Walker News » Software

Chinese Calendar For Windows 7 and Windows 8

Walker — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:11:11 +0000

For people who are searching Chinese calendar for Windows, I would recommend them to try Microsoft Chinese Date & Time, a good old freeware made for Windows XP but also works perfectly on Windows 7 and even the latest Windows 8 (tested on Developer Preview edition).

Besides displaying Chinese lunisolar calendar system (农历; pinyin: nónglì) alongside the Gregorian date, this freeware also features four configurable clocks for displaying current time in other time zones with reference to system time. If the two additional clocks of Windows Vista/7/8 is not sufficient, you could top up another 4 clocks from this freeware!

The screenshot shows today is the fifth day of Chinese New Year 2012, the year of Dragon. You can certainly find out the Gregorian date of Qingming Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, Winter Solstice Festival, Solar term (节气; pinyin: jiéqì), etc.

How To Check DB2 Table Size?

Walker — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 17:32:07 +0000

For IBM DB2 v9.x users who would like to find out the total physical disk space used by a table, you can get the estimated table size from SysIbmAdm.AdminTabInfo administrative view.

Besides, DBA can also retrieve logical size of table from AdminTabInfo. For detail information, please refer to IBM DB2 9.7 LUW official guide.

This guide is tested on both DB2 9.7 and DB2 9.1 installed on Redhat Enterprise Linux 5.7.

For example, the following SQL SELECT statement is used to display physical size of each table in a database, sorted in ascending order (run it at Linux/Windows command prompt as DB2 CLI command):

db2 "SELECT SUBSTR(TabSchema,1,15), SUBSTR(TabName,1,15), TabType, (Data_Object_P_Size + Index_Object_P_Size + Long_Object_P_Size + Lob_Object_P_Size + Xml_Object_P_Size) as Total_P_Size FROM SysIbmAdm.AdminTabInfo ORDER BY Total_P_Size"

If you only interested in checking table size of particular table or schema, just use WHERE clause to get specific result.

How To Configure Android 3.2.1 Proxy Setting?

Walker — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:51:11 +0000

As you may know, Android 3.1 supports HTTP proxy for each connected wireless access point. If your goal is to save bandwidth or reduce data usage by having web browsing on tablets to go through proxy server, then this built-in proxy feature is there to help.

Here, the guide is made with reference to Acer Iconia Tab A500 running Android 3.2.1 (a.k.a. Honeycomb):

1. Click on the time display at bottom-right corner followed by Settings icon.

2. Click Settings from the overlay menu. Make sure the tablet is already connected to Wi-Fi access point (AP) and then only click “Wi-Fi settings”.

3. Perform tap-and-hold on the connected Wi-Fi AP until you see the “modify network” option pops up and then click on it. You should see “connected” on the first AP displayed in “Wi-Fi Networks” section, if the Android tablet is connecting to the wireless network.

4. There you’ll see option to set HTTP proxy setting for Android web browsing.

Direct Download Windows 8 Developer Preview ISO Image Files

Walker — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 18:11:31 +0000

For everyone who is interested to install and use Windows 8, now you can directly download official ISO image file of Windows 8 Developer Preview version (a pre-beta version) from Microsoft website.

NOTE: This Windows 8 Developer Preview version is not suitable for normal users or used in production environment, as it includes prerelease software that may contain bugs and security risks.

For those who are curious to see how Windows 8 looks like without installing the Windows Developer Preview version, here is one of the video presented by Steven Sinofsky:

For testers, developers, advanced users, people who desperately want to have their hands on Windows 8, you can certainly download the official Windows Developer Preview ISO image files for installing on Intel/AMD platform (Windows 8 can also run on ARM processor platform but this version is not available yet in this collection):

Windows Developer Preview with developer tools (English) (64-bit) (4.8GB)
SHA-1: 6FE9352FB59F6D0789AF35D1001BD4E4E81E42AF

Windows Developer Preview (English) (64-bit) (3.6GB)
SHA-1: 79DBF235FD49F5C1C8F8C04E24BDE6E1D04DA1E9

Windows Developer Preview English (32-bit) (x86) (2.8 GB)
SHA-1: 4E0698BBABE01ED27582C9FC16AD21C4422913CC

The minimum system requirement to install Windows 8 is similar to Windows 7:

1GHz CPU (64-bit CPU is required to install 64-bit Windows 8)
1GB RAM (for 32-bit) or 2GB (if 64-bit Windows is installed)
16GB free hard disk space (for 32-bit) or 20GB (for 64-bit)
DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0
Touchscreen monitor that supports multi-touch (optional if not testing Windows 8 touchscreen user interface)

Kaspersky Causes Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client Unable To Establish Connection

Walker — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 16:39:18 +0000

The Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client v2.4 keeps on saying it’s unable to establish a connection and record some errors such as “NETINTERFACE_ERROR_INTERFACE_NOT_AVAILABLE” in the Windows Event Log.

On Windows Device Manager, there is a new network adapter called “Cisco AnyConnect VPN Virtual Miniport Adapter for Windows x64″ appears in disabled mode (this might be the answer of error in Event Log). Though I’ve manually enabled the virtual network card, it’s still disabled by Cisco VPN client during its attempt to establish connection :(

I suspect this has something to do with Kaspersky Internet Security software, but hey all Cisco-related programs are set to be automatically grouped as “trusted” apps granted with all rights.

I can’t figure out what else to be configured, until I found this trick from Google.

How to fix Cisco VPN client connection error caused by Kaspersky IS 2011?

1. Classify all Cisco program as trusted apps granted with full right (as those granted to Windows system programs).

2. Set Kaspersky IS to “monitor selected ports only” and don’t monitor HTTPS (port 443):

Note, there is an alternate trick proposed by others, which configure Kaspersky to not scanning opened files and network traffic of Cisco VPN program. Personally, I don’t prefer this alternative, but it’s up to you which one to use.

How To Download Adobe Reader Full Installer From Official Site?

Walker — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 17:57:28 +0000

Since Linux users are allowed to get the latest PDF reader setup file in full, why can’t Windows users allowed to download Adobe Reader offline installer to facilitate multiple installations?

If you’re using Windows and desperately looking for the latest Adobe Reader X full installer, here is a trick to get it directly from official site:

Yes, by tweaking user agent string of web browser (or download manager)! For example:

Right click on Google Chrome shortcut and select Properties, go to Shortcut tab, then append --user-agent="Mozilla Linux" to the string in Target box:

Note, that UA am using is dummy. One of the proper UA of Linux Firefox is this:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b5) Gecko/2008042803 Red Hat/3.0b5-0.beta5.6.el5 Firefox/3.0b5

Just in case the dummy UA doesn’t work, change it with a proper UA and try again. Am using this to get Adobe Reader X 10.1.0 standalone installer for my 3 Windows machines (without having to download thrice!).

How To Setup VPN Server Using pptpd On RHEL?

Walker — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 12:42:25 +0000

You might need only 3 minutes to install and configure a Linux VPN server using pptpd and a minute later have Windows 7 VPN client connect pptpd successfully.

On RHEL or CentOS 5 Linux:

Download pptpd. The current version used by this guide is pptpd-1.3.4-2.rhel5.i386.rpm. For experts who want to compile pptpd source code for installation, get it from Poptop official page.
Confirm the Linux kernel supports MPPE for encrypted tunnel:
```
modprobe ppp-compress-18 && echo ok
```
If you see “ok” printed after execution, meaning that the MPPE is enabled and nothing need to be done. Otherwise, refer to this guide for help.
Install pptpd:
```
rpm -Uvh pptpd-rpm-file
```
Edit /etc/pptpd.conf file to set the IP of VPN server and clients using private network address space defined by RFC 1918. For example:
```
localip 172.20.20.1
remoteip 172.20.20.2-6
```
Where VPN server IP is 172.20.20.1 and only 5 VPN clients allowed connecting concurrently (because remoteip is limited to allocate IP 172.20.20.2 to 172.20.20.6 for connected client).
Edit /etc/ppp/chap-secrets file to set VPN login ID and password. E.g.
```
walker   pptpd   vpn123:)   *
```
Where 1st column is VPN login ID, 2nd field is fixed to “pptpd”, 3rd field is the VPN login password, and fourth field is an asterisk to indicate any VPN client IP (defined by “remoteip” in previous step).
Configure RHEL/CentOS to auto start pptpd at each reboot:
```
chkconfig --level 345 pptpd on
```
Start up pptpd immediately (without reboot Linux) and confirm the VPN server is up and listening for client connection:
```
service pptpd start
netstat -tulpan | grep pptpd
```
Temporarily stop Firewall for first VPN connection attempt (to confirm the pptpd setup is good to go):
```
service iptables stop
```

On Windows 7 (64-bit Ultimate edition), nothing need to be installed as the bundled VPN client is capable to connect with pptpd server:

Right click the connection icon at Notification Area (bottom-right corner where the Date/Time is displayed) then choose “Open Network and Sharing Center”.
Click “Setup a new connection or network”, “Connect to a workplace”, “Use my Internet connection (VPN)”.
For “Internet address”, enter the VPN server’s public/WAN IP (not the 172.20.20.1) which can be “seen” and ping-ed by Windows 7. The “Destination name” is friendly name defined by user to identify this particular VPN connection.
Next, enter the VPN login ID and password (as what you’ve defined in /etc/ppp/chap-secrets) and click Connect.

Suppose the login credential is correct, Windows 7 should have no problem connecting with pptpd VPN server.