How to make an “EXE” installation file

We all download software from the Internet or install applications off a CD or some other media. While some companies decide to just distribute their applications packaged in zip files, most of them use some form of an installation program, which is usually an EXE – Executable file – that runs you through a series of steps to install the said software on your machine.

Have you ever wondered how those EXE files are created ?

Well, there are a lot of software that can help you create install packages to distribute your software, and today we’ll walk you through using one that has been been there on your Windows system all along. This unassuming utility is called iExpress and is (probably) the easiest utility you’ll ever find to make an EXE file for your software.

So, if you’ve ever wondered how those installation programs are created, how the “magic” happens during the installation wizard and how a simple single executable spits out hundreds of real useable program files, we’ll answer that question for you today.

Since Microsoft doesn’t create an icon for iExpress in the Programs menu, we’ll have to run it manually. If you’re using Windows XP, go to the Start menu and click the Run button. In the dialogue box that pops up, type iexpress.exe and press Enter. If, like me, you use Windows Vista, just click the Start menu and start typing iexpress and you’ll see the icon popup in the search results.

iExpress runs as a simple wizard and will ask you a couple of questions and based on your choices will generate the installer for you. The first question that you have to answer is if you want to create a new Installer or open an existing one. Since, this is (presumably) your first time using iexpress, we’ll select the first option and click Next.

The next screen will ask you the type of package you want it to create.

iExpress can create a package that runs a command after it unpacks all files to a temporary location, or only extract the files to a location that the user specifies. The first option is useful if you want to, for example, run a script to make changes to the registry before the user runs your program for the first time.

There is a third option to create compressed files only but that is only applicable if you’re distributing Active-X controls. iExpress displays a handy description below each option so you can read that if you’re still not sure which about which option to select.

The next step is to give a name to the package that you’ll create. Enter the name in the text box and move to the next screen.

This step will let you display a confirmation message to the user installing the application. If you want to display a message to your user asking for confirmation if he/she wants to go ahead with the installation, then type in a message in the text box provided and when you’re done click Next.

Now, you will be able to select a license agreement which the installer will ask the user to adhere to. If you have a license agreement for your application, then type it in a text file and provide that here or else select the “Do not display a license” option and move on.

This is where you actually select the files that will be installed by the installer that you’re creating. You can select as many files as you want here. Add files to the list by clicking on the Add button.

Now, you can safely move forward a few steps and keep clicking on the next button till you come across the Package name and options screen. This is where you select a name for the actual EXE file that gets generated and decide whether you want to hide the extraction process from your users or let them see all the gory details. You can also generate a log files for the installation process.

In the next step you can choose to create what iExpress calls a Self Extraction Directive file. This is needed if you want to later change some of the options that you chose and create another modified installer. Since, we don’t want that right now, we’ll choose not to create an SED file.

That’s it. iExpress will now go ahead and create an EXE file for you. Wasn’t that easy?

What other tools do you prefer to make exe files?

(By) Sharninder is a programmer, blogger and a geek making a living writing software to change the world. Join him on his travels around the tech 'o' sphere at Geeky Ninja

How to print directory contents in Windows without applications

It’s one of those simple tasks that suddenly come upon us and we have no idea how to go about it. I had a whole fat folder filled with ebooks and someone casually asked me to send over a list. A list… that sounds really simple.

Did I forget to mention that the ebook folder was really filled with a lot of titles? It must have had almost 120 ebooks. I almost started manually typing the names when I figured that there must be a less laborious way to print out the directory contents.

Printing directory contents seems so mundane an activity that we forget it has very useful applications in our day to day usage. Especially in a professional setting where you might be told to send over a list of so and so files about such and such subject. In a jiffy. If it’s a small bunch of files then manually writing it down is not a problem. But what if it numbers a few dozen?

Instead of searching for a poor flunky to lend a hand, you can just tap a few keys and get it for yourself. All in double quick time with a few methods.

So let’s work on not one but five ways to print folder and directory contents and get that file list.

Command DOS

This is one command line that’s easy to remember and easy to do.

1. Start the command prompt from Run – cmd. Type cd and the directory path of the folder you want to list.
2. Type dir > print.txt
3. Press Enter and exit from the DOS window.
4. Open the folder you wanted the listed file content for and you should see a print.txt file. This is a simple Notepad file that can be copied or printed easily.

Setting A Contextual Menu

A print directory feature can be added to the right-click context menu for a folder. This sends the folder content list directly to the printer. For Windows XP follow these steps:

1. Create a batch file in Notepad by pasting the following text
   

   @echo off
   dir %1 /-p /o:gn > “%temp%\Listing”
   start /w notepad /p “%temp%\Listing”
   del “%temp%\Listing”
   exit

2. Save the file as %windir%\Printdir.bat
   
3. Open Control Panel – Folder Options. Click on the File Types tab. Under the registered file types select the entry for Folder. Click on Advanced.
4. In the Edit File Type box, click on New. In the Action box, type Print Directory Listing. In the Application used to perform action box, type printdir.bat.
5. Click on OK and close all boxes.
6. Right-click on any folder and use the Print Directory Listing command to send the list to the printer.

The above instructions and those for Windows Vista can also be found on the Microsoft Help and Support page.

How to get statistics of your website using Google Analytics

There’s no debate whether or not our online activities are tracked, they most surely are. It’s not even a single party that keeps the score; your ISP, website owners, advertisers and NSA know the reason you switched to Private Browsing Mode yesterday at 22:12. If the cool kids are doing it, why shouldn’t you? Here’s how you can get to ‘know’ your website’s visitors IP address.

The first thing you want to do is go about creating an account over at Google Analytics. Why would I want to do that, you ask? Well, in my own experience, the service provides a tremendous amount of data, has a great user interface, is easy to install on any website, and, more importantly, is completely free of charge. It’s undoubtedly the easiest, cheapest and fast way of getting your visitors’ information, including their IP address or hostname.

If you already use any of the Google services, you can easily sign in with your existing credentials. The process of setting up your website with Google couldn’t be easier. You will be prompted to create a profile. A profile is basically a metaphor for a folder, where you can keep track of various aspects of your websites’ traffic. Each different domain will have its own separate profile. Select ‘Add Profile for a new domain‘ and enter your domain’s address and timezone.

The next page will generate a bit of code that you’ll have to insert in the header or footer of your website’s template. You have to do this because you want to keep track of visitors across your website, not just the homepage. This way, no matter where the user navigates to (eg. mysite.com/secondpage), you will know about the total time spent, the pageview/unique visitor ratio and exit funnels.

How you add the code to your website varies dramatically – and requires the knowledge to manually access and edit your theme files. You probably set your own website up, so you must know how to do this. If you don’t know how, don’t panic, and instead search Google for ‘[service type] + edit theme OR Google Analytics‘. For example, ‘Wordpress edit theme Google Analytics‘. There are plenty of guides out there that will show you how to add this bit of code.

In the latest version of the self-hosted Wordpress, I only need to click on ‘Appearance‘ in the sidebar, ‘Editor‘ and choose from the right side list ‘footer.php‘. As a golden rule, insert the code before the last ‘</body></html>’ tags. They’ve also got a lot of support material over at the help page, which you might want to check out if in doubt.

Twenty-four hours later and you’ve got the first taste of website statistics. Be prepared to spend the rest of the evening looking at various graphs of source locations, connection speed, ISP, browser capabilities, operating systems, browsers, time on site and more. After that, the only problem that could arise is that you’ll wish you could install a tracking code in your girlfriend, in order to be plot the ‘visitor loyalty’ chart.

If you want to view individual IP addresses of your website’s visitors you need to click on Visitors>Network Properties>Hostnames, from the right sidebar, as illustrated in the screenshot above. There you will see a list of IP addresses and how many times each has visited the website. This can prove useful if your site is being attacked (defaced, DDOS-ed, etc.), as you can determine who your attacker is, or at least his proxy.

More views and information is accessible through the sidebar on the right: Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content and Goals. They’re pretty much self explanatory. The Visitors tab will contain information about – you’ve guessed it, the people who accessed your site. Traffic sources will identify who sent you traffic, be it a search engine, a referral or just organic. The Content tab will dutifully tell you how each page is doing when it comes to attracting eyeballs. Finally, Goals is used by e-commerce folks and companies to measure conversions, a fancy word for a sell.

(By) Sharninder is a programmer, blogger and a geek making a living writing software to change the world. Join him on his travels around the tech 'o' sphere at Geeky Ninja

How To Make Your Own Windows Live CD

Live CDs as you know allow you to boot your computer from a CD-ROM and performs various functions on your system. Such Live CDs are excellent for recovering data, fixing problems or to have a custom desktop at your disposal when you are not at your own computer.

While the Live CDs are common place in the Linux world, it’s not often that you hear about a Windows Live CD.

Here today we are going to show you how to make custom Windows Live CD

Tools Required

• Bart PE
• Your Windows installation CD

Steps

1. Download and install the latest version of Bart PE. Fire up the PE Builder. This is the main screen that appears:



2. All additional functionality that you want to add is done by means of plug-ins. There are loads of them to choose from. Plug-ins are nothing but a way to add additional software to your Live CD. You can visit the Bart PE plug-in repository here.
3. For our purposes we require a special plug-in called Windows XPE, which gives us a way to boot into a GUI environment similar to Windows as opposed to the usual command line interface. You are free to choose any other plug-ins for additional functionality that you want to add. There are plug-ins for disc recovery, office work, backups, disk imaging and so on.
4. Now insert your Windows Installation disc and point PE Builder to the CD/DVD drive containing the Windows installation disc or the location of the copied files (great if you have a laptop and the i386 folder containing the files).
5. Click on the plug-ins button at the bottom. This allows you to add more software and tweak the existing software/plug-ins. If you get an error here, chances are that the path you provided in source is not correct.



6. Click ‘add’ and browse to the location where you stored the Windows XPE plug-in to add it. Since we are using the XPE plug-in you can safely disable the Nu2shell, PENETCFG and A43 plugins since these offer functionality that is already included with the XPE plug-in.
7. Click ‘close’. You can now directly burn a disc or save an ISO file for testing which you can burn later. Click ‘build’ and PE builder will get to work.



8. If the build process completes without any errors, you have made yourself a Live CD.

Mine completed in just under 2 minutes without any errors and amounted to 270 MB with Windows XPE plug-in and 154 MB without it. Here are the screen shots from my LiveCD which I tested in VirtualBox:

There are additional hacks that you can use to customize the text that appears when loading, the wallpaper and other things. However, that required editing some files and is a little cumbersome. In any case, with or without the visual customizations, you now have a fully functional Live CD with the tools you want according to your specific requirements. There are numerous other possibilities that you can explore with such a tool. For example you can create a Live DVD with all your favorite programs and documents.

(By) Varun Kashyap - Programmer, Blogger and Tech Enthusiast, who tweets @VarunKashyap and blogs about tips, tricks and latest on the web at TechCrazy Blog

Create A Virtual Machine Clone of Your Existing Hard Drive [Windows]

As many of you know, with virtualization you can run an operating system within another. There are plenty of reasons why you would want to do that: if you are a developer you might want to see how your application behaves on different operating systems; you can test out software, products and suspicious files in an isolated environment without damaging your host operating system.

There are various software available for creating and running virtual machine image. Microsoft’s Virtual PC, VMware, and Sun Microsystems’ VirtualBox to mention a few. Usually, there are several steps you would need to follow in order to create a virtual machine. These include creating a virtual hard disk and then installing the required operating system on the virtual hard disk.

Recently, Microsoft-owned Sysinternals released a utility that would be useful for easily creating a virtual machine image from your existing hard drive contents. This can be very useful if you have one of your computers at home or work set up for a particular task and you want to access all the same tools and software temporarily from your laptop.

The tool is aptly called Disk2vhd. Its a small download and doesn’t require installation. Just fire up the application with administrator rights and you are good to go. It will show you various hard disks and partitions on your computer. Select the one you would like turned into virtual hard disks, hit create and the applications goes about doing its thing.

In the ‘Space Required’ column, Disk2vhd shows you the amount of hard disk space you will need to have in order to create the virtual hard disk from your computer’s partitions. The process could take really long so you might as well go out grab something to eat/drink and come back — and if you are lucky, it would have created the virtual hard disk. The time it requires would depend on the size of the disk you are trying to turn into a virtual hard disk. Generally be prepared to wait for quite a while.

Once the VHD file is created, you can use one of the virtualization apps mentioned above to run a virtual machine off the hard disk image you’ve just created. All three support VHD files. Here are the details in case you want to look into them.

In addition, Vista (and now Windows 7) users can mount .vhd files as regular hard disks as well. Follow these steps:

• Right click on My Computer icon and choose ‘Manage’.
• Listed under Storage, choose ‘Disk Management’.

• From the Action menu, choose Attach VHD, browse to the location of the VHD file, check read-only if you want to safeguard the contents against modification and click OK.

• You will now be able to access it like a regular hard disk.

Disk2vhd is a great tool that lets you create a virtual machine image from your existing hard disk setup. The tool does all this from within the operating system without requiring you to boot from a CD. You can easily take your current computer and run it as a virtual machine on another computer. One thing you would require is free hard disk space.

What do you think of it? Do you know about similar tools? Share them with everyone in the comments.

(By) Varun Kashyap - Programmer, Blogger and Tech Enthusiast, who tweets @VarunKashyap and blogs about tips, tricks and latest on the web at TechCrazy Blog