Working In The Background

One of them stuff I’ve been busy with lately is reuniting with my first ever love, programming.  I have to choose not to discuss my platform maybe because I don’t want to lecture you with boredom.  But if the stars and moons in the galaxy pushed you here and you happen to be indulged with debugging curiousness, I’d rather share a few ones that I also got tangled into recently.  Read along and learn with me:

Introduction
To be a good programmer is difficult and noble. The hardest part of making real a collective vision of a software project is dealing with one’s coworkers and customers. Writing computer programs is important and takes great intelligence and skill. But it is really child’s play compared to everything else that a good programmer must do to make a software system that succeeds for both the customer and myriad colleagues for whom she is partially responsible. In this essay I attempt to summarize as concisely as possible those things that I wish someone had explained to me when I was twenty-one.

This is very subjective and, therefore, this essay is doomed to be personal and somewhat opinionated. I confine myself to problems that a programmer is very likely to have to face in her work. Many of these problems and their solutions are so general to the human condition that I will probably seem preachy. I hope in spite of this that this essay will be useful.

In this essay the term boss to refer to whomever gives you projects to do. I use the words business, company, and tribe, synonymously except that business connotes moneymaking, company connotes the modern workplace and tribe is generally the people you share loyalty with.  Click here to read further.

-RLR

Behavioral Targeting via Deep Packet Inspection

I’m sure you’ve heard about wire-tapping issues, online credit card abuse, identity theft or the least known spyware and virus attacks. Hearing it from the news or just finding it on a random news website doesn’t surprise me until this newsletter from one of my technology sources explained one specific way on how it really works. Well, it really drew me closer in terms of awareness, so I will just gladly share it with you peeps.

Picture this:
1. Your local post office
2. The City post office
3. You and your state-of-the-art, snail mail
4. A desperate advertising agency with an “underground contractor”

If you experienced it old school, you get what I’m pointing at from the first 3 items. You compose a letter, maybe a shared tale of your out-of-the-country experience to a special relative, sealed it neatly inside an envelope and write the recipient details at the back. As I grew up in the province, it has to be sent to our local post office wherein they carefully sort out all the incoming mails and brought to the corresponding City post offices. By then it can be sent to their destination by Mang Isko. All of these, paid enough to keep your precious letter “sealed”.

What is the last item for? Almost all present businesses would love to know people’s interests, not to mention if the same people would interest their own products and services. As advertising has become a lifestyle in all types of media, being desperate isn’t a subject.

But how would you feel if your City post office, together with a high-paying advertising agency, fully-authorize and pay an “underground contractor” to open all those neat and secured letters and expose your itineraries, interests and professional background (even your identity) just to be informed of what advertisement offer they can accurately send right to your doorstep?

Wicked.

Important Points in DPI:
1. Your snail mail is the modern e-mail or any transaction made online nowadays. Such transactions are validated and sent together with cookies, if any, made possible by your web browser and your desired web destination.

2. The local post office is your internet connection, most likely deployed with a local firewall to intercept basic security level and online threats.

3. The City post office is your ISP, which basically can possess a protocol-based intrusion and detection systems (IDS/IPS) which are far better than your local firewall. As illustrated above, they can only “sort” your letters based on sender and recipient details, represented by header packets of most online transactions.

4. Advertising agencies are the real-life character in our analogy.

5. The “underground contractor” is the next-generation (is that today?) online filtering system called the Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) which can easily conduct a protocol and content-based intrusion and detection system on any online transaction. That would mean going beyond your local post office’s job. They are hired to perform “operations” on your sent transactions up to the top layer of the OSI model. DPIs can easily drill inside your cookies, including your user information, to determine which content can be submitted as queries to advertising companies, even as you type in real-time. These contents can be then “forwarded” to the online advertising agencies and sent back to your web pages as advertisement banners, based on your browsing habits and online transactions.

Some Advantages of DPI:
1. Grainy details of virus and spyware intrusion and prevention.
2. Protection from copyright distribution. (Boo!)
3. Implementation of basic network access rules.
4. Ensure ISP traffic control and bandwidth allocation.
5. Better internet experience thru advertising.

As vast as the issue of internet security, it better to know these small details compared to being aware of nothing. I may not be a critical target of this subject, I still want to be a factor of consciousness to those that COULD or WIL be.

I do hope it opened the same level of awareness to you.  Feel free to drop your comments.

Power-up Your Context Menu

I’m sure you’re familiar with the following scene:

1. Select the desired file(s).
2. Right mouse click and select Copy/Cut or Press Ctrl+C/X.
3. Browse to destination drive/folder.
4. Right mouse click and select Paste or Press Ctrl+V.

You consider yourself a Power User? Think again.

Two of the handiest file management tools in Windows are the Copy To Folder and Move To Folder commands, which allow you to copy and move files or folders anywhere you want simply by selecting an item, a file, or a folder and then choosing the desired location from the resulting dialog box.

Context Menu on Windows Explorer

Unfortunately, these handy commands are hidden away on the Edit menu in Windows Explorer and My Computer. Further masking their existence is the fact that the Menu bar is hidden by default in both Windows Explorer and My Computer.

Fortunately, you can add the Copy To Folder and Move To Folder commands to the context menu with a couple of registry edits. Here is how you do it:

Editing the registry
To launch the Registry Editor, click the Start button, type Regedit in the Start Search box, and press [Enter]. When the Registry Editor appears, navigate to the following folder:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTAllFilesystemObjectsshellexContextMenuHandlers

When you get there, click on the ContextMenuHandlers folder to give it the focus. Then, pull down the Edit menu and select the New | Key command, as shown in Figure A:

Figure A

When the new value appears, paste the following code including the brackets:

{C2FBB630-2971-11D1-A18C-00C04FD75D13}

After you do so, just press [Enter] and the Copy To Folder command will be added to the context menu.

Now, pull down the Edit menu and select the New | Key command again. This time when the new value appears, paste the following code including the brackets:

{C2FBB631-2971-11D1-A18C-00C04FD75D13}

After you do so, just press [Enter] and the Move To Folder command will be added to the context menu. When you’re done, your ContextMenuHandlers folder will look like the one shown in Figure B. To complete the operation, close the Registry Editor.

Figure B

Using the commands
Using the Copy To Folder and Move To Folder commands is easy, and they work the same regardless of whether you’re copying/moving files or folders. All you have to do is right-click on the file or files you want to copy or move and then select one of the commands from the context menu, as shown in Figure C.

Figure C

Now you know how to add the Copy To Folder and Move To Folder commands to the context menu. Come back soon to know how you can further enhance your menu delays. 😉

Destress Your PC Resources

No matter how fast your processor and regardless of how much ram you carry, there comes a time when you realize your computer just doesn’t run as fast as it did when you bought it. Windows loads slower, programs take longer to launch, and, in general, your computer drags like it just came off a 2-night drinking binge. If this sounds like your situation, these 5 tips should help you get some extra speed from your PC.

1. Disk Cleanup Utility
You may not realize it, but just because you finish with a file doesn’t mean your computer does. In many cases, if your computer’s hard drive were a garage, you would have unused junk files piled 20 feet high and spilling out into the street.

Everyone should use the Windows “Disk Cleanup Utility” to delete old, unused, and temporary files that clog your hard drive.

Click Start, point at All Programs (or Programs), Accessories, System Tools, and click Disk Cleanup. Analyze your hard drive for files you can eliminate and it may shock you to see how much hard drive space (and speed) you can free up with a few clicks.

2. Defrag
Imagine a properly maintained hard drive as room the size of Wal-Mart filled with filing cabinets.

Now imagine ripping open every drawer of every filing cabinet, slinging the contents onto the floor and trying to find one document -that’s a fragmented hard drive.

Sometimes lack of speed simply results from your computer working too hard to find the files it needs. You can solve this problem by “defragging” your hard drive.

Click Start, point to All Programs (or Programs), Accessories, System Tools, and click Disk Defragmentor. Choose the disk you want to defragment and expect to let the program run for several hours.

3. Uninstall Unused Software
We all maintain software on our systems we rarely, if ever, use.  That software can steal system resources. Click Start, Control Panel, and “Add Remove Programs” to pull up a screen that allows you to remove old programs you don’t use anymore. Simply select and uninstall all programs you know for sure you don’t need or want.

4. Buy More RAM
Increasing your RAM, a computer’s memory, can dramatically increase speed when running certain operations or programs. RAM costs so little now that you should install the maximum amount of memory your system can handle.

5. Stop Them At Startup
This operation requires a bit more technical savvy than the other four, so proceed with caution. Many programs load into the system tray in the lower right of your computer’s desktop and consume system resources even if you never use them.

Click Start, Run, type in msconfig, and press Enter. Click the “Startup” tab to see a list of programs that automatically start with Windows. Clear the check box next to programs you know you don’t want to load at startup.

But don’t clear any checkbox unless you are 100% certain of a program’s purpose. Once you finish, click OK and it will prompt you to restart Windows.

(Extra Tip: Tweaking your Windows system startup is a separate story. See here if you want to know how to boot in five (5) seconds. Really.)

Lazy, Hands-free, Talkin’ Acrobat Reader

You need to read an all-text PDF document. You have an Acrobat Reader and a speaker. Strain your eyes no more and let your PC read it for you.

Here are the Acrobat Reader 6 (or higher) shortcuts:

Ctrl+Shift+B = to hear the whole document

Ctrl+Shift+V = to hear the current page