I got a Western Digital My Passport Essential 320 GB portable hard drive last week, when I plugged-in to computer it automatically installed WD Smartware for syncing stuff between drive and PC, all good till now.
WD Smartware appears as an icon in the Windows Status bar and there was no option to ‘exit’ and stop this application from running, after all I was not going to keep the portable drive connected to the laptop all the time, so why should I keep its software running indefinitely ?
Not only that, WD Smartware Service WDDMService.exe was eating up System Memory like anything, It was among the top 5 memory users, using even more than Firefox with 4 open tabs and When you terminate WDDMService from Task Manager, it just keeps on restarting itself! all this essentially wasting the precious resources of PC
and of-course, how WD could have forgot to make this crap smartware auto load with every restart!
anyway, for now, I have disabled the auto load of ’smartware’ from msconfig, I hope that now the next time, when I boot my laptop, I will not have to deal with this good for nothing software!
1st of all please be clear, this post is not for recording Calls through Skype or Gtalk, as although services like Skype are VoIP (voice over IP) but they use their own propriety protocols.
If you are using a standard VoIP solution (your own PBX e.g. asterisk or you have account from a SIP Service Provider e.g. SIPGate ) than you can easily record or in fact capture VoIP Calls using wireshark
Wireshark will not only capture but will also play you back the recorded audio
But remember to use G711 PCMA or PCMU for your communications as wireshark is not able to decode G729, GSM and other Voice Codecs
Read the rest of this entry
I always thought that I was a command line guru but recently a pretty silly question had me, I opened Windows DOS Prompt by typing cmd in run . It landed me in the base of my user folder i.e D:\document and settings\MyUserName>
Now I wanted to jump to drive C:\ to run a program
I kept trying with cd C:\ and C:\ or chdir C: but they were wrong. 
I wasted a good two minutes before realizing that the correct way to change drive in DOS prompt is to just enter the the Driver letter of the partition where you want to go
all I had to do was to type c: and that would take me to C drive
the example is also show below
D:\>
D:\>
D:\>c:
C:\>
Change dos drive
We all know that how insecure is FTP, it sends your password in simple plain text and anyone can read it just as easily you are reading this post. in spite of this most people still use FTP instead of SFTP and Telnet instead of SSH.
However due to these security concerns, now many vendors have started to exclude the FTP from their systems and all you have available is SFTP
Many are faced with a challenge when for the first time they have to connect to a SFTP server with Filezilla which is one of the most commonly used and free Windows FTP client)
connecting to SFTP via Filezilla is fairly straight forward
just in the address location window you have to add sftp with ftp address like sftp://theftpaddress , if you were first connecting to 192.168.33.4 than now you have to write in address bar sftp://192.168.33.4 and Filezilla will handle the rest
Here is a screen-shot of the same
Snoop is the Solaris equivalent to tcpdump,
Just like tcpdump you need to specify a network interface which you want to tap, otherwise it will default to the 1st interface
The command syntax for a basic capture would be
snoop –d ce2 –o /tmp/output.cap
here ce2 is the network interface whereas the output has been pushed in output.cap file in tmp directory , you can download the file using ftp/sftp and analyze using wireshark
There are many instances when for want to run snoop for longer intervals of time to capture some specific even in network traffic . in this case you can force snoop to run in background using nohup and &
nohup snoop -d ce2 -s 2000 -o /tmp/backgroud.cap &
DONOT close the snoop window do exit to close the terminal .. .otherwise the snoop will stop
If you are looking for a SIP client for blackberry than unfortunately you are out of luck, No SIP or VoIP Client for Blackberry exists to date
Although things like Google Talk work on a blackberry but those are not true ‘sip clients’ since they are tied to the network of respective software vendor, Having a SIP client on you blackberry would allow you to configure any voip provider of your own choice on your handset and you can even connect it with a local asterisk PBX and make free calls between places where you have these PBX placed, all this can save you a lot of money over long distance calls
Perhaps this is the reason that RIM has not yet allowed developers access to the necessary API and documentation for the development for a Blackberry SIP solution
Fan is there in the laptop to cool the system and manage heat generated by CPU, however sometimes the noise from laptop fan becomes so loud that it starts to annoy you.
If your hp laptop fan is making loud noise than please get your laptop cleaned, the dust which accumulates in the laptop fan hinders its operation, consequently leading to generation of fan noise, take your laptop to a repairman and get the inside cleaned away by a air blower. Dust is the most common reason which causes laptop fans to generate excessive noise.
Dust also hinders the air flow within the laptop and consequently the fan has to do more work to keep the temperature down and keeps on running for large periods of time.
Also make sure to check the BIOS settings, there is an option to always run the fan when laptop is on AC power, please ensure that this is disabled. Otherwise your fan will never stop while you are on AC power
There are many ways by which you can install fonts in Linux
If you are using Gnome than you can just copy the font files to the default font location which can be accessed by going to fonts:/// via Nautilus (the file browser for GNOME)
Another way to install linux fonts is to customize the Font Search Path using xset
do this from terminal
$ xset fp+ <path of font directory></path>
$ xset fp rehash
The 1st line add a directory (which should contain your required font) to the end font search path and the rehash does a reload of the font data
Remeber that the directory you specify in path of font search must be defined as a font directory, you can do this by issuing the mkfontdir command at the directory, this will generate the required fonts.dir file in designated font directory
You can also define the fontpath in X server config file
/etc/X11/XF86Config file (or XF86Config-4 ) in Section “Files” add the line
FontPath “”
remember all of the above methods require the restart for X server (ctrl+alt+backspace)
I was looking for a tool or software that would convert PowerPoint slides to video as I wanted to upload some power point presentations to youtube
As quick search on Google led me to authorSTREAM , there were a couple of blogs claiming that authorSTREAM allowed you to download the video version of presentation after uploading
I uploaded my power point presentation at authorSTREAM but was disappointed when I saw that they don’t allow any free PowerPoint to video conversion , authorSTREAM watermarks your video with their ugly logo if you want covert video for free.
After again looking a bit for a real free PowerPoint to video conversion tool I stumbled upon a nifty little application which was of course free and did the required video conversion job
E.M. Free PowerPoint Video Converter
http://www.effectmatrix.com/PowerPoint-Video-Converter/Free-PowerPoint-Video-Converter.htm
It not only supported all versions of PowerPoint including 2007 but also had lots of other options like AVI, WMV, MPG, BMP, MP3 output formats with differece quality, ability to add or remove sound in created video
autorun.inf a simple text file which tells Windows that what application or program it needs to start automatically
This is specially used in removable USB disks and CD/DVD disks, so that the removable disks are able to automatically load the desired program
autorun.inf viruses generates a autorun.inf files in every disk of the system and whenever you open the disk it tries to execute the virus , They usually spread from external USB thumb drives
How to delete autorun.inf
To delete autorun.inf you need to reboot your PC to Safe Mode Command Prompt Only
When the DOS prompt appears , change to the root of the Disk drive
e.g for C drive you should do
c:
next step is to un-hide the autorun.inf file
execute the command
ATTRIB -H -R -S AUTORUN.INF
Finally delete it by the command
DEL AUTORUN.INF
So now you have deleted autorun.inf from C drive, do the same for other disk partitions in you PC
If you want to delete autorun.inf from a removeable or USB drive than you don’t need to boot into the safe mode, you can execute the above commands directly from CMD prompt or it would be even better if you just format the USB and get it cleared from all menaces