Archive for The Lab

Baoding trackball mouse

June 21, 2009 at 1:36 pm · Filed under The Lab ·Tagged , , , , , ,

I routinely clean my trackball mouse but this time something else came to mind also: Baoding balls.

A small excerpt from Wikipedia about Baoding Balls:

Baoding balls, also called Chinese exercise balls, Chinese meditation balls, and Chinese medicine balls, are thought to have been created in Baoding, China, during the Ming dynasty. Baoding balls are a tool for injury recovery or as an exercise tool to improve manual dexterity and strength. They consist of two or more balls which are rotated to orbit in the hand. The iron-ball system is the greatest of Baoding prefecture’s “three treasures.” Long throughout history, renowned within China and other countries, this is Baoding prefecture’s traditional product. This item of Buddhist martial arts was first produced in the Northern Song Dynasty.

So imagine the mouse initially like this:

How the mouse normally looks

Then ready to be cleaned:

How it looks without its ball

But suddenly, the Baoding Balls sitting on the shelf catch my attention:

The perfect match!

So you can imagine what I did next:

Top view

Spiritual Baoding trackball mouse

Oh btw, Baoding balls produce a nice sound when you juggle them in your hands:

But I doubt you can use this mouse at work since it will produce lots of melody! ;)

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How to steal facebook accounts?

August 10, 2008 at 9:51 pm · Filed under The Lab, Tips and Tricks

Catchy title huh?

Well, I am going to tell you how to do that, but first let me explain to you about what we call “phishing” yeah with a”ph” and not an “f” as fishing the fish! :P

Okay, as Wikipedia puts it:

“Phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.”

In simple terms, it is to trick user into going to a fake website that looks like a genuine website, and have him/her submit hir* username/password to that fake website.

As a live example, the website: http://www.faceilbook.com is a phishing website where you are tricked to believe that this site is facebook. Now look closely:

1. That website is not facebook, it is f a c e i L b o o k . c o m
Notice the “i” and “L” introduced in the name. These are tricky characters that are not easily seen in the URL.
2. Notice the domain name WHOIS information of this website:

http://whois.domaintools.com/faceilbook.com

It the domain name was registered by a Chinese person.

3. Notice the source code of that fake website, it will redirect you to the profile:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=81014163 after you give away your username/password.

It looks like “Carl Cachia” is somehow involved in this scam.

My advise to you:

1. Never to click any URL or address you are given, even by the trusted ones, without making sure that the website looks okay or not (as I explained above). Your trusted friend might be infected by a virus which sends this fake website automatically.

2. Always doubt when you click on a URL and you suddenly find yourself being asked to enter your username and password

3. In case of doubt, enter a wrong username/password and see if the website reacts normally.

That’s all for now, hope you got informed!

Take care,
Elias

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Want to run your mobile on your PC?

March 20, 2008 at 1:54 pm · Filed under The Lab

The other day I was playing God Of War on PS2 and PSP and later found out that Sony has released a mobile version of the game as a J2ME application.

Since it is not that practical to play using the phone keys, I searched for a practical and easy to use J2ME emulator and found this: http://mpowerplayer.com/ , give it a try and enjoy!

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“Hello World” in 330 programming languages

July 9, 2007 at 10:23 am · Filed under Programming

So you think you know many programming languages? :)

Take  a look at this website http://www.roesler-ac.de/wolfram/hello.htm which exhibits around 330 “Hello World” programs in different programming languages!

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“Threads” without Threads

June 30, 2007 at 6:22 pm · Filed under Programming

Have you ever wondered how threads work and how they achieve “parallel” execution?
I have written a small demonstration article and posted it on CodeProject: “Threads” without threads

Check it out and rate my article!

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The “CON” Folder

June 25, 2007 at 4:07 pm · Filed under Programming, Tips and Tricks

I just received a funny email today, reading:

TRY IT NOW , IT WILL NOT CREATE ” CON ” FOLDER.
YOU WON’T BELIEVE THIS !!!!!!!! An Indian discovered that nobody can create a FOLDER anywhere on the computer which can be named as “CON”. This is something pretty cool…and unbelievable… At Microsoft the whole Team, including Bill Gates, couldn’t answer why this happened!

TRY IT NOW , IT WILL NOT CREATE ” CON ” FOLDER.

What is funny about it is that people forward emails without research or verification.

As a programmer and as most programmers know, the “CON” is a special device name which stands for console. There are many other reserved devices names in the DOS/Windows OS, such as: AUX, NUL, LPT1, COM1, etc….

However, you would be able to create use such names if you pass a complete file as: “\\.\c:\con”. As an example, follow these steps:

  1. Start -> Run -> Cmd
  2. type: “notepad \\.\c:\con.”
  3. now go to “My Computer” -> “C:” and notice the file named “CON”
  4. Notice that you won’t be able to delete that file simply by selecting it and pressing DEL. If you ask why, it is because (again) Explorer is passing the name “CON” to the operating system’s DeleteFile() API and not its full name
  5. Now to delete this file, simply type “del \\.\c:\con.” in the command prompt

If you want another “CON” (console) trick, here’s one that allows you to create a text file without using notepad or any other text editing tools:

  1. Go to command prompt and type:
  2. copy con hello.txt
  3. start typing anything you want here, for everything you type here will go into the “hello.txt” file
  4. When you want to finish, simply press CTRL+Z (which will show as ^Z on the screen) and press ENTER

If you wonder what’s the CTRL+Z (aka ^Z) it simply marks the EOF (End Of file).

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Scan for Virus using several AntiVirus programs

June 21, 2007 at 4:54 pm · Filed under The Lab

Have you ever scanned a file using your favorite AntiVirus (AV) program and found nothing, but yet you were infected?
Is your AV not up to date and not detecting everything?
You want to know the different names of the same virus?

If you answer is Yes, then VirusTotal.com is what you’re looking for. You can either send your suspicious file as attachment via email to scan@virustotal.com with the “SCAN” as subject, or you can simply upload the file using their online interface.

Speaking of OnLine file submission, did you check out BitDefender’s Online scanner?

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Visual Studio and some useful keyboard shortcuts

June 6, 2007 at 4:24 pm · Filed under Programming, Tips and Tricks

Hello

I will present a short and handy list of useful keyboard shortcuts:

Key Meaning
*Make text selection then Shift+( This will surround the selected text with “(” and “)”
*Make text selection then Shift+{ Same as above but with { } surrounding
Ctrl+Ins/Shift+Ins To Copy / Paste (aka Ctrl+C/+V)
Ctrl+SPACE or Alt+RIGHT Toggle the autocompletion combobox
Ctrl+T To test a resource dialog
F12 When cursor is over an identifier, it goes to definition
Ctrl+- and Shift+Ctrl+- To navigate back and forth
Alt+F, J To go to Recently Opened Project

Hope you find them useful!

(*) You need Whole Tomatoes Visual Assist

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Panasonic BL-Cxx network cameras

April 17, 2007 at 9:22 am · Filed under Programming, The Lab

Working with Network Cameras

Recently I had the chance to explore the two network cameras from Panasonic: BL-C1 and BL-C10.

Both cameras have builtin webservers and can be plugged to the network and operate standalone. They can also be configured to get static IP address or make use of a DHCP server.

Once the camera is set up, the user can explore its features by accessing its IP address via web protocol, example: http://192.168.1.253:80/ .

From there on you can see the camera image stream (pseudo-stream), control brightness/image quality, add users so they can access the camera, control timers, sensors, etc…

BL-C1 is a simple model where it provides nothing more than image capturing facility and motion detection which works by comparing an image with a previous image and see if the difference is within the user defined threshold.

The BL-C10 is a bit more complex model allowing you to control the camera’s eye direction. You can move the view to all the four directions. There is no motion detection, though one can implement this feature from the software, there is human detection sensor (“by picking up the infrared light naturally emitted from people and animals”).

The cameras come with a software CD containing set of user manuals and a windows application to control the cameras. For developers, they can download C SDK written and provided by Panasonic. You may compile the code using Visual Studio or (did not try it) any other C compiler. The C code is highly portable and should also work on other operating systems such as Unix. In case you want to program the camera using a different programming language, then you may download the CGI programmer’s document and start forming your own HTTP requests in order to talk with the camera’s webserver.
Now using CGI, to control the camera’s direction, one for example can call this web address: http://camera_ip_address:80/nphControlCamera?Direction=HomePosition

Till next time,
lallous

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C++0x ?

April 17, 2007 at 9:16 am · Filed under Programming

Hello

I’ve been looking around and was surprised that there will be a new C++ standard and additions dubbed “C++0x”.

According to Bjarne Stroustrup, “the new standard will be almost 100% compatible with the current standard”.

Some of the features I like about this new addition are:
- atomic keyword (for uninterruptible code)
- thread local storage
- asynchronous calls through the “future” keyword
- implicit function calls (as if using properties in other languages)
- parallel execution

The good news for some, probably bad news for eager ones is that the C++ Standards Committee aims to introduce the new standard in 2009.

Reference:

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