.Net Geek: A blog by Aakash Jain

Recently, I fixed a very annoying bug of Google Talk or Winamp 5 (I don’t know). Google Talk and Winamp were freezing (hang/not responding) when the status was selected was “Show current music track” in Google Talk messenger and same time I have Winamp playing my songs. So Google talk and Winamp 5.x wasn’t working together. However, I saw that this was not the case with other media players. But I like listening to music using Winamp player. That’s the best player available and I don’t want to use any other. Someone suggested me that creating a blank “m3u” file (Winamp playlist file) in the installation directory of Winamp (usually “C:\Program Files\Winamp”) may solve this issue. I perform the following steps and Wow! It worked.

Step 1: Go to the root directory of Winamp which is usually in C:\Program Files\Winamp\

Step 2: Select Tools->Folder Options->View (Tab) and uncheck the hide extensions for known file types and click Ok.

Step 3: Now create an empty file (Right click the mouse -> New -> Text document), so the default file would be like “New Text Document.txt”.

Step4: Rename the above file to “winamp.m3u” and save.

Step5: Close Winamp and Google Talk. Now open again and Your Show Current music track status should work like a charm !

Happy Tweaking

In this fast paced IT world things are getting smaller, faster and better. Take the example of a pen drive. It’s now an essential component that one techie should have in widget list. So do I, but lately I have stopped using them as they are most vulnerable to a virus or worm. You can make sure that there is no one unwanted living in your hard drives but what about other’s PC, they can have viruses. And I really don’t want that my computer get affected with these things because of a pen drive which is used frequently between various devices for data transfer. Antivirus does help to some extent but seriously I cannot rely on them when it comes on my data security. What make things worst is that a pen drive execute (Autoplay) automatically when inserted into a PC. So here are my few suggestion for all to make sure things don’t run ugly when you use a pen drive.

• Make sure what are copying from a source computer. Try to copy individual files instead of a folder at once. When copying a folder it also copies the hidden content in it which is useless to you and may contain some hidden programs.
• Always copies from a secured network or computer. Source should be trusted and secured with an antivirus. Before copying it is a good idea to confirm with the owner (may be from your friend/colleague) of device if it is virus free.
• Most important, disable the Autoplay on all drives on your PC. To do this follow 1,2,3 –

1. Go to start> run> type gpedit.msc
2. Select ‘computer configuration’ from the left tree and then go to ->’administrative tempates’->’system’.
3. In the right panel look for ‘Turn off Autoplay’, Double click on it and Select ‘enabled’ and then select 'all drives'.

This will disable the auto-play of pen drive when you insert it in the PC. Most viruses attach them with the auto-play program and run automatically unknowingly. So the above steps make you little closure to the secure data transfer to your PC.

Last but not least, you should have an updated antivirus guarding your PC all time.

Happy Tweaking!

If you ever tried or try to bind an Repeater control with a data source that have a period or dot in its one/more data item’s name then you might receive a error while binding the property using DataBinder.Eval method.

For Example, I was trying to do a simple thing with Asp Repeater control (which is bind to a DataTable). Please see the following piece of code

<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "alt.price")%>

Here is a column name "alt.price" in the data source (DataTable) . But the above line was resulting an error as follows

DataBinding: 'System.Data.DataRowView' does not contain a property with the name 'alt'

To resolve this issue I used a new Method ‘DataBinder.GetPropertyValue’ that simply retrieves property value without any evaluation on the expression while DataBinder.Eval method uses reflection to parse and evaluate a data-binding expression against an object at run-time.

Conclusion – If you don't want that the expression to be evaluated at the run time, it’s a good practice to use GetProtperyValue method instead of Eval method.

SpamPoison is a small but useful utility to fight against spammers. It won’t directly help you in bringing down spam in your blog/Inbox but will stop spammers harvesting information which they can use for sending spam emails. Spammers usually get email addresses with the help of Bots. Bots (also known as wanderers, spiders or crawlers) crawls a web page and continually retrieving linked pages for extracting any email like string and store it in a database. Certainly this database is further used for sending spam emails using mass mailer software. Spam poison identifies these spammer’s crawlers and feed them through an infinite loop of dynamically generated fake email addresses. All you have to do is link back this page so that whenever a spammer's robot scans your page, it will be sucked into this one. To link to this page, just use this simple code:

<a href="http://english-130430879095.spampoison.com">Fight Spam! Click Here!</a>

Microsoft launched its WorldWide Telescope, bringing the free Web-based program for zooming around the universe to a broad audience. The image above shows how the Earth looks like at night,  taken from this utility. visit here

Today is the day when I first visited Central London and also the day when I landed at London Heathrow Airport one month back. It was a strange feeling touching down UK as this is my first time in Great Britain. Here for a business assignment, I received a wonderful experience so far and I am happy having accepted this assignment from my company. Here at workplace in London, there are peoples from about 140 different nations. That’s really excites and never to forget experience to work with so many different people from different culture. Today, In Central London I was able to see Westminster, London Bridge, Parliament and London Eye. I’ve see few monuments here but Big Ben is the one that I really wanted to view in life. One just can't forget the experience of viewing London from London Eye. It is simply spectacular.