3G only mode for Android - Resolved

Have a 3G data plan, but get charged by your operator when android switches to 2G? yeah, that burns a big hole in pocket...esp with the high adhoc data usage charges. Or maybe .. you are stuck with LTE and want to switch to 3G or other mode.

Anyway for me , it was the first reason - having a 3G data plan, but the operator charging heavy fess whever the network switched to the slower 2G . Talk about a rip-off and perhaps telecoms have mastered the art more than anyone else.

Anyway, luckily there is a way around and it worked for me. Before you get excited - this might NOT work on all the phones, primarily because your operator or manufacturer might have locked these settings.

Here you go :
http://siliconstation.com/how-to-force-android-only-3g/

This is the importnat extract from above link:

Access Android Testing Menu

• Go to Phone and type *#*#4636#*#*
• It will open the Android testing menu.
• There you have several category of information. Tap in phone information.
• Scroll down there and you can find set preferred network type.
• Set it to WCDMA only, same as in HSDPA USB modem.

Hope it works for you!!

How to Partition your External / Portable Hard disk Free!!!

Just got a Iomega eGo 500 GB portable hard drive.

The drive has got a nice casing which makes it durable. On the downside, it needs two USB ports... the manual says that you "might" need to connect second port for additional power..

And yes, at least I need the second USB port to be connected.

So yeah... if your drive does not get recognized , make sure you have connected both the USB connectors.

One more trivia : documentation of Iomega eGo drive indicates that the second or power connector will have a symbol on the same. However, there is no such symbol. In fact there is an easier alternative to tell which is the additional "power" port - the thinner cable of the two usb port.

The drive speed is pretty good.. 1 GB from my 7200 rpm laptop HDD in around 1 min..

so the next step after connecting 500 gig drive is to partition it.. I prefer to partition my drive for manageability and it also provides some recovery advantages.

Here is how you can manage (add/delete) partition from you portable drive in Windows XP :

and yeah.. this is totally FREE... no need to buy software to setup partition on your new portable drive.. ! :)

1. Go to Start-> Run. Type "mmc" [ this opens up Microsoft management console ]

2. Click of File -> Add/Remove Snap in

3. Click on Add and Select "Disk Management" and click Add. Click Finish on next screen

4. Close the Snap in popup and go back to main screen [ console ]

5. Click on disk Management. Your new portable drive should be listed.

6. Right click on your drive and click delete partition

NOTE: This will DELETE and REMOVE all the data from the drive you are changing partition. 7. You can see all the drives will space and partition info listed graphically, just below the list.

8. Right click on your drive (graphical section) and click Add partition. Choose the size and quick format option.

9. Repeat it to create other drives until no free/unallocated partition is remaining for the drive..

Thats it... now you are set. Your new portable hard drive is set up with new partitions.

Split Excel Sheets into different files

Need to split your xls file with multiple sheet into different file for each sheet.

Try google and you will mostly find the paid softwares to do this task. However, google deep enough and you might come up with multiple posts with VBA code - which does this for free.. and yes yes,, hold on.. most of these dont work..

But since I was able to find a working solution I am posting the same here

Scenario 1

Split Excel File having Multiple Worksheet - Each Worksheet saved as separate file. Each file will only have one sheet.

VBA Code:

Sub SplitBookIntoSheets()

Dim i As Integer

Dim ws As Worksheet

Dim CntSheets As Long

Dim FileFolder As String

FileFolder = InputBox("Where would you like these saved?", "filename", "C:\Temp\")

For i = 1 To Worksheets.Count

CntSheets = Worksheets.Count

If CntSheets <> "1" Then

Sheets(CntSheets).Move

ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs Filename:=FileFolder & ActiveSheet.Name & ".xls"

ActiveWindow.Close

Else

ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs Filename:=FileFolder & ActiveSheet.Name & ".xls"

ActiveWindow.Close

End If

Next i

End Sub

Scenario 2

Split Excel File having Multiple Worksheet - Each Worksheet saved as separate file with file name as the sheet name. However, each copy will hold all the sheets..!! not sure if you will ever need this scenario.

VBA Code:

Sub SplitSheets() Dim W As Worksheet For Each W In Worksheets W.SaveAs ActiveWorkbook.Path & "/" & W.Name Next W End Sub

Hope it helps ! :)

Comments Welcome.....

Lost Safely Remove USB Hardware icon in Windows XP?

I plugged my 4GB USB drive into my home laptop and copied some recent tours photos to share with friends.. I copied over the select photos.. and then plugged the USB out once copying was over... and then when I connected to my friends laptop..my flashdrive FAT had been corrupted!!

See.. i missed the step to Safely remove my hardware from Windows XP and removed the USB key without actually turning it off from Windows..and since Windows has some sort of delayed write to these disks... the end result was that Windows was not aware that USB stick has been removed and I lost all data on my list.. most likely the FAT table got corrupted..

And why did I not eject the drive?It turns out.. I do not have that icon appearing on my taskbar when I insert my USB stick...

Formatted my USB key again...:( and then googled to see if can get around the problem caused my messy Windows...

and yes you can manually trigger that Safely remove hardware by following :-

1. Click on Start-> Run

2. Type %windir%\system32\rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll

3. Hit Ok.. and you should be done..

Another better approach.. if you would like to use it more often is to create a Windows shortcut and add the above command to shortcut.. and then just double click and stop any USB hardware and eject them safely...

Hope it helps..

Remote Sharing - Luckily an easy alternative exists to Netmeeting

Netmeeting - its a hate and love relationship. You love it , because it makes sharing and collaboration so easy - type in a ip address, call the computer and bingo! now you can share, control and even conference! and you hate it.. because apparently for MS this was a useful tool which user might find useful and even gain productivity - so they did what they can do best.. trash the simple and working software and create new versions, give them a new name, trash netmeeting and yes.. here we go MS way..

Since this has not been updated by MS in quitesometime, Netmeeting as of now has serious limitations - most prominent being not being able to connect to user behind routers . For the general user this would mean going into router and playing around with settings.. not a very pretty task for average Joe...

Sunday afternoon, and got a call from Home.. PC almost dead.. need to troubleshoot it. Being some thousand kms away, the only thing that came to mind was netmeeting. Folks being not too tech savvy, other options were ruled out. Somehow I never liked remote desktop and too bad I dont have XP Pro edition.

Googled for simpler alternatives and yes.. they do exist to make life easy ->

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/7-easy-screen-sharing-and-remote-access-tools-all-free/

The link above contains links to some easy to use and simple screen sharing tool. And Crossloop tops the list. Not without a reason. Its simple, no nonese approach.. and the best its free.

So herez a mini how-to on how to use this to connect to your PC remotely (assuming both are running MS OS) and get your taks done.. or maybe help someone out by troubleshooting:

Download Crossloop(Very small, approx 2.5 MB):

http://www.crossloop.com/ipage.htm?id=download

Install it and run it once installation is complete.

You can skip the registration process to create account. Simply click on Skip in the bottom right hand corner of application screen

NOTE : The software needs to be installed on both the machines .

You will see two tabs- Access Share

If you want to access someones PC:

For You:

Ask the person (remote) to send you their access code.

Click on Access Tab

Put the access code (incl space between numbers)

Click Connect

For Person on remote machine:

Click on Connect.

And yes.. you are done!!

after few moments, your status should be connected and you can see the remote desktop. You can use it to perform taks, share files etc.

Easy,simple, short.. I liked it. It saved my day and hopefully you will find it useful too...

With the advent of digicams, photography for amateurs(like me) is about click, preview and keep/delete. But at times there is need to share those high resolution pics via email. And with most of us using ADSL, which means slower upload speed as compared to download speed, sending across pics can be bit painful. Thankfully there are loads of batch resize tool available to help us cut down the size of image while maintaing most of the image quality. One of the tools which I personally use and find quite adequate is Visualizer Photo resize (http://www.freeimagebrowser.com/resize/). Just point to the folder which contains all the pics, the desired size of the new pics and yes you are done. All your photos are resized in one click . It simple. But then it means not too much of configurations…for me it works fine. And yes its FREE.

On another note, for those in India , if you ever suspected u were missing belonging from your airline baggage, this might be just what you have been thinking. Certainly for me, its just the tip of iceberg. The fact that complaints almost fall to deaf ears, probably calls for deeper investigation. Anyway herez the most recent news about the issue…. Finally at least somewhere culprit is caught…..[ http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/subcontinent/2007/June/subcontinent_June433.xml&section=subcontinent&col=

]

I wonder if they cant use security tapes available to investigate the claims of its customers instead of shooing them away……long live customer care.

How Fiery is your Firewall!!!!

Yes, I am talking about the software based firewall which most of us use .... free or paid...
And most often than not, the decision of a particular firewall is based on its price and recommendation by our "friends", but then have we seen any comprehensive tests of these... something which would test each firewall for vulnerability...?

I came across one such study in the always useful Scott's Newsletter. You can get a copy of the same at http://www.scotsnewsletter.com/91.htm . Yes, its free . Its amazing how someone can write such a useful stuff, which obviously takes up loads of effort and maintain good quality and yet keep it free.

Coming to the discussion, Scott Newsletter pointed me to quite a comprehensive lists of tests done for personal firewalls. yes, it includes the seemingly popular firewalls , Zone Alarm( free and Pro versions tested separately), McAfee, Norton Internet Security, Sygate and lots of others and it ranks them. You will be surprised by the results of the effectiveness of your firewall and perhaps your "sense" of security might change once you go through the results.

Here is the link to the full report,
http://www.matousec.com/projects/windows-personal-firewall-analysis/leak-tests-results.php#firewalls-ratings

Or take a look at the firewall effectiveness at this website:
http://www.firewallleaktester.com/tests_overview.php
(Click View results to see the results comparing different firewall products).

Well, though it has been stressed in tests, but its a point worth noting that the firewall tests were carried out after "disabling" the antivirus. The raw strength of firewall defence was used to asses them. But in a real world, there is generally an antivirus running on user's pc, hopefully with latest definitions and engines. These antivirus can block some of the attacks , but then quite few and not really a great alternative to firewall's own strength to catch them up.

Hope this helps in choosing the firewall, more on rationale.

I generally browse some of the techie blogs from blogs.oracle.com or dzone.com. Since am yet not much into blogging ,am still on lookout for the new and interesting blogs. Any suggestions to the same would be welcome.

Speaking of something interesting, came across this piece of nicely written blog from Jonathan Gennick. I wasnt aware that a query which had been running fine in versions before 10g, might suddenly fail, with far-reaching impact to some of the apps.

As I read through the article, I found it really intriguing and scary. As a matter of fact , it seems that given the new built in intelligence of the much publicised "CBO" from oracle, migrating from other versions to this new version would need a rigorous amount of testing maybe with the live data set and analysing the tables (as in this case).

Dont get me wrong. I am not against CBO. But sometimes it seems to be overdoing things.
I have been working on 10g for sometime and my experiences with it have been mixed. Had a near fatal experienceonce thanks to 10g. I wasnt aware that 10gR1 doesnt like the index rebuild to go online while the data is being loaded in direct path mode. It corrupted the whole damn index!!!!!!! Thankfully the system was still in trial.

And speaking of CBO, its way too dynamic and would certainly not recommend it if you are dealing with VLDB. My experiences with it havent been too great. Oracle certainly needs to take new steps in parallelism, if it wants scalable ETL tools to be built using PL/SQL or OWB. They have moved forward, no doubt, but yet some of the basic parallelism is still tough to implement. Take the simple case of unloading data from two tables going in parallel. Most of the ETL tools would run two threads and unload the two tables in parallel, almost by default. But I am not sure if thats the case with OWB . Pl/SQL makes it tougher to implement. It canbe done, but there isnt a simple way to do this yet. (Any ideas/suggestions welcome).

The diwali weekend. Its celebration time and holiday time. It was supposed to be same with me. But due to some personal reasons and the fact that am away from home(read no holidays) , this was a diwali I would like to forget, but perhaps would not be able to quite easily.

Once again, I marvel how close this e-revolution has brought us, at least in terms of keeping in touch(nah, I aint new to this… just keep getting fascinated). Its always nice to have frndz you can speak to.. talk nuisance without worrying too much about the impression thats going to make…..and yahoo(just my preferred example) certainly makes that task lot easier.

Thanks everyone for bearing with me.

And yeah, I spent some time googling for “boring diwali” and it did threw up some interesting , nice to read blog. Otherwise, it was just another weekend, shopping for the necessities, cleaning, and most part of the day: online, surfing and chatting.

Speaking of search, I do try some search engines from time to time and have almost always found google on top. The searches from MS simply didn’t match in terms of quality . But guess the new live.com is different. Unlike previous MSN search , which I considered to be the worst, live.com provides quite impressive search results.

It would be interesting to see the clash of titans in the search industry. For me, google is the preferred option and likely to remain so . Its just the simplicity and the comfort factor it provides with the search that awes me. Its email service though is one area where it can take some tips from Yahoo.

And yeah, every time I sit for lunch and dinner, it just reminds me that cooking is not my forte. I can cook good enough to survive, and have been doing so almost an year. But then, I feel like I have almost forgotten how good food tastes like and the different dishes you can cook. Maybe I am just lazy.

Had mentioned the performance benchmarking about my notebook and its unexpectedly low results. Have been doing a bit search on this and then using my friend’s working DELL power adapter, re-ran the tests. The results… Phew… amazing.

Apparently, the SpeedStep technology of the Intel, which varies the processing power, when running on battery (in my case the faulty adapter) , was causing the low benchmark for my notebook. The Speedstep doesn’t interfere with the processing speed when running on AC power or if it has been explicitly disabled from the BIOS.