Zero Hour Sleep

Facebook has become some sort of online gallery for almost everyone… You can find most of family, friends, coworkers pics on facebook already.

Sometimes it would be nice to be able to save those pics, to have it as a local copy in your picture library, of course without having to go through the whole album and browse it and save each pic.

To automatically download all album pics, there is a cool Firefox Extension that does this called “FacePAD” (Facebook Photo Album Downloader )

It can’t get any simpler… Here is the link : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8442

Enjoy but Don’t be such a stalker

Wether you like it or not, facebook is one of the most used and viewed applications on the web and it might be a good idea to promote your blog on Facebook among your friends and people you know who are likely to care about what you have to say to this blogsphere.

Of course you can post manually a link to the new entries you write or you can have it automatically done by using an application called “My Blogs”

All you have to do is add the application to your Facebook Account and then you can start adding your blogs to the application, when u post something new to any of your blogs, the application will write on your wall and it will show in the Feeds a link to your post you just created.

Here is a Sample :

Mireille posted a new blog entry Geeky Animation - When Computers fall in Love : Mic a Mac. - Comment - LikeUnlike - Show Feedback (2)

then your friends can like or un-like your posts and comment in Facebook giving you some type of feedback and making THEIR friends want to visit YOUR blog

The Cool thing also is that when the user clicks on the link, he goes to your blog in the browser , unlike the regular links u post in facebook where the user stays inside facebook but sees you page.

Here is the Link to the Facebook Application : http://apps.facebook.com/allmyblogs/

Happy and Popular Blogging

Installing the rollup update 5 on a machine running Microsoft Exchange 2007 SP1 might cause your Outlook Web Access, OWA, to fail with error Outlook Web Access did not initialize

I have already experienced this error at 2 of my customers on fresh installations and I am surprised I didn’t find this error documented at Microsoft (Maybe I didn’t look hard enough)

The problem is that, for some weird reason, the installation of the rollup update 5 is removing the Exchange server from the Exchange Domain Servers group !

So if you are facing this issue simply find that group, add your exchange server account to it and restart your server. That should do it!

Interesting subject isn’t? Ok, first let me tell you there is no way to decrypt MD5 hash values, because MD5 is not an encryption algorithm in the first place!

In fact, Md5 is a hash, and the difference between an encryption algorithm and a hash is that encryption is a 2 way process, while a hash is 1 way process. When you encrypt a value, you can decrypt it using some mathematical function function, while when you hash a value (say X), you compare it to a second value (say Y) by hashing “Y” as well, then you compare the 2 hashed values, if they’re equal then X and Y are equal.

MD5 is applied in various applications, mail servers for example use MD5 to store you password. When you first sign up, you password is hashed and stored in the database. Next time you login, the password that you enter will be hashed and the result will be compared to the hash value in the database, if they match then you are granted access. So, the “real” value of your password is never stored anywhere and then you can rest assured no one will have a peek at your password. And that’s why by the way such applications never offer recovering your password unless by sending you a new one.

Conclusion: a hash function is irreversible.

I do understand now if you’re thinking that I fooled you with the post title, but I really didn’t. There are various websites on the internet with a database containing dictionnary of words along with their corresponding MD5 hash values, and they will be a great help to you if you have a hashed string and want to know the original corresponding word to it.

http://md5.rednoize.com/
http://www.md5oogle.com/
http://www.gdataonline.com/seekhash.php
http://www.md5-db.com/

Each one of these websites has a certain number of words and their hash values, Rednoize for example has more than 50 million words, the other 3 websites have less than 10 millions each. So Rednoize should be your best choice.

Suppose you lost your e-mail password, and it happened that you have access to the backend database, so all you got is the hash of your password. Let’s assume it is “5d41402abc4b2a76b9719d911017c592″.

Now you can go to one of these websites, enter the hash value you have and get your password. Rednoize will give us “hello”. Try to login to your e-mail using “hello” as a password and it should work!

If you are familiar with Microsoft Exchange 2007 you already know about the AddReplicaToPFRecursive.ps1 script that can be found in the “X:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Scripts”, however this script has a bug it doesn’t look to support public folders which names contains spaces.

It is quite common to enclose parameters that contains spaces with “quotations” but that doesn’t work here.

If you simply try to use the following it will fail.
AddReplicatoPFRecursive.ps1 -TopPublicFolder “\PublicFolder with space” -ServerToAdd “servername”

The solution turned out to be to use single quotes inside the double quotes so it should be something like

AddReplicatoPFRecursive.ps1 -TopPublicFolder “’\PublicFolder with space’” -ServerToAdd “servername”

That’s really weird and not standard but it works !

Now You can put Fences for your Windows ! I bet Mr Bill Gates will be happy

I know it is a lame attempt from me at being funny in technical writings… but well, I had to say it

Fences is actually a Lab software from Stardock, and I personally find it quite interesting for ppl with messy desktops

Basically you install it (6.3 MB) , if you stick with the standard procedure, you will get 2 fences, those are areas where u can somehow collect you desktop icon in it,you get the chance to add more fences by drawing them simply, position them, change the display and all those details that background loving ppl like to do and another interesting feature is that if you double click your background, you hide your desktop mess, of course you can exclude some items from hide

So without further ado, I give you the official overview of Fences and the download link : I http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/
Fences is a one-of-a-kind program, allowing you to draw labeled shaded areas on your desktop, which become movable & resizable containers for your desktop icons. These groups can help bring organization and consistency to your computer’s desktop, solving the “constant mess” problem that has plagued the desktop since its inception.

Fences also helps you finally appreciate the wallpaper you have hiding behind all that clutter.
In addition to its organizing features, Fences offers a novel quick-hide feature (in-patenting-process). Double click your desktop, and all your icons will fade out. Double click again, and they’ll return

– psst, I will appreciate if you share cool background pics or print screen of your “newly ordered desktop”

Windows Vista and Windows 7 will loose they ability to hibernate after you run a disk clean up, this is due to the fact that you have selected “Hibernation File Cleaner” while performing the disk cleanup

To restore Hibernate functionality you have to run the following command
Powercfg /hibernate on

Alternatively you could decide to remove the “Hibernation File Cleanup” option from Disk cleanup, to do so simply use your favorite registry editing tool to delete the following key

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Hibernation File

Let us assume you are a dude/dudette trying to keep up with technology and you are developing solutions using visual studio 2008. That is quite what the average nice geek would do… no ?
Let us also assume that by of course your cleverness, patience and long nights surfing the web you managed to code your totally bug free solution…. Deployment Time soon *YeY*
Well not exactly *YeY* it is more like an aouch in my opinion.

Let me elaborate.

First you have  to get your head around the many application deployment options which Microsoft currently offers then In order to distribute your application you need to have the .Net Framework installed at the client machine. Those are the size of the “Installers” YOU will need to download and package with your application.

• .NET Framework 1.0: 19.7MB
• .NET Framework 1.1: 23.1MB
• .NET Framework 2.0: 22.4MB
• .NET Framework 3.0: 50.3MB ( x86 )
• .NET Framework 3.0: 90.1MB ( x64 )
• .NET Framework 3.5: 197.0MB
• .Net Framework 3.5 SP1: 231.5 MB
If you happen to live in an internet- challenged country like mine, you will know the cost and time consumption and stress levels required to download the framework only.
You can manage to download it yourself, you are a developer after all, and you can give the client the corresponding CD, but if you are building a vertical application that you’re distributing over the Internet you are probably more concerned about the size of your installation, and people are weary of downloading a 200 meg runtime in order to run an application that has a 2 meg footprint on its own
a good thought is that you would want to install the client version of the framework
The full package is a 231MB download. .NET , The .NET 3.5 SP1 `Client Profile` is now a 255.5MB download. Don’t ask !
We are not done yet, While installing at the client computer, you will need up to 500 MB Disk space for the framework alone without adding your own application files, try to explain that in your MSR Document!
Anger management 101 – Developers Edition says that you should google first and indeed I ran into this link called smallestdotnet, it is a single detects what framework you have, give you a link to download an installer that will download the actual installer that you will be needing for this specific computer (bootstraper), I tested on a vmware, I had 3.5, the upgrade size was 52 MB… it doesn’t work for mass distributing software tho but it was better for my pc.
However, hope in the horizon, Microsoft will release a super-small download for XP SP2 machines that have no version of the .NET Framework. It’s a 280k setup program that will download the “Client Profile” of the .NET Framework that’s only about 26megs and will run most Client .NET applications. Then, in the next few months, those “Client Profile” will receive the rest of the complete .NET Framework (another 30 or so megs) over Windows Update

Deep Zoom is an implementation of the Seadragon technology for use in Microsoft Silverlight applications. It allows users to pan around and zoom in a large, high resolution image or a large collection of images. It reduces the time required for initial load by downloading only the region being viewed and/or only at the resolution it is displayed at. Subsequent regions are downloaded as the user pans to (or zooms into them); animations are used to hide any jerkiness in the transition. [the Full Geeky Details]

Ohh.. well that thing is amazing ! You just simply can’t help falling in love with it from the very few first milliseconds, and it is quite rare for things to have that wow effect while having tons of new technologies emerging everyday.
This Definetly stands outs - Respects Microsoft.

Now, if your fingers are itching on the keyboard and you want to try it, click this link
it is basically a collection of memorabilia items from Hard Rock Cafe ! ( it Litteraly Rocks ! )

This can change the way we view pics on the web, advertisements (no more scrolling flashing stuff) and almost an infinite amount of info in a small web space. and you can unleash the artist in you and get quite artistic with it ! ( check this for some great photography Deep Zoom art )
And the good thing that is quite simple and easy to work with this technology, you can get start producing in almost no time ( i’ve seen some stuff done in just few clicks ) , the official Microsoft SilverLight has all the right links and easy downloads and videos for you

At Zero Hour Sleep, we will be experimenting with it, since the 2 other Editors are great photographers, so if you are stuck somewhere, feel free to ask, we hope that we can provide help and I hope soon we will be posting some step by step tutorials, and please do share links to any work you have done and  give us a deep zoom on your silver light experience

When installing Exchange 2007 SP1 in Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR) configuration. The setup of the passive node fails with the following error:

“This is not a passive node. A clustered mailbox server represented by the cluster resource group [clustername] was found on this node.”

I’ve found out that the reason for the problem is that upon finishing the Exchange Cluster installation on the active node the setup will ask you for a restart. Restarting the machine will cause the Windows cluster to failover to the passive node to be and thus causing the Exchange installation to fail on that node.

To solve this problem use the cluster manager to move back the cluster resources to the active node or simply restart the passive node to be and re-run the Exchange 2007 SP1 installation on failing node.

This solution was tested on Microsoft Windows 2008 and Microsoft Exchange 2007 SP1