a4apphack

This is a quick post about getting an updated (or a specific) version of Python running on your Linux (Backtrack is used here).  A tool called ‘pythonbrew‘ is used for this purpose. It not only lets us download and install required version of python, but also allows us to choose which version needs to be active.

You can install python brew with any of the method mentioned below.

Easy method

This method requires you to have cURL up and running.

$ sudo easy_install pythonbrew

$ pythonbrew_install

Manual Installation

You need to follow this method if cannot get your cURL/ automatic fetch of required resources from various repositories,  to work. This might happen, if you are like me who is trying this installation from behind an enterprise proxy.

Once you installed ‘pythonbrew’ using method 1 or 2, you can follow the steps above (from Python installation part)  and switch to the new version.

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In this post, we talk about using various third party Chart APIs to display a trend graph on any SharePoint site (or a blog). These graphs delivers a quick summary of the vulnerabilities identified during various security assessments. This can be embedded in a Security SharePoint portal or a dashboard which will be accessed by clients/higher management.

For applications that are assessed at the end of every release cycle (version change), from this graph, one can visualize the trend of vulnerability detection. Here severity scale – Critical, High, Medium & Low (Info) is also displayed in the graph.

We will have a look at 2 charting APIs to achieve this – Google Charts and Highcharts

Using Google Charts

By using Google Charts API, we try to embed the following chart on our SharePoint site. Once the code is embedded, user can hover over the data points to get its value and other information.

There are various obvious reasons for choosing a chart API over a static image inserted into the site.

1. Its easy to update. Just need to change the values in the embed code.
2. Less cluttered. As you can see, values of the data points are not displayed in the chart. If anyone needs to know the value, he/she just has to hover over any column.
3. This can later be programmed to update itself from the data available in any SharePoint list.

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We can extract the images or any media content present in the word document by opening it as an archive and extracting the files with the help of un-archival tools like 7zip.

1. A word document containing images to be extracted.

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This post details about the steps to add Syntax Highlighting Feature to any SharePoint site where you have access to upload files to server. This can help people who embed code snippets in the SharePoint site and share it with their team.

Download and extract SyntaxHighlighter scripts to your PC (Check the download link at the bottom of the post). Now access the SharePoint site and create a folder structure as shown in the below screenshot (i.e. to create ‘scripts’, ‘src’ and ‘styles’ folders inside syntax folder which is present in ‘Shared Documents’). Now upload the syntax highlighter files to appropriate folders.

Upload Scripts Folder Structure

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Translate any page on the fly in a single click by using a simple bookmarklet. Entire page is translated without a need of reload and it happens in real time. The best part is that ‘Automatic Language Detection’ is enabled by default, so all you have to do is to click on Translate button in the ‘Google Translate’ bar displayed after opening the bookmarklet.

Click on the Translate and notice that the translation progress is displayed

Real Time Translation - In Progress

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Mozilla Firefox considerably a fast browser but the more we use it the more slower it will become, this includes a great reduction in the start time. The reason is fragmentation of profile databases. A free tool SpeedyFox is designed specially to resolve that problem.

Using Speedyfox is easy.

1. Download SpeedyFox
2. Run the program and click on ‘Speed Up My Firefox’ button, thats it!

TIP! : For Portable Firefox Users

1. Choose Custom from the Profile dropdown.
2. Browse to ‘PortableFirefox\Data\profiledir’ on your portable drive
3. Now Click on the ‘Speed Up My Firefox’ button

Download SpeedyFox :

Go To SpeedyFox Homepage

Easily map your frequntly accessed directories in your PC’s to a drive. You can choose the any drive letter from the set of ‘not used’ drives which is displayed in the tool.

Virtual Subst

This can be of very much use if mapping is done for folders with a long path, so that VirtualSubst can act like a bookmark.

TIP:

I usually take backup of my thumbdrive in a particular location, say D:\Usb. Now, when the thumbdrive is not connected, with VirtualSubst I can map the Usb back up folder to a drive letter which would have been assigned if thumbdrive was connected. So my backup folder acts as a virutal usb drive with the advantage of having active linking of most recent files list in my Word or any app. This also helps in creating desktop shortcuts of files present in the thumbdrive, which can be accessed if the thumbdrive is connected or not.

Features

• Tiny and Portable
• Option to enable virtual drives at startup
• Add/Delete any number of virtual drives quickly

Visual Subst Info
App Name	Visual Subst
License	free
Type	portable
App URL
More Info	link

This post talks about utilizing faviconize tab extension with other greasemonkey scripts and addons to effectively reduce the cluttering due to too many tabs in your firefox. Free yourselves from the tabs panic.

Note : You need to install Faviconize Tab before you proceed with following the below mentioned addons.

If you have faviconize tabs installed and know about it, then skip to Faviconize All Tabs Section

Faviconize Tabs

Faviconize Tab is a wonderful addon which can be helpful for the users who browse heavily with firefox. This addon provides an option to reduce the size of the tab to the favicon of the site reducing clutter.

Before Faviconize

After Faviconize

Download page for Faviconize Tab :

Faviconize All Tabs

I love using Faviconize Tabs and was thinking why is this not a default firefox feature and why in the world would I need to see ‘Site Name – Some Crap Text‘ (Like ‘Gmail – Inbox(3123) – xxx@gmail.com‘) in the tab title to know that its gmail’s tab, if I can simply understand that it is the tab for gmail from the favicon displayed in the tab.

So we can faviconize each tab and keep it simple. But the prob is, every time I have to faviconize any tab, I need to right click and select faviconize and I have to repeat for all the tabs… Is it so? Not really..

Go to Faviconize Preferences and in the Auto Faviconize, put ‘*’ as wildcard. Now every tab you open will be faviconized

Gmail FavIcon Alerts 3

But now you might ask me that the long title in the tab, Gmail – Inbox (No of Unread Messages), is very useful. Atleast you can get to know if you get a new mail, which is not possible with a faviconized tab. But there is an useful greasemonkey script which displays unread count in the tab and also the incoming chat indication in the tab…

Unread Messages

No Unread Message

Incoming Chat

Download Page :

GReader FavIcon Alerts

So what about Google Reader? Fortunately we have something for that too…

Unread Message Count

Unread Message greater than 1K

Download Page :

NOTE: You need GreaseMonkey installed to setup the above to scripts

Tree tabs

So you dont like the tabs on the top or do you think that you need to know from whether you opened this page (Parent page)? Then treetabs is there for you…  Its self explanatory, check the screenshot.

Download page :

Faviconize tabs +(Gmail +Greader) Favicon Alerts +Tree Tabs =  Ultimate Clutter Reduction in Firefox…

To classify the feeds subscribed at Google reader, based on certain rules, Google Reader Filter can be used. Its a simple GreaseMonkey script for Firefox, which means we don’t need to install any addons to activate it. Once this script is installed we can specify the conditions based on which the highlight/exclusion is applied.

Refresh Google Reader and click on filter settings button on the right top and enter your rules in plain text. For specifying advanced rules, few of the RegEx chars can be used.

* Here Trial|Shareware|Demo|Adware in the Excludes section implies that any one of the keyword match from the four specified will exclude (greys out) that post

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While trying to extract large files (say in GBs) with 7zip (Or any compression tools) and you don’t have enough space in your C drive (or whereever your OS is installed), you might probably notice something like this….

And what you do is clear the temp files or search for some less important applications which you can uninstall. But you would ultimately fail by not finding the required space. The solution is to change the working folder used by 7zip. By default the working folder will be the root drive where OS is installed.

Change the temp folder is easy, Open Options from Tools Menu and select Plugins tab, now click Options and then Folders tab. Now change the temp folder as shown below.

And commandline options for geeks, the command is

7z x _FiletoExtract_ w_WorkingDir_ o_OutputFolder_

x : Denotes extract
w : Working Folder/Temp Folder (e.g. wD:\tmp\)
o : Output Folder (e.g oD:\Files\)

For more options check here

Note: Changing tempdir is not the feature available only in 7Zip, but its mentioned here because 7Zip is the most popular archivial tools available in the market.