Code Corner

If you ever need to recover lost password to your RAR file (or, let's be honest, unrar a file you got from the Internet), look no further than cRARk - beautifully done RAR password recoverer. It's the only utility capable of using NVIDIA CUDA, which utilizes GPU for password permutations, and even without that it's extremally fast. And it's free!

You can download it at http://www.cRARk.net

Recently I upgraded an ASP.NET project from ancient 6.3 version of Infragistics to current (at the moment) 9.2. Suddenly UltraWebGrid control began to display an unpleasant effect - columns that used to have no caption now showed what appeared to be default captions:

Looking at grid's HTML markup I noticed that it set the caption to an empty string (showing code for one column):

<igtbl:UltraGridColumn HeaderText="">
   <Header Caption="">
   </Header>
</igtbl:UltraGridColumn>

Apparently it's a new behavior in Infragistics 9.x to substitute empty captions with default column names. The solution is to set caption to a single space which, while invisible, is considered a real text caption and is not substituted by anything:

<igtbl:UltraGridColumn>
   <Header Caption=" ">
   </Header>
</igtbl:UltraGridColumn>

The result:

I have an existing ASP.NET application that uses Microsoft Charting control for .NET. I created a CCharting class that hold several methods related to getting data for the chart, applying chart appearance etc. Main method of that class is

Public Sub DrawChart(ByVal i_omsChart As Chart, ByVal i_iChartWidth As Integer, ByVal i_iChartHeight As Integer)

As a 1st parameter it accepts actual chart control from the page, 2nd and 3rd are chart width and height. The method then gets the data for the chart, binds chart to that data, applies chart appearance (colors, series, axises) etc. So drawing a chart is a simple as instantiating the class and calling the method:

Dim oCharting As New CCharting
CCharting.DrawChart(xmsChart,500,300)

where xmsChart is a chart control from HTML markup of the page. The result is displayed on the page:

But now I needed to give access to that chart to external applications, that do not have access neither to chart data nor to Microsoft charting control, may run under different OS's, be Web apps or not. Read more...

My New Year resolution is to make more sense in my code and my blog posts.

If you'd like to generate a steadily increasing stream of income online in addition to your day time job, you can do it in 6 easy steps and once initial setup is done, everything is completely automatic, you won't have to do a thing. (If you already have a blog and don't need content posted to it automatically - jump directly to step 6).

1. Get a good web hosting with PHP. If you don't already have one, sign up with Blue Host, for less than $7/month they offer pretty much unlimited everything (disk space, traffic, databases, sub domains etc.)
2. Install WordPress MU. Once web hosting account is set up, download and install multi-blog version of WordPress. This will allow you to setup multiple blogs to have multiple sources of income.
3. Setup your first blog.  Add 5-10 categories related to your blog topic. Then download and install Unique Article Wizard WordPress plugin (scroll down to actual download), this is a very cool service, once setup, in about a day it automatically starts to deliver high quality posts to you blog, related to your blog topic.
4. Fill your blog with initial content. Your blog needs to have some content to be indexed by Google (this is important). One way to create several hundred initial posts it is to search Google news for related keywords, switch to RSS mode (hint: if you add "n=100" without quotes at the end of Google RSS feed URL,  you will get 100 records instead of default 20),  save RSS feed as XML file and import that XML file into your WordPress blog.
5. Promote your blog. To speed up indexing of your site by Google you can add it to social bookmarking sites (Digg, Delicious, Propeller, Yahoo Buzz are good start).  You can also add SEO-specific plugins to your blog (XML SiteMap and All-in-one SEO Pack are the best) and add your site to Google Webmaster Tools.
6. Sign up for TNX.NET text links. Once your site has at least 30 pages indexed by Google (you can test how many pages are indexed by doing Google search for "site:your.site.name") you can sign up for TNX.NET account. You will need an invitation code to open a new account, so you can use one of these 4:

   4b3552de
   4b3552ef
   4b355325
   4bdf463d

   After signing up you will get a small block of PHP code which you can add either to your blog's theme templates (for example header or footer) OR install a PHP widget plugin, paste the code there and drag the widget into a sidebar.

TNX displays unobtrusive text links on your pages, for the links you are credited TNX points, which you can cash via PayPal. Links are sold on every page, so the more pages the blog has - the bigger income.  And having Unique Article Wizard will add unique pages to your blog every day.  I already implemented this approach on 7 of my autoblogs you can see here:

Automotive News
Real Estate News
Building and Construction News
Ecommerce News
Business News
Travel News
Web Developement

You can repeat steps 3 thru 6 to add new blogs adding even more to your income.

If you have any question about any particular step or if you need a new invite code to TNX, please leave a a comment here.

TNX Corp allows you to place static ad links on pages of your site, so you can earn some profit. Unfortunately if you leave it to TNX system, automatic rate at which links are sold and paced on your site could be very slow. You can add links to your pages manually via TNX site interface, but it is only allowed if your page Google PageRank is above 0. Also manual placement can be really inconvenient and you cannot place more than 4 ad links.

Fortunately there is a solution. Read more...

This tree now stands on the roof of parking lot at 700 Plaza Drive in Secaucus.

Hopefully there will be a parking spot big enough for the sleigh.

In IE6/7 if you open 2 independent browsers (not using "New Window" or "New Tab") they do not share common session and you can login to, let's say, a web mail account under 2 different users at the same time.
This is not the case with IE8. Using 2 browser (and seeing 2 "iexplore.exe" processes in task manager) if you try to login as 2 users - the second will take over the first. I guess it's a new "feature" of the browser.
But IE8 gives you a way out, albeit not obvious one. In menu, you can select File -> New Session. This will open a new browser window with independent session.

Epix HD offers a variety of movies, both classics and new releases in beautiful 720p HD. You can watch movies online for free and unlike similar services - no trailers or clips - full length movies. And you don't need a T3 bandwidth either to get great picture and sound.

Read more...

Now, I've been using Windows 7 for a several months now and find it surprisingly good. But this Apple commercial for Windows 7 launch is too good to pass, just too funny