My recent activities!

Sunday, January 30, 2005   Google Search Language Setting
	Since I use Google search in my website, I had a small problem with its results. Google normally checks your IP address, regional settings and cookies then return results in your language if its possible. In my case I got different languages in different browsers, when you create search profile in Google control panel, it does not provide any feature to set the search result language. To solve this, when you search normally through Google website, look through the query string showing in your address bar, a parameter named hl holds language name of the result, if you change its value like this hl=fa you will receive search result in Persian, and en is for English. For your website you need to add this inside Google search form for English language: <input type="hidden" value="en" name="hl"> For other languages, at this time, Goggle supports these languages: Persian=fa, Arabic=ar, English=en, Indonesian=id, Romanian=ro, Bulgarian=bg, Estonian=es, Italian=it, Russian=ru, Catalan=ca, Finnish=fi, Japanese=ja, Serbian=sr, Chinese (Simplified)=zh-CH, French=fr, Korean=ko, Slovak=sk, Chinese (Traditional)=zh-TW, German=de, Latvian=lv, Slovenian=sl, Croatian=hr, Greek=el, Lithuanian=lt, Spanish=es, Czech=cs, Hebrew=iw, Norwegian=no, Swedish=sv, Danish=da, Hungarian=hu, Polish=pl, Turkish=tr, Icelandic=is, Portuguese (Brazil)=pt-BR, Portuguese (Portugal)=pt-PT Other Languages may be supported, if your language is not listed above you should check at Google website.
	posted by Mohammad Ali  # 8:15 AM

Tuesday, January 25, 2005   Picas2 Category Password Recovery....
	When I was trying Picasa2 features I found that it can protect specific categories by password, I set a password, after a while I forgot it!!!! I tried google to find password recovery for Picasa2, but there was nothing on the web, to be honest, I didn't search too much because I was almost sure that I can solve it ;-) Anyway, This might help you to recover your Picasa2 category password. 1. Open this folder on your computer: [localUsernameProfile]\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Picasa2\db 2. Remove (Or Rename) this file: catdata_info.pmp 3. Open Picasa2 4. Change the password of that category 5. Exit from Picasa2 After that you will find another catdata_info.pmp in that folder Have Fun!!
	posted by Mohammad Ali  # 11:58 AM

Hello and Picasa2 are good softwares!
	Today I found these two softwares very useful to manage my pictures and share them with my friends, I installed both of them, at first glance they look very strange but easy to understand, after you start working with them you will find that their dictionary is completely different from other common softwares, I think they will add some new words to our Computer/Internet vocabulary, these two softwares are other inventions of Google and I think they can be more common for home users. Picasa manages your pictures and Hello lets you communicate with other Hello users and share your pictures, when you chat with your friends try some smilies, they are funny I tried ':)' ':(' 'XO' 'LOL' , you may find more! Picasa and Hello work together, it means when you receive a picture from your friends on Hello you can have it in you Picasa as well, even you can have chatting archive. You can find them from here: Picasa: http://www.picasa.com/ Hello: http://www.hello.com/
	posted by Mohammad Ali  # 11:45 AM

Wednesday, January 12, 2005   GAG! The Graphical Boot Manager.
	I was looking for a simple and easy to user/install software to use it as multiboot manager on my laptop. I googled and found a very simple boot manager, it's just a free software which you can download it from http://gag.sourceforge.net/download.html , then you just need to make a floppy and ...... Okay.. When you download the zip file, read install.txt to find out how to deploy this small software. About the features I just copied following information: Allows boot of up to 9 different operating systems. It can boot operating systems installed in primary and extended partitions on any available hard disk. Can be installed from nearly all operating systems. GAG doesn't need its own partition. It installs itself in the first track of the hard disk, which is reserved for these kinds of programs. It can also be installed on a floppy disk, without using the hard disk. It has a timer to boot a default operating system (selectable by the user). The configuration menu can be protected with a password. The program works in graphic mode (needs a VGA or better graphic card), and has a lot of icons. Hides the primary partitions which allows the user to have installed more than one DOS and/or Windows in the same hard disk. Allows a password to be put on each operating system, denying access to non-authorized people. Allows the boot manager text to be translated to all languages. Can exchange disk drives, allowing to boot from the second, third... Hard disk operating systems such as MS-DOS. Has the SafeBoot system, that allows to boot your hard disk even if GAG is accidentally overwrited. Supports a great variety of keyboards (QWERTY, AZERTY, QWERTZ and DVORAK keyboards). Fully support for hard disks up to 4 terabytes (4096 gigabytes). Full version and free software (distributed under GPL license, with source code) ..... Enjoy it!
	posted by Mohammad Ali  # 11:53 AM

Sunday, January 09, 2005   Mozilla Firefox is amazing!
	I'm really excited since I ran Mozilla Firefox 1.0 on my PC for the first time, I found Internet Explorer features and Mozilla security in Firefox. Specially I found it very quick and tiny! One of the most important features that other well known softwares does not support in a good manner is Site Feed Handling. With Firefox you will be informed if the website you are visiting has Site Feed. Firefox sister is Thunderbird, which is a powerful mail client, I like it. It handles Site Feeds like e-mails so you can be more comfortable with this part of it. The most important part of an e-mail client is to be able to work with large files, I didn't check this software with lots of e-mails, if Mozilla programmers haven't check this before, your huge amount of e-mails might overwhelm the software's normal activity! My suggestion is to backup your e-mails occasionally and don't let your mail directory become too big. Two things are useful to be added when Mozilla programmers revise the software. Ability of dragging and dropping e-mails from mailbox list in Thunderbird and copy them to a real folder on the hard drive with .eml extension, like outlook. This will help user to be able to make a clean back up of his/her e-mail. Another thing, its good idea to add Tray Icon in software, so the user can hide Thunderbird's window and its button from Task bar and have the software running when user are doing other tasks. I suggest you to use this software and enjoy browsing the net, if you are not windows users or you use different language you can use it either. Check Mozilla website to find more information. http://www.mozilla.org/
	posted by Mohammad Ali  # 4:32 PM

Okay, my friend joined to the game!
	For people who knows farsi language they can use his blog to improve their knowledge about compiling FreeBSD Kernel. http://j2ee-saleh.blogspot.com/2005/01/kernel-freebsd-freebsd-source-mount.html I recoomend you to follow his blog...
	posted by Mohammad Ali  # 2:57 PM

Friday, January 07, 2005   How to use .htaccess files for APACHE HTTP Server
	If you have important information which you don't like to make them public, you can use .htaccess files to customize your directory. But you have to ask from your provider if they can provide you .htaccess file. I post this memo because lots of people use shared hosting services because of their cheap prices, so if you are going to put important information on those type of hosts, asking about this feature will help you for your further website developments. First of all you should have your passwd file to be uploaded on the server, or the hosting service provider should give you some tools to handle this file. After you create your passwd file you should put in a secure place that nobody can access it. of course you should be able to access it through FTP or webtools to handle users and passwords. If your provider doesn't have these tools you can create password file yourself. You need Apache Webserver to be installed on your computer you can find htpasswd.exe in [apache home]\bin directory. Using this command is so easy. If you run it without any parameter it will show you usage and parameters. For instance you can use this command as follows: c:\ApacheHome\bin> htpasswd -c users.pwd sarbanha Automatically using MD5 format. New password: *********** Re-type new password: *********** Adding password for user test C:\ApacheHome\bin> Now you have a file named users.pwd, later if you want to change the password you don't need to use -c parameter. Okay, You already have a simple password file. Two other files are needed, one to secure a directory on webserver and the other one is to force HTTP Authentication for directory visitors. Now make a directory on your host to store your password file, before uploading your password you should be sure about its security. Create a text file named .htaccess with the following content: Deny from all Then upload it to the directory which you created to put your password files. Try the directory it shouldn't allow you to view its content otherwise there are two possibilities, first you put your file in a wrong place or your provider does not let you use Limit tags like Deny or Allow in your .htaccess file, So you have to cunsult with your provider to provide you a secure directory and give you its full path so you can upload your password files there. Okay, when you make sure that you have a secure place for password file you need to upload it there, you have to know its correct full path name otherwise your directory visitors can not be successfully authenticated. Time to creare another .htaccess file which is our goal. Just to remind the subject we are doing this to secure a portion of a website, let say a sub directory of our website. So, create a new .htpasswd file with the following content: AuthType Basic AuthName "Password Required" #Chenge the the path to your password file in the next line AuthUserFile /hosts/mywebsite/www/passwords/users.pwd Require valid-user Note that AuthName tag is only a prompt, you can change it to whatever you want. Now if you upload this file into any directory, it needs HTTP Authentication and the visitor should enter a correct password to be able to visit that part of your site. Thats it, if you have done this procedure correctly it should work. Another small tip is, if your service provider does not let directory visitors to be able to read your password files or it has a special format or extention for password files you will need only one .htaccess file. I mean you don't need to creat a directory and secure it yourself. So you can omit the first .htaccess creation.
	posted by Mohammad Ali  # 7:57 PM

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