Andrei DANEASA

It’s astonishing how often you’ll come across people using their computers on a daily basis who not only have no firewall or antivirus software installed, but are openly happy to take major risks with their personal information, regardless of the potential consequences. But the problem is that many of these people see web security as far too complex and difficult to bother with.

Allow me to disagree. For those who’ll begin by claiming it costs too much, let me direct you to AVG, or many other free antivirus and firewall packages that will happily do the job for years without a single push towards locking you out if you’re not willing to pay. Go to the site, hit the download link, go play Party Poker Romania or update your Facebook while it downloads, install, and you’re done!
Read the rest of this entry »

My parents in-law got their home router replaced by the provider with a crappy Zyxel wi-fi router. Besides the fact everything is working slower than before due to some internal firewall and management, one laptop having Vista on it (hmmm, it came with it) was unable to connect to the new network.

After spending few hours trying to connect, changing all the settings in the router, restarting the router like hell, I was about to reinstall the OS on that laptop. But as I never worked on Vista, I thought google-ing a bit might reveal similar experiences. And yes, I was so right… one of the first results was stating:
Read the rest of this entry »

I was doing some insane browsing during my vacation and realized that my oldest blog post is 5 years old!
… and my domain, webxpert.ro is 8 years old. It had quite a few versions and in the end I decided that nothing worth to be on the first page.
… and I don’t even call myself “blogger” or anything else.

I am proud not to put all kind of garbage on my blog, proud of most my posts and proud that I kept my interest in this so many years. And yes, I want this coffee mug:

I’ve been tasked to add some features (subversion is one of them) under a Virtual Private Server (cPanel WHM) on a Hosting site.

First I downloaded and unarchived subversion:

Since the last versions are requiring SQLite, I had to download and copy one file from sqlite folder to subversion folder: Read the rest of this entry »

I am a huge fan of Picasa, moved from Flickr due to their stupid limit of 200 photos in free accounts. After one and a half year of using Picasa Web, my web space reached its limit and I had to buy 10 GB of space for $20 per year (this was the cheapest option).

There was a post on Google blog saying they are now offering twice the space for quarter the price. I went immediately to my account and saw that I now have 80 GB of quota !!

… and the first option is to buy 20 GB for $5 ! Long live Google !

One funny thing here: check the “round” prices for bigger plans: $512, $1024, $2048….

Related posts:

I’m a constant user of Google Analytics. It’s a great piece of software with lots of useful reports, easy to read and to understand. However, I was never curious how far I can go with it.

Last week I had a discussion with someone in Oracle about Real-Time Decision (RTD) Server and Real User Experience Insight (RUEI), so I decided to find out first all the capabilities of Google Analytics.
After half of day of reading the course materials on Google Conversion University, I decided that a challenge might worth 50$, so I took the exam.

More than an hour later I passed the 70 questions exam, much difficult than I expected, with a score of 87%:

Now having the proof I understood correctly what’s happening with Google Analytics, I can jump into conclusions: Read the rest of this entry »

There’s no way to develop a web app and don’t need a chart/pie, even this is for the backend. Google offers this Chart API and it’s fabulous. No need to install anything, just call a web page with your set of parameters. Now they offer maps and I can, for example, to keep track of the countries I visited.

Example:

Europe countries I visited so far

People say that one picture worth more than a thousand words. This is true: just change, or offer charts as alternative to your long and boring tables and you’ll see the result.

What have I done here:
Read the rest of this entry »

I used both services to take tests in the past as the following: Microsoft - Pearson VUE and Oracle - Prometric.

It seems that driven by the cut-costs strategy they started to steal each other’s clients. Oracle just moved to Pearson VUE. The result for me as a customer, not as an Oracle employee, is that I cannot access my history. You have to believe me or to wait until Oracle will provide online transcripts when I will tell you what I own. There’s no history on their side, they claim the history will be kept on Oracle’s side at Certview, but I was unable to check my history.

I remembered I used Pearson VUE to take my Microsoft MCSD exams, so I tried to log in with my old credentials. Surprise…. Microsoft is no longer with Pearson, but they moved to Prometric. It’s totally confusing and you don’t want to take an exam these days

Related posts:

Total Commander - File Manager – I am using it since version 3, ~10 year ago. Simply not replaceable.

Pidgin - Instant Messaging – Single client for all protocols, including Oracle internal one.

Launchy - Application Launcher – just press ALT+Space and write a few letters from app name to start it

MPlayer – Movie Player – no GUI, just console, very quick, no need to install codecs. Some issues with external monitor.

Firefox - of course, user since version 0.9 Beta

Dropbox - File Sync – simple sync of some folders between laptops or laptop and desktop. As a bonus files are stored online and you get revisions history

Google Mail – Personal Email – lot of space, even bought extra. Can also use it to read other POP3 accounts, all in a single interface.

Google Reader – RSS reader – the best RSS reader

Google Calendar – Calendar – simple to use, simple to share, to sync. Can also use it to read other calendars.

TripIt – Booking Manager – just forward all the travel plans to Tripit and you’ll have your itinerary ready, published as a web calendar, links to online check-in and other usefull stuff.

Related posts:

I deleted by mistake some unsaved photos from my camera. Even that I never came across with file recovery software, this time I had to.

After a short google search, I found PC Inspector Smart Recovery who did a brilliant job. Not very fast, but speed was not what I was looking for.
It managed to recover ~200 MB in less than 10 minutes, good enough for a FREE application.

Good luck!

Related posts: