Archive for July, 2006

Zipping prevents email attachment corruption

Saturday, July 29th, 2006

When you’re sending an email with an attachment, do you zip the attachment?
Have you ever sent a document to someone only to find out that the document the recieved, won’t open, or doesn’t look right?

Email itself is very prone to having it’s attachments corrupted. By zipping a document, not only do you shrink the size of the document to be sent, but you are also encasing it in a way that prevents tampering with the data itself.

By shrinking the size of the document you are lessing the chance of corruption by sheer ratio.

CPanel clean-up/remove spam-box with cron-job script

Monday, July 24th, 2006

Here is the shell command for removing all the spam-boxesfind /home/username/mail/ -name *spam* -exec rm '{}' \; -print
Note the orange text indicating where you would put your admin user name. This clears all the spam-boxes (spam files that Spam Box generates to hold all the spam as determined by SpamAssassin… if you have used CPanel a couple of times, you’ll know what all this means).
Ideally you would want to create a cron-job for this. In the CPanel menu area select the icon “Cron jobs” (Cron job is a daemon that runs all the time on your server. It can carry a host of tasks and each task has a date and time of execution. It just runs on your server and waits for those execution times. Once it reaches that time it executes the task associated with it.).
Once in the Cron jobs section choose the ’standard’ way of creating a cron job. Enter the shell script above with the correct changes for your server (*note, it’s a good idea to test-out the shell script without the -exec rm ‘{}’ \; -print in a controlled environment, to make sure it works), select when you would like the script to run… everyday, once-a-week, whatever meets your needs. Click ‘Save Crontab’ and you’re done.

Flash Decompilers, turn a swf to fla for Mac OS X

Saturday, July 15th, 2006
  1. Flash Gordon – The best by far.
  2. Flare – Free, just extracts the actionscript from the swf.
  3. SWF to FLA Converter – Not that great at extracting Actionscript, but good for extracting elements.

MS Vista “showcase site” has work-around for the IE ‘click to use flash’

Wednesday, July 12th, 2006

Microsoft decided to release a critical update several months back that modified Internet Explorer so users cannot directly interact with Microsoft ActiveX controls loaded by the APPLET, EMBED, or OBJECT elements. Users can interact with such controls after activating their user interfaces. Basically, IE blocked flash from running right-away. A dot-border box with the phrase “Click to activate and use this control” would appear if your mouse hovered-over the flash object. Activating the flash object would require a single click.

Lawsuits followed, Microsoft lost. Here’s the ironic part…

Windows Vista (new OS from Windows) is setting to be released soon, so there is a promotional site showcasing all new features that Vista will offer.
http://www.seewindowsvista.com/
The site listed above loads in the following javascript:
//work-around for IE "click to activate" object
var objects = document.getElementsByTagName("object");
for (var i = 0; i < objects.length; i++)
{
objects[i].outerHTML = objects[i].outerHTML;
}

The javascript listed above, is a work-around for “Click to activate and use this control” function initiated several months ago by Microsoft.

Kismet for Mac OS X (KisMAC)

Friday, July 7th, 2006

Kismet is a tool for wireless sniffing (just viewing what’s already passing through the air). And KisMAC is the OSX version. Best part about KisMAC is the Apple Airport Extreme card drivers for both Active and Passive support. Active, meaning you can see but can’t collect, and passive meaning you can see and collect.
So if your on OSX and you want to see the wireless in your area and collectively watch what’s be sent around, getting KisMAC is a good starting place.