Category Archives: Personal

Personal/Other Posts.

Investment Advice Book…Should I go Ahead and Read it?

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I run into an investment advice book printed in 2002 (i.e. before the recession) and the preface starts like this: “(The US people should be) positive about buying or refinancing a home at historically low interest rates or buying a new car under new no-interest offers”. Obviously the recession came later on and everyone who invested in homes (and cars) lost a good deal of money.Moreover, many articles about the recession and its effect on the housing market mentioned that when interest rates are so low, there’s one way to…UP.

So..I was wondering whether I should spend my valuable time to read the rest 280 pages … I guess not… 🙂

Zenbe Lists is Down = Personal Organisation Gone Bonkers

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Zenbe Lists has been down for the past few days and I am losing track of my things todo. Had a huge list of things to do on my days off, but…  Anybody got any suggestions for a TODO lists program that works with iOS 3.0.1 and will sync with a PC? Guess I could always try a pen and a piece of paper, but I am afraid it will take me some time to remember how to use this archaic user interface.

A small adventure comes to a happy end..

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I have a Windows XP installation on a VMWare hard disk. Today I tried to boot it, but… OOPS (no.. I don’t mean Object Oriented Programming and Systems… I mean..crap!). It seems I forgot the password of the installation. So a little adventure started…

1. After a bit of research I found out that there is ophcrack. I downloaded the live CD as an ISO image and set VMWare to load that CD.

2. When VMWare starts and before windows starts booting I clicked on the VMWare screen and pressed ESC. This gives me the menu to select the device I want to use to boot.

3. I chose to boot from the CD.

4. The ophcrack live CD starts loading, but when it finishes I get a:  “No partition containing hashes found” error.

5. The problem seems to be that the Windows installation is on a SCSI virtual disk that is not recognised by this distribution of linux. Tried “fdisk -l” on a terminal from within the ophcrack live CD and it didn’t return any results.  To be able to crack the password I need to have access to the “WIndows/System32/config/ folder of my virtual hard disk. So…

6.  I created a second virtual hard disk in the same VMWare virtual machine. I downloaded an ISO image of Ubuntu

7. Installed Ubuntu on the newly created hard disk.

8. Boot using Ubuntu. Ubuntu was able to access the virtual hard disk of the windows installation. I copied the folder “WIndows/System32/config/” on my local Windows 7 installation.

9. Downloaded ophcrack for Windows and installed it on my Windows 7. Also downloaded the XP Free Small Table.

10. Launched ophcrack and clicked on “Tables”->Install and selected the folder where I had downloaded the XP Free Small Table file (if it is a zip file you need to unzip it).

11. Select Load->Encypted SAM and select the “config” folder I had copied from the VMWare installation (through Ubuntu).

12. Got my password in 45 seconds!!

Importing WordPress Blog Posts to Facebook/LinkedIn

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I keep this blog (which I don’t update very often, but that’s another story) and I post both personal and professional (in the sense that it will appreciated by Computer Scientists) content. I would like to import all blog posts automatically from this blog into my facebook and linkedin profiles.

The thing is that I don’t want to post Computer Science related content into facebook and I don’t want to post into my (professional) linkedin profile all kinds of rubbish. I found out that it is easy to selectively syndicate content depending on the tags that I will add to my post.

So I added two tags, an import_facebook for posts that I want to be imported into my facebook profile and an import_linkedin tag for posts that I want to be imported into my linedin profile.

Then I installed the “WordPress” application for linkedin and I set as a feed url of my blog the following: http://kyriakos.anastasakis.net/tag/import_linkedin

I also installed RSS Graffiti for facebook and I set as a url of my feed the following: http://kyriakos.anastasakis.net/tag/import_facebook/feed

From now on any WordPress post I tag as “import_facebook” will be imported into my facebook profile, while every WordPress post I tag as “import_linkedin” will be imported into my linkedin profile. Before installing the WordPress and the RSS Grafiti apps on your linkedin and facebook profiled respectively, you need to have at least one post tagged “import_facebook” and a post tagged as “import_linkedin” for the applications to pick up the links properly.