HOW-TO: Force Firefox Add-on Compatibility

With the release of best, greatest and latest Firefox 3.5 (download here), the temptation to upgrade is very appealing. However, as Firefox thrives with the availability of millions of customizations -- in the form of add-ons -- one will have to be careful as not all of your add-ons are compatible.

How then can you upgrade to the latest and greatest version of Firefox without having to sacrifice missing add-ons? Can you force your add-ons to install (at least) and check functionality with Firefox? The answer is yes, that's exactly what you need to do and here's how.

First, download the add-on to your hard drive. Right-click on the "install" button and choose "Save Link As.." (or another name for it). You will be downloading a file with .xpi as extension. And, chances are, it will not be recognized by Windows.

Next, open the .xpi file with your favorite archive program. WinRAR and 7Zip are tested to work, so use either one. Extract the file install.rdf inside that .xpi archive. It is advisable to save the .xpi file on the Desktop for ease of use later.

For our procedure we will play around with FasterFox add-on which is compatible only up until Firefox 2.0.XX versions. So this will never install with Firefox 3.XX.

(NOTE: This add-on was chosen for the purposes of illustration only. But if you want to use it, by all means do so.)

Open install.rdf in your favorite text editor. Look for the string "maxVersion" (see below) and change the value to 3.5. Save the file and re-insert it to the .xpi archive.

Launch Firefox and drag the .xpi file from your Desktop to the Firefox window. It will then install and prompt you to restart Firefox. Once restarted, viola! your add-on is now installed. This, of course, does not guarantee that your favorite add-ons will work exactly as expected. It just allows them to install. Others may work and others may not. Therefore, use this guide at your own risk.

But if your add-on is compatible with Firefox 3, chances are it will be compatible with Firefox 3.5. Again, no guarantees.

ARTICLE: Hard Drive Performance Tweaks

It is no secret that the hard drive is the slowest (and probably the least improving part) of the average desktop. Although the price per gigabyte has dropped significantly over the past few years, the transfer speed has not increased as equally in proportion.

And, as many of you already know, the fastest desktop can only go as fast as the slowest component -- which we know to be the hard drive. How then can you squeeze the best performance out of the slow hard drive? With tweaks of course. Here's how.

First, disable the index service and remove indexing of the drive contents. Open windows explorer and right click on drive C (Local Drive C:). Untick "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching" (ignore all files that cannot be changed). You will find a similar window like the one below.

Next, disable file and directory access times. Each time a file is accessed, the access time is modified and this adds I/O to the drive. Disable it to increase throughput. Save the registry entry below and merge to your registry.

REGEDIT4

; NTFS tweaks
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem]
"NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate"=dword:00000001

If you want to do it via command line, open a command window and key in:

FSUTIL behavior set disablelastaccess 1

The registry merging above requires a reboot. So the command line is the better alternative. But to make sure that the registry contains the change you may opt to do both. You may choose to reboot after defrag. See below.

And lastly, the most significant tweak of all.. Defrag your hard drive. This best works with buying a very useful tool -- Disktrix Ultimate Defrag. I'm not an affiliate of this company but their product simply works for me. So I endorse it.

Launch Ultimate Defrag.
1. Select Tools --> Options. Under High Performance, place a check next to include These File Types
2. Select Add and scroll down and add "*.EXE". Then Select Add again and add "*.DLL"
3. Under Archives, add *.MSI, *.MSP and *.CAB in a similar way .EXE was added but only for archives. I added extras like *.ISO, *.RAR and *.ZIP. But those are only my preferences.
4. Accept all changes. And on the main menu, select Defrag Method Consolidate
5. Tick "Respect High Performance" and "Respect Archive"
6. Tick "Put Directories Close To MFT"
7. Start defragmentation. This will take a while if run for the first time.

After performing the above steps, reboot. Then you will note that your computer becomes a bit more responsive than before. Of course, you tweaked it this time!

Enjoy the speed boost.

TECH: Prototype Nokia Phone Recharges Without Wires

Yes.. You have read the title right: "Prototype Nokia phone recharges without wires".

Pardon the cliche, but it's one of the holiest of Holy Grails of technology: Wireless power. And while early lab experiments have been able to "beam" electricity a few feet to power a light bulb, the day when our laptops and cell phones can charge without having to plug them in to a wall socket still seems decades in the future.

Nokia, however, has taken another baby step in that direction with the invention of a cell phone that recharges itself using a unique system: It harvests ambient radio waves from the air, and turns that energy into usable power. Enough, at least, to keep a cell phone from running out of juice.

While "traditional" (if there is such a thing) wireless power
systems are specifically designed with a transmitter and receiver in mind, Nokia's system isn't finicky about where it gets its wireless waves. TV, radio, other mobile phone systems -- all of this stuff just bounces around the air and most of it is wasted, absorbed into the environment or scattered into the ether. Nokia picks up all the bits and pieces of these waves and uses the collected electromagnetic energy to create electrical current, then uses that to recharge the phone's battery. A huge range of frequencies can be utilized by the system (there's no other way, really, as the energy in any given wave is infinitesimal). It's the same idea that Tesla was exploring 100 years ago, just on a tiny scale.

Mind you, harvesting ambient electromagnetic energy is never going to offer enough electricity to power your whole house or office, but it just might be enough to keep a cell phone alive and kicking. Currently Nokia is able to harvest all of 5 milliwatts from the air; the goal is to increase that to 20 milliwatts in the short term and 50 milliwatts down the line. That wouldn't be enough to keep the phone alive during an active call, but would be enough to slowly recharge the cell phone battery while it's in standby mode, theoretically offering infinite power -- provided you're not stuck deep underground where radio waves can't penetrate.

Nokia says it hopes to commercialize the technology in three to five years.

Source: Yahoo! Tech

Now imagine harnessing this power technology for other uses.. like notebooks (power on the go), portable gaming consoles, PDAs.. The possibilities seem endless.

ARTICLE: Microsoft Outlook Memory Usage

I'm a bit paranoid about what runs in my computers. So as a force of habbit, I would sometimes fire up TCP Viewer (from sysinternals) or the native task manager. Believe me, paranoia (not too much of it) has its own set of advantages. From task manager you can see what's running on your computer.. and more.

One of the many advantages it brought is this observation I recently had. While trying to monitor memory usage of an application for a client, I compared data using Hobbit (now known as Xymon) client on the host running Windows XP. And found a bit of disparity between data points. The data points I'm talking about here had no relation to the application I was monitoring. It was the memory usage of Microsoft Outlook that the client was running, aside from the application itself. The memory consumption from Microsoft Outlook jumped from 4MB to 16MB five minutes later (hobbit's data points are sent to the server every 5 minutes).

That experience and the curiosity it brought got me to dig deeper.. But no sooner after I left the client, I forgot all about it. So later when I got home, I sat in front of my notebook and launched the task manager, that brought me back to the experience earlier in the day. I ran Microsoft Outlook next (I'm using Microsoft Outlook 2007) to monitor its usage. And what better tool to use for this than the task manager. I do not need any more monitoring as the task manager offers that data in real time!

Right out, task manager presented me with information that Outlook consumes about 20MB of memory. The personal folders (.pst) file associated to it is 27.2MB in size. The memory consumption of Outlook is presented in the screenshot below.

I was intending to replicate the scenario I witnessed in my client's office but I had no idea what was being done on the monitored host. And even more puzzling, how do I replicate the sudden memory drop/increase that I saw Outlook do.

So I went on launching typical office applications, browsed the web, and opened files.. anything to replicate the observation earlier. But Outlook memory consumption remained pretty much the same.. Until at last I hit paydirt -- I minimized the Outlook window and boom.. memory drop!

I restored the window and saw the memory consumption return. Minimized and replicated the previous observations. This must be how I saw it from my client's office.

So then, if you are running low on memory and you are running Outlook it would be best to minimize it to free up more memory. Or better yet, if Outlook is "idle" or running in the background, minimize it to make more memory available to the current application in focus.

I hope that by relating this little experience of mine you can put it to good use.

HOW-TO: Microsoft DirectShow Vulnerability Exploit

Microsoft says hackers are targeting a security flaw in the DirectX feature of Windows. According to Microsoft, attackers are using malicious QuickTime videos to exploit the bug. From the security advisory:

Microsoft is investigating new public reports of a new vulnerability in Microsoft DirectX. The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if user opened a specially crafted QuickTime media file. Microsoft is aware of limited, active attacks that use this exploit code. While our investigation is ongoing, our investigation so far has shown that Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 are vulnerable; all versions of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 are not vulnerable. Microsoft has activated its Software Security Incident Response Process (SSIRP) and is continuing to investigate this issue.

According to security bulletin KB971778, one of the workarounds is to delete the registry subkey: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{D51BD5A0-7548-11CF-A520-0080C77EF58A}.

The quickest copy-n-paste procedure is to open a command terminal (Start --> Run.. --> "cmd"). Copy and paste the commands below..

First backup the registry subkey before deleting it (execute this in the command terminal)..

reg export HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{D51BD5A0-7548-11CF-A520-0080C77EF58A} QuickTime.reg

It follows that the newly created file QuickTime.reg is the backup. Then upon successful backup, delete the subkey (execute this in the command terminal as well)..

reg delete HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{D51BD5A0-7548-11CF-A520-0080C77EF58A}

Confirm deletion when prompted.

Although this procedure will not correct the underlying vulnerability, it is a workaround to mitigate the threat and block the potential attack.

Having a backup of the registry subkey will make it easier to revert the change when a permanent patch is available.