Force HTTP 403 error when there is no index file

If you want to display HTTP 403 error (instead of files list) for folder, where there is no index.html or index.php file, then in .htaccess file you must add following line:

Options -Indexes

This works for current folder and all subfolder (unless .htaccess file if any of these subfolders will “locally” change this setting).

WolframAlpha in action

If you don’t know, what WolframAlpha is then consider a Star Trek computer answering your even wildest mathematical and statistical questions. Want to know the population of Far East countries in mid-fifties of XX century? Or statistically how many cities were involved in biggest earthquakes in history?

This and many other questions may be easily solved with WolframAlpha. If you’re still not convinced, then why don’t you take a look at live demo of WA for iPad. Let it convince you!

Disable Program Compatibility Assistant

Windows Program Compatibility Assistant can be a real pain in the ass when you often use programs, scripts or applications that runs just for a second or two and then terminates itself. It can be also painful, when you run some software by a mistake and quickly close it right after starting. In each such scenario you’ll be nagged with a stupid message asking, if you want to run this program again.

To completely disable Program Compatibility Assistant follow these simple steps:

  1. Run Registry Editor (regedit.exe).
  2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\AppCompat branch
  3. Create new key named DisablePCA of dword type and give it 00000001 value

Or… save the following code as a .reg file somewhere:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\AppCompat]
"DisablePCA"=dword:00000001

Then double-click saved file and confirm addition to Windows Registry.

What Agile is NOT?

If you ask Google on what is agile software development you’ll find thousands of results. Let’s then turn the table around and say what agile isn’t.

There’s no agile development, if:

  • there is at least one-man team,
  • iterations are longer than 4-6 weeks,
  • development is not started before the analysis is completed,
  • delivered code is not thoroughly tested at the end of each iteration,
  • each iteration does not end with the production version of the application,
  • progress is measured by lines of code or hours, and not by a delivered results.

And the most important — Agile is not a miracle solution to all your problems! You know:

Agile is not the remedy, the magic cure that will solve all the problems. It will only make them so painfully visible that further ignoring them won’t be possible.

Ken Schwaber, a SCRUM’s co-author

Human population counter

I’ve found a simple and cool JavaScript counter that is able to count current human population and it’s increase every second.

It:

  • takes current date and time,
  • calculates its different toward July 1, 1995 at 00:00:00 (when human population was 5 733 687 096)
  • multiply known “human population increase” factor by the number of seconds that passed since then till now

In this particular (very old — year 1995) example result is printed into form’s text box. With a simple modifications you can have this turned into a actual JavaScript function to return result.

Read More “Human population counter”

God Mode or admin’s power panel in Windows 7

The magic word is Admin.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}.

Create a new folder in any folder you like (make it root folder on your first drive or deeply hidden secret dir) and use exactly above string as folder’s name. Folder’s icon will change to confirm that you’ve succeeded.

Double clicking this folder — instead of showing contents of empty directory — will give you an access to a really impressive list of shortcuts to most powerful and hidden features of Windows 7.

Happy hacking, folks!