Terminating XMBC remotely on Ubuntu

Last few weeks I have been testing XMBC 9.11 Alpha/Beta on my Ubuntu Media system. Personally I think it is the best Media manager/player ever :).. But due to the fact it is still a beta release, the application sometimes does not respond or hangs and completely blocks the system.

The easies way to kill it and free your system without a reboot, is just open putty.exe and login remotely to your ubuntu system and issue the following command:

killall -9 xbmc.bin

This will terminate XBMC and will free your system. In my case I just restart XBMC :)

Merging items with same title in gantt view in Sharepoint

Today, got a challenge with Sharepoint where a user wanted to see multiple entries in a gannt view in Sharepoint. Below is the jquery magic you can use in a CEWP.

function docready() {

var row = [];
var ix=0;



$('tr.ms-ganttTaskRow th').each(
  function() {
    row[ix] = $(this).parent();
    ix++;
  }
);


ix=0;
for(ix=1; ix< row.length; ix++){
   var $prevrow = row[ix].prev();
   var prevtxt = $prevrow.find('th').text();
   var curtxt  = row[ix].find('th').text();
   if (prevtxt == curtxt) {
     var colix =0;
     row[ix].find('td').each(
       function() {
         var ht = $(this).html();
         if (ht.length > 0){
           $prevrow.find('td:eq('+colix+')').html(ht);
         }
         colix++;
       }
     );
     row[ix].remove();
   }
}

}

_spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames.push("docready");

Explanation of the code:

1. Trigger the docready on load
2. Store all the rows in an jquery array for easy processing
3. Walk through the rows array starting from second item and match the row header with previous row, if so, copy the contents of the columns to the row above and remove after processed.
   

There is only one catch, the gantt view needs to be sorted on the row header column.

Killing tasks/processes from the command line in Windows 7

Sometimes you quickly need to kill a task in Windows (mostly from the command line). With Windows 7 this can be done by using the taskkill command. First thing you need to do is start a command line with administrative priviledges:

Type in command in the start menu, when the Command Prompt shows up, right click and select Run as Administrator.

 

After a warning message (if UAC is turned on), the command line is shown. Before we kill something, we need to know what we would like to kill :). This can be done by issuing a tasklist command.

The tasklist command will show all the running tasks (similar to task manager). This list can be quite long depending on your system. You can quickly filter by issuing the /M switch, eg.

taskkill /M vm*

will show all tasks (and modules) starting with vm in the name

Now killing the task is the easy part. Just issue a taskkill /IM with the name of the task:

The /IM specifies that we are using the image name and the /F at the end is used to specify we would like to kill the process forcefully. You can also kill a task by PID (process id) by using the /PID instead of /IM. It also allows you to kill multiple tasks eg:

taskkill /PID 230 349 230 /F

will kill processes 230, 349 and 230 simultaneously. The taskkill has much more functionality, eg killing multiple task based on filters, for example:

taskkill /IM note* /FI "windowtitle eq untitle*"

 

will kill every task name starting with note (eg notepad) and where the title starts with untitle, with other word kill all instances of empty notepad.

Enjoy!

Cisco VPN 5.0.00.340 after Windows 7 Update

2 weeks ago I have updated my laptop to Windows 7 and today I wanted to use my VPN account. When trying to connect, I got an error 440 Driver Failure. Fixing this issue was quite easy, however you do need to have the Cisco VPN installation files.

Goto start, type "add remove"  and select Add or Remove programs

From the list of installed applications, scroll to the Cisco VPN item and press repair.

If your original installation files are still in the same folder, all will go well, otherwise you will get a popup screen asking for the installation files. Luckily I have my backup and it was easy to find them :)
It works like a charm now!

Domination of the web

Just read an article on techcrunch that Sean Parker thinks that the web will be dominated by Facebook/Twitter and not google:

To be clear, he thinks Google will stay huge and relevant, but it’s dominance will go down because collecting data is less valuable than connecting people, he said.

I have to disagree with this.

1. I still believe that Facebook and Twitter (and any other major social service) is currently over-hyped. In the future the hype will disappear and the dying process will start.
   As long as google delivers the best search experience, it will never die. Finding information on the net is an essential part of surfing the web.
   
   
2. It is also a matter of time until the success of social website will hurt itself. People are still not aware of the privacy issues involved with it; every day I see more and more FAIL pictures of facebook updates. When the users realize that everything they say/post/publish is stored forever with the possibility that it can be used against you, the frequency of use will become less.
   
   
3. If you want to spot the next big thing for the future, you need to look at the teenagers, as they are the future. I remember that these social sites are not very strongly presented in this age category. This is also correct when I look around me. I believe the current social sites are focused on the 25+ to 45 age range. This means either when the teenager become older they will start using the current social sites or they will laugh at it and invent/continue with their own technology. (see also point 6)
   
   
4. As this guy mentions, Connecting people is the future relevance of being dominant, I don't think so. Connecting people has always existed during the existence of the internet. In my youth it was something called IRC. Great tool to chat and meet people. In my time and area I think it was even more popular then the current social sites. It still exists and is used widely I guess, but as mentioned in point 1 the hypes goes over and it gets into coma.Other old examples are ICQ, MSN, Skype, etc.... All still exist and all do their work but they were never able to dominate the web. This brings us to point 5.
   
   
5. I think this guy doesnt understand the web. The web is much much more than a way of communication between people. Just of because of this social sites can not dominate. They are trends of the internet, like trends of color. Suppose the most trendy color currently is red (eg. 80% of cars/dresses/etc are red), I believe you cannot say that all important things in the future will be of the color red. It will be for a time, but then the next color will come...etc. But google is the freaking color spectrum itself... no matter what the trend is, it will always be on top of that.
   
   
6. The future is the mobile web and google/apple understand this. Teenagers mostly use mobile devices to communicate directly (mostly with SMS messages in europe). It is just a matter of time until the internet connectivity speeds and costs will be low enough for people to massively use it. Once this happens, the usage of internet will shift to the mobile world. Collecting data and presenting it (as this guy mentions what google does) will become even more bigger then now. People will want to have information anywhere at any time. I think Augmented reality is a good example of a future technology which will be very big. No matter how social a human is, at the end the world evolves around its self. Finding the information to help him/her a step further will always overrule the social aspect.

As a conclusion I would expect that the current social sites will still be big and can only stay big if they become part of the cloud, allowing future users to integrate their services with other services. This is also where google expels and will unless it doesnt become evil, will dominate the future :)

FileList Version 1.0 Release

I mentioned in my previous post, I was planning to develop a tool to easily generate a list of files in a folder for further processing. Well, last night I put something together and I am now releasing it to the public.

I am calling is FileList and it is a portable application. Unzip to a folder where you have read/write access. All settings are saved in the application folder.

Some features:

• Unicode support for multilingual use
• Drag and drop support, you can drop folders/files to the application and it will list the files of the folder
• Command line argument supported (for right click event in explorer)
• Settings to change font and customize output
  

Screenshots:

Original Location

Mirror



 


Some disclaimers (just to make things clear)
You are free to use this application for personal, business or any other use. The application is provided as is and use it at your own risk. The application is not evil and has no ET functionality (call home). I cannot be put responsible for any damages what so ever.By downloading and using this application you confirm this. I have tried to make the application as bug free as possible, however if you encounter any issues, do let me know. If you would like to distribute this application, please let me know. In no case can you ask any money for this application.

Files list

Today I have been in need of a tool which could easily generate a list of files in a folder which I can easily copy and paste for further editing. Normally I do this by issuing a dir command in the command prompt and redirecting output to a file, etc. This works fine if it is occasional, but if you need to do it on a regular basis (like me in this case), a tool might help.

Searching on the net I have found the "5 Ways to Print Folder and Directory Contents in Windows", which listed some apps, which I tried. None of the application met my criteria (easy to use, small, multilingual, drag and drop), so I have decided to create my own app which I will share soon.

If you have any suggestions on a file lister tool, please let me know.