Access “Computer Management” even if it is blocked…

Some times security policies specify on blocking few Control Panel items such as “Computer Management”. You will be presented with a message box which says The snap-in below, referenced in this document, has been restricted by policy. Contact your administrator for details.”

But we may have to access it for reasons such as viewing/enabling Indexing services. In such cases you can you can use the following method to open Computer Management.

Go to Start> Run; type cmd and hit Enter Key.

Enter the following DOS command at the prompt

at 10:35am /interactive “cmd.exe”

where 10:35am is the time at which you are scheduling a job to start. Best way is to enter a time which is 1 minute more than the system time. So the job starts once the system time becomes the time you have mentioned.

Another command window opens up at the specified time.

Enter “compmgmt.msc” without the quotes at the prompt on the new command window and hit enter. Voila….! Computer management opens up….!

Use this trick only in genuine situations like the one I mentioned and don’t get in to a mess for violating the policy.If you want more help on “at” DOS command enter “at /?” without the quotes at the DOS prompt and hit enter to see the DOS documentation for the command.

For full list of DOS commands, check this link.

 

Finding a route is easier than ever…!

Last month Google came up with its “Directions” service. Since now there are considerable number of websites which provide directions service, I just thought of sharing my findings on the same.

Now basically there are three major web resources which provide mapping services for free; Google, Windows Live, Yahoo . Of these Google started its directions service recently.

Prior to Google Windows Live Directions was my favorite. Now Google added few more features to the features list which were available with Windows Live. For example You can specify criteria such as Avoid Tolls, Avoid Highways, Directions by Car, Flight, Distance in KM etc…. which are helpful in real time.

Windows Life provides only two options i.e. Shortest time and Shortest distance.

What’s more..? with Google directions you can now find out a way to MG Road (Bangalore) form your place….! Which is not possible with Windows Live or Yahoo.  It seems Yahoo needs to add data related to India; even I could not get a route map for Delhi to Mumbai. Where was New York to Chicago returned a result….!

Bottom line is I will go with Google Maps rather than any other…!

If you want a site specific to Indian Cities then try try http://btis.in/. It provides bus routes, live traffic, directions and so on.

 

Here is how to retain HTML tags after XSLT

In continuation to my XSLT work, I had to ratin all the HTML tags which were part of the XML elements. For example consider following XML document

<root>

<element>

Text goes here with bullets <ul><li>Item 1<li><li>Item 2</li></ul>

</element>

</root>

Here, if we capture the element with the following line in XSLT, all the HTML tags will be stripped off.

<xsl:value-of select=”element”/>

That is result will not shown as a bullet list, rather it will be shown as plain text.

Instead if you use following code in XSLT, all your HTML tags will be retained.

<xsl:copy-of select=”element”/>

Reason being: “copy-of” Creates a copy of the current node (with child nodes and attributes) where as “value-of” Extracts the value of a selected node.

Here is the bottom line: If you want to extract the value use “value-of”, if you want the value present in the xml element as it is, use copy-of.

Here is a list of XSLT Elements for your quick reference.

 

Apply XSLT on XmlDocument directly

I was working on a piece of code in C# and wnated to apply XSLT on an object of XmlDocument. Following is the code to achieve the same 

Language: C#

.Net Framework Used: 2.0

using System;

using System.IO;

using System.Text;

using System.Xml;

using System.Xml.Xsl;

namespace XmlUtils {

public class XsltTransformer {

public string TransformXmlWithXslt(string fXmlPath, string fXsltFilePath){

XmlDocument objXmlDocument = new XmlDocument();

objXmlDocument.LoadXml(fXmlPath);

XslCompiledTransform objXslTransform = new XslCompiledTransform();

objXslTransform.Load(fXsltFilePath);

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

StringWriter swriter = new StringWriter(sb);

XmlTextWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter(swriter);

objXslTransform.Transform(objXmlDocument, null, writer);

return sb.ToString();

}

}

}

 

using System;

using System.IO;

using System.Text;

using System.Xml;

using System.Xml.Xsl;

 

namespace XmlUtils {

public class XsltTransformer {

 

public string TransformXmlWithXslt(string fXmlPath, string fXsltFilePath){

XmlDocument objXmlDocument = new XmlDocument();

 

objXmlDocument.LoadXml(fXmlPath);

XslCompiledTransform objXslTransform = new XslCompiledTransform();

objXslTransform.Load(fXsltFilePath);

 

 

 

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

StringWriter swriter = new StringWriter(sb);

XmlTextWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter(swriter);

objXslTransform.Transform(objXmlDocument, null, writer);

 

return sb.ToString();

}

}

}

 

Thumbnail Mystery Revealed…!

It was a forward email that caught my attention… probably you also might have received it and wondered how on earth this is done…! And you might have thought it would have been better if you also could do it.

What was so interesting about that mail then..? Well it had a JPEG image as attachment whose thumbnail and the actual image were different… strange heh…! And the mail says it is mystery…. break it if you can etc etc….

Sounds interesting…..? Well I will share the secret of that image with you and how to do one for yourself.

A JPEG image stores a lot of details about the image as image header. The header uses a format called EXIF to store the details. Thumbnail of the image is also a part of the EXIF. So if we can manually write this Exif information then we can play with the image as we want… pretty simple rite…!

Download Exifer a small utility and install it and just follow the following steps.

1) Navigare to the folder in which you have the Jpeg image. Select the image you want to modify. If the image has thumbnail data stored then, it will be displayed in the lower rigth panel.

2) Right click on the thumbnail image in the Exif Thumbnail panel and click on “Insert thumbnail”. Select the image you want the thumbnail to be. You are done.

Now fire it across and create your own mysteries….!

Download this sample Image and observe the thumbnail and original image.

 

RegEx Matcher on Codeplex – Opensource Tool

Software engineers often deal with Regular Expressions for string validation or pattern matching. Composing a regular expression that matches exactly what is required and does not match what is not required is quite a tricky job. I created a tool that can help in this endeavor.

Now you can easily verify whether a regualr expression matches the required pattern or not.

You can download it along with the source code from CodePlex .

Download .net Framework 2.0  Here.

 

Read Thinking in C# online….!

I was just browsing and found this book online…… One of the coolest books on C# fundas….. Enjoy…..

View this document on Scribd

 

Real-Time NSE Equity Data Leacher – Extended

Apologies for not posting the next version of Quote Leacher. But I have extended the expiry  date for the same to 31st March 2010. So you can use it for one more year without interruptions…..:-)

If time permits I will surely come up with next version. Some of you have given valuable comments for the improvement, which I will consider in while coming up with next version….

To download the extended version of Quote Leacher click Here.

To Download  .Net 2.0 Framework click Here.

All your feedbacks are welcome….;-)

 

Send Gmail through GLook

Ever fed-up with logging in to gmail account and sending mail…? Ever thought it would have been better if Gmail had an offline client thtough which I can send mails in a giffy…? Then here it is…. With GLook 1.0 Beta you can do exactly the same.

To send mails fill in Display name, username (excluding @gmail.com), password, Subject and message body. You can enter as many email-ids as you want in To, CC and Bcc separated with Semicolons (;). You can leave CC and Bcc as blank. You can attach as many files as you want but size of files and number of files that can be delivered depends on gmail server.

You can leave CC and Bcc as blank. You can attach as many files as you want but size of files and number of files that can be delivered depends on gmail server.

This application uses Gmail.com’s SMTP server for sending mails and full credit goes to gmail.com for the same.

The application is developed on .net Platform 2.0 and you will need to download and install .net Framework 2.0 from the following link

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0856eacb-4362-4b0d-8edd-aab15c5e04f5&DisplayLang=en
The application is being tested with Norton Antivirus and does not contain any malicious code.  Still I suggest that you scan it with your antivirus scanner before you proceed. I do not take any responsibility for any damage caused to data or system due to use of this application.

To Download Click Here (39KB). You need WinRar to extract the file.
Enjoy Gmailing…

 

Real-Time NSE Equity Data Leacher

Since a long time I wanted to make an appliction that can fetch real time Equity share prices from web and store it on the local computer for further analysis. Now I took some time to implement the same and am posting the first beta version.  I named the application as QuoteLeacher as it leaches share prices from a given source.

As of now it downloads the data from www.nseindia.com; but in the future I’m planning to add other sources such as Yahoo Finance.

Following are the salient features of the application:

• Connects to www.nseindia.com and fetches equity market details for the companies you specify
• You can add as many companies as you want
• Can refresh data automatically @ a specified interval either in Minutes or Seconds
• Can write the data fetched into CSV files. The CSV file will automatically be stored in a folder with the particular date and the file name of the CSV will be in the format “mm-dd-yy hhmmss”
• “Proxy settings” in the Settings dialog box has two options

  o If you connect to internet directly, Select Automatically detect settings

  o If you connect to internet through a proxy server, select Use Proxy server and provide the proxy settings. If you do not have a user name, password and domain, leave them blank.

The application is developed on .net Platform 2.0 and you will need to download and install .net Framework 2.0 from Microsoft

If you want to suggest anything or have found any bugs, please feel free to add a comment below.

<Link removed for original download>

To download the extended version SEE this post…!

Happy trading….