Category Archives: applications

Microsoft Outlook.com to Replace Hotmail, Microsoft Throws $30 Million into Outlook.com Marketing, Including Attack on Google Gmail Advertising

Things are changing!!!  How many of you like changes? Probably not that many, right?  Microsoft has decided to actually migrate their Hotmail infrastructure to Outlook Web.  Not to confuse the Outlook native application.

Microsoft Outlook.com to Replace Hotmail, Microsoft Throws $30 Million into Outlook.com Marketing, Including Attack on Google Gmail Advertising – ABC News.

How to access XAMPP from external address – HTTP and MySQL

Assuming that your internal firewall is open (this is not the right thing to do BTW). you can open a connection from any IP address to your XAMPP server.  This small tutorial will take you through the changes that you will need to do in order to be able to access XAMPP host and MySQL remotely.

for Apache go to the following line “c:\xampp\apache\conf\extra\httpd-xampp.conf” and do a search for “<LocationMatch”.  Once you find it, make a change to the “Deny from all” to have a # in front of it.  See code below.

 <LocationMatch "^/(?i:(?:xampp|security|licenses|phpmyadmin|webalizer|server-status|server-info))">
 Order deny,allow
#Deny from all
 Allow from ::1 127.0.0.0/8
 ErrorDocument 403 /error/XAMPP_FORBIDDEN.html.var

Now the next thing is to fix MySQL
Once you find the “my.cnf/my.ini” file, open it up and find the line that has “[mysqld]”.  Under that set of line add skip-name-resolve.  This should fix the issue.  Note that once you enable this, you might have some issues if you are trying to login on MyPHPAdmin.  See code for example.

# The MySQL server
[mysqld]
port= 3306
socket= "C:/xampp/mysql/mysql.sock"
basedir="C:/xampp/mysql" 
tmpdir="C:/xampp/tmp" 
datadir="C:/xampp/mysql/data"
pid_file="mysql.pid"
skip-external-locking
key_buffer = 16M
max_allowed_packet = 1M
table_cache = 64
sort_buffer_size = 512K
net_buffer_length = 8K
read_buffer_size = 256K
read_rnd_buffer_size = 512K
myisam_sort_buffer_size = 8M
log_error="mysql_error.log"
skip-name-resolve

Sources:
Apache Friends Support Forum • View topic – How to access XAMPP from external adress
XAMPP MySQL Server Remote Access
MySQL: Can’t get hostname for your address

Microsoft Office 2008 Database Problem – The macosxhints Forums

If you ever have issues when re-installing office on your mac by getting this error

There is a problem with the Office database

Office might be unable to access the database or the database file might be damaged. Without the database, you might be unable to use the Address Book, Scrapbook, and other features that store your personal information.

To rebuild the database, open Microsoft Office 2008/Office, and then open the Microsoft Database Utility. For more information, open the Database Utility application, and on the Help menu, click Database Utility Help.

The section below will help you solve it!!!

Deleting “Main Identity” only did not help me. Here is how I solved
it:
1- Deleted “Microsoft User Data” folder under Documents
2- Deleted all com.microsoft.* under ~/Library/Preferences
3- Deleted Microsoft folder under ~/Library/Preferences
I then re-ran Office Setup Assistant, and problem solved.

via Microsoft Office 2008 Database Problem – The macosxhints Forums.

How to use conditional formatting to shade every other row in Excel

The other day I was on MS Excel and I wanted to have every other row colored, since it was really difficult to read due to the content that I had.  I found a really good solution where all you would have to do is to

  1. Select the rows that you would like to color
  2. Go to Format -> Conditional Formatting
  3. In Condition 1 change it to select Formula Is instead
  4. enter the following formula =MOD(ROW(),2)=1
  5. Click on Format button
  6. When then new box opens up, click on the Patterns tab
  7. Pick the color that you would like, and then click OK.
  8. Now on the Conditional Formatting dialog box, click OK.

Then enjoy your colors on every other row 😛

Source How to use conditional formatting to shade every other row in Excel.

Upgrade to Ubuntu from Natty Narwhal 11.04 to Oneiric Ocelot 11.10

The following steps below from Ubuntu will guide you in terms of successfully upgrading your Ubuntu system from Natty Narwhal 11.04 to Oneiric Ocelot 11.10.

To upgrade from Ubuntu 11.04 on a desktop system, press Alt+F2 and type in “update-manager -d” (sans quotes) into the command box. Update Manager should open up and display following message: “New distribution release ‘11.10’ is available. Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions”.

To upgrade from Ubuntu 11.04 on a server system, follow the steps listed below: Step 1: Install the update-manager-core package (if it is not already installed). Step 2: Use following command sudo do-release-upgrade -d to launch the upgrade tool. Step 3: Follow the on-screen instructions. Note that the server upgrade is now more robust and will utilize GNU screen and automatically re-attach in case of dropped connection problems, for example.

Source: OneiricOcelot/ReleaseNotes – Ubuntu Wiki.

Installing XML plugin in Notepad++

i recently started working on more XML data since i am trying to do more data transfer between databases.  i use notepad++ as my main editor and i wanted to keep using it with my XML data without having the need of installing another program on my computer.  i found out that that there was a plugin develop for notepad++ in order to allow me to use it as my XML editor.  the problem was that there was no documentation on how to install what file and where.  below you will be able to find the proper steps on how to do so.

NOTE: you need to have notepad++ installed in your computer before proceeding. if you don’t have notepad++ install you can click on this link.

  1. after you have notepad++ installed
  2. goto this link http://bit.ly/rcCK1N download these packages
    1. External libs -> ext_libs.zip
    2. XML Tools -> Xml Tools 2.3.1 r764 Unicode Beta1 -> xmltools_2.3.1_r805_unicode_beta2.zip
  3. when extracting the files here is where you will need to place them…
    i am going to assume that you have installed notepad++ in it’s default directory which is “C:\Program Files\Notepad++”
    1. the ext_libs.zip will extracted on “C:\Program Files\Notepad++”
    2. the xmltools_2.3.1_r805_unicode_beta2.zip will be extracted on “C:\Program Files\Notepad++\plugins”
  4. now, if you had notepad++ open, restart it and you should be able to use the XML plugin …

enjoy!!!

Windows blue screen even on virtual machines

if you thought that blue screens are only on regular windows boxes…. you are wrong!!! yesterday i just experience  a blue screen on my windows virtual machine (vm).  i am currently running ubuntu 10.04 and have windows xp pro on my virtual machine.  apparently the vm got stock on a process with a infinite loop.  isn’t that something…. only on the windows journey.

vboxdisp

Virtual Machine Blue Screen of Death

untangle linux protecting me from virus

i have been having utangle for a while now and i did not know how useful it was to protect my gateway until today.  out of 52072 files that the clamav antivirus look for 25761 were blocked :o.  that is about 49% of the files that would of probably infect my computer were blocked at the gate making by only windows pc safe.  so, if you are thinking about safety on a windows environment, maybe utangle might be the solution :).

for more information about untangle visit the following site http://www.untangle.com/.

Ubuntu Backup Before Upgrade (UBBU)

just in case you didn’t know i created not too long my first linux bash script.  the reason why i developed this was because i was getting tired of backing up my ubuntu linux system every six months.  so, if you would like to be able to backup certain selected folders and files you could download a copy by going to Ubuntu Backup Before Upgrade site.