Monday, July 29, 2013

Link to cancel your AWS account/services

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

CommStor Tech

Wishing the company CommStor Tech all the best! FB and YouTube page looks good.

Download Java Dependent Jars using Maven

To add Java Sources and Javadocs to the maven repository (basically so that you can explore via Eclipse or other IDEs), please refer to:
http://tedwise.com/2010/01/27/maven-micro-tip-get-sources-and-javadocs/

Interesting internal URLs in Chrome

If you are using Chrome and love the feature where typing in few characters at the address bar completes the URL, have a look at chrome://predictors/ (Type it in address bar).
Lists all the combinations that have been used and their frequency. Now you know why typing in f lists facebook.com and not ftv.com :)
One more interesting URL for chrome users: chrome://omnibox/
It lists out how your omnibox (address bar in other browsers) list out contents in the drop down as you type.
For e.g., just type india and press submit. It will list out options which it will show in the drop down when you actually type it out in omnibox. And it also shows category where it was fetched from (history/bookmarks/google search)

Images in Emails


Do you get emails with images, and outlook blocking the display of images in the preview/display page? Then this image would resonate well: 

Image files were always thought to be vulnerable for viruses as it’s quite easy to embed malicious code into jpg or other format of images. See this reference for some more details: http://www.sophos.com/en-us/press-office/press-releases/2002/06/va_perrun.aspx
Now this problem can be easily mitigated by good image readers/scanners which only understand the image format and display it if it adheres to that standard and it doesn’t execute anything.
So VIRUS is not the problem. If you carefully read the warning, it says to “protect privacy”… 
That’s interesting! What can a image from a 3rd party site do with privacy? Answer is simple and it’s not addressable by email clients.
Consider the image(s) to be downloaded is at customized link for your email id. Once this image is downloaded from the site, it just means that your email id is valid. Quick and Safe way for spammers to make sure your email id is valid and can be targeted for more spams! Since email client like outlook can’t easily determine if the image is used for email id verification or not, it simply blocks images asking you to validate to download images. This happens everytime the sender id isn’t from your trusted domain or safe list.
This concept is not only used by spammers but interesting apps have been designed using this. Checkout: http://www.spypig.com/


All this does is find out if your email has been read without asking for read receipt from clients!

Monday, February 4, 2013

Mac Os X - Force Reboot

If your mac icon isn't working on the system menu, then here are 2 quick ways to achieve the same.

  1. Ctrl-Cmd-Eject works - does a force reboot.
  2. Open a terminal and type in:
sudo reboot
(sudo is required if you are not an admin)

or you can use
sudo shutdown -r  which is mentioned to be more gracious and other options.

Cross-posted from