THE SOLITARY REAPER

Download all popular apps

2010-09-19T15:12:00.001+05:30

Has your computer crashed? Have your computer lost all applications due to a crash and need to download all over again individually? You might have faced similar situation many times, where you do not have a backup of the applications. You need to remember first which apps are required and need to be reinstalled, and then download one by one from the individual sites. Sounds hectic and time consuming?

Here's a simpler solution to that..
Try www.freenew.net/ where you can find all popular applications you require to be downloaded from the internet. It provides a single dashboard and flexibility to choose them as per your requirement.

Note: All software are downloaded from vendors' servers or trusted sources, and have been tested to ensure they are free of virus, spyware, adware and any other threats.

Disclaimer: For licensing of each applications, (if required) you need to check with the application developers site for more details. I will not be responsible for any license violation. This site is only a feature to find the popular tools in a single dashboard, rather than downloading individual files from various locations.

Download video from Youtube without installing any tool

2010-09-19T14:57:00.000+05:30

I have just stumbled across a site which will allow you to download Youtube videos directly without installation of any Video downloader or any other tool.

Steps:
1) Open a video on youtube (or copy the URL if you already know it)
2) Select the beginning part of the video's URL "http://www.y" from "http://www.youtube.com/"
3) Change/ delete the selected part and just type "3"
4) The URL will now look like this "http://www.3outube.com/"
5) You will see many options of downloading the video

An easy step by step snapshot is also available on the website itself

Courtesy: http://www.3outube.com/

How to change label with multiple posts in Blogs !

2010-09-13T21:36:00.002+05:30

You never cease to learn something new in life, no matter how simple you may think it is. I was having case sensitive issues on Labels in my blog and have been trying to correct it. With time, the label count increased despite the error in case of the label. Today i was organizing my posts, when something struck me, and could make the changes. Let me show you how..

Below are some labels as seen on the left and its corresponding posts in Blogs.
Suppose you wish to change the label tagged "funny" to "jokes", you do not need to go and open each post, and change the label.

Fig 1.Edit post option in posting

Removing labels

Select the label you wish to change, say "funny" (highlighted in RED on left pane)
Select all posts (highlighted in picture below)
Click on "Label action" and select "funny" in "Remove label" section

Fig 2. Selecting the label and posts

Fig 3. Removing the label through label action

Suppose, you dont want to remove the label but make some changes in it, say the spelling.

Now this is a bit tricky. This works like the counter in computer programming, where a separate space is reserved for temporarily storing a variable.

Changing/ editing Labels

Select the label you wish to change (say "MBA")
Select all posts under the label
Create a new temporary label which is unique , say "abcdef"
Then after creating and assigning the new temporary label, select all posts and remove the particular label you wished to edit ("MBA" in this eg). (You cannot edit existing labels directly since it is linked with various posts)
Select the temporary label "abcdef", select all posts under it.
Create a new label with the correct spelling (say "fun")
Dont forget to remove the temporary label ("abcdef")

Isn't it fun? Now you can easily organize your labels, depending upon your requirement.
Have fun...

How to add Contact page and other forms in Blog

2010-09-12T19:03:00.003+05:30

Blogs have been offering multi-paged blogs for some time now. In order to create multiple pages, you need to first enable the "Pages" gadget in Blogspot. After enabling the gadget, save the layout so that it is visible in the page elements.

To create new pages, go to "Edit pages" under posting tab.
You ca create upto 10 standalone pages in Blogspot.
Create some pages, you can change the layout later on.
For more details on making pages and changing its layout, please refer the Blogspot help page here.

Assuming that you are done creating your pages, lets move forward on creating a contact page in Blogs.
Some of the pages (if you are pondering to create) can be About, Contact, Disclaimer, Copyright/ Privacy policy, Newsletter etc.

Google has provided provision for creating pages, but have missed out on providing a contact form. Google however have not ruled it out after all. We are going to use Google Documents to create a form and then link it in the blog page.

To create a Google document form, follow the following steps:
1)    Navigate to http://docs.google.com,
2)    Click Create New and select Form (or) From Template option,

3) Enter form title and brief description to distinguish, then add your form fields; make some required fields, as per your convenience

4)   You can grab the embedded code under “More actions” then “Embed” option
5)    Choose HTML view, paste the embedded code in your Contact page and publish your post.

You have successfully created the contact page in your blog.

Courtesy : Mayvelous blog

Track your activity on your PC

2010-09-11T20:49:00.001+05:30

Recently i have come across this time tracking software called True Time Tracker that tracks your activity on the desktop/ laptop along with time. You can customize projects for which you need specific details, time consumed etc , basically required if your project is a time based one.

You can later pull out reports, make invoice of the time consumed in the project etc. Though it think its in its nascent stage of implementation, it could not capture all websites i had visited during the day. With time i believe they will provide some plugin to resolve the issue.

Check out a sample report from the site

Looking forward to test more such tools. Will keep you updated.

Maintain and Organize a clean Gmail interface

2010-09-11T20:11:00.001+05:30

Many of us use Gmail for accessing just mails. Google however provide immense facilities other than just mails. Lets have a walk through on how we can organize and maintain our Gmail in a better way.

Labels

Labels are a way of organizing mails, categorizing them as per defined sets of parameters. When your inbox size crosses 80% full, you find it difficult to organize the inbox. Labels can help you categorize the inbox into different sets based on users, subject line, containing some words etc. So the next time when you wish to see all mails sent by a user, all you need to do is just click the label categorically set for that user. More the labels, the easier for you to find mails. However when the labels become more and more, it still becomes a pain. You need to organize your labels also accordingly. In the labels tab in Gmail, you can choose to show, hide or show when there is an unread mail. I prefer the last one, as it would hide my 17+ labels, which otherwise would clutter the page.

Gadgets

Gadgets are an important part of Google, which will help you have a simple dashboard of tools which you require in your daily life. Some examples are Google calendar, Orkut, Twitter, FB etc which one uses on day to day life. What if i say that all these things can be clubbed into a single view under Gmail? Yes you can.. Google provide various gadgets to use and access such facilities fro Gmail page only. It is similar to the Desktop gadgets which you use on Windows machine.

You can have a better picture of what i am telling through the educational video below..

How to remove a page or site from Google's search results

2010-09-09T21:41:00.000+05:30

In order to remove a page or a site from Google’s search results, you need to first bring down the page or site. Google's search results are based on indexes, since the page or site is no longer there, once the index gets updated with the changes.. the search will turn futile.

However, if you need to urgently remove your site's content from search results, or if you need to remove Google's cached copy of a page that has already changed on the website or stop Google from showing results for a page that has been taken down completely, you can use Google's removal tool to expedite the process. To use the tool, you'll need to follow certain requirements, detailed below.

If are the owner of the site, you'll need to make the changes to your website yourself and then request removal of the problematic page from Google's search results using the URL removal tool in Webmaster Tools.
If you are not the owner of the site, your first step is to contact the site's webmaster and request that the content is removed. Once the changes have been made, you can request removal of the content from appearing as a cache copy or snippet in Google's search results by using the public URL removal tool. (It bears repeating: The site owner—whether it's you or somebody else—must have first made the required changes to the site, or this process will not work to remove the content from search results.)

The URL removal tool is designed for URLs that urgently need to be removed, such as URLs that accidentally expose confidential data. If you recently made changes to your site, Google’s crawlers will see this when recrawling URLs, and any outdated pages will naturally drop out of our search results over time. There’s no need to request an urgent removal.

There are also other ways to remove or hide the contents from Google’s search.

Meta tags - Using meta tags to block access to your site

To prevent a page's contents from being listed in the Google web index even if other sites link to it, you can use a noindex meta tag. As long as Googlebot fetches the page, it will see the noindex meta tag and prevent that page from showing up in the web index. This method is useful if you don't have root access to your server, as it allows you to control access to your site on a page-by-page basis.

To prevent all robots from indexing a page on your site, place the following meta tag into the <head> section of your page:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

To allow other robots to index the page on your site, preventing only Google's robots from indexing the page:

<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">

robots.txt - Block or remove pages using a robots.txt file

A robots.txt file restricts access to your site by search engine robots that crawl the web. These bots are automated, and before they access pages of a site, they check to see if a robots.txt file exists that prevents them from accessing certain pages.

You need a robots.txt file only if your site includes content that you don't want search engines to index. If you want search engines to index everything in your site, you don't need a robots.txt file (not even an empty one).

You can make a request for removal from Google’s search by clicking here.

Courtesy: Google Webmaster Tools Help

How to download all attachments from Gmail account?

2010-09-05T23:12:00.001+05:30

You can use IMAP to organize the folders in Gmail using a tool called IMAPSize. Unfortunately its not working on my Windows 7 machine . Please go through the link if you are using any other OS. So i am going to show you another alternative..

You can easily download every attachment in one go using a combination of Gmail's IMAP capability, Mozilla Thunderbird, and the AttachmentExtractor extension for Thunderbird.

Setup the Moziilla Thunderbird and configure the Gmail IMAP client to access all of your email. (You can refer to the help section in Gmail settings for configuration of IMAP.)
Make sure to fully sync all folders, including your All Mail folder.
Install the AttachmentExtractor extension by going to Tools \ Addons and dragging in the downloaded file.
You need to first sort the All Mail folder by the attachment icon, (so that mails without attachments are not included)and then select all the email that has attachments.
Right-click and choose "Extract Selected Attachments to..." from the menu, and pick a folder to save your attachments.
It will take time to access all the attachments. You need to wait, probably for a very long while, for all the attachments to download.
You will see the below progress bar once it begins downloading.

This technique should work for any email account that works in Thunderbird, so you aren't limited to Gmail.

The only issue that may creep up is account lock down by Google due to high bandwidth usage. I would advise you to download selective attachments if possible and delete old and un-important attachment cum mails.

How to export the contents of your hard disc on a File !!

2010-09-04T23:13:00.002+05:30

How many times had you searched your hard disc for a particular song among the thousands of files?

How many times had you wished if you could have a list ready to be shared with others?
How many times had you wished, you could organize the files ?

I know how much pain it is to search a particular file among GBs of data.. here is a simple solution for that.
Using simple DOS commands, which have been known to us; but maybe forgotten with time.. i have exported the contents of a particular location of the hard drive into an Excel.

Steps to be followed
1) Open Command prompt in Windows
2) Go to the directory location where you wish to export the contents
3) Type dir /b >> (filename).csv
4) Go to the directory in windows
5) Open the CSV file in Excel

You may refer the video attached for better clarity

Disclaimer:
I always wanted to share my knowledge, tips and solutions to make like simpler for a Technology layman.
It is is my first educational video. Hope you like it

When security bites..

2010-07-24T17:33:00.000+05:30

I have been using Bit Defender Total Security 2010 for the last one year now and did not have a single problem.Except for the compatibility issue due to up-gradation to Windows 7, which was later phased out in 2010 edition, there has no problem on my laptop. And why not, the resource utilization is mild, interface is clean and very effective enough. No matter, it is the best antivirus of the year (read here).

There is a Beta version which got released just recently, for which you need to register to get it. I could not just get the same installed on my laptop, maybe coz an earlier version is still installed on the machine. However, i was looking at one of the beta testing videos of Bit defender 2011, it was an awesome tool. So light, fast and clean interface... i just loved it. However, i came to know of some other malware softwares which are used widely.
Then i come to think of it!! I said, my Bit defender has a malware protection but is it enough?

So i downloaded this Malware Bytes from the internet, and scanned the seemingly perfectly fine machine..
Oh my gosh!!! I saw a dozen of malwares being detected, which were left undetected by even the nest claimed antivirus!!!

I then, keep reminding myself that.. security is not an issue with the tool, but with the mindset.
Security is a relative term... I have learnt my lesson in time, before any damage could be done.
When are you auditing your machine?

Symantec Antivirus woes

2010-07-18T17:21:00.001+05:30

Symantec might have done wonders in the field of Technology and has a big market in providing Antivirus softwares. But to my amazement,a flaw in the software Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) software has been discovered. An application would throw up an "I/O resource overlap" error whenever SEP was running. So what is a resource error?

Coming from the basic architecture of how a computer is made, there are many resources assigned to each devices, each processes and threads for having a particular service request to be carried out. An I/O resource is related to the read/ write resource related to disks. So basically the above issue happens when an application is already writing some data on disk, and antivirus make a request for that particular resource; the server being unable to process the requested resource throws up error. We were puzzled on how to optimize the resource allocation and had many theories that thew up in the air.

Eventually when we were focusing on the exclusion list in the antivirus, we found that the application path was excluded as per recommendations. But it got scanned ,processed, and the same error came up. Later we come to a conclusion that due to the spaces in the path name, the excluded path got scanned. Isn't it ridiculous? Say the application path is "C:\Program Files\ABC"; the space between the 'Program' and 'Files' led to the issue. After addressing the space between then, we made sure that the application path is not scanned while the application is in use. This took care of the resource conflict.

We could not believe that we spent almost 4 months on trying to resolve the issue, involving technical experts and the resolution was such a stupid one..

Solution to Autoplay issue in Windows 7

2010-06-06T14:59:00.000+05:30

Windows 7 have changed the basic interface to a common user, thereby make it more simpler and easier to use. You dont have to be a techie to resolve any issue petaining to your 'dumb box". For example, when you have issues connecting to a network earlier in Windows XP; you may require to go to command prompt and flush the DNS cache, renew IP or reset the connection with the DOS commands. In Windows 7, you wont require to go through all the steps. All you need to do is click on "Troubleshoot problems" and a set of solutions will appear. Depending on your issue, you need to select an option and Viola! issue is resolved in minutes.

There are however,few things in Windows 7 which require a little tweak here and there. For example, the Quick launch butttons sometimes dissapear, and you need to brring it back through the tweaks (already posted earlier in my blog). One of the most common issue with Windows 7 I have seen is the inability to autoplay when a new device is inserted. This has happened many times with me, and i could not figure out a way through the control panel. Untill i found a solution in the registry.

All you need to do is make a change in the registry.
Follow the following steps

Step 1: Goto rrun and type regedit
Step 2: Click OK if there is a Access control feature is enabled
Step 3: Go to following path in registry editor
HKEY_local_ machine\software\microsoft\windows\current version\policies\explorer\NoDriveTypeAutoRun
Step 4: You will find the value as oxff in Hexadecimal
Step 5: Change the value to 145 in Decimal or ox91 in Hexadecimal
Step 6: Click OK and exit from registry editor
Step 7: You need to reboot the machine to make the change reflected

I find the help in Wiki very helpful. You can read it here

Note:
- Registry tweaks are subject to change the system settings.
- Take a backup of registried before making any change in registry for safe side
- Do the changes at your own risk

Google earth comes back with a bang

2010-05-30T22:30:00.000+05:30

It has been a very long time since i explored Google earth since its inception. When i today downloaded the latest version did i come to know that Earth is the least possible places to be explored by Google.
It has mapped the constellations, the Universe, Moon, Mars and what not. Even if you want a 3 D tour of a place, all you need to do is search it and then wait...what a beautiful work they have done..

I just love Google..

Courtesy: Google Earth

Bored on earth, visit Mars

2010-05-30T22:10:00.001+05:30

Do you sometimes get tired and bored of life? Do you sometimes want to escape from the face of earth?
Heres how.. Google has started exploring faces of Mars planet (i come to know just now), where you can have a 3 D view of the planet and have archived views of the planet starting in 1800's and you can even view the latest images through NASA's giant telescopes. To have a brief idea, click here Explore Mars

Heres a visible 2D photograph of Mars planet as seen through Google Labs

I am just a newbie in this regard.. will explore Mars and let you know soon on the possibilities of expanding business (just kidding)

Image Courtesy: Google Labs

Insert image instead of sending as attachment in Gmail

2010-05-30T21:47:00.000+05:30

Once again, Google has proved its user friendliness in its product. Many of us might have wondered how images are inserted inline with text in Mails, instead of sending them as attachment. Until the Google Labs thing started, i used a simple trick to get the images embedded right into the mail. Let me describe it in steps..

Step 1: Ensure you have Picassa installed on your PC
Step 2: Right click on the image and click "Upload to Web album" (you may require to Sign in)
Step 3: Once uploaded into Picassa web folder name " Drop in", a new link to the Picassa folder will open in the browser
Step 4: Copy the image using mouse, as in you copy the whole text.
Step 5: Paste the image into the mail where you were composing.
Viola!! Your image is inserted right into the mail

Now that Google labs has enabled a plugin where in you can directly do the same from Gmail
You can do so as below

Step 1: Login to your GMail account.
Step 2: Go to “settings”
Step 3: Go to “labs”
Step 4: Search for “Inserting Images” and enable it.
Step 5: Drag and drop an image into the compose area...
(Uploading of image will take time, according to the image size)

File handling in Windows: TeraCopy Vs ExtremeCopy

2010-01-26T18:18:00.000+05:30

I just came up with this new software called Extreme Copy, which supposedly handles file copying/ moving much faster than TeraCopy. I downloaded the Freeware and tested it limits. It has a slider option on the top left corner to change the speed of the file handling process bit seriously , i did not notice any change in the process.

Then i tested TeraCopy, which i have been quite familiar for many years now. I found that the speed of file reading were almost the same, and it hardly matters. In fact i would add that TeraCopy can be used to even delete/ test/ copy/ move files in Windows. It has better interface with more options and customized preferences than this dumb software Extreme Copy. 100% votes for TerCopy against ExtremeCopy, unless you want a simplified version of file handling software.

Tuneup 2010 : Personal review

2010-01-26T17:13:00.002+05:30

Windows XP (R) has been known to be the most stable home-use based OS, Microsoft has ever produced. I had used Tuneup in Windows XP but with the upgrading of OS to Win 7, i was unaware of the compatibility issues. Since my VMware had been eating my all resources, i finally uninstalled it and downloaded the new Tuneup 2010 version. Its awesome!!!! They have made so many improvements in the new version. I could not imagine how they could indulge deeply into the functions of the applications and suggest application specific recommendations.

Some of the features that were added as follows:

- Turbo mode (new)

This tool disable unneeded processes and concentrate all the PC processing power on your active program!

- Live optimization (new)
This tool accelerate the startup and response times of your programs - for optimal PC performance!

- Increase performance
This tool can increase the system performance by removing unwanted files, registry etc.

- Customize Windows
This tool can customize the way Windows looks, right from the appearances, styles, themes, logon screens and startup screens

- Fix problems
This tool can scan the system for any problems related to hardware, applications, drivers or registry and recommend changes if required to enhance the system performance and integrity

Some of the recommendations i received while running the scan were
- To install advertising filter, namely ADDBLOCK in Firefox (see attached snapshot)
- To customize the speed settings for higher speed
- The NIC card settings can be enhanced further for better speed etc

One of the nicest feature was the LIVE optimization of system, just like an antivirus scanner that would scan the data packets in the system.And a small summary snapshot can be seen as an icon on the lower right task-bar. As you can see in attached image below, some of the services have been optimized to improve system performance in my system.

I made a customized logon screen using my last trip to Dharamsala, and my frens are quite impressed with it.. of course the looks and not of my foto :)
The registry cleaner has been improved with not only detection of stray registry entries but recommendations on what can be removed and its aftermath if removed, what applications will be affected and what are the effects etc. It was an awesome experience. Try your luck on it, i guarantee you a good time and satisfaction on the results

Windows 7 : Boon or disaster

2010-01-26T15:04:00.000+05:30

When i used Windows 7 for the first time, about two months ago, i was pretty excited with all the new cool features and utilities. Down the line, i found it to be a resource chocking OS with CPU utilization touching 100% all the time. Until yesterday everything was working fine and then suddenly all the applications seems to be in hung state. When i checked the processes in task manager, i found so many application threads in queue mode, waiting to be served! I tried troubleshooting on my own as i was not able to use any application (including browser). The help offered by Windows are nice and user friendly, but i guess it needs more advanced options to be included as there was nothing which i can see what changes have been done to the system to improve the performance. Even after running the performance diagnostics tool and other things, i was still caught up with the hung state in the system. I had to uninstall some applications which were not used frequently, deactivate some services and so on , but there was no sign of improvement.

I finally took the pain to search on internet to resolve the issue, and came across this site but Computing Unleashed. I found it an amazing resource and did all what was told in the site. Now the CPU utilization has gone down to 30-40% at the most. I am very happy now. I do not understand why Microsoft has activated all those features that has bogged down the system! The features do look cool, and i have been using it for months now. I raised the performance issue to Microsoft development team once when a guy from the Win 7 development team had come to our office for the demo thing. He just asked me to do a defragmentation of the drives, and mail him in case of any problems. I did defrag the drives but in vain. The defag tool was also user friendly but not powerful tool. I used a third party tool for defragmentation and worked fine, still it would not resolve the performance issue.

If you are also a victim of the performance issue in Windows 7, please follow the above link.
I am not sure of the intentions of the Microsoft team. Imagine having such problems even when i have got 4 GB RAM, you kidding me?

Windows 8 in the making!!!

2010-01-08T23:49:00.002+05:30

How many people on this earth do you think might have upgraded their OS to Windows 7?
Very few, i suppose. Microsoft on the other hand is working on a newer version of Windows Operating System called Windows 8, can you believe it?

Its reported to be based on the interactive design by User interface designer Cullen Dudas.
Here are a few of the features reported to have been known to be added so far

* 128-bit compatibility to be possibly in Windows 8
Date of Discovery: October 2, 2009
Source: LinkedIn profile of a Microsoft employee
Link to corresponding post on W8C

* 8 to be possibly released in 2012
Date of Discovery: August 2009
Source: Italian Windows Server Presentation
Link to corresponding post on W8C

* Possible Windows 8 features (Distributed File System Replication and improvements to BranchCache) and the fact that its development has already begun
Date of Discovery: April 2009
Source: Job application posted by Microsoft
Link to corresponding post on W8C

Heres a video on the same

Courtesy: Windows8center

GodMode in Windows 7

2010-01-08T23:39:00.004+05:30

I have discovered this one just now, thought its worth sharing.

Someone (dunno who did it) discovery of a hidden “GodMode” feature that lets users access all of the operating system’s control panels from within a single folder.

All you have to do is create and rename a folder!!

By creating a new folder in Windows 7 and renaming it with a certain text string at the end, users are able to have a single place to do everything from changing the look of the mouse pointer to making a new hard-drive partition.

Here’s how to enable this hack:

Create a folder in Windows 7
Re-name the folder to this exact string “GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}”

And there you have it, a folder with all of your control panels for your PC .

Click on image to enlarge

Courtesy: BloggerIndia

UAC Virtualization (Part 2)

2009-12-23T22:22:00.007+05:30

As expressed in my earlier part about User Account Control in Windows Vista; when a standard user is logged into a Windows based computer, there are certain activities and actions that need to be protected. This is essential to protect the overall stability and security of the operating system. Windows Vista provides an excellent solution to help protect these key system areas. Vista uses User Account Control and Virtualization to accomplish the security and protection.

The Program Files directory (typically located at C:\Program Files and referred to as %ProgramFiles%) is where most applications store the executable files. The settings for the application are stored under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software key in the Registry in most cases. Both of these locations are protected by the operating system by only allowing the system and administrators write access, where users have read and execute access only.

The application data locations are created on user basis and are protected such that only that user has access to the data that is written by default.

However, many applications are not designed to work this way. Instead, they are designed to store user specific data under %ProgramFiles% and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software. Unfortunately standard users do not have access to write to these locations, which has caused many companies to add standard users to the local Administrators group in order to run these applications.

Since the applications are not easily changed and users must still run these applications, Vista takes a different approach to fix the problem. Within Vista, UAC lends a helping hand by virtualizing the file system and Registry namespace. UAC will virtualize legacy applications, allowing standard users to remain a “standard user”, but still run the application. The definition of legacy in this case includes processes that are 32-bit, not running with administrative privileges, and does not include a Windows Vista manifest file. If a process or operation does not meet these criteria it is not virtualized.

UAC Virtualization
In Vista, you can see the UAC virtualization option in Task manager where you can see the various processes running in process tab. Right click on any one of the process which you wish to virtualize and you can click the UAC Virtulaization option.

When an action is virtualized, the resulting content is stored within the users’ profile as mentioned above. Depending on which content has been virtualized, there will be some indicators within the different interfaces to help you see the virtualization.

The first indicator will be within the Windows Explorer GUI. Depending on which folder and files have been virtualized, you will see additional menu options within Windows Explorer. Figure below illustrates what Windows Explorer shows when you have Virtualized files under the C:\Windows folder. (Compatibility Files)

The “Compatibility Files” menu addition to Windows Explorer only appears when there are files that have been virtualized. The new menu option appears only for those folders which have virtualized files or folders.

When the Compatibility Files menu option is selected, it will direct the Windows Explorer window to the virtualized files and the containing folder. Figure below illustrates what the contents of this virtualization of files and folders looks like.

Understanding User Account Control in Windows Vista (Part 1)

2009-12-23T20:25:00.003+05:30

When Microsoft Windows® XP is initially installed, the Windows XP Setup Wizard creates all user accounts as local administrators. This account type enables users to install, update, and run software since an administrator account has system-wide access. When a user is added to the local administrators group, that user is automatically granted every Windows privilege. These privileges are collected and maintained in a user’s access token. Every Windows resource has an Access Control List (ACL), which is a list that records which users and services have permission to access the resource and what level of permission they have. Windows' authorization model uses the data contained within a user's access token to determine what access the user is permitted/denied in a resource's ACL.
Administrative users automatically have:
* Read/Write/Execute permissions to all resources
* All Windows privileges

In Windows Vista, there are two types of user accounts: standard user accounts and administrator accounts. Standard users have limited administrative privileges and user rights—they cannot install or uninstall applications that install into %systemroot%, change system settings, or perform other administrative tasks. However, standard users can perform these tasks if they are able to provide valid administrative credentials when prompted. With UAC enabled, members of the local Administrators group run with the same access token as standard users. Only when a member of the local Administrators group gives approval can a process use the administrator’s full access token. This process is the basis of the principle of Admin Approval Mode.

UAC Architeccture:
Each application that requires the administrator’s access token must prompt the administrator for consent. The one exception is the relationship that exists between parent and child processes. Child processes will inherit the user’s access token from their parents. Both the parent and child processes, however, must have the same integrity level.

Windows Vista protects processes by marking them with integrity levels. Integrity levels are measurements of trust. A “high” integrity application is one that performs tasks that modify system data, such as a disk partitioning application, while a “low” integrity application is one that performs tasks that could potentially compromise the operating system, such as a Web browser. Windows Vista prevents applications with lower integrity levels from modifying data in applications with higher integrity levels.

When a standard user attempts to run an application that requires an administrator access token, UAC requires that the user provide valid administrator credentials. The "UAC User Experience" section in this document details this process.

Virtualization
Windows Vista includes file and registry virtualization technology for applications that are not UAC compliant and that have historically required an administrator's access token to run correctly. Virtualization ensures that even applications that are not UAC compliant will be compatible with Windows Vista. When a non-UAC-compliant administrative application attempts to write to a protected directory, such as Program Files, UAC gives the application its own virtualized view of the resource it is attempting to change, using a copy-on-write strategy. The virtualized copy is maintained under the user's profile. As a result, a separate copy of the virtualized file is created for each user that runs the non-compliant application.

The virtualization technology ensures that non-compliant applications will not silently fail to run or fail in a non-deterministic way. UAC also provides file and registry virtualization and logging by default for pre-Windows Vista applications that write to protected areas.

Courtesy:
Microsoft official site

Handling error page efficiently in Firefox

2009-12-19T14:57:00.006+05:30

I could not have imagined my anger and frustration when a URL to load due to congestion in network, peak performance, load on server or maybe due to low bandwidth of the internet connection. Until i found a solution for my anger management.. a simple add on in Firefox that lets you handle the error page efficiently and easily. Let me arrive to the tool later on, while i briefly explain the technology behind.

Coral Content Distribution Network
Coral is a free peer-to-peer content distribution network, comprised of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers. It allows a user to run a web site by offering the service through some of its participating web servers where the content has been already replicated instead of pointing at the original server which may be overloaded at that time, thereby increasing the performance and meeting its volumious demand.

To use the service, one needs to first publish the site through CoralCDN. It is as simple as appending a short string to the hostname of objects' URLs. A peer-to-peer DNS layer transparently redirects browsers to participating caching proxies, which in turn cooperate to minimize load on the source web server. Sites that run Coral automatically replicate content as a side effect of users accessing it, improving its availability. Heres a snapshot of how a coralized site looks like.. notice the URL?

Using modern peer-to-peer indexing techniques, CoralCDN will efficiently find a cached object if it exists anywhere in the network, requiring that it use the origin server only to initially fetch the object once.

One of Coral's key goals is to avoid ever creating hot spots in its infrastructure.(Hot spot here means a region of a computer program where a high proportion of executed instructions occur or where most time is spent during the program's execution.) It achieves this through a novel indexing abstraction called distributed sloppy hash table (DSHT), used in peer-to-peer networking protocol like Torrentz. (Hash table is a data structure that uses a hash function to efficiently map certain identifiers or keys to its associated values.) It creates self-organizing clusters of nodes that fetch information from each other to avoid communicating with more distant or heavily-loaded servers.

Wayback
Almost everything is archived on the internet, in form of snapshots, caches, thumbnails etc.
Wayback is a technology used to see those archived version of the site, which people believe to be of use for future generations. It not only archives live URLs but also dead sites. One of such sites that offer wayback service is Archive-It.

Archive-It allows institutions to build and preserve their own web archive of born digital content, through a user friendly web application, without requiring any technical expertise or hosting facilities. Subscribers can harvest, catalog, and archive their collections, and then search and browse the collections when complete. Collections are hosted at the Internet Archive data center, and accessible to the public with full text search.

This is a snapshot of how Google site looked on 17th January 1997.

Going to the main stream; you can find the add-on here

Technology never cease to excite me the way i am now, handling error functions are more interesting than making a bug free code. I am enjoying the privilege that i am being offered.
I can see opportunity in the errors now and not a sad face, don't you agree?
I have left programming a long time ago, yet Hope Mozilla guys are listening to me?

Browser testing experience

2009-12-19T14:13:00.002+05:30

After a long time i have been into the mood and time to do something i like... checking out gadgets and apps available online. This week, i had been cribbing about which browser to use as i was finding Firefox to have problems in memory leakage. I had tested three major known browsers - Firefox, Google chrome and Flock . As i did not have time to do the tests in one go, it took me several days as i use the browsers one by one, sometimes three of them at a time. I would not rather tell the statistics but rather share my experience with each of them.

Firefox:
- Memory leakage issues
- Customizable to user requirements
- Open source and easy to change browser settings
- Addons and plugins available at disposal which simplifies user
- Can be tweaked to run faster at the cost of memory usage or vice versa
- Browser crash happens frequently, but resumes very fast

Chrome:
- Has different process and memory usage for each open tabs
- Browser does not crash, only the tab crashes
- Difficulty in finding which process is of which tab in process list
- Makes difficult to use tools like Cheat code
- Not so fast as Goodle claims , may require tweaking

Flock:
- Another open source social networking browser
- Developed with Firefox as base
- Interface is clean with all social networking sites given as links/ thumbnails
- Memory usage is between Firefox and Chrome
- Issues in loading and rendering files online.

By large, i found Firefox to be the best among the three. Of course i would have to choose between browser speed and memory usage, which are very much customizable; unlike the other two browsers. So here i am, still using Firefox. I have customized it to run faster and jeopardized the memory usage. I have kept the Firefox Optimizer tool to tweak the same, just in case i need it. So with one click of a button, i can decide what i want .. more memory resources to be free for background applications to run or focus on the speed of the browser.

Memory resource fix for Firefox

2009-12-13T14:21:00.012+05:30

I am not sure if I have already written and mentioned this in my earlier Firefox hacks post. But i am writing this in the enlightenment of those people who might have been facing high utilization of memory resources while using Mozilla Firefox. Firefox being an open source project, unlike other browsers can be optimized according to users requirements. In this post, i am going to show you how the high utilization of memory resource in Mozilla can be fixed. The tools used to demonstrate this are available freely on internet and not licensed versions.

One thing you may like about Mozilla is that these settings can be saved and restored or reused on other machines if you like... say your workplace. You may save the boookmarks, links, tweak settings etc in it and send it via mail or transfer it into another machine and restore or use those settings to have the same look and feel as you are at your home.

Heres a snapshot of my memory utilization of Firefox on my machine.

Step 1: To start with, the back end source code of Mozilla can be accessed by typing "about:config" on one of the tabs. Click "OK" or "I'll be careful, I promise" depending on the version of Mozilla you use.
Step 2: Download "Mozilla Optimizer 1.6.3" from Computer Base
or you can go ahead with the optimzations yourself to save the download time from the source codes. If you want to explore using the source codes, here they are

Preference name Value/ Boolean
nglayout.initialpaint.delay 100
content.notify.ontimer true
content.notify.interval 100000
content.notify.backoffcount 5
network.http.pipelining true
network.http.proxy.pipelining true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests 8
network.http.max-connections 32
network.http.max-connections-per-server 8
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy 4
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server 2

To find the mentioned preference name, use the filter on top of the table and change the boolean or value as mentioned above. To save all these, you can can download the mentioned tool above and just install it once.

Now lets take a look at the performance of Firefox, attached is the snapshot below.

Step 3: (Optional) In case you are still not happy with the result, you can use one more tool to minimize that. But you should remember that this tool needs to be invoked each time you require to minimize the utilization and isn't one time activity unlike the above, which was code injected. Ensure that this tool is always when you open Firefoz, unless you wish to run it.
Search for "Firefox Ultimate Optimizer" in Google and you will find it. After running it, here is the memory utilization snapshot.

See, how easy it is. Happy hacking around.

Disclaimer: Use these tools and hacks at your own risks. I wont beheld responsible for any issues or concerns raised using these freely available tools.