Archive for January 2006

Host Your Domain Email with Google on Gmail Technology

January 25, 2006 Add Comment

Host Your Domain Email with Google on Gmail Technology


Google is offering a service which Google will provide Gmail service to a domain. Call Gmail For Your Domain, it will use a company’s or organisation’s domain name instead of the Gmail.com domain, although the email service will be hosted on Google’s servers.

As with Gmail, users of the Gmail for your domain hosted solution will be able to get 2 Gigabytes (GB) of email storage space, plus the advanced features of normal Gmail services, such as searching, spam filtering and user interface that similar to normal Gmail view.

In addition, Google also provides administration and management tools that allow administrators of Gmail for you domain to easily manage user accounts, aliases as well as mailing lists. And all users on your domain will be allowed to get the Gmail-powered webmail account.

Currently, San Jose City College is using the Google’s Gmail for your domain hosted solution. All college’s students are getting the email addresses that ends in ‘sjcc.edu’ although the email service is actually hosted by the Google’s servers at ‘google.com’. However, Google allows custom logo and layout to be displayed on the service.

Gmail for your domain is still in beta. And interested organisations are invited to apply with Google by answering few questions. Gmail is needed beforehand though.

Microsoft is also offering a similar service to the Gmail for your domain as part of its Windows Live initiative. The Microsoft Windows Live Custom Domains offers to host a user’s domain and the email will be available via MSN Hotmail interface.

Administrator Account show in user option in Windows XP

January 25, 2006 Add Comment

Administrator Account show in user option in Windows XP


In every installation of Windows XP, there is a built-in and default administrator user account named Administrator, which is equivalent to super user or root in Unix system. However, if you have set up another user account in Windows XP, the Administrator account will be hidden, cloaked and invisible in User Accounts or Computer Management.

To see the Administrator account, you have to boot the Windows in Safe Mode. However, you can modify the Windows’s registry so that the Administrator account will be shown at Windows XP’s Welcome screen for you to select, in the Control Panel’s User Accounts and in the local user lists in Computer Management.

Launch Registry Editor.
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList in the Registry Editor.
Double-click the Administrator key in the right pane.
If the Administrator key doesn’t exist, right-click on the above tree in the pane, choose New, DWORD Value, name it Administrator and press .
Type 1 in the “Value data” box, and press .
Note: To launch User Accounts in Control Panel, you can go to Control Panel -> User Accounts, or click Start -> Run, and then type Control userpasswords and press Enter.

Once you unhide and reveal the Administrator account, you can change its picture or assign it a password or change the password. In addition, on the next boot to the Welcome screen, the Administrator account will be visible, along with all of the computer’s other user accounts.

Web 2.0 Problems

January 18, 2006 Add Comment

Web 2.0 Problems


What’s the problem? The solutions today never seem to do what I want, and I think there are some hard problems that we may be glossing over in all the hype.

Here’s an example of what I want to use Web 2.0 applications for:

I am often researching different topics either personally or as part of a group:
For example, I’m researching eLearning 2.0 for articles, presentations and my blog? Who is actually doing stuff with this? What are they finding? What works? What doesn’t?
I’m researching content management and Wiki software with a group of people in the office for an upcoming proposal.
I’m researching learning object models in concert with a client.
I’m researching vacation places with my wife.
What I would want Web 2.0 software to provide is the following:

I need to be able to search every document I have, every site/document I’ve viewed or marked in the past. I want these to exist forever so that I don’t have to worry about them. Right now I use desktop search to hit all the documents I’ve got locally. Soon we’ll have a network search to search across all the many project files on the network. And, I’ve been looking at a couple of Web 2.0 applications to find something that will keep all the stuff that I mark out in the world.
Of course, I shouldn’t have to think about which search to use in which case. And, I shouldn’t have to worry about where things are located.
I also need to be able to control access to the information. I have various groups I belong to. These groups may be very long lived or may come together for very short bursts. While we are operating, we want to be able to work collectively. We want the stuff we share to be automatically available after we are done working together (under my search solution). I need to be able to communicate with these groups at the appropriate speed without need for worrying about how to actually reach them. I shouldn’t have to think about email, IM, phone, SMS, etc. And, if I’ve done it via some kind of text, it should save that correspondence along with the group and project.
With the Web 2.0 Software that exists, I find that I have to fight the different (but seemingly related) models. Blogs are great for the simple creation of information – but there is no sense of groups. Wikis definitely can have groups, but they are not nearly as easy to get setup and going as Blogs. And, of course, all the linking, adding comments, file sharing stuff seems to suggest the use of Social Bookmarking. But this really doesn’t seem to handle the grouping aspects at all.

I think some of this is going to naturally fall away, especially as people like Yahoo start to pull in all these separate pieces.

But there are two problems that I see looming: one is Solo vs. Group; the other is hierarchy, tagging vs. search.

Part of the beauty of Blogs is the incredible ease - you can just create it and go. Literally, this blog took 10 minutes to setup. Blogs are primarily a linear activity (generally with one owner or a small group of owners). Aggregation then becomes the problem. How do you turn all of these separate unrelated linear streams of activity into a meaningful collection. Do you just search? Do you enforce structure? Sure there’s software (even myYahoo) that can aggregate the RSS feeds, right? But it doesn’t really pull them together in any meaningful way. And, people can go on their merry way saying what they want in their Blog without every really participating in the aggregated group. They may even be unaware of other blogs talking about the same topic. It becomes the responsibility of the reader to make sense of the many streams of information. And, there is inherently little structure. 

Wikis come at it from an explicit group standpoint. I think this group modeling is very important and some of the Wiki tools have it right where you can define groups and then define what they can do and what they see. Of course, there’s still mental overhead to set this up for each group. And, there’s even more overhead in thinking about how the group will work together. A wiki generally also forces you to face the question of how do you organize the information.

And both Wikis and Blogs today are really bad at supporting the collection of documents and links, tagging those.

The structure part is also really interesting. I love the idea of tagging. It frees me from having to think about the hierarchy. Certainly now that I have desktop search, I’m less concerned about where files get place and my inbox doesn’t get sorted into a whole bunch of project specific folders anymore. At the same time, I’ve not found tagging to be very helpful to me. It’s too random. I find that I’m missing things. I end up having to go back to search and retag.

Yeah, I know that Web 2.0 is all about having software in small chunks that you can compose together. But, it sure doesn’t feel easy right now having all these separate pieces running around.

Worse yet, what would I recommend a client adopt who wants to do the same kind of thing internally?

I’m really excited about where this is going, but I feel like we are actually at Web 2.0 pre-alpha release right now.

Or am I missing it?

Remove and Uninstall Windows Messenger

January 10, 2006 Add Comment

Remove and Uninstall Windows Messenger


Windows Messenger is an instant messaging program that built-in to Windows XP, and thus, comes shipped with each and every copy of Microsoft Windows XP operating system. There is also a Windows Messenger service built-in in Windows XP that helps produce pop up ads via IP addresses. The two programs are completely different and separate though they have almost the same name.

Windows Messenger will loaded whenever you boot up your Windows XP PC or launches Outlook Express, Outlook or Remote Assistance that have been tightly integrated with Windows Messenger. Luckily, the Windows Messenger chat program can be removed and uninstalled.

To Uninstall Windows Messenger from Windows XP (without Service Pack 1)

To check if you have Service Pack 1 installed, go to Start -> Control Panel -> System. On the General tab, under System, checks if the words “Service Pack 1″ are listed. If it’s there, your system has Microsoft Windows Service Pack 1.

1) Make sure Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Windows Messenger and other programs are not running, or else stop them. Note that the Windows Messenger must be unloaded from system tray too.
2) Click on Start -> Run.
3) Cut and paste the following command into the Run text line:

RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection %windir%\INF\msmsgs.inf,BLC.Remove

4) Click on OK.

To Uninstall Windows Messenger from Windows XP (with Service Pack 1)

To check if you have Service Pack 1 installed, go to Start, the right click on My Computer and click on Properties. On the General tab, under System, checks if the words “Service Pack 1″ are listed. If it’s there, your system has Microsoft Windows Service Pack 1.

1) Click on Start -> Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs.
2) Select Add/Remove Windows Components.
3) Uncheck Windows Messenger.
4) Click Next.
5) Click Finish.
6) Restart the computer.

After uninstall Windows Messenger, a long delay will occurs when opening Outlook Express if you have the Contacts pane enabled. To prevent the long delay when opening Outlook Express, use the following instructions:

1) Click Start -> Run.
2) Type REGEDIT into the command link and press Enter.
3) In REGEDIT, go to the following registry location by clicking on the Pluses (+) next to the said items:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Outlook Express

4) Right click in the right pane and select New, Dword value. Enter Hide Messenger as the name of the new registry key.
5) Double click (or right click and then click modify) this new (Hide Messenger) registry entry and set the value to 2.

Google Earth on Suse Linux with VMware

January 08, 2006 Add Comment

Google Earth on Suse Linux with VMware


Google Earth is an exciting and powerful application that delivers satellite imagery, maps and 3D terrains and buildings to your desktop. However, currently Google Earth is available only for Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Mac OS X (10.3.9 +) platform only, rendering other operating system users, especially Linux and Unix, in the cold.

In you’re using Linux, especially Suse Linux 10.0, Linux-Tip has a tutorial where you can run Google Earth on your system with the help of VMware virtualization software. VWware virtualization applications allows users to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single PC.

To use the tutorial,you need to have Suse Linux 10.0, VMware Workstation, VMware Player and Windows XP Installation CD. General steps are you use Suse Linux 10.00 as your host, and install VMware Workstation and VMware Player to create a virtual machine that will allow you to install Windows XP, thus enabling you to have both Suse Linux and Windows XP at the same hardware. Google Earth can then be installed on Windows XP.

For detailed instruction,Linux-Tips guide

Disable or Uninstall the Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications from Microsoft

January 02, 2006 Add Comment

Disable or Uninstall the Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications from Microsoft


Microsoft has released step-by-step removal instructions to disable or manually uninstall pilot or pre-release version of Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) Notifications (KB905474) which is versions that range from 1.5.0527.0 to 1.5.0532.2, although the instructions can also be used to uninstall the updated release and general release of the anti-piracy tool, but it will not be supported. Instead, Microsoft recommends to install general release of WGA Notifications (1.5.0540.0) to replace and uninstall the pre-release version during the pilot program.

If you uninstall or WGA Notifications component in your Windows computer which is part of the Windows Genuine Advantage program, Microsoft will offer the general release version of WGA Notifications at a later date (actually is immediately if you check for updates via Windows Update) through the Microsoft Automatic Update service or Windows / Microsoft Update service. So you must unselect the updates or reject the EULA when asked to install again. Microsoft instructions can be found here, or listed below.

Disable WGA Notifications

Log on to the computer by using an account that has administrative permissions.
Make sure that the WGA Notifications version that exists on the computer is a pilot version listed above. The version format for the pilot version is 1.5.0532.x. In this case, you can uninstall versions 527-532 only (Note: the steps should disable other version of WGA Notifications too). To find the WGA Notifications version, follow these steps:
Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
Double-click Add or uninstall Programs, locate and then click Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications, and then click Click here for support information.
In the Support Info dialog box, verify the version number, and then click Close.
Rename the following files by changing the extension to .old:
Rename %Windir%\system32\WgaLogon.dll to %Windir%\system32\WgaLogon.old
Rename %Windir%\system32\WgaTray.exe to %Windir%\system32\WgaTray.old

Restart the computer.
Uninstall WGA Notifications Manually

Log on to the computer by using an account that has administrative permissions.
Make sure that the WGA Notifications version that exists on the computer is a pilot version that range from 1.5.0527.0 to 1.5.0532.2 (Note: other versions should works too). To find the WGA Notifications version, follow these steps:
Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
Double-click Add or uninstall Programs, locate and then click Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications, and then click Click here for support information.
In the Support Info dialog box, verify the version number, and then click Close.
Rename the following files by changing the extension to .old:
Rename %Windir%\system32\WgaLogon.dll to %Windir%\system32\WgaLogon.old
Rename %Windir%\system32\WgaTray.exe to %Windir%\system32\WgaTray.old

Restart the computer.
Unregister LegitCheckControl.dll by using Regsvr32 with these steps:
Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.
At the command prompt, type the following, and then press ENTER:
Regsvr32 %Windir%\system32\LegitCheckControl.dll /u

Restart the computer.
Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.
At the command prompt, delete the following files by typing the Del command and follow by pressing ENTER after you type each command.
Del %Windir%\system32\wgalogon.dll
Del %Windir%\system32\WgaTray.exe
Del %Windir%\system32\LegitCheckControl.dll

At the command prompt, type regedit.
Locate and then right-click the following registry subkeys. Click Delete after you locate each subkey.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\ CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Notify\WgaLogon
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\ CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Notify\WgaLogon
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows \CurrentVersion\removeremove\WgaNotify
Restart the computer.

Remove Excel Workbook or Worksheet Lost Password for Free

January 01, 2006 Add Comment

Remove Excel Workbook or Worksheet Lost Password for Free


It’s possible to protect Microsoft Office Excel worksheets and workbooks from unauthorized changes with password. But, what if you forget or misplace the password? If you can’t remember or recover the password, the Excel data might become inaccessible.

At this situation, the freeware Excel Password Remover comes in handy. It’s a Microsoft Office Excel Add-In that removes and cracks the Excel workbooks and worksheets password protection, and thus enable you to regain access to the Excel data. It can remove passwords of any length, also passwords containing special characters.

Excel Password Remover adds two extra menu-items on the “Tools” drop-down menu (or its equivalent in non-English versions of Excel). These are:


  • Unprotect workbook
  • Unprotect sheet

Excel Password Removeer can be downloaded here. To install the add-in, just open it with the usual way you open an Excel file, ie. by double clicking on the file. Note that you must enable the macro for it to load properly. The add-in works in Microsoft Excel 5.0 and above (including Microsoft Office Excel 2000, XP and 2003).

Important Excel Password Remover is intended for recovering worksheet or workbook element protection password only. It should not be confused with file security password, which protects the whole Excel file from opening or editing. So if you’re unable to open an Excel file due to forgetten password, this add-in won’t be able to help you.
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