Free online icon maker

By Ajith | Published: August 17, 2008

Free tools have always been my favorite. You can see that under the free tag. If you don’t have any software to create an icon or cannot create a free icon as in the previous post, you must try this free online icon creator.

Free online favicon editor

The site allows you to make 16x16px icons. You can also select an image make it to 16x16px and upload to the site and convert it to ico fromat. Since the canvas is highly magnified you can easily create shapes and write using the provided tools. After the work is finished the icon can be downloaded by clicking on the Download icon button on top.

Posted in Software | Tagged File, Free, Icon, Image | Leave a comment

Analytics account open to stream lined login

By Ajith | Published: August 15, 2008

Analytics LogoGoogle has opened streamlined login to analytics also. If you don’t know what this is read the second tip given in the previous post – Logging in to Blogger. If you login to one Google service (like GMail) and open another service like Blogger then you will automatically be logged in to Blogger also.

Till recently this was not allowed for Analytics (although the facility was available fro Adsense). So you would have to enter your password a second time to login to Analytics. From now on you can login to Analytics by logging in to any of the other Google services.

(Analytics is the free Web traffic and site data Analyzer from Google.)

Posted in Internet | Tagged Google, Permissions | Leave a comment

Create PDF files for free form any file by printing

By Ajith | Published: July 29, 2008

PrimoPDF logoPrimoPDF is a free software that installs itself as a printer in your system. It will accept the print requests and allows you to save them as a PDF file. So you can create a PDF file from virtually any file in your system. If you need to create a PDF file from an Office document you may use the export feature available in OpenOffice.org.

PrimoPDF also allows you to change the quality of the output files to four preset ones and one custom setting.

PrimoPDF quality selection

PrimoPDF is light on system resources and produces good quality PDF files. Although you might end up with file having its own path printed into it, PrimoPDF can be used as a basic tool to create PDF files. Download the Windows installer here

Posted in Software | Tagged Free, PDF, Review | 2 Comments

Windows virus infects Linux

By Ajith | Published: July 24, 2008

Windows has always been considered a vulnerable OS to viruses, but not Linux. I haven’t heared about any virus for Linux except for some university project somewhere. So do not expect me to discover a new virus for Linux. This is much more interesting, actually.

The virus I found, running, on Linux (Ubuntu to be specific) was actually a Windows virus. Some of you might already have figured out the culprit here. So how did the Windows virus manage to run on Linux which doesn’t even support any Windows specific file.

A windows virus running in Linux

A windows virus running in Linux (Ubuntu)

Wine is a software application which allows Unix like OSes to run programs written for Windows. So if you set the default assocaiation for exe files to Wine in Linux, you can just double click on exe files and run them just like you do in Windows. So if this is right then you can get infected with almost any Windows Virus in Linux.. although the consequences may not be much important.

[Screen Shot soon]

Any Virus using AutoPlay can infect by this method. So if the virus is running after you inserted a USB drive it will copy itself to any external storage device automatically. So virtually you get your USB drive infected with virus from a LINUX system. To prevent this from happeneing do not set the default association for exe file to Wine. Just leave it in the Open with list and chose it when you need to run an exe file.

The removal and detection could be understood from the screen shot provided. Click on the screen shot for a bigger one with more details.

Posted in Linux, Virus | Tagged Report, Tips, Virus | 3 Comments

Adsense temporarily down

By Ajith | Published: July 20, 2008

The Google Adsense web site is down temporarily. I went to the login page and found and Error page stating that Adsense is temporarily down. The error message was shown in 27 languages. Here is the link to the error page – http://www.google.com/errors/asfe/system_down.html

This is a screen shot of the error page in PNG format.

Adsense down shown in 27 different languages

Posted in Internet | Tagged Adsense, Error, Google | Leave a comment

Opera doesn’t accept text in Tiny MCE – WordPress

By Ajith | Published: July 20, 2008

Opera 9.5 failed to process TinyMCE correctly. so if you enterd something in the HTML editor and came back to Visual editor mode.. you won’t see any text. Check out thses screen shots.

Text is rendered correctly when in HTML editing mode.

Actually it is caused by wrong implementation of JavaScript in TinyMCE. More about it is explained at opera development blog. In the race to win Acid3 test Opera made the implementation of web standards strict. It was this that caused the error.

This text doesn’t show.

Text is hidden when it is previewed

As of now the problem has been solved in Opera 9.51 and this post is being written using Opera 9.51. Another known issue with TinyMCE was scrabling of text when pressing the ENTER key. This is also solved now.

Posted in Software | Tagged Error, Opera, Wordpress | Leave a comment

Free font previewing utitlity

By Ajith | Published: July 14, 2008

Pig font viewer is a free utility that allows you to preview your fonts. You can enter any text you want and click on the list of fonts shown from your fonts library. You can also select fonts saved in a directory by browsing to that directory through Pig Font Viewer.

If you want to have the fonts loaded in Pigfontviewer when you open it just install it by right clicking on it. It is available for Linux, Windows and MAC platforms. You can download Pig font viewer from their web site.

Posted in Software | Tagged Free, Review | 1 Comment

Change the default Drive Icons in Windows XP

By Ajith | Published: July 8, 2008

You can change the default drive icons available in My Computer under Windows XP through the registry. Although it is done via registry the task is pretty simple and straight forward. (You can also use the Autorun method – please read that article if you prefer to do so)

Open registry editor ( WIN+R » regedit )

Navigate to the key
HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerDriveIcons

Registry allows you to change the icons associated with each drive

Here you can see some sub keys with name as drive letters in you system.

Each one of them will have another sub key DefaultIcon . The Default string under DriveIcon keyDefault string value here contains the path to the icon used for that drive. Double Click on this and set the path of the icon you want to use.

Default icons for drives in XP xhanged to Vista ones.

This will change the default icon of that drive. Repeat it for other drives also. I don’t know any easier way, but if you know just post a comment and I will publish it here and link back to your blog.

Posted in Windows | Tagged Customize, Icon, Registry, Visual | 2 Comments

Adsense refferal program being withdrwan by Google

By Ajith | Published: July 1, 2008

After a major policy change for Adsense in January, Google is finally pulling off their Adsense referral program. In January Adsense had shocked many of its customers by withdrawing the Adsense referal program completely but had changed it after customer complaints.

But this time it is final. You will have to remove the Adsense referral code from your site before August first week. After that the referral will not be shown. Google has provided an alternative for this by pointing out Google Affiliate Network. Sign up for Google Affiliate network here.

Posted in Internet | Tagged Adsense, Google | Leave a comment

Virus infection by autoplay, how to prevent it

By Ajith | Published: June 30, 2008

One of the main reasons of rapid spreading of viruses is due to the presence of Autoplay in Windows. Autoplay feature was originally introduced to enhance user experience. An easy way for a virus to enters a PC is through exploiting this option. You can see Autoplay in action when a driver CD of you Motherboard or a Printer start its installation process as soon as you inserts it. Here let us look at how Autorun can be added to a drive (CD, USB, HSS etc..) and make it Windows open a program automatically when you puts it in or double clicks it.

Adding Autoplay to any drive is as easy as creating a text file and typing some commands into it. Have a look at the Autorun.inf file (this makes Windows run programs automatically from CDs) of the Microsoft Office 2007 CD.

Autorun file can add options to the default right click menu.

The Right Click menu has been modified according to the entries in the autorun.inf file. The file need to be saved with the name Autorun.inf  The bad part is that autoplay can be added to any drive. And a virus can create an autorun file in a USB drive inserted into an infected system. It then makes the autorun file such that not only does the autoplay option open an infected file but the Open and Explore commands in the right click menu will also do the same.

This is the Screen shot of an Autorun.inf file created by the virus Infostealer.Wowcraft.D virus

An autorun file created by a Virus

It will automatically install itself with out you ever knowing, if autoplay is enabled. You might have figured out how easy a virus can infect a Windows based system.

Prevention :

As they say prvention is better than cure. Here are some steps you can take to prevent infection of viruses due to Autoplay.

1. Disable autoplay

2. Always Open a CD or Pen Drive (USB stick) by using the pull down menu of your address bar. You can also type the drive letter followed by a “ : “  eg. D: in the address bar or Run box and press enter.

More about disabling autoplay will be posted in the next post.

Posted in Virus | Tagged Tips, Trick, Tutorial, Virus | 4 Comments