September 10, 2009 at 7:22 pm (Useful information, Windows)
Tags: change, display, enterprise, eula, express, home, internal, language, microsoft, mode, non-working, pack, premium, rtm, search, seven, sp1, sp2, ultimate, update, Vista, Windows
So.. if you are here, you probably bought your laptop from a country different from the one you are originating from and want to change it to your local language.
Hmm.. So you google a bit and realize that you can’t do that unless you are using an Ultimate/Enterprise version of Vista. Well, there is an unofficial way to achieve your aim.
Note: This probably violates the EULA of Microsoft, so carry on at your own risk.
June 15, 2009 at 10:18 pm (Useful information, Windows)
Tags: device, dialog, eject, hardware, hotkey, programmatically, remove, safely, shortcut
Just right click anywhere in a folder select New->Shortcut.
As the path to the shortcut, write this:
%windir%\system32\RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll
Now, whenever you double-click that shortcut, it will open up the “Safely Remove Hardware” dialog.
You can actually do better by selecting “Properties” from the context menu of the shortcut, and assigning a hotkey for it. Now, you don’t need to search for the icon in the system tray. You just have to press a hotkey. Hope it increases your productivity a little bit. 
By the way, you can also execute the path above programmatically to get the “Safely Remove Hardware” dialog.
May 3, 2009 at 1:30 am (Others, Useful information)
Tags: google, problem, microsoft, crowdsourcing, human, computational, power, luis von ahn, games, utilization, captcha, automated, bots, tag images, genius, cmu, solve, computers, cannot, with, purpose
I just watched this great video of a Google Tech Talk by Luis von Ahn; who is a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Luis von Ahn developed reCAPTCHA, a new form of CAPTCHA that also helps digitize books. In reCAPTCHA, the images of words displayed to the user come directly from old books that are being digitized; they are words that optical character recognition could not identify and are sent to people throughout the Web to be identified. He also was awarded many fellowships and awards like the MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a., the "genius award").
He came up with really interesting thoughts on how to use humans to identify and tag images on Google’s image database, and more importantly, how to do it for free! When people play, they help label images on the Web with descriptive keywords. These keywords can be used to significantly improve the accuracy of image search. There are, of course, algorithms behind to prevent cheating and to prevent wrong tags.
This talk introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve. The idea is to make the people want to help this verification process by actually turning it into an enjoyable and fun game!
March 20, 2009 at 2:08 pm (Useful information, Windows)
Tags: hide, desktop icons, right click, context menu
Yep, there are some programs to do this; but actually you don’t need anything.
All you need to do is,right click on your desktop; and then select Arrange Icons By->Show Desktop Icons.
Give it a try!
March 7, 2009 at 5:33 pm (Useful information)
Tags: archive, bypass crc check, crc problems, cyclic redundancy check, end, error correction code crc, get non-faulty part, keep broken files, multi-part files, quick look, rar file, rar files crc problem, repair, unexpected, unrar, video, winrar
Here is the predicament that will probably seem familiar to you:
You are downloading <insert someone’s name here>’s <insert an activity name here> recordings, however since it is a HUGE file; it is compressed in multi-part form to make it suitable for file sharing sites.
You start downloading it by getting all parts; one by one. You start extracting it; you call your friends/family to watch it together only to see that the CRC check has failed on the last part! 
(or any other, but for purposes of demonstration, assume that it is some part close to the last one)
CRC(Cyclic Redundancy Check) is an Error Correction Code. If the CRC check fails on a file, it means that during the transmission of that particular file; some bits were corrupted causing the CRC check to fail.
.
You could, of course, try to repair it by opening the faulty part and selecting “Repair archive” from the Tools menu as shown on the bottom, and trying to extract it again.
But what if that also fails?
December 11, 2008 at 8:03 am (Useful information)
Tags: how to, notepad++, regex, regular expressions, use
Did you know that you can use regular expressions in Notepad++? Well, it sure comes in handy sometimes.
If you don’t know what a regular expression is; here is a quick intro for you:
A regular expression (regex for short) is a special text string for describing a search pattern.
We, as software developers, use it a LOT! Many software applications and programming languages support regular expressions. You can often accomplish with a single regular expression in one or a few lines of code what would otherwise take dozens or hundreds.
 | Muriel on Google Wave Invite Giveaw… |
 | jack m on Google Wave Invite Giveaw… |
 | Aseff on Google Wave Invite Giveaw… |
 | Steve B on Google Wave Invite Giveaw… |
 | Ozan Safi on Google Wave Invite Giveaw… |
