Excel password breaker

One of the things I can't stand at work is working on a spreadsheet that has a bunch of macros, gadgets, and all these functions but it seems to break and you can't fix it because it is password protected. Yea its probably there for good reason as to not have everyone messing around with how the sheet works. It becomes a pain to me when it prevents your team members from adding useful features that could possibly be useful, that just seems like someone ensuring job security to me. I guess I'm more of an open source person, I like to share the scripts I build with the team so they could add to them and make them better.... but that's a whole other story.

Anyhow, this is a macro for a password breaker in excel and there's nothing to pay for. Just cut and paste in to the macro editor and save. Voila!!! Then you can run the macro on any sheet you want to open.

35% of internet traffic from Bittorrent

I know I use bittorrent alot myself, I never knew that it could account for so much traffic though. Of course with so much traffic it is only a matter of time before lawsuits will start flying for users of this as well. Read the article over at the Wired.

Blast from the past....

This is something I wrote almost two years ago when I was first introduced to knoppix and I've pretty much still enjoyed ever since. I've now incorporated a few other live distros under my belt based off knoppix with WHoppix being the one that currently has my attention. But there's so much packed on to each one you use its kind of amazing that it is just running off a CD.

Subject: Knoppix reviewed
Sent: 01/09/03 12:50 PM EST
By: tj1037

If you have ever heard of Knoppix you know that it is getting great reviews from everyone. You can use it as a demo to introduce others to Linux , or use it help you rescue those broken windows boxes.

What is knoppix?
Before I get into why decided to download knoppix, I guess I can give some insight into what it is. This is the definition from the knoppix site:
KNOPPIX is a bootable CD with a collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals. KNOPPIX can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk. Due to on-the-fly decompression, the CD can have up to 2 GB of executable software installed on it.

Getting & Installing Knoppix
There are a few different ways to get a hold of this distribution. The most obviouse of course for those with broadband would be to download it. Those who have dial-up and do not want to wait a couple days for it to download can purchase a copy from a list on the knoppix site. I downloaded my copy within about 2 hours, I burnt the .iso to CD and I was ready to go. Of course there`s really no installation ivolved seeing as the whole thing is on CD. So you only have to make sure you pop in the CD and restart the computer.

What do I do now?
After you restart your computer, you`re presented with a boot prompt. I read the help fle and found that knoppix lang=us would put me onto the english desktop, I also found that if you just leave it alone and let it do its thang you`ll get the same results. After that it goes through its configurations, autodetecting and autoconfiguring your devices on your machine. It bookts up into the KDE 3.0 desktop environment by default but if you read the cheatsheet you can figure out how to get Gnome or a different window manager if you like.

Need something to do
After booting into KDE, I was greeted by a very clean desktop. I was amazed by the great amount of software that came with knoppix, especially programs like The Gimp, OpenOffice, Bluefish HTML Editor, Ethereal...and a bunch of others. Everything runs at a decent speed but even better when you configure a swap partition on your hard drive. That`s right, did I mention it auto mounts your hard drive partitions, it even does NTFS. Your hard drive partitions however are configured as read-only by default, but a quick right click can change all of that...changing it from read-only to read and write. although it mounts ntfs so you can read, you`re not going to be able to write anything to it. I wanted to see if I could browse the internet. I have a network using DHCP so after checking everything in /etc/resolv.conf, I was ready to surf. There are a few plugins that you need to download to make sure you`re able to reach all your favorite sites.

Conclusion
Applications load up a little slower than usual, but thats to be expected for one its on a CD and two its compressed pretty well. I had a hard time printing, only because I selected the wrong driver. Other than that everything was great, an abundance of software, easy setup & configuration makes this a definite one to try. Best of all it does not interfere with your current system setup so when you`re done ..logout..take out the CD...reboot...and you`re back to your original setup. I have such a high opinion of it that I`m giving away CD`s to people I know. If you need a copy leave me a not or drop me an email and I`ll put one in the mail for you. So give it a try you`ll like it.


This review was brought to you by TJ on his new Knoppix CD using Mozilla

We Do Not Send Spam

I had a two hour long meeting today discussing the fact that we do not send spam and the new tool we have to filter spam out of customer accounts. So I can no longer tell a customer if they have spam in their account because technically I don't know. "Mrs. Johnson, I'm sorry to say that I really don't know what kind of messages you have in that account. I don't know what you would consider unsolicited or solicited email. For all I know you may be passing out viagra samples as christmas stocking stuffers."
Yea, I know that's extreme but I needed something to think about while sitting there while my brain started to numb. So if someone mentions the word spam then all kinds of red flags and lights will go off..... seriously, there's a red light that reacts to the word spam if said on the phone...... well ok, not seriously but it was a long meeting so I put that into my thoughts as well.

Got this from mikedup.net

Grab the nearest book.
Open the book to page 23.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal......along with these instructions.

:::

"Expectation is another powerful mental process that you can harness." from Using HTML 4, XML, and Java 1.2

How to never miss another episode of your fav show with BitTorrent and RSS

I think I can definitely say that I am a big fan of bittorrent, I hardly watch TV due to the fact that I don't have cable or satellite. (Probably due to the fact that I get everything from Suprnova) Anyways I use Azureus as my bittorrent client of choice and in while I was doing my daily searches today I came across a little article on how to get bittorrent to automatically download your shows from tvtorrents using RSS.

I haven't tried this yet since I'm still at work, but I will give it a try when I get home though. Also who says you have to use just tvtorrents, i bet you can find some suprnova rss feeds to throw in there.

The how-to:

1. You will need to use Azureus. It’s a pretty good BT client and I’d recommend using it anyway. It is a Java application and works on most platforms.
2. You will also need the RSS Import plugin for Azureus. Installing it is a matter of dragging the unzipped folder into the plugins folder in your Azureus directory and restarting Azureus.
3. In Azureus, go into the preferences and expand the plugins tab. Choose RSS Importer.
4. Check the Activate RSS Importer Plugin box.
5. Enter http://www.tvtorrents.net/rss.php as the RSS Channel to import. You can also enter http://www.btefnet.com/backend.php, each some shows that the other doesn’t.
6. In the next text box, Filter …, enter a regular expression that matches the name of torrent of the the show you want to download. A quick guide to the kinds of regular expressions that are expected here is provided on the RSS Import page. For The West Wing, for example, I put in west.wing.*hdtv — which means download any file that include the letters west, followed by any single character, followed by the letters wing, followed by any number of characters, followed by the letters hdtv, to make sure I get the HDTV version and not the VCD version. For multiple shows, separate them with a semi-colon, so west.wing.*hdtv;enterprise.*hdtv would download The West Wing and Enterprise.
7. Under Recheck channels… I would recommend putting in 60, so as not to bombard the TV Torrents server with more requests than necessary.
8. And you’re set. Don’t worry about the other options. Now you just have to wait for the next episode to air. You should have it in your downloads folder the next day.

The original howto is over at pealco.net