Techie Connect

Link to cancel your AWS account/services

2013-07-29T14:40:00.001+05:30

Just head over to: https://portal.aws.amazon.com/gp/aws/manageYourAccount?#productToCancel

Reference to the quick link from:
http://drewsymo.com/cloud-computing/how-to-cancel-your-amazon-web-services-aws-account/

Cross Post: http://bschandramohan.blogspot.in/2013/07/link-to-cancel-your-aws-accountservices.html

CommStor Tech

2013-07-23T23:10:00.000+05:30

Wishing the company CommStor Tech all the best! FB and YouTube page looks good.

Download Java Dependent Jars using Maven

2013-07-23T23:09:00.000+05:30

To add Java Sources and Javadocs to the maven repository (basically so that you can explore via Eclipse or other IDEs), please refer to:
http://tedwise.com/2010/01/27/maven-micro-tip-get-sources-and-javadocs/

Interesting internal URLs in Chrome

2013-07-23T23:07:00.002+05:30

If you are using Chrome and love the feature where typing in few characters at the address bar completes the URL, have a look at chrome://predictors/ (Type it in address bar).

Lists all the combinations that have been used and their frequency. Now you know why typing in f lists facebook.com and not ftv.com

One more interesting URL for chrome users: chrome://omnibox/
It lists out how your omnibox (address bar in other browsers) list out contents in the drop down as you type.
For e.g., just type india and press submit. It will list out options which it will show in the drop down when you actually type it out in omnibox. And it also shows category where it was fetched from (history/bookmarks/google search)

Images in Emails

2013-07-23T23:06:00.001+05:30

Do you get emails with images, and outlook blocking the display of images in the preview/display page? Then this image would resonate well:

Image files were always thought to be vulnerable for viruses as it’s quite easy to embed malicious code into jpg or other format of images. See this reference for some more details: http://www.sophos.com/en-us/press-office/press-releases/2002/06/va_perrun.aspx

Now this problem can be easily mitigated by good image readers/scanners which only understand the image format and display it if it adheres to that standard and it doesn’t execute anything.

So VIRUS is not the problem. If you carefully read the warning, it says to “protect privacy”…

That’s interesting! What can a image from a 3rd party site do with privacy? Answer is simple and it’s not addressable by email clients.

Consider the image(s) to be downloaded is at customized link for your email id. Once this image is downloaded from the site, it just means that your email id is valid. Quick and Safe way for spammers to make sure your email id is valid and can be targeted for more spams! Since email client like outlook can’t easily determine if the image is used for email id verification or not, it simply blocks images asking you to validate to download images. This happens everytime the sender id isn’t from your trusted domain or safe list.

This concept is not only used by spammers but interesting apps have been designed using this. Checkout: http://www.spypig.com/

All this does is find out if your email has been read without asking for read receipt from clients!

Mac Os X - Force Reboot

2013-02-04T11:21:00.000+05:30

If your mac icon isn't working on the system menu, then here are 2 quick ways to achieve the same.

Ctrl-Cmd-Eject works - does a force reboot.
Open a terminal and type in:

sudo reboot

(sudo is required if you are not an admin)

or you can use

sudo shutdown -r which is mentioned to be more gracious and other options.

Cross-posted from

http://bschandramohan.blogspot.in/2013/02/system-restart-mac-os-x.html

TextWrangler and formating XML & JSON Documents

2012-10-30T19:15:00.001+05:30

TextWrangler is a good alternative for Notepad++ on Mac Os X but it quite doesn't have the plugins that notepad++ enjoys.

2 Scripts which I really use:

Format Xml Document:
http://www.bergspot.com/blog/2012/05/getting-xml-tidy-xmllint-to-work-on-textwrangler-4-0/

Format JSon Document:
http://ukitech.blogspot.in/2012/08/format-json-in-free-textwrangler.html

Cross:post from
http://bschandramohan.blogspot.in/2012/10/textwrangler-and-formating-xml-json.html

Maximize window shortcut in Mac OS X

2012-09-06T15:27:00.001+05:30

Very handy tip:
http://simianuprising.com/2010/03/15/mac-osx-setting-a-keyboard-shortcut-for-maximizeresize-window-green-jewel/

Mac OS X Lion Tweaks Tool

2012-05-07T15:26:00.000+05:30

Mac OS X Tweaks - Very useful tool especially to show and hide hidden files.
http://ifredrik.com/applications/download_step.html

F5 and F6 on MAC OS X

2012-05-05T18:38:00.000+05:30

If you have the Mac OS X laptops and wondering what the F5 and F6 keys do like me, then here is the answer: It's for the backlit keys of the keyboard.
I was always thinking that laptop was intelligent enough to figure out when to light up the keyboard and when not to (depending on the surrounding lights) but looks like it can't :(. That is disappointing :D :)

XCode 4.3.2 install fails

2012-04-20T14:53:00.004+05:30

If you get an error stating mobile device framework has to be installed, but errors out when trying to install it, then try the following:
Right click on the xcode.app file and click on show package contents.
Goto Contents/Resources/Packages/ and open MobileDevices.pkg
Try launching xcode after installing above and it should go ahead fine now.

MAC: Remove icons from Finder toolbar

2012-04-20T14:45:00.001+05:30

Customize Toolbar doesn't have option to remove the icons. Right clicking the icon only gives options to

If you want to remove the icon, then press "Command" and drag the icon outside the toolbar and release the mouse.

Associating file types to an app in MAC

2012-01-04T23:18:00.000+05:30

There doesn't seem to be one place like windows registry classes subclass or the file associations application where you can set the application to open a file of certain extension in Mac OS X.

If you select one file and click open with and select an App, it's associated to open that file only even if you select "Always open with". It doesn't set the open with app association for all files with that extension.

Easiest way (or is it the only way?) to do that seems to be this way:
Open File Info of a file of that extension. For e.g., to set all .sh to open in macvim, select any .sh file in Finder. Then Click Command I or right click -> File Info.
In the Open With section, select the app to open the file with
And importantly select the option "Change All". That's it - This should do.

Quick Calc on Mac

2011-12-17T09:22:00.000+05:30

Click on Apps icon - Select calculator Or open spotlight, type calculator and select the first option to launch calculator. Type in your numbers and operators to get the result, seems to be the most used one.
You can also use Dashboard (by pressing F4) and calculator should be there by default.
BUt the easiest of them if your data isn't very complex is just open spotlight (cmd-space) and type in your data there... For e.g., 3^4*2 and the first result is your answer. :)

Android/Java Static Code Analysis Tools

2011-12-10T12:32:00.001+05:30

Java/Android compilers in itself are very good and give very good warnings to inform about various issues/things done wrong.

Just thought about trying free Static Code Analysis Tools and found the below 2:

FindBugs
PMD

Both have eclipse plugin urls, so you can add the URLs at the software site link and easily add the plugins.

FindBugs

Damn good tool. Install the plugin and then right click on a java/android project. You will find FindBugs Menu. Just click on FindBugs and it gives a very good overview of the review bugs in it's own perspective.

Each of the bugs is categorized by the pattern (you can change the categorization in the toolbar) and it lists all the occurrence of that type in all files in the project under that.

Clicking on it, it gives a very very good description about what the error is and why that is considered to be an error. It indicates if its just a suggestion or performance issue or style issue. Some of these were quite new for me and the explanation made me feel good to have learn something.

It has mechanisms for marking/filtering out the warnings/bugs we know doesn't make sense in our case - either file by file or by the pattern type.

It gives a handy way to save the results in XML format too.

All in all, a professional tool/plugin which does it job well.

PMD

I wasn't very impressed with this tool. Similar features of finding issues as FindBugs but gives issues in file by file manner. One useful feature is "Find Duplicate Code" which might be useful in some cases but not when you have various design levels for same data objects and it says code is repeating in the classes.

Do you use any other tool which you have been impressed with? Do share it in comments.

Cross posted from: http://bschandramohan.blogspot.com/2011/12/androidjava-static-code-analysis-tools.html

Open Terminal window here - Mac OS X

2011-11-01T18:13:00.000+05:30

It isn't as easy as updating registry key in windows (or atleast I don't know). Found this link to be good source for app to do that.

https://sites.google.com/site/michaelsafyan/software-engineering/open-in-terminal
Chose the one with customized terminal window icon.
If the folder Finder doesn't exist in your 'Application Support' directory, then do create it.

If you have any other easy ways of doing this, let me know.

Mac DVD Not visible in Finder

2011-11-01T17:58:00.000+05:30

In MAC, the dvd drive gets listed in finder only if a dvd is present. Else it's hidden.
In some rare cases, even after you inserted a drive, the disk might not be visible in finder and since there is no eject hardware button near the DVD, there doesn't seem to be a way for removing the disk.

Browsing around, found the following ways (from multiple sources) to eject the disk and re-insert it:

Force restart finder.
Open disk utilities (Applications/Utilities/DiskUtility) and the drive should be available there. Right click on it and select eject.
Command line always rocks. Run the following in a terminal: drutil tray eject

Eclipse: Removing Todo: Auto-Generated comments

2011-04-20T19:32:00.001+05:30

When you use Eclipse menus to create new class, constructor, method or even add a try/catch, typically it not only generates the functionality but also adds a TODO. This is good to indicate that the comment has to be replaced with a proper functionality.

However in a team environment, it's not easy to make people delete the line and add the code. Task remains and it becomes difficult to delete it at the end.

To remove the auto addition of that comment line, you have to follow the below steps:
Goto Window -> Preferences -> Java -> Code Style -> Code Templates
Click on Method Body.
Click Edit.
Remove the commented line. (Something like: // ${todo} Auto-generated method stub)
Click Apply.
Repeat the steps for other elements.

Click save.

Ugadi wishes

2011-04-04T10:05:00.001+05:30

Wishing everyone a very happy Ugadi !!!

Open javadoc in external browser - Eclipse

2011-03-01T12:42:00.000+05:30

Solution:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4413883/how-to-open-attached-javadoc-in-external-browser

Should we do this for each workspace?

Function key on aluminium keyboards - MAC

2011-03-01T12:37:00.000+05:30

Seen that many people do not find the Fn key in the new aluminium keyboard for mac and end up setting "use default functionality of function keys" in system preferences. However this affects the laptop keys too and might not be preferred by all.

Solution: There IS a function key in the keyboard. Not in the place we expect it though. Look for the key under F13. :-)

Opening multiple instances of Eclipse on mac.

2011-03-01T12:08:00.000+05:30

Double clicking on eclipse icon always opens the same instance on MAC. To solve this, you can open terminal (Command-Space to launch spotlight. Type in terminal and click on the top hit/Terminal link).
Cd to the place where you unzipped eclipse.
For .e.g, Eclipse/Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/

Then run eclipse &. (& makes sure you run eclipse in background, so that you can kill the terminal window.).

passportindia site using weak public key?

2010-11-19T11:32:00.001+05:30

I got this error in chrome but it happily went through in IE.

Server has a weak ephemeral Diffie-Hellman public key

This error can occur when connecting to a secure (HTTPS) server. It means that the server is trying to setup a secure connection but, due to a disastrous misconfiguration, the connection wouldn’t be secure at all!
In this case the server needs to be fixed. Chrome won’t use insecure connections in order to protect your privacy.

Happy Diwali to All!!!

2010-11-04T14:02:00.001+05:30

Wishing this festival brings great joy to everyone.

Printing Wikipedia articles

2010-11-02T23:19:00.001+05:30

Typically we copy contents from wikipedia articles – paste it into word documents or other wysiwyg editors. Then format it and print. However after posting the question on facebook questions (http://www.facebook.com/q/Is-there-a-easy-way-to-print-wikipedia-articles-without-the-sidebars-and-see-also-references-etc/10150286691460015?t=1&keep_objects=1), I found that there is an option right there in the sidebar to get printable version or even download it as pdf.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/02/27/print-you-favorite-wikis-as-books-courtesy-of-wikipedia-and-pediapress/ has some more details on new initiatives. We can add multiple chapters into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Book and print out combined articles too.