding SVCHOST.EXE. Langa Blog shows in this article, that we can use Windows Defender or process Explorer from sysinternals to displays information about SVCHOST.EXE. But the most complete software to display SVCHOST information is SVCHOST Informations. This freeware may be downloaded here. The author is called Pierre Torris. Actually only a French version is available. This application display each svchost process running then with a tree all the services attached to the process. You also have all the informations regarding the services: Library, account, start mode, etc. A screenshot is shown below: