But this doesn't account for those rare but possible times when you are not on your machine, or don't have access to a browser set up to your tastes. No extensions available.

That's where "KeepVid" comes in. Just enter your URL and it automatically extracts any video(s) found on that website and allows you to download in both FLV and MP4 formats. The MP4 would play on your Nokia, iPhone, or Blackberry too. The FLV file is a flash viewer file, and easily played using common video players–if you don't have VLC, get it pronto.

Here's a straightforward screenshot:

I wanted to turn this off, but without turning off other auto complete functionality:

• I want to retain the autocomplete in forms (which can be managed from Tools -> Options -> Privacy)
• I also want to retain the autocomplete in the search box on the right (which can be turned off by right-clicking inside the box, and then checking off "Show Suggestions")

But the Location Bar is a somewhat more involved beast. After hunting in the innards of "about:config" I discovered that this was possible. Just follow these steps:

1. In the location bar, type about:config. The location bar is of course the place where you type URLs. Note that this is your internal Firefox configuration. Don't mess with it.
2. In the text box that appears at the top of this page, enter browser.urlbar.maxRichResults as the preference name. (Tip: copy it from here and paste it into that box.)
3. Set the value to 0 if you wish to disable the auto-complete altogether. I have it set to 2 so I get some suggestions but it doesn't crowd up the experience.

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.

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.

While searching for a converter between the captioned formats, Google did not turn up too much. After some searching I found a nifty little utility that allows you to convert between many formats of subtitles. It's Windows only, so if you are not on Windows you may have to use this within a virtual machine:

Download Subtitle Workshop

Usage is as simple as loading a subtitle file from the File menu, and then Save As and Bob's your uncle.

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.

Hilarious shtick

Get one now! Keep a credit card handy.

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

The recent upgrades of Cpanel have been a pain because they've broken mysqlhotcopy. Not kosher. Fortunately fixing this is pretty easy, by simply downgrading the DBD module of Perl, which mysqlhotcopy relies on.

Usually the error is something like this:

To solve this, simply downgrade the DBD to version 4.001. Create a script anywhere on your root folder as, say, dbd-downgrade.sh:

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#!/bin/sh
cd /usr/src
wget -O dbd.tar.gz  "http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/C/CA/CAPTTOFU/DBD-mysql-4.001.tar.gz"
gzip -cd dbd.tar.gz | tar xf -
rm -rf dbd.tar.gz
cd DBD-mysql-4.001
perl Makefile.PL
make
make install

Then of course chmod the file to executable (644) and run it:

Then try your mysqlhotcopy command again. It should work. The only thing to consider is that if your Cpanel is setup to upgrade automatically, it may rebuild DBD. You may need to downgrade the DBD again, until this thing is fixed!

If after this update, you see the error for RELOAD privileges, like this…

DBD::mysql::db do failed: Access denied; you need the RELOAD privilege for this operation at /usr/bin/mysqlhotcopy line 472.

…then simply login to mysql as "root" user through the root SSH terminal, and execute the following command:

mysql>  grant all privileges on *.* to root@localhost;
mysql>  flush privileges;

Done. That should do it. Let me know if it doesn't.

A more long term fix

MySQL bug list has a couple of suggested fixes. If you are comfortable with Perl, you can edit the code in /usr/bin/mysqlhotcopy and have it solved in a better way.