How to take a Screenshot on iPhone

iPhone allows taking a screenshot very easily. In order to take a screenshot on your iPhone follow these steps:

1) Press the top right button of your iPhone.

2) While holding the top right button, press the main iPhone button.

Here is exactly where you have to press:

You can find you screenshot by pressing the “Photos”. It is categorized under: “Camera Roll” album.

Create folders on iPhone OS 4

iPhone that has OS 4 allows creating folders. If you have several applications that share the same category, you can easily put them under the same folder. This reduces the need to do paging on the iphone, if you have large number of applications. Each folder can hold up to 12 applications. I believe that more than 12 applications will really miss the point of easy and fast access.

The steps need to be done in order to create a folder are:

1) Point with your finger on an application from which you would like to create a folder (hold your finger on the applications). After about a second all the applications (icons) will start rotating and have “x” on their top left. It should look like this:

2) Drag the application from which you would like to create a folder and drop it on another application that you wish to be on that same folder:

3) Release your finger or wait a second or 2 and a folder will be opened. A name for the folder will be automatically suggested according to the category of the application for which you wanted to create a folder:

4) Edit the name of the folder if you want, then press on the folder in order to close it and finally the press the iPhone main button in order to release it from “reordering mode”:

Open Task Manager on a Remote Desktop session within a Remote Desktop session

Opening the Task Manager on your local machine is done by: <ctrl> + <alt> + <delete>

Opening the Task Manager on a remote desktop session is done by: <ctrl> + <alt> + <end>

So far, so good. But what if you are opening a remote desktop session inside a remote desktop session?

The following combination should do the work: <ctrl> + <shift> + <escape>

iTunes software update – Network connection timeout

I wanted to update my new iPhone with a new version. Things seemed to be running fine. But when the download was finished I got this error:

"There was a problem downloading the iPhone software for the iPhone. The network connection timed out"

I tried running the update for several more times with no luck and exactly the same “Network connection timeout” error.

Finally, I got that the problem was due to the fact I was using Kaspersky Anti Virus. Pausing Kaspersky and running the update again solved the problem. I assume other anti viruses might cause the same problem.

Rename all files from one extension to another using DOS command line

I was looking for a fast way of massively renaming files from one extension to another. Apparently, DOS command line was pretty handy solving this issue.

For example, in order to rename all the files with extension “jpg” to “test” on the directory named “C:\My Pics” you should do:

ren "C:\My Pics\*.jpg" *.test

This is how it looks on the DOS command line:

Disable password complexity on Windows 2008 Server

Windows 2008 server enforces by default a pretty hard restrictive policy for defining user passwords. Actually, it is so hard, that after 15 minutes of trying to define a new password I simply gave up. Instead, I simply disabled the password complexity requirements.

Here is how you can easily disable password complexity on Windows 2008 Server:

First, you have to load a program named “gpedit”. Press on Windows “Start” button, and on the text box write: “gpedit.msc”. This is how it should look:

When “gpedit” is loaded, on the tree, go to: Computer Configuration –> Windows Settings –> Security Settings –> Account Policies –> Password Policy. This is how it looks:

On the right pane, you will see list of policies. Search for a policy named: “Password must meet complexity requirments”. It should be “Enabled”. In order to disable it, double click on the policy. A dialog will open:

Choose: “Disabled” value and press “OK”. That’s it. Now you will be able easily define/change passwords on Windows 2008 server.

EXIF Eraser – Free EXIF/IPTC/XMP erasing software

A long time ago, I was using Delphi to write all of my software. I think Delphi was and still is the best choice for rapidly developing Windows UI applications (though I have to admit, I have superficial familiarity with Visual Basic and C#, that I believe are also good candidates for Windows UI development). The biggest problem with Delphi, is that you have to write in Pascal, which is kind of an anachronistic language.

Anyway, a month ago, I decided It will be a nice thing, to have a look at Delphi again, and check what way it did along the years I left it. I downloaded the latest Delphi version from http://www.embarcadero.com/, which I believe is currently the company that maintains and develops the future of Delphi. Back then, Delphi was strongly identified with Borland. I was surprised to find, that things didn’t changed much along the years. Many features of modern IDEs were added, but the main idea was pretty much identical.

In order to refresh my Delphi development skills, I decided to write a small utility program, that wipes EXIF, IPTC and XMP meta data from image files. EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) data is a record of what camera settings were used to take a photograph. This data is recorded into the actual image file. Therefore each photograph has its own unique data. EXIF data stores information like camera model, exposure, aperture, ISO, what camera mode was used and whether or not a flash fired. IPTC and XMP are also additional meta data that are attached to image files.

I named the utility: Free EXIF Eraser. The nice thing is, that it deletes EXIF, IPTC and XMP meta data without doing any modifications to the original image. That means, the quality of the original image is kept untouched.

It was so fun and easy to get back to Delphi development, that I decided to put a bit more effort on my small utility: I dedicated for it a special domain and created a home page. If you need a small and lightweight utility, that will easily erase EXIF, IPTC and XMP meta data, you can check: http://www.exiferaser.com

Change Windows clock time synchronization interval

Windows has an option synchronizing it’s time against a time server. The time server returns a very accurate time. In order to synchronize your machine with a time server you need double click on the clock that appears on the task bar. On Windows 2003 server you should see something like this:

Then move to the tab named: “Internet Time”:

Make sure that the check box: “Automatically synchronize with an Internet time server” is checked.
Usually, we would like to synchronize several servers on our farm to have almost exactly the same time. For this, the default synchronization interval of Windows is not enough, since it takes only a few days to start seeing differences.
Changing the default synchronization interval can be done by changing the value of the key: “SpecialPollInterval” in the registry of the machine.
This is the complete path of the key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\TimeProviders\NtpClient\SpecialPollInterval

In order to change the synchronization interval to 1 hour, set the DWORD value to: e10 which is 3600 in hexadecimal. The value is in seconds, therefore 3600 gives 1 hour.
This is how it looks on regedit:

After updating the value in the registry, press the “Update Now” on the “Date and Time Properties” window, and make sure, that the “Next synchronization” shows you a next update time of an hour.

Firefox – Disable login confirmation dialog

There are times FireFox presents a confirmation dialog, telling you that you are about to log in to a site that does not requires authentication. The exact text of this dialog is:

You are about to log in to the site “somesite.com” the the username “someuser”, but the web site does not require authentication. This may be an attempt to trick you. Is “somesite.com” the site you want to visit.

And here is how the dialog looks like:

By showing this dialog FireFox is trying to protect you from cases in which someone would like to trick you to go to a different domain. For example, take a look at the following url:

http://www.mybank.com:password@example.com/badsite

The first part of the url is: “www.mybank.com:password”, is not a domain, but actually the username/password used to log to the domain: example.com. FireFox showing this dialog in order to get your attention and decide if you are sure you would like to proceed to the domain.

However, if this dialog is annoying you, you can easily remove it. First, write on FireFox url: “about:config”. This will take you to FireFox advanced configuration. This configuration contains a long list of keys and values. In order to cancel the configuration dialog you have to add a new value by right clicking on the list and selecting: new—> Integer from the popup menu:

On the popup that will show enter the following value: “network.http.phishy-userpass-length”

The press “OK” and enter the value: 255

That’s it. The confirmation dialog should never bother you again.

Set/Reset identity value on SQL Server 2005

There are times we would like to set identity column to a specific value on SQL Server. In the most common case, we would like to reset it to start from the value 1.

This is how it is done:

DBCC CHECKIDENT('some_table', RESEED, 0)

Note that the last parameter is the value for which the identity column is set. If we set it to: 0, the next value of the inserted row will be: 1.