Synchronize directories in Total Commander ignoring certain files

adminsoftware, VCS0 Comment
2 min. reading

The Synchronize directories tool in Total Commander is magnificent and I’m using it very often for all my backup-like and sync-like works. The only thing, that I was missing is an ability to ignore hidden system files or files stored in .svn or .git folders, i.e. hidden version control files. So, I wrote to Total Commander’s author and received immediate response, that this is possible.

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Correct wallpaper dimensions for different Android-based devices

adminAndroid0 Comment
3 min. reading

Even prettiest wallpapers looks pretty ugly when stretched by Android to fit different device screen size. Either used algorithm is poor or I have too high expectations, but most of my Windows wallpapers look like a real crap, when copied to Android and used there as that system wallpaper. Some idea is to prepare own set of wallpapers, especially fit to your device screen size. For this purpose it is good to know, how to calculate it.

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Where is PHP on QNAP?

adminQNAP0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

Well.. at least on my QNAP TS-210 it is in:

[code language=”shell”]
/mnt/ext/opt/apache/bin/
[/code]

You can validate this by executing:

[code language=”shell”]
/mnt/ext/opt/apache/bin/php –version
[/code]

Which should show version PHP installed on your QNAP box.

Strange Windows 7 folder names

adminMicrosoft0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

After installing Service Pack 1 over your Windows 7 (or some other update “around”) you may find, that some of your folders has now a strange name. This happen mostly in non-English versions of Windows 7.

To fix this problem, turn displaying of hidden files on, locate desktop.ini file, edit it and remove LocalizedResourceName key from it or delete entire desktop.ini file at all.

Force HTTP 403 error when there is no index file

admindev0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

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

adminother0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

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

adminMicrosoft0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

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?

adminVCS0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

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

adminJavaScript0 Comment
3 min. reading

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.

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God Mode or admin’s power panel in Windows 7

adminMicrosoft0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

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!

FujitsuSiemens AmiloPro V2060 no HDD found

adminhardware, Microsoft0 Comment
2 min. reading

When installing Windows XP Professional on FujitsuSiemens AmiloPro V2060 laptop in most cases it will turn out, that the hard disk is not found. This is because many Windows XP Installation CDs do not contain drivers for the Intel SATA HDD support, that is available in AmiloPro family of FujitsuSiemens laptops. This article may help in this situation.

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Quickly switching network connection in Windows XP

adminMicrosoft0 Comment
3 min. reading

A lot of people uses the same notebook to access Internet from many places or networks. For example from home and office. If all these networks are using DHCP-assigned IP addresses and network parameters or if you’re using different medium (i.e. One at home, wireless at work) then there is no problem. However, if both networks uses static parameters over the same medium, then the only option you’re left is manually changing network parameters, as Windows does not allow you to create more than one connection for single hardware (network medium). Hopefully, you can easy your life with a set of simple batch scripts.

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Autosave and revisions in WordPress

adminWordPress0 Comment
2 min. reading

WordPress by definition performs automatic saves of each post being currently edited and also, for each post update, it creates a revision. This enlarges database and sometimes can make life a little bit harder, because both WordPress and browser can get a little bit wako on any of these mechanisms. So, here is a quick way of disabling these features.

This post is based on Revision Management in Wrodpress Codex. Refer to it for details.

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Redirect page in HTML

adminHTML0 Comment
2 min. reading

To redirect user to another page directly in browser (without using server-side and HTTP error codes) one just have to add this to <head> section of HTML document:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="x; url=http://.../page.html"/>

Where x means number of seconds after each the redirection is happening.

This is just to remind me, what to use in this case. Nothing more.

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A very introduction to steganography

adminDelphi and Free Pascal0 Comment
10 min. reading

In very short words steganography is a method or technique to hide some message within another message or other kind of media (like image, painting, sound etc.). The masquerade is so subtle that person not expecting to find a hidden message won’t notice anything.

With the IT era possibilities are getting bigger and bigger. You can change just a one bit of each byte in i.e. image to store (encode) hidden images and the viewer won’t notice any difference in most cases. In the same, the size of encoded image is really impressive. You can store around 175 thousand letters (or seventeen thousand typical words) in a single 800×600 pixels image!

This article describes how to write a simple Delphi / Pascal code as an example of steganography — to encode (and decode) some mysterious text message within simple bitmap.

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