The other day me and my friend were struggling to fix this funny problem in windows vista where it always gets 169.x.x.x IP address. And because of this the PC is not able to connect to the internet. When we searched that net I am surprised to see the number of people facing this problem. But unfortunately, the solutions offered in those forums did not work for us. We tried many things like disabling the DHCP and assigning a static IP address, editing some settings in registery entry for the network connection, remvoing and adding the connection again etc.
At the end of an hour or so, when we found the fix for the problem we felt like slapping our face because the problem is such a stupid problem. Ok, the problem is that the mcafee is installed on the machine and the firewall is enabled thereby forming a proxy network which is not allowing us to directly connect to the internet. We simply disabled the firewall in mcafee and voila!, we are able to connect to the internet.
It may not be such a good idea to completely disable the firewall as the machine is directly exposed to the internet. There should be some solution to connect to the internet while the firewall is enabled. But, we will worry about it for some other day.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Standalone torrent downloader
For a long time I was wondering why can't there be a standalone torrent client. When I say a standalone client, I mean a device which can download torrents without the need of a PC. Recently, I got my answer from twitter feed of one of my friends. Here is the link to the product. It can download torrents to external hard disk, usb flash drive. It has an inbuilt SAMBA file server and FTP server. It has web server allowing connections over internet for administration. It seems to have decent security features allowing to created different users with different privileges. As I do not own this product, I cannot share personal experiences. But the link has reviews from users who own the product.
On a related note, when I was searching the web, I found that utorrent software has a standalone mode which is different from what I am expecting. It basically means that utorrent can run without installation. This gives it an advantage that it becomes very easy to move partially downloaded files from one PC to another. If you have a pendrive, have both the utorrent client and the download target on the pendrive and you are good to go. You can continue the download from any machine without needing to install. This is also a pretty good use case.
On a related note, when I was searching the web, I found that utorrent software has a standalone mode which is different from what I am expecting. It basically means that utorrent can run without installation. This gives it an advantage that it becomes very easy to move partially downloaded files from one PC to another. If you have a pendrive, have both the utorrent client and the download target on the pendrive and you are good to go. You can continue the download from any machine without needing to install. This is also a pretty good use case.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Mouse customizations not working after standby
I was using Logitech marble mouse(trackball mouse) for a quite some time. BTW, it is a very nice alternative for the regular mouse especially for people who get pain in the wrist. I closed down on this item mainly because of its cost effectiveness and good set of features. First of all its ergonomic. It fits well for both left-handed and right-handed people. In general, trackball mouses causes less strain on the muscles because you need not hold the mouse and move it. It stays in a place and we only have to move the ball on top with our fingers. I read on the internet that gripping the mouse contributes to most of the strain caused by mouse usage. Though its very less strain to do it once, we catch the mouse a few hundred times in a day and it causes RSI(Repetetive Stress Injury). I used to get pain in my wrist earlier because of my typing and mouse usage. Now, my pain reduced a lot after using this trackball and a softkey keyboard.
Coming back to the main topic of my post, recently, I started getting one strange problem with my mouse. I customized the mouse buttons to do page up and page down when I press the small buttons on the mouse. (By default they are assigned to previous and next for the browser). When I boot my machine from scratch I do not have any problem and my customizations work fine. There is a mouse icon in the system tray which can be used to customize the button assignments. The problem starts when I put the machine and standby mode and come out of it. The mouse icon in the system tray is missing and my customizations do not work any more. Everything goes to default. Rebooting the system is not an acceptable solution for me.
Finally, I found a solution to the problem where I need not reboot the machine. The trick is to get back the mouse icon in the system tray, i.e. get back the necessary daemon/service working. From the list of applications that run during the startup, I figured that LOGI_MWX.EXE is the one that corresponds to the mouse service. It is located in c:\windows\logi_mwx.exe. The solution is to run this application after coming out of standby mode. You will get back your customizations. You can create a shortcut to this application on the desktop for easy access.
Coming back to the main topic of my post, recently, I started getting one strange problem with my mouse. I customized the mouse buttons to do page up and page down when I press the small buttons on the mouse. (By default they are assigned to previous and next for the browser). When I boot my machine from scratch I do not have any problem and my customizations work fine. There is a mouse icon in the system tray which can be used to customize the button assignments. The problem starts when I put the machine and standby mode and come out of it. The mouse icon in the system tray is missing and my customizations do not work any more. Everything goes to default. Rebooting the system is not an acceptable solution for me.
Finally, I found a solution to the problem where I need not reboot the machine. The trick is to get back the mouse icon in the system tray, i.e. get back the necessary daemon/service working. From the list of applications that run during the startup, I figured that LOGI_MWX.EXE is the one that corresponds to the mouse service. It is located in c:\windows\logi_mwx.exe. The solution is to run this application after coming out of standby mode. You will get back your customizations. You can create a shortcut to this application on the desktop for easy access.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Twitting just by thinking
For the un-initiated folks in twitter(I am one of you until few weeks back), you should first ask "what is twitter ?". Twitter is a kind of social networking tool where you post small messages(max 140 chars). Its like micro blogging and is a new fad of the world. People follow you to know your latest updates. It is a nice way to keep your friends and family updated. The small messages that you post are called twits. My loginid on twitter is 'sunilvirus'. So, you know where to follow me.
Engadget is running this article about a new human computer interface(HCI) where the user can type anything just by thinking about the alpahbet. The computer system will analyze your brain patterns and does the job of typing for you. Ofcourse, this technology can be used in many applications, but it seems the inventors of this gadget are obsessed with twitter. They developed an application to send twitter messages. See the below video for this technology in action. Do not have high expections thinking that you can type at the speed of thought. This is still in very nacent stages and is slow. Damn slow actually!
update: A related article from washingtonpost about a mindcontrol gadget.
Engadget is running this article about a new human computer interface(HCI) where the user can type anything just by thinking about the alpahbet. The computer system will analyze your brain patterns and does the job of typing for you. Ofcourse, this technology can be used in many applications, but it seems the inventors of this gadget are obsessed with twitter. They developed an application to send twitter messages. See the below video for this technology in action. Do not have high expections thinking that you can type at the speed of thought. This is still in very nacent stages and is slow. Damn slow actually!
update: A related article from washingtonpost about a mindcontrol gadget.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Confiker is paging home...
In case you do not know about confiker(a.k.a downup/downadup), it is the most widespread virus till date. It propagates by exploiting a vulnerability in windows. The estimated number of computers that this virus has affected range from 9million to 15million (by different security teams). Microsoft announced $25,000 reward for any information that will lead to finding the creators of this virus but none was successful till now because the code is very obfuscated. See the wikipage for more information on this.
The interesting part is that the malicious action to be performed by this virus is not hardwired into it. First it just spreads and form a big botnet(a network of affected machines). It has the capability to download a payload(action to be performed) later and execute it. It has an interesting way of dowloading the payload. The 'D' variant of this virus generates a pool of 50000 domains everyday and randomly pick 500 of them and look for payload. Many experts believed that this virus will download the payload on 1st of April signifying the April Fools Day, but nothing happened on that day. It really made a fool out of the experts :)
A week after the April Fools Day, this virus seems to be actively downloading payload. It is downloading payload from the Waledac botnet, which is a botnet known for data-theft and spamming. Slashdot is running an article on this which points to this article. Here is one more article about this activity from Trendmicro and one more article from Zdnet.
Update: Cnet has an article where it mentions that this virus installs fake antivirus software which actually installs a trojan downloader. It fakes as if the system is effected with a virus and offers to clean it for $49.99. Funny, isn't it ?
The interesting part is that the malicious action to be performed by this virus is not hardwired into it. First it just spreads and form a big botnet(a network of affected machines). It has the capability to download a payload(action to be performed) later and execute it. It has an interesting way of dowloading the payload. The 'D' variant of this virus generates a pool of 50000 domains everyday and randomly pick 500 of them and look for payload. Many experts believed that this virus will download the payload on 1st of April signifying the April Fools Day, but nothing happened on that day. It really made a fool out of the experts :)
A week after the April Fools Day, this virus seems to be actively downloading payload. It is downloading payload from the Waledac botnet, which is a botnet known for data-theft and spamming. Slashdot is running an article on this which points to this article. Here is one more article about this activity from Trendmicro and one more article from Zdnet.
Update: Cnet has an article where it mentions that this virus installs fake antivirus software which actually installs a trojan downloader. It fakes as if the system is effected with a virus and offers to clean it for $49.99. Funny, isn't it ?
Saturday, April 4, 2009
iphone music over bluetooth headset
In my previous blog post when I wrote about bluetooth file transfer in iphone using iBluetooth, I mentioned that we cannot listen to the music or video in the bluetooth headset. I explored more about this topic and am happy to find that I am wrong. There are couple of tricks to workaround this limitation. It is possible to listen to the iphone music or video in the bluetooth headset. The trick here is to exploit the capability of iphone to transfer audio during calls over bluetooth. The beauty is that these tricks does not need any hardware or software changes. The following tricks assumes that you have already coupled your bluetooth headset to your iphone.
The first trick is simple but not practical to use. As the phone can export audio over bluetooth during active call, the trick is to play the music while you are active on the call. While you are on the call if you press home button, it will give access to the main screen when you can select ipod and play the music. But the problem is that the music will stop if the call ends. So, this is not practical as you do not want to burn out the phone minutes.
The second trick is to exploit voice mail. You do not need to be on active call to use this. Go the voicemail tab in the phone menu. If you have voice mail enabled and configured, you will see a button for audio source. Tap it and select your bluetooth headset as the source. Then open the ipod and start playing your music. You will hear it in your headset.
The third trick is the geeky way. It reminds me of the days we used to jailbreak by making a fake call. As an active call is needed to have voice over bluetooth, we make a fake call. If you dail *#301#, the iphone will call itself. You can answer the call and it will be active till you end it. As you are calling yourself, you do not pay for the minutes. But there is a catch. You cannot get calls while you are on this unless you have call waiting enabled. See this video which explains the procedure.
The first trick is simple but not practical to use. As the phone can export audio over bluetooth during active call, the trick is to play the music while you are active on the call. While you are on the call if you press home button, it will give access to the main screen when you can select ipod and play the music. But the problem is that the music will stop if the call ends. So, this is not practical as you do not want to burn out the phone minutes.
The second trick is to exploit voice mail. You do not need to be on active call to use this. Go the voicemail tab in the phone menu. If you have voice mail enabled and configured, you will see a button for audio source. Tap it and select your bluetooth headset as the source. Then open the ipod and start playing your music. You will hear it in your headset.
The third trick is the geeky way. It reminds me of the days we used to jailbreak by making a fake call. As an active call is needed to have voice over bluetooth, we make a fake call. If you dail *#301#, the iphone will call itself. You can answer the call and it will be active till you end it. As you are calling yourself, you do not pay for the minutes. But there is a catch. You cannot get calls while you are on this unless you have call waiting enabled. See this video which explains the procedure.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Full list of new features in iphone 3.0 firmware
When apple released iphone 3.0 firmware(unofficial youtube version), it claimed that it has about 100 new features and 1000 new APIs but listed them nowhere. I was hunting on the web to get a list of new features. This link is the best so far that I found. It has about 81 items. I hope that the list is accurate. I do not think that I understand all of them. You can see this video that demos some of the features.
I am an iphone 2G (first generation) user. I am a bit unhappy that some of the new features are not being offered for 2G phones citing hardware limitations. The following list of features in 3.0 firmware are not available for 2G phones. i.e the limitations for 2g phones in 3.0 firmware.
- No MMS (says radio is not capable)
- No A2DP. i.e stereo audio over bluetooth.
I am very unhappy about A2DP limitation for 2G phones. Atleast they should have supported normal audio, if not stereo audio, over bluetooth. I am sure normal audio is possible as we can use bluetooth headset to receive calls.
By the way, you might have heard that iphonedev team already did jailbreak the 3.0 beta firmware. These guys are amazing. I hope unlock is not far way.
I am an iphone 2G (first generation) user. I am a bit unhappy that some of the new features are not being offered for 2G phones citing hardware limitations. The following list of features in 3.0 firmware are not available for 2G phones. i.e the limitations for 2g phones in 3.0 firmware.
- No MMS (says radio is not capable)
- No A2DP. i.e stereo audio over bluetooth.
I am very unhappy about A2DP limitation for 2G phones. Atleast they should have supported normal audio, if not stereo audio, over bluetooth. I am sure normal audio is possible as we can use bluetooth headset to receive calls.
By the way, you might have heard that iphonedev team already did jailbreak the 3.0 beta firmware. These guys are amazing. I hope unlock is not far way.
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