Problem: Nokia's WLAN option kept prompting me for the WEP key *everytime* I would connect to my email or any website.

After googling for a good many days and bumbling around on Nokia's forums, I have finally figured out how to make Nokia remember the cotton-picking password. Simple answer: you need to lose your cached WLAN entry, which may be stored as a non-WEP access point.

Here are the more detailed steps:

1. Delete your current WLAN access point you've created for the E61i. This is the secret sauce.
2. Now, under

   Tools > Settings > Connection > Access Points

   Select Options and create a new access point using "default settings". We'll tweak them below.

3. Under Connection Name, pick a name for your connection. This doesn't have to be your wireless network's SSID, but you can keep it under the same name.
4. Under Data Bearer, select WLAN.
5. Under WLAN Network Name, select manual entry and type in your SSID name.
6. Under Network Status mark "Hidden".
7. Network Mode will be the default: "Infrastructure".
8. Under WLAN Security Mode, choose your security type. For instance, mine is WEP, so that's what I selected.
9. Under WLAN Security Settings, go to WEP key settings and define your encryption level, format, and key. For instance, for WEP you might have 64 bit, ASCII, and "xyzabc" as your level, format, and key respectively. If you don't know this stuff, this entire tutorial is perhaps not for you, otherwise you know what these values are. (You can always login as admin user into your wireless router and reconfirm these settings for your specific case.)

That's it. You can now connect to some website or your email server on your mobile phone, select the WLAN with the name you chose in Step 3 above, and your Nokia e-series phone will remember your WEP password for good. Finally.

1. MainMenu. Free. Superlative. Creates a neat little menu item on the top bar. Better than most other tools I have tried for this purpose, especially in its clean interface. Sometimes, if you have the pleasure of experiencing a situation when the Trash won't clean because OSX says that the "Application is still in use" but you're sure you quit it and it's not live anyway, MainMenu's "Force Empty Trash" is a fabulous tool to have at your fingertips.
   
2. Little Snitch: Tells you everytime some program on your machine wants to "call home" and connect to some server. Great flexibility in allowing the program to connect to a server, a port, or in general. Allow (or Deny) it to connect only once, or until the application quits, or Forever.
   
3. RCDefaultApp: Just as it is on any OS from Windows to Ubuntu, it often happens that you would like to associate certain file types with certain applications. On Mac OSX, we do have the same right-click contextual menu as Windows that allows "Open with [Application]" and "Make this the default application", but for some reason this doesn't always work, and occasionally doesn't even show up as an option. No matter. RCDefaultApp is the application that allows you to do that superbly, and then some.
   
4. Butler: Another small utility with a negligible footprint that allows for some nifty shortcuts to stuff already on your machine.
   
5. Perian: No Mac should be without this. This pretty much explains itself. There's a nice video tutorial here that shows how easy it is to install and then forget it. Suddenly your Quicktime (and iTunes) will be able to play a whole raft of video formats. If you want to be really equipped, get the Divx codec, the 3ivx, and Flip4Mac which plays wmv (Windows Media Player) files on your Mac. Of course if you get really frustrated there's always the tried and tested VLC Player.
6. CleanApp: The best application uninstaller out there, hands down. Don't believe for a minute when the OSX manuals tell you that on a Mac all you need to do is drag the application into the Trash and you're done. BS. Many applications (think Adobe) install several things in several locations. CleanApp 3 tells you all the associated trappings of these applications and allows you to uninstall them all together.CleanApp is not free, alas (there is always a poor man's AppCleaner, which does some basic stuff) but it allows for much more granular control. The best part: CleanApp has a "Logging" service that keeps track of whatever you install, and then knows in granular detail everything that you need to uninstall later; you can enable and disable this logging service at will, so it is useful to keep it generally off and only switch it on before you are undertaking a serious install of software, such as Final Cut Pro from Apple for example.
7. TinkerTools: To modify the many system preferences in your OSX that should have been made tinker-able but are not. Us Windows switchers are used to modding everything, so this is a fabulous tool.
8. Transmission: The best torrent client for OSX. Very simple, no-nonsense, and yet pretty interface. BitRocket is all google-juiced as it has been around longer, but it went down more often than Paris Hilton's pants.  Limewire now has an OSX version too, but I am done with crashing and slow download speeds unless you cough up a few dollars.
   
9. Candy Bar: If you really, really want to modify your icons. Panic is one of the better software developers for the OSX platform. Their Unison tool, a native OSX Usenet client is pure code poetry. There's a lot of iconography available at their partner website IconFactory. CandyBar is not free though. If you are short on cash, you can always try the somewhat barebones LiteIcon.
10. Vienna: The best and most elegant RSS reader client for OSX at the moment. Now if only they could sync it with Google Reader, Bob might be my uncle. How long has the Google API been out now!?
11. Chicken of the VNC: The best VNC client out there, connects without problems to Windows VNC servers too.
    

    

12. OmniDiskSweeper: As you start using your OSX, and installing applications and such, your hard disk usage keeps mounting (no pun intended). The fast, small footprint OmniDiskSweeper does this job faster than anything else on the market, including the somewhat visually prettier WhatSize.
    
13. Monolingual: Like Windows, OSX also comes with about a gazillion languages preinstalled, which take several gigabytes on your hard disk. Likewise, OSX the operating system also comes with a number of architectures such as PowerPC even if you have an Intel system, because the same OS needs to support older Apple hardware. Anyone who has bought a new system with Intel's architectures (the latest Macbooks or iMacs) can safely get rid of the other architectures. Monolingual is a simple, free utility that does exactly that.
    
14. Tech Tools Pro: Explanation coming soon.

On Windows, there is the fantastic SSH2 tool SecureCRT. Or if you're cash crunched, a combination of Putty and Putty Connection Manager works for many.

On Mac OSX and Unix/Linux systems, one doesn't truly need an SSH client at all, because the "Terminal" application is inbuilt. People talk of iTerm and such, but I have still to see a value add for such tools.

But one does miss the convenience of SecureCRT on OSX, because I have still to find a true SecureCRT alternative for the Mac platform. Something that allows me to make pre-determined connections so I can just click on them to connect (which tools like JellyfiSSH do) and then logs me in directly without prompting for a password (which JellyfiSHH does not do).

So I have simply made aliases in my [code].profile[/code] file, which gets executed everytime you start your Terminal window (so it's a good place to put your shortcuts and any code you wish to execute when the terminal starts, such as paths).

1. Start the Terminal.
2. Open the profile file for the current user (you).

pico .profile

3. Enter a new line for our shortcut.

alias s='ssh -2 -p 22 user@host.com'

Quick explanation for that command in step 3. The letter "s" is the shortcut I make for connecting to the sniptools.com server. Change it to what you wish. This will mean that when I start Terminal, all I need to do is type "s" and it connects me via SSH to the sniptools.com server. The "-p" switch is an important one because some of us with paranoid security settings might have a different port number than the default port 22 for secure SSH. The rest user/host stuff is self-explanatory. The "-2" is to force SSH2 connections instead of older vanilla SSH.

Now. Save the profile file and source it to try it out:

source .profile

Sourcing is only for this one time, for your current Terminal window, which had already executed the profile file *before* we added this alias. When you start a new Terminal session, these aliases et al will be automatically set for you.

Done. Now your profile has the alias for "s". From now when you type "s" in your Terminal, it will connect, but it will ask you for a password. To get rid of the nagging password, we need to create public authentication key for the domain. This, in fact is what SecureCRT does behind the scenes on Windows too.

Here are the steps to accomplish this. Run these one-time commands in order from the Terminal window.

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# generate pub and priv keys, leave the passphrase empty
# (simply press ENTER when asked for it)
ssh-keygen
 
#copy the pub key to the remote computer
#(change port number if different from the usual 22)
#change "user" to your user name
#change "host" to your domain name
scp -P 22 ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub user@host:~/
 
#log on to the remote computer
ssh -p 22 user@host
 
#create the .ssh directory in the root login directory, if it doesn't already exist
mkdir .ssh
 
#append key to file
cat id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
 
#delete the public key file, no longer needed
rm -f id_rsa.pub
 
#log off the remote server
exit
 
#logon to the remote server, without password prompt
ssh -2 -p 22 user@host

That's it. This is a huge timesaver. Now all I need to do to login to the sniptools.com server is type one letter, "s" in the Terminal, and I'm on! Follow these instructions for each host you connect to on a regular basis and you'll love the convenience henceforth.

Office 2007 — First Look

Now I don't know about you, but to me this bloo-ey look is hideous.I am not on Vista yet, by choice, so that sky blue gradation thing going on the top was not my cuppa. Why software designed for a certain platform cannot honor a user's general system UI preferences is beyond me, but Office 2007 does insist on having it's own look and feel. As though the new ribbon clutter was not enough.

I wanted to get rid of those ribbons to begin with. So I downloaded the the free version of Ribbon Customizer. They offer some Pro version but it does things I don't particularly care about. Alternatively, there is ToolbarToggle, but on their site I did not seem to catch a free version, and I was unwilling to pay for this stuff.

The RibbonCustomizer install is pretty straightforward and when you start Word 2007 after its installation, here is how Word looks. There is an additional item in the View menu at the end:

Word 2007 after RibbonCustomizer

I clicked on the obvious menu option to make ClassicUI my first menu tab. This is what this does:

Classic 2003 interface

That's a good start, but I now wanted to clean up some other stuff. Fortunately, Microsoft chose to include the additional "Minimize Ribbon" feature, which contextually hides the ribbon when your focus is on writing inside the document. So let's do that:

Minimize the Word 2007 ribbon

Now to get rid of the forced Blue. Click on the "More Commands" option in the menu shown in the screenshot above. Choose Silver and make other adjustments to your taste:

Choose silver

Now this is what Word 2007 looks like, with minimized ribbon, classic 2003 UI, and a somewhat less intrusive silver gradient:

Phew. I also recommend setting the default "Save" options as your regular Word ".doc" instead of the new ".docx" (or other .xlsx and .pptx equivalents) as that is a bit more standard even today in 2008.

For instance, I do not want *.png files opening up with Adobe Fireworks just because I use the software to create new ones.

Here's a mighty useful app that allows you to set the default applications for file extensions, or mime type, or most common uses (such as "Email", "Browsing") etc. It sits snugly within the "System Preferences" and is quite easy to access.

How it looks:

Click on the image to go to the developer's website.

To reinstall it, I visited the usual forums and searched Google. No solution. No downloadable file.

Well, the solution is simple.

1. Insert DVD 1 of your original Mac OSX software.
2. Click into the folder "Optional Install".
3. Click on "OptionalInstalls.mpkg".
4. Expand the menu item "Language Translations".
5. Choose "Japanese".

That's it. It should install the input menu in about 2 minutes. When you're done, eject the DVD and click on the "International" option in your System Preferences.

If the option does not show as English (romaji) "Kotoeri", it should show up as original Japanese as in the screenshot below:

The solution is simple. Use the following command:

find . -name 'dos-*' -print0 | xargs -0 rm

Where "dos-" is a string contained in the files you wish to delete. That should do it.

Suggestion: for log folders that fill up quickly, e.g., the logs of a database or Apache modules such as mod_evasive, it's usually a good idea to automatically remove the files older than a certain number of days. For instance, to remove all log files in the mod_evasive folder older than 2 days, use this command in the crontab:

01 01 * * * find /var/log/apache/mod_evasive/* -mtime 2 -exec rm {} \; > /dev/null 2>&1

Most Cpanel/WHM servers come with PHP and Zend installed. With the recent (and important) update of PHP 5.2.1, the Zend Optimizer that is installed by default (version 3.0.1 as of this writing) breaks.

You might begin to see a message like this:

To fix this, simply login to your SSH as root and execute the following command to upgrade Zend Optimiser:

/scripts/installzendopt 3.2.8

Note that if you skip the version number, Zend Optimizer 3.0.1 will be installed by default. The trick is to specify the version as above. This will also work in the future, so as long as you know the latest released version of Zend Optimizer, just replace the red text above with that number.

This ZDNet post brings up a good point: How to REALLY erase a hard drive. You know when you want to delete a file on a machine, it doesn't truly get deleted. It is saved somewhere on the hard disk because hard disks have in-built protection features.

Now it this really something to rejoice? Not really. If you've ever deleted a file while you were being stupid, trust me, it'd be easier to float in the Niagara than to recover your document. I was in a similar soup recently, and searched far and wide (ok, I did start with Google), I even paid for a few commercial ones, but the truth is that erasing a hard drive using pretty much any tool which overwrites the entire drive at least once will make any data on it unrecoverable.

Can someone do it in principle? You know, like those men in white in FBI crime labs? I read recently in Forsyth's The Afghan (and I am sure such examples abound in crime thriller novels and Hollywood) that recovering hard disks was brushed off as a trivial matter. Not quite, not so soon. I asked a friend who's been in reconnaissance in his draft, and he says it's amazing what they *can* recover. For instance, some labs will claim to be able to pull data of a drive put through an industrial chipper–one little bit at a time, on a magnetic microscope, for tens of thousands of dollars.

However, you overwrite it once, and you'll be told the same thing: it is irrecoverable, not even with the microscope.

But since this is actually a post about file recovery and undelete software, I'll include a couple of recommendations: Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) is a superb FREE utility that works well. If you want a paid piece of software, I've tried a few but found R-Undelete to be the best.

If you use Linux, check out this detailed visual guide from Engadget (although there's always the dreaded shred command which is a pretty secure delete as it blasts random data over the file multiple times.)

PS: If you're really, really destroying a hard disk for legal or other reasons, you shouldn't be reading google stuff anyway. Toss the disk into an searing oven and you can rest assured there's very little recoverable from melted metal

Firewalls are dime a dozen these days. When the concept of a firewall first became important on home computers, with the advent of real high-speed broadband, Tiny Personal Firewall was the best. It even had the approval of experts. Unfortunately, CA stepped in and gobbled up the company.

Zone Alarm was already a strong contender, but with Tiny gone, it soon became the de-facto firewall on the machine of users who knew better than to let this computer flounder under the bloatware of Mcafee or Symantec.

Unfortunately, of late, Zone Alarm has been a bit of a hog on my machine. It's a Core2Duo, which means software such as Zone Alarm should cheerfully work in parallel with no fuss. AVG for instance scans my entire machine for an hour without my so much as bothering about it.

It is in this context that I came across Comodo Firewall, one that is recommended by more than a few techies. Being a born tinkerer, I was off in a jiffy to download the thing. And short story: it rocks.

Below's a screenshot. It looks more professional than even Zone Alarm Pro. There are more options, explained more clearly.