Technical Tips, Tricks and Articles

May be you have read the following article of mine in which i have given an idea about what could be the possible future of Operating Systems and Web. At that time the web was not that much mature compared to today and now that concept has moved one step forward with number of online softwares other that OS so that you don’t need to install things on your system. Here are few

• Google Docs

A nice collection of online Office suite – Word processor, SpreadSheet, Calendar, Notebook.

• Zoho

One of the best contender to Google’s online office product and i believe some are really better than what google have developed. Besides those, it is providing online project management and other such features as well.

• SplashUp

One of the awesome online web application. If i’d have to rename it i’ll rename it as “Online Photoshop” – yes and i hope you got it what does this application do.

• Roxer

A nice online free tool to build websites without any cumbersome coding. A replacement of early versions of FrontPage and DreamWeaver.

I’ll updating this post regularly with new applications – and don’t forget to share with me .

I am working on “database synchronization” between Sql Server 2005 (running on windows server 2003) and MySql (running on *nix). Before starting developing my own component i thought to digg around and find some already made tool instead of “re-inventing” the wheel. So by then i found this tool.

Daffodil Replicator

It’s nice tool but while configuring it according to the documents i faced an error message

"[Microsoft][SQL Server 2000 Driver for JDBC]End of stream was detected on a read."

Man, i was so stuck in this error and was not able to get any work around then somehow i got to know that may be SQL Server 2005 does not allow REMOTE CONNECTION. When i tested and it was true. SQL Server 2005 does not allow remote access through TCP or NAMED PIPES. You have to allow these connection and you can do this by following this tutorial

How to configure SQL Server 2005 to allow remote connections

I got this error today when i was trying to sign in using WLM (Windows Live Messenger)
You cannot sign in to Messenger. Additionally, you may receive the following error message: We were unable to sign you in to the Messenger at this time. Please try again later.
To let us try and troubleshoot the problem, click the Troubleshoot button.
Error code: 80048820
Extended error code: 80048412

while digging around, i found the solution which is quite simple. Just make sure that you have properly set your system date accurately.

First of all, I’d like to clear all those people who have opened this topic to read something about “how to break into others computer”. This article isn’t any way intended towards breaking into others computer. So if you are here to read something un-ethical then let me tell you that you are at wrong place.

The focus of this article is just to provide the *real meanings* of *hacking*, which is mostly miss interpreted by Pakistani people or more precisely every that person who is new to computer field.

Hacking isn’t anyway means that you break into other’s computer or you break some security rules or you steal some private information. Hacking is something the most passionate and the most attractive word for *Programmers*. It’s really hard for me to explain what really hacking means, the best way I can make you familiar with this words is by this quote

Hackers are just programmer except that they know a lot more than normal programmers.

So if I rank a programmer from grade 1 – 10 (10 being highest) then a normal programmer can be of grade 3-4 and a programmer with knowledge of 8-9 will surely fall into this category which I call *Hacker*.

I guess now you know the meaning what really Hacking means. But I guess you’ll be now confuse with the thinking that if it is the definition of a hacker then why all people say that *hacking means to break into someone computers*. Let me explain it to you.

The person who will be competent enough to break into someone others computer is intelligent enough to know all those security holes of an operating system and know the *CORE PROGRAMMING* concepts to exploit those holes; ultimately gaining access of others computer or breaking some security rules. So he is basically someone who has extra knowledge of OS and Programming.

Similarly, there can be a person who may have extra knowledge of networking (Protocols, Internet) other than programming – then he can surely do those un-ethical things which are referred here as *Hacking*.

So every person, having extra knowledge of some particular domain with programming and who can use the that in depth knowledge to do something which is not *Directly* allowed in that domain is a hacker

There are several books available in the market like *Hacking Unix* or *Hacking Ubuntu*. Does any of this book means that you’ll be taught to break into a *NIX (Unix) OS? No, the real purpose of these books is to teach you the *IN DEPTH* knowledge of these OS. Which means you’ll be just at the higher grading rank than a simple OS user.

I hope this article have cleared the wrong meaning attached with the word *Hacking*

Hi,

Just today while wandering on the internet and by request of one of my friend, i realized that the method i told about to download google videos is no longer working. eew! .. We need something else to work out, so googled around and found 2 things.

Tutorial 1

1. First of all make sure that there is bookmark Toolbar is shown on Firefox, if not then click anywhere near the address bar and select Bookmark Toolbar.
2. Now, click on the bookmark toolbar and click on “New Bookmark”
3. In the “Name” specify anything you want, i use “Google Video DL”
4. in the location bar .. paste this javascript:if(frames[0].document.getElementById('macdownloadlink')!=null){window.location.href=frames[0].document.getElementById('macdownloadlink')}else{alert('You are not visiting Google Video or the current video can\'t be downloaded.')};
5. Press OK
6. now open any video on google page and just when it starts buffering, click on the bookmark link, you’ll get the option to download the file as avi

Here is the other one, relatively simple.

1. Go to google videos and open any video link.
2. on your right side, you can see “Download Video Manually” link. Click on it and you’ll get GVP file to download, relatively of small size, i.e in some KB.
3. When the GVP file has been downloaded, use any TEXT EDITOR which support ANSI (Notepad will work fine) to open it.
4. in the file you’ll see url:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx … text, copy this and paste in your broswer. The browser will prompt you for download the AVI file
5. Working na!!

Have FUN!!!!

Hi,

Here is the trick to lock a folder. Suppose there is folder name Games in drive D. (D:\Games). Make a batch file on Drive D: and write the following code in it

CODE
ren games games.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}


save it as “loc.bat” or what ever you name like. Now, run it (double click it) and you’ll see the folder Games has been changed to “Control Panel” icon. Now if you double click on it, it will open control panel for you, won’t open the actual folder’s contents.

Nice na. Now you want to convert your folder back to games. Make another batch file named “key.bat” and write the following code in it

CODE

ren games.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D} games


Your “control panel” iconed games folder will be renamed to “games” and you’ll be able to access it.

Cool!

I guess you people have enough idea what trick is used. Here is some more KEYS that you can use to fool around our loveable WINXP

CODE

My Computer.{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}
Fonts.{BD84B380-8CA2-1069-AB1D-08000948F534}
Inbox.{00020D75-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
URL History.{FF393560-C2A7-11CF-BFF4-444553540000}
Printers.{2227A280-3AEA-1069-A2DE-08002B30309D}
Network Neighborhood.{208D2C60-3AEA-1069-A2D7-08002B30309D}
Recycle Bin.{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}
Internet Cache.{7BD29E00-76C1-11CF-9DD0-00A0C9034933}
Dial-Up Networking.{992CFFA0-F557-101A-88EC-00DD010CCC48}
Desktop.{00021400-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
Briefcase.{85BBD920-42A0-1069-A2E4-08002B30309D}
Fonts.{BD84B380-8CA2-1069-AB1D-08000948F534}
My Documents.{ECF03A32-103D-11d2-854D-006008059367}


• UNIX is simple. But it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity. (Dennis Ritchie).
• Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. (Fred Brooks).
• Theory is when you know something, but it doesn’t work. Practice is when something works, but you don’t know why it works. Programmers combine theory and practice: Nothing works and they don’t know why.
• It’s hard enough to find an error in your code when you’re looking for it; it’s even harder when you’ve assumed your code is error-free. (Steve McConnell)
• The Six Phases of a Project:
  • Enthusiasm.
  • Disillusionment.
  • Panic.
  • Search for the Guilty.
  • Punishment of the Innocent.
  • Praise for non-participants.
• Good code is its own best documentation. As you’re about to add a comment, ask yourself, ‘How can I improve the code so that this comment isn’t needed?’ Improve the code and then document it to make it even clearer. (Steve McConnell)
• The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. (Bertrand Russell)
• No matter how slick (efficient) the demo is in rehearsal, when you do it in front of a live audience the probability of a flawless presentation is inversely proportional to the number of people watching, raised to the power of the amount of money involved.
• One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs. (Robert Firth)
• Fifty years of programming language research, and we end up with C++? (Richard A. O’Keefe)
• C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
• If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. (Edsger Dijkstra)
• There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third works. (Alan J. Perlis)
• Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. (Bill Gates)
• Before software can be reusable, it first has to be usable. (Ralph Johnson)
• Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning. (Anon)
• As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn’t as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs. (Maurice Wilkes)
• I did say something along the lines of “C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows your whole leg off.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)
• Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. (Pablo Picasso)
• Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. (Edsger W.Dijkstra)
• I’ve finally learned what “upward compatible” means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes. (Dennie van Tassel)
• Rules of Optimization:
  • Rule 1: Don’t do it.
  • Rule 2 (for experts only): Don’t do it yet. (M.A. Jackson)
• Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written, and another for which it wasn’t. (Alan J. Perlis)
• Technology is dominated by two types of people: Those who understand what they do not manage. Those who manage what they do not understand. (Putt’s Law)
• Copy and paste is a design error  (David Parnas)
• Any code of your own that you haven’t looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else.  (Eagleson’s law)

I have just gone through one of the best site i seen in the start of 2007

http://www.geni.com

A unique idea, may be, but new to me at least. Here you can enter your name, your brothers/sisters/spouse/father/mother etc and you can see your FAMILY TREE (Shajra-e-nasab). Invite your cousin to site to update their side and you can check who are your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, nth cousin are … really cool na.

I know there are couple of other sites like namesdatabase and other but they don’t emphasis on FAMILY tree but this site will really add a new thing on your web profile

WebOS, a new breed of operating systems (“so called”) has been started. But before going into some detail, let me explain you some historical development that lead towards the “invention” of this new breed in high tech world.

The technology developer has always tried to make the Websites more dynamic and attractive. You are witness of the booming age of java applets, Flash and now AJAX. All has added a lot to the websites which ultimately results in to develop advance websites.

Recently I saw a few websites on net like,

• http://www.desktoptwo.com
• https://www.youos.com/
• http://www.goowy.com/
• http://www.xindesk.com/
• http://eyeos.org/
• http://www.zoho.com

These websites showed the trend where the new market is moving on. You can see that every major giant in computer industry is trying to make AJAX based solutions, like the above mentioned sites, which has provided your desktop on the internet, with about 1 GB of storage, built in mail client, chatting client, wallpapers, multimedia players etc. What these sites are expecting? Actually these are facilitating the user to have their ONE desktop, independent to your Operating System, your System. Does not matter how many times you wipe out your OS or get new system, you’ll have your desktop with your important documents and mails stored at one position, accessed from any place in the world.

Impressive enough? Well, the first time when I came to know about one of the sites I was thinking; “wow”. That is great piece of designing and AJAX based coding but will these things able to replace our traditional OS (Windows, Linux, MAC, etc)? Well, the very first answer come to my mind was simply a big “NO!”. Reason; to access these sites we should have at least an Operating System installed on our system, so that we may connect to the internet using our system resources (modem) to access our very “Desktop”. So if we are going to have OS then why should need these websites?

Then I got remember one of the news that I read earlier,
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,121027-page,1/article.html read the article and you’ll find that Intel is already planning to move one step forward to put a sub-operating-system in mother-board chips. This is the beginning, what future can be? May be Intel and Microsoft joins hands to provide mother-boards with build-in OS to avoid piracy and if this will happen then we can use that little OS to use our system resources (modem) to connect to the internet and ultimately to our ONE DESKTOP on internet.

In the above scenario, what you need is OS (built in chips), internet connection and a browser and all the rest will be available on these sites. Like your messenger, mail client, important documents, multimedia player.

Though, these OS, initially, will not be able to solve the need of a professional “developer”, “designer” or “architect” but definitely these OS will help those people who mostly manage documents, have much to do with their emails and just listen to songs.

That was just a thinking that I had about the future after analyzing the web development and hardware trends, may be future will entirely different from what I thought, but I guess it’d definitely have a little piece of my this thinking .

Today i was surfing on the net and found the following tip to stop user writing on USB.

Open the Registry Editor click on the Start button on your taskbar,
then click on Run and type “regedit” and click on OK to start the
regedit utility.

Expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control.

From there right click and create a new key and name it
“StorageDevicePolicies”. In the window on the right then create a new
DWORD value and label it WriteProtect, give it a value of “1″ and users
can no longer write to USB drives. To re-enable this option change the
value to 0 and users are again allowed to write.

The modifications you made will be in effect after you reboot your PC.
Reference: http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/1536/how_to_prevent_windows_xp_users_writing_to_usb_drives