- Go to http://www.befunky.com
- Upload, grab a picture
- Play with different options
- Save, Print, Enjoy 🙂 Â (you can print the manipulated pictures on mugs, t-shirts, keychains, magnets etc..).
Here’s an example
ORIGINAL
AFTER PLAYING AROUND IN BEFUNKY
HOWTO
HOW TO : View HTML pages in Linux (command line)
If you are stuck in a terminal on a Linux workstation and need to view a html file.. you can use the following command
links NAME_OF_HTML_FILE
Links displays the HTML code in the page by default..If you want to just view the rendered HTML, press “\” and you can toggle between HTML and Text views.
P.S : You need to have links installed to use it :).. But most of the new distributions have it installed by default.
HOW TO : Delete duplicate lines in Linux/Unix
If you have a large text file and want to quickly delete any duplicate lines, you can use the following option of sort in *nix..
sort -u filename > newfilename
If you want to get even funkier :), like only checking duplicates on a particular column, feel free to check out this link http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/sort-invocation.html#sort-invocation.
HOW TO : Microsoft Windows – Routing to /dev/null
Ran into an interesting issue at work today and wanted to document it. We had a rouge process in one of our applicatoins and it was trying to send e-mails via one of our mail gateways at an alarming rate..There was no customer impact, since the mail server was rejecting all the connections. But the high number of connections were causing a strain on our firewalls..
If this was Linux, we would have done something simple like adding a route to point all the traffic destined to mail server to /dev/null by running “route add IP_ADDRESS_OF_MAIL_SERVER MASK /dev/null”
A search on Google showed that you can achieve similar results by doing the following “route ADD IP_ADDRESS_OF_MAIL_SERVER MASK 255.255.255.255 127.0.0.1“. 127.0.0.1 being the IP address of the loopback interface in this case. But when we ran the command, we got an error “incorrect gateway 127.0.0.1”.. So there is NO way to route traffic in Microsoft Windows to a null device..
Finaly, we figured out a round about way to achieve this.. Since the main aim was to reduce the load on the firewall, we identifid an un used IP in the same network as the application server and added a static route to point all traffic going to the mail server to this IP. We ran the following command “route ADD IP_ADDRESS_OF_MAIL_SERVER MASK 255.255.255.255 UN_USED_IP_ADDRESS”
For example, if you application server is in the range 192.168.1.0/24, the mail server is 192.168.2.20.. and an unused IP in the application server range is 192.168.1.10.. the command would look like this “route ADD 192.168.2.20 MASK 255.255.255.255 192.168.1.10“.. You will see a lot of SYN_SENT status in the network connections, since the application is trying to connect t othe mail server via an IP address that doesn’t exist..
Might not be the smartest way to achive this.. but it did the trick.
HOW TO : Configure AT&T 3G on Windows Vista without Communication Manager
This is a howto for the geek in you :-). You can easily configure a AT&T 3G Wireless card on your workstation using the Communication Manager software provided by AT&T.. But then I have always been against using bloated software for something you can configure on your own.
I recently got a 3G card at work and needed to install it on my laptop. I figured that the AT&TÂ provided software was just setting up a dial-up connection with specific settings. Guessing that some Linux geek might have already figured out what the settings where, I used the following search term in Google “Linux Ubuntu Configure AT&T 3G card”.. Lo and behold, the following link showed up http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2008/12/07/how-to-use-an-att-ericsson-f3507g-card-on-ubuntu-intrepid/.
Here are the steps, I follwed to configure the card in Microsoft Vista
- Insert card into the laptop and use the “search online” feature for installing the required drivers.
- Open “Network and Sharing Center”.
- Click on “Setup up a connection or network”.
- Choose “Connect to the Internet” option and click on Next.
- If you are already connected to the Internet, you will get a message stating the same, but choose the “Setup a new connection anyway”.
- If you already have existing dial-up or DSL connections, choose “No, create a new connection” and click on Next
- Choose “Dial-up”
- Choose the modem related to your 3G card.. For example, mine was “Sierra Wireless AirCard 875 HSDPA Modem”
- Enter the following information in the ISP Information
- Dial-up phone number : *99#
- User name : *
- Password : *
- Connection Name : Whatever you want to name it
- Click on Connect and enjoy the broadband speed without bloatware :-).
HOW TO : Recover deleted SSL certs from IIS
Here’s the situation.. you installed SSL cert on a website in IIS. You think you don’t need that site anymore and delete the site from IIS. The moment you delete it, you bite your tounge and remember that you are supposed to back up the SSL cert for future purposes.. But since the site has been deleted from IIS, you cannot export the key from the IIS manager!!.
Thx to Microsoft’s oversight (or potentially by design), you can still recover the certificate from the server.. Here’s how
- Open a MMC console by typing “mmc” in the Start –> Run prompt
- In the MMC console, click on File -> Add/Remove Snap-in
- In the “Add/Remove Snap-in” window, click on Add
- Choose the “certificate” snap-on and click on Add.
- Choose Computer Account in the certificate snap-on window and click on Next.
- Choose “Local Computer” (Note : If you want to recover from a remote computer, you can put in the UNC path. But you need to have admin rights on that machine) and click on Finish.
- Click on close and go back to the MMC console
- You will see all the certificates installed on the server
- Expand the “personal certificates” folder and you will see the SSL certificate from the website you deleted from IIS. Follow standard steps to export the certificate.
HOW TO : Sync files using FTP
If you ever run into a situation, where you need to sync two different directories and need to do that in a batch mode, try using FTPSync.
FTPSync is a freeware tool written by Kristof Gajsek. The tool has a bunch of options, like being able to operate in GUI and batch mode. Also good automated sync capabilities.
Only limitation is that it is windows based.
HOWTO : Use find and grep together
If you ever wanted to search for a particular text in certain types of files in Linux, you can use the following combo of find and grep
find / -name \*.xml -type f | xargs grep -i “text_to_search”
I used *.xml (note the \ before *) as the mask in the filename to look for all XML files.. then I piped this to grep using xargs.
A colleague pointed out that I can do the same by using
grep -r o-i “text_to_speech”
HOW TO : Clear saved username/passwords in Windows
I came to know this method, when I saw one of the IT techs use it to troubleshoot some Internet connectivity issues.
To clear any saved username/passwords (i.e. Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer etc) in Microsoft Windows, do the following
- Click Start –> Run, and type in
control keymgr.dll - Delete any entries you want to from the list
- Click on close
I tried this on Windows XP and Vista.
HOW TO : Configure JBoss to follow symbolic links
Jboss, in addition to being an application server also serves static content. We recently ran into an issue where some static content was not displayed when users hit the link. The JBoss server kept spewing 404 errors, stating that the content was not found. On some hair pulling research, we figured out that JBoss, like Apache, does not follow/allow content mapped to a symbolic link.
So for example in your web app, you added a sym link to another directory, where most of your content is stored, Jboss would not show the content, when you go to the link.
Here’s a quick guide to fix this.
- Go to the deploy folder of the context you want to configure. For example, if you used the default context, you go to $JBOSS_HOME/server/default/deploy/jboss-web.deployer
- Edit the context.xml file and add allowLinking=”true” in the Context (NOTE : This allows Jboss to publish symbolic links on all apps in your application server, if you want to restrict it to just one particular app, you have to edit the context.xml in your specific application folder). Upon adding the option, our context.xml file looked as such
org.jboss.web.tomcat.security.RunAsListener
More information on options for the context.xml can be found here
http://www.jboss.org/file-access/default/members/jbossweb/freezone/docs/2.1.0/config/context.html
For the record, Jboss configuration and accompanying documentation is what I call black magic :).. Too many options, too many ways to do the same thing.