Virtualmv (Michael Verhaart)'s Blog

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Link to virtualmv.com

This is a holding blog ( to stop someone else using virtualmv) go to http://www.virtualmv.com to get to my working blog

Sunday, November 25, 2012

To shut Windows 8 down, just move the mouse cursor to the bottom right corner of the screen, click the Settings icon - or just hold down the Windows key and press I - and you'll see a power button. Click this and choose 'Shut Down' or 'Restart'. Some of the tricks available in previous versions of Windows still apply. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del, for instance, click the power button in the bottom right-hand corner and you'll be presented with the same 'Shut Down' and 'Restart' options. And if you're on the desktop, press Alt+F4 and you'll be able to choose 'Shut Down', 'Restart', 'Sign Out' or 'Switch User' options. From Paradigm PCs

Monday, November 5, 2012

Handbrake DVD rip

Some Open Source software that (apparently) allows DVD ripping. As far as I know it is ok to burn a personal backup copy. I read somewhere that it works with VLC but haven't had time to play around with them yet.

http://www.winxdvd.com/resource/handbrake-windows-tutorial.htm

Monday, September 3, 2012

Some Music Software

If you are into writing/ playing with music, check this out

It is free, almost writes it for you, will play back to you etc

http://musink.net

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Domain Name cloaking using frames

Learn't something the other day. We have a wordpress web site on hostable.com and the Domain Name is with Freeparking.

We have been having trouble with the url displaying in the browser. So you get "http://mydomain.com/" no matter what page is displayed - this is pretty useless if you want to bookmark a page.

Lots of web searching revealed that Freeparking cloak your site in a 100% frame - which is VERY bad form as search engines tend to ignore any frame based sites (we couldn't figure out why the site rated so poorley).

So the actual page HTML looks like

<frame name="top" src="http://xxxx.12345.a.hostable.me/wordpress/" noresize="noresize" frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" />
<noframes>
<body>
This document uses a frameset.
<a href="http://xxxx.12345.a.hostable.me/wordpress/">Click Here</a> to view the page.
</body>
</noframes>
</frameset>

Ok.. so off to Freeparking Help desk .. and their response

Subject: [WebFarm/Freeparking #1400011] URL Redirection - xxxx.co.nz

Hi , There's no good answer to that unfortunately. Cloaked wont show much in the way of filenames, or anything else, as you mentioned. You can really only cloak it or not cloak it. -- Regards, Chris

So the choice is either show xxxx.co.nz on all pages or forget the domain and wind up with urls like http://xxxx.12345.a.hostable.me/wordpress/be-involved/ .. so whats the point of the domain name???

There does not appear to be away around this apart from:

Host the site with freeparking or

register the domain name with someone else (though check if they also do cloaking the same way - I have been told godaddy does the same)

Any ideas welcome....

13-Aug: Suggestion from Inga - does require certain conditions to be met before this will work. http://www.thesitewizard.com/apache/frame-blocking-anti-clickjacking.shtml

Wordpress hacking: Bat Boy and Mr. DJh

Grr!@###$

What a damn nuisance looks like there is a way to hack your WordPress web site. My research shows it as The Bat Boy or in my case Mr. DJh (see below)

Bat Boy Hack on WordPress

It does 2 things

Changes your admin login & email account in the users table and (this means you can't log in as admin)

Changes index.php code for the theme (which is what shows on the page)

Anyway this is how to fix it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESp_rceZ_gw

UNFORTUNATELY, in my case the admin user was unchanged (but I still can't log in) but one of the index.php files in the template was changed (you can see by the edit date on the server) though cleverly in code: starts like

? echo(stripslashes(base64_decode('PGh0bWw+ .....

Renaming the folder killed the site so the hack is in there somewhere and this was the only program with a different date that I could find.

At this stage I can either find the index.php file (which is pretty old) or reinstall Wordpress and import the main blog (which I will probably do as it was only my backup anyway).

I am guessing a flaw was found in one of the versions of WordPress and subsequently fixed by the WordPress people, however (as in my case) this was my backup blog and was quite old - so probably had the flaw still, and so wide open for the hack. My more recent one was left alone (so far) - this one. Can anyone confirm this???

So the Moral is "Keep up with updates" - yes I should know that!!!!

Thursday, May 31, 2012

PC Mouse Bike

Bit of a hard case Bike Mouse that records your typing speed by making the mouse go faster. A while ago I bought a a USB PC Mouse Bike. Searched the web for some drivers, but eventually found them on an old Hard Disk Drive.

For others looking for the drivers here they are: mouse bike installation.zip

And I have it working on a Windows 7 machine. This is what I did:

Don't plug in the mouse and run set-up.

Then plug in the bike mouse. The drivers will try to install through Windows Update (the USB Bridge one will fail) Had to go to Control Panel > Device Manager > then locate the device with the error (USB bridge I think) . Click on Driver > Update Driver > Browse my Computer and get Windows to search the Driver Folder in the Mouse Bike Installation folder.

Run "Launch Mouse Bike" from the desktop and all going well the mouse should fire up.

If you open up Notepad the counter will show the Words per minute...

Enjoy!!