patembe dot com

Securing Our Site’s Directories

patembe — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 18:15:04 +0000

If we store files or images in a folder called “images”, and people enter www.oursite.com/images as a URL, they will see a list of all the files we have in that directory. A quick way to solve this is to create an empty index.html or index.php file and upload it to the directory. This will load an empty page instead of showing a content list.

Another way of doing this is by modifying (or creating) a .htaccess file. Just place:

Options -indexes

in our .htaccess file and it will do the same thing as adding an index.html file to your folder.

Elastic – Make The Textarea Grow jQuery Plugin

patembe — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:37:42 +0000

This Jquery plugin makes your textareas grow and shrink to fit it’s content. It was inspired by the auto growing textareas on Facebook. The major difference between Elastic and it’s competitors is it’s weight.

How to use Elastic

The usage of Elastic is very straight forward. All you have to do is include the javascript file containing the plugin and use the elastic method.

$('#myTextarea').elastic();

If you want to see the demonstration of this plugin, try to grab the textarea on the comment form below.

Download Elastic 1.6.4

Display Rulers On Your PC Screen

patembe — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 17:59:59 +0000

Having an on screen ruler at hand may be very handy at times. Sure, many design related applications offer their own rulers, but other programs may not. A standalone computer ruler can aid the user indesigning a form for a website or software, measuring the exact size of an object on the screen, or if the work requires different scaled rulers.

Yoshida Rulers is an application that supports all of this, and more. The portable program can display up to ten rulers on the screen, of which all can be configured individually.

The program places a semi-transparent ruler on the computer screen on startup. It is possible to move the ruler around with the left-mouse button pressed. A right-click displays the options menu, which can be used to add up to nine additional rulers on the screen, or configure the way each ruler is displayed in the options. Only the first ruler stays always on top though.

The customization for each ruler is extensive. It begins with the font and color, goes over alpha blending and luminosity to dimensions, orientation and ticks.

Yoshida Rulers supports all four major orientations, and a completely configuration ruler size. Default sizes are set between 640 to 1280, it is however possible to click into the field to change the size to a custom value.

The software program offers everything one would expect from a ruler software. The only downside some users may see is that always on top is not supported for all rulers, only the first one. The portable program is compatible with most Microsoft Windows operating systems. It has been tested on a computer running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. A download is offered at Softpedia

Deletist, Bulk Delete Folders And Files

patembe — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 04:41:01 +0000

Deletist is a lightweight portable software for Windows that can be used to delete folders and files in bulk. The program supports two operation modes. The user can add folders and files by pasting their paths into the program interface, or by loading a text file that contains the full path of the directories or files that need to be deleted.

Each file or folder needs to be listed in its own line in the text file, for the program to recognize them correctly.

The data is then added to the main interface, with additional information including the names of the files and folders, their full system path and their status. The status informs the user if the file or folder could be located on the system.

A click on Delete Files will process all files, and delete them to the recycle bin. It is possible to uncheck the recycle bin option, so that the files and folders are deleted directly without being moved to the recycle bin first.

Deletist indicates the status of each deletion by changing the status message and the icon in front of each row.

The program offers some interesting deletion options. It is for instance easy to use it for system maintenance. Instead of deleting files and folders individually in Windows Explorer, users could use Deletist to collect all the paths to delete them all together in one big swoop in the end.

Deletist is available for download at SKwire Empire. It may be flagged as malicious by some antivirus programs.

Change Your Default Facebook Profile Image

patembe — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:30:42 +0000

If you would like to change the default profile picture of your Facebook page while retaining the default white silhouette look, just head over to picasa.com.

There you’ll find an interesting collection of character avatars from Einstein to Buddha to a Facebook man wearing iPod headphones all rendered using the default Facebook style. Choose your own!

We’ve Detected Unusual Activity on Your Account

patembe — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:57:55 +0000

We’ve detected unusual activity on your account. That is a notification from gmail that I found when I try login to my gmail account. But I don’t sure that I really have done an unusual activity. So I ask to send verification code to my mobile phone. After receiving and enter the code, I found another case.

The information I get that my account actually been compromised. “We’re sorry to hear your account has been compromised or taken over.” So I decide to contact gmail support. Several minutes later I can login again with my account after reset my gmail password.

Virtual Router Turns Windows 7 Into Wifi Hotspot

patembe — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 04:09:07 +0000

Connectify was the first downloadable application that used the virtual Wifi capabilities of Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system to turn the computer system into a Wifi hotspot. The developers offered the program as a beta version that could be freely downloaded. Their intention on the other hand was to sell the software program once they managed to compile a retail version of the virtual Wifi software.

Virtual Router is another application released a year ago as beta that makes use of the virtual Wifi options in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Unlike Connectify though it has been released at Codeplex which suggests that the program will remain free even after it has been released in a final version.

The program’s interface contains only a few options. The Start Virtual Router button being the most important. This button is only active if the computer
uses a supported wireless adapter. Other options include changing the network name, password (recommended as the default password is always the same). Virtual Router uses WPA2 Encryption to provide a solid protection for the wireless network.

Virtual Router can be downloaded from the program’s Codeplex page. It is only compatible with Microsoft Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 and requires a compatible wireless adapter.

If Facebook were a Country?

patembe — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 18:53:58 +0000

The number of people who now to Facebook may now have surpassed that half a billion mark. So if you were to think of Facebook as a country, it would be the third most populated nation in the world after China and India.

If the Facebook country were further sub-divided into states based on Pages and Apps that have most users, the map of the country would look something like this. Zynga, developers of popular Facebook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, would obviously get the maximum real estate in this fictitious country.

Download the full version of the graphic from VisualEconomics.com.

How To Backup All Your Current Windows Drivers

patembe — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:58:54 +0000

When we buy a new PC, the vendor will almost always provide us with a “driver CD” that has the device drivers for all the hardware that’s inside our new machine. The CD comes handy when we are reinstalling Windows from scratch or are trying to recover our machine to its original state after, say, a system crash.

There are however two drawbacks with the driver CD.

First, we need to remember the physical location where we placed that CD months ago and second, it may have outdated device drivers. Hardware vendors continuously release new and improved versions of drivers but if we are restoring drivers from an old CD, we are bound to install the old and outdated versions which may be both slow and buggy.

An easy solution to this problem would be that we take a backup of all the device drivers that are currently installed on our system and put them on a CD or another drive. Double Driver is a free utility that can help us with this process.

Double Driver scans our Windows system and creates a listing of every since device driver that’s installed on the system. When we click the “backup” button, the tool will place all the drivers in separate folders – the modem drivers will be in one folder while the display related drivers will be in another one and so on.

This will make it easier for us to restore the relevant drivers without having to remember any of the file names and other technical details.

Double Driver is portable and requires no installation and available for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 and is compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit edition of Windows.

- Download Double Driver (2.06 MB)

Not Able To Access The Administrative Menus?

patembe — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:32:59 +0000

Just now, I couldn’t access my blog administrative menus after login, the dashboard doesn’t show, instead it’s just a white blank page. I can’t seem to load the /wp-admin page or in another words my blog unable to load /wp-admin. I remember that I just update one of my plugins there. I’m sure it seems like that may be there’s a missing or damaged file or one of my plugins may be conflicting with the admin panel.

How to deactivate all plugins when not able to access the administrative menus?

Sometimes it may be necessary to deactivate all plugins, but we can’t access the administrative menus to do so. One of two methods are available to deactivate all plugins.

Use phpMyAdmin
- In the table wp_options, under the option_name column (field) find the active_plugins row
- Change the option_value field to: a:0:{}

Create an empty plugins folder
- Via FTP or your host’s control panel, navigate to the wp-contents folder (directory)
- Via FTP or your host’s control panel, rename the folder “plugins” to “plugins.hold”
- Via FTP or your host’s control panel, create new folder called “plugins”
- Login to your WordPress administration menus
- Via FTP or your host’s control panel, delete the empty “plugins” you previous created
- Via FTP or your host’s control panel, rename “plugins.hold” back to “plugins”

Now, the administrative menus works fine again.