DarenHan's Blog

Make your pdfs smaller :)

2008-08-17T04:41:00Z

Compress PDF file and reduce the actual size of PDF document with this completely free PDF Compressor.

Free PDF Compressor removes duplicate PDF objects, optionally takes advantage of new compression features of latest PDF specifications that for many classes of documents compresses 30 - 60% better than what is possible in PDF 1.5.

Free PDF Compressor allows you to shrink PDF file by using Flate or RunLength compression algorithm. With this freeware, you are able to set the compression level to generate PDF files of smallest size.

Another benefit of this freeware utility is that you can decompress or expand any PDF file to its original size for better conversion from PDF to other formats.

http://www.nicepdf.com/PDFCompressor.exe

Save 15% on a new TechNet Subscription

2008-08-02T17:34:00Z

Microsoft is providing a small measure of relief for those purchasing TechNet Subscription. When purchasing a new Microsoft TechNet Subscription, you will be ask for a Discount Code. When prompted, simply enter TMSAM02 and instantly save 15%! (Special Note: This Discount Code will work in any part of the world where Microsoft TechNet Subscriptions are available for purchase and is only valid for new Subscriptions.)

TestDisk Data Recovery works for most platforms

2008-07-19T03:17:00Z

TestDisk is OpenSource software and is licensed under the terms of the GNU Public License (GPL).

TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.

TestDisk can
Fix partition table, recover deleted partition
Recover FAT32 boot sector from its backup
Rebuild FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 boot sector
Fix FAT tables
Rebuild NTFS boot sector
Recover NTFS boot sector from its backup
Fix MFT using MFT mirror
Locate ext2/ext3 Backup SuperBlock
Undelete files from FAT filesystem
Copy files from deleted FAT, NTFS and ext2/ext3 partitions.

TestDisk has features for both novices and experts. For those who know little or nothing about data recovery techniques, TestDisk can be used to collect detailed information about a non-booting drive which can then be sent to a tech for further analysis. Those more familiar with such procedures should find TestDisk a handy tool in performing onsite recovery.

TestDisk can find lost partitions for all of these file systems:
BeFS ( BeOS )
BSD disklabel ( FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD )
CramFS, Compressed File System
DOS/Windows FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32
HFS, HFS+ and HFSX, Hierarchical File System
JFS, IBM's Journaled File System
Linux ext2 and ext3
Linux LUKS encrypted partition
Linux RAID md 0.9/1.0/1.1/1.2
RAID 1: mirroring
RAID 4: striped array with parity device
RAID 5: striped array with distributed parity information
RAID 6: striped array with distributed dual redundancy information
Linux Swap (versions 1 and 2)
LVM and LVM2, Linux Logical Volume Manager
Mac partition map
Novell Storage Services NSS
NTFS ( Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008 )
ReiserFS 3.5, 3.6 and 4
Sun Solaris i386 disklabel
Unix File System UFS and UFS2 (Sun/BSD/...)
XFS, SGI's Journaled File System

Url:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Use outlook to access your live hotmail account

2008-07-17T11:54:00Z

I am searching for hotmail pop3 access but found they have disabled it. :(

Only solution are to use OutLoook Connector with Outlook to browse your emails on hotmail.

Check out this url for more info:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA102218231033.aspx?pid=CH100622151033

OSCON 2008 registration is now open

2008-07-17T00:42:00Z

For those who are interested in open source development, there is a 5 day seminar at Portland, Oregon, USA. Join over 2,500 open source developers, hackers, experts, IT managers, and users at OSCON 2008. This year's convention will include 40 tutorials that go deep into open source technology and over 400 sessions focusing on Administration, Business, Databases, Emerging Topics, Java, Linux, Mobile, People, Perl, PHP, Programming, Python, Ruby, Security, Web Applications, and much more. This event is organised by Oreilly.

Here is the schedule.
http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/grid

Here is the official web site.
http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/content/home

Optimise Cursors in Stored Procedures

2008-07-09T12:26:00Z

I have been checking my emails lately after my NS reservist. Among one of my spam emails, I manage to find a useful url for optimising cursors within stored procedures in SQL Server.

Yes we all know that cursors is slow but this guy manage to optimise them.
Read more:

http://sqlblog.com/blogs/hugo_kornelis/archive/2007/11/21/curious-cursor-optimization-options.aspx

E-book readers on the Go.

2008-07-07T15:51:00Z

Amazon has come up with kindle , however, this set does not work in singapore becos the wireless book service is not available in singapore.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FI73MA/ref=sa_menu_kdp4?pf_rd_p=328655101&pf_rd_s=left-nav-1&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_i=507846&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0KXSN65GMW3H7FJJX4GC

Sony has come up with an e-reader for ebooks and this works in local context.
http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?storeId=10151&mpe_id=1908904905&identifier=S_BrandShowcase_Reader

so what is next? A lot of similar products but belongs to different company.

Foundations of Programming Ebook

2008-06-29T04:20:00Z

From the author of codebetter:

" I'm excited to finally release the official, and completely free, Foundations of Programming EBook. This essentially contains all 9 Foundation parts including a conclusion and some typical book fluff (table of content, acknowledgement and so on). A number of spelling errors were corrected, along with some small technical changes and clarifications - largely based on feedback, so thanks for everyone who provided it! Otherwise it's exactly the same as what's been posted here over the past several months. "

Download the free ebook
http://codebetter.com/files/folders/codebetter_downloads/entry179694.aspx

System.MissingFieldException - Field Not Found: ?.s_webServicesFactoryType

2008-06-25T17:11:00Z

We got a Production issue about this following error:
System.MissingFieldException - Field Not Found: ?.s_webServicesFactoryType

Googling on it does not yield any useful results so we turn to microsoft support staff.

They advise us to

Method 1:
1. Check the ASP.net IIS Tab whether there is same version of asp.net being used for the web app.
2. If the asp.net Tab is missing,

Check if only one version of ASP.NET is allowed in the web service extensions. If it is, the Tab will not appear since 2 versions are installed but only 1 is allow in the web server extensions.

Other links to solve the missing tab:
http://weblogs.asp.net/plip/archive/2006/05/25/Where_2700_s-the-ASP.NET-Tab-in-IIS_3F00_-It_2700_s-Missing_2100_-I_2700_ve-installed-.NET-2.0-_2E002E002E00_.aspx

http://dotnet.org.za/ahmeds/archive/2005/04/26/19028.aspx

Method 2: do a NGEN
1. Open a command window,
2. Navigate to the .Net Framework 1.1 directory, which should be %windows%\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v1.1.4322\
3. Run this command (without the quotation marks) “ ngen System.runtime.remoting.dll “
4. After this operation, you can check the GAC assemblies for the result, there should be native version of remoting.dll. To do this you can navigate to %windows%\assembly\ path, and can run this command (without the quotation marks) “ dir /a /s /b System.runtime.remoting.*.* ”

ASP.net viewstate problems and thoughts

2008-06-25T16:48:00Z

I did a benchmark of my project aspx pages that are written in asp.net 1.1 and observe some improvements in viewstate and overall page size.

Before Change of Code,
ReportMapping_Selection.aspx has page size of 39 kb
has viewstate size of 16 kb

After Change of Code,
ReportMapping_Selection.aspx has page size of 33 kb
has viewstate size of 12 kb

Before Change of Code,
AddReportMapping_Selection.aspx has page size of 53 kb
has viewstate size of 43 kb

After Change of Code,
AddReportMapping_Selection.aspx has page size of 17 kb
has viewstate size of 4 kb

I did use a free tool though called ViewStateHelper.

Forumula - > Page Size = ViewState + HTML markup

Viewstate can be reduced by using html controls to an extent but it is not a full-proof solution.

Scenario 1:
For example, datagrid in asp.net don't have an equivalent client-side control. Imagine a datagrid with 1,600 rows of data on 1 single page. Yes, I can probably improve the viewstate by disabling the viewstate row by row but however due to the large amount of data, HTML markup remains big.

According to the above forumla, if I have a small viewstate but big HTML markup size, I still stuck with a big page like 4 megs? That is where pagination comes in. Lol.

Scenario 2:
If I use viewstate to store my datatable on a page, and with each click of a button, it refresh the datatable, it will result in viewstate being different at different points of the day. That is where Caching comes in.

By looking at Scenario 1 and 2, you will notice both are common Viewstate problems but have varying solutions. So there is no hard and fast way to reduce a page size but rather you use the tool you are blessed with to solve a problem at hand depending on Scenarios.

AOL music radio online

2008-06-24T23:08:00Z

Since when did AOL started radio business? I was skeptical but did a trial on the online player which stream 150+ CBS Radio stations from around the US, including 30+ news, sports and talk stations.

Much better than our local radio stations I will say.

http://player.play.it/player/aolPlayer.html?ur=1&us=1&id=757

Free Firefox 3 Revealed SitePoint eBook

2008-06-23T14:39:00Z

http://www.sitepoint.com/popup/popup.php?zone=2&popupid=114

as above title.

Mobile Applications on your mobile phone

2008-06-22T14:20:00Z

I saw this being advertised on Channelnewsasia TV. Looks like a J2ME client though..sighed. It can connect to your facebook and friendster sites, push email, mobile IM, rss feeds etc.

http://monet.morange.com/

free app giveaway of the day :)

2008-06-01T10:23:00Z

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/

Root Cause behind the dot.net 1.1 serialization error

2008-05-27T15:11:00Z

I got this error prety long ago till now we managed to find the root cause why this error happens though i cannot find any article on google that clearly explains why.

I got the answer from Microsoft Support staff.

We have one windows 2003 Service Pack 2 server as application server in Production.

The rest of the web and app servers are on windows 2003 Service Pack 1.

The error:
System.Web.HttpUnhandledException: Exception of type System.Web.HttpUnhandledException was thrown. ---> System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationException: Type missing for member of type Object '_ContextID'. Server stack trace: at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap.ObjectReader.ParseMember(ParseRecord pr) at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap.ObjectReader.Parse(ParseRecord pr) at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap.SoapHandler.EndElement(String prefix, String name, String urn)

Reason why it happen:

According to http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;944925

There is a file in c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322

system.runtime.serialization.formatters.soap.dll

When it was on win2k3 SP 1,

system.runtime.serialization.formatters.soap.dll
version is 1.1.4322.2300
128 KB (131,072 bytes)

When it was on win2k3 SP 2,

system.runtime.serialization.formatters.soap.dll, version is 1.1.4322.2306, 132 kb

So the differences of the version of this file results in the Dot net CLR unable to serialise and deserialise properly as the app and web servers are using different version of dll after windows 2003 service packs after the load balancer assign the specific web server (win2k3 SP 1) to specific app server (win2k3 SP2).

The solution is to maintain the same version of this dll throughout the servers which use the serialisation feature in Dot Net Remoting.

Now my infrastructure guy keeps quiet cos he know that his aggressive system patching has crippled the web application because of this dll, since he has no idea what will Microsoft patch after the Service Pack 2 was applied on the server. Lolz