Onedrive puzzle answer

The solution lies in replacing the letters in the folder as per the wheel mapping. Translated it roughly reads as follows.


"The first hundred thousand users to log into onedrive.com at 11:11 AM PST today (February 19, 2014) will win 100 GB of extra storage."

All the best !

android wifi proxy in windows office domain

I am sure there are a lot of people who have tried to connect their android devices through their office network in order to save the mobile bandwidth costs.

While some phones like samsung have built in proxy settings most of them do not. The issue with connecting to office networks is that most proxy use NTLM domain authentication that is not widely know and most stock solutions do not provide capability to connect and authenticate to these types of proxies.

Recently ProxyDroid available in the marketplace allowed for these types of connection for rooted devices.

After installing start the application. It will request for SupoerUser Permission. Grant the application the requested permission.




Select New profile


Then select each of the parameters and fill it up

In Host put the address of the proxy server

In port, fill up the proxy server port

Proxy type select HTTP

Scroll down and check the Enable Authentication tab


Enter the username , enter the password and enable NTLM Authentication (important)

Finally select the Domain option and enter the Domain name of the connection. Now you should be good to go !

Android Screen Control Without Root

The ability to control the screen of my Android phone has been a major pain since I moved from Windows Mobile to Android quite some time ago.

The only solutions required root permissions. However there are scenarios where that is not an option such as in a corporate environment / providing remote support for a device that is not your own.

Android 2.1 onwards ( as far as I know) supports a API called MonkeyRunner that is to be used for application testing. Using this along with java sources provided by "The Android Open Source Project" I have put together a small application that will capture the screen and allow passing of click and key press events to the device.

It is highly limited to the extent that it allows only for touch events and keystrokes. It currently does not support drag events and typing of special characters but something is better than nothing :)


Download the zip file from here

http://www.mediafire.com/file/a8870ynh151vm9d/ScreenControl.zip

In order to run the files, you need to ensure that the device is connected via USB cable only and debugging has been enabled on the device.

Once this is done, Fire up the screen.bat and it should load up the window. The screen.bat is a single line command calling java.exe along with all the required class and jar files required to make this work.

I have also included adb.exe which is required, you could replace with your own, however mine will probably be more stable.



Again, Consider this only if your device is not rooted. If you have rooted your device I would recommend you use the either of the following better softwares

Android Screencast
http://code.google.com/p/androidscreencast/

This works with the USB connection

Droid VNC Server by José Luis Pereira
http://www.onaips.com/wordpress/?page_id=60

This works with Wifi



I hope this has been helpful for some of you all. Am sure there are more brilliant people out there who can modify the sources to add drag functionality as well. Do let me know !


UPDATE
F.J. Wechselberger has integrated this functionality into MyPhoneExplorer through native TCP-Calls. Its not possible for him to implement Java-Library into the PC-Program but he was able to translate the source of MonkeyRunner. I Would recommend you download this if you are looking for a simple solution for controlling the screen.

www.fjsoft.at


Cheers,
Vikram Sridharan.

Compress large files on windows server 2008

This started out as something else. We had a large database of about 100 GB that we wanted shift to our DR location. Due to bandwidth restrictions we started out to explore options on how we could reduce the overhead of transferring such a large file.

Now compressing a 100 GB file is not a joke. After some looking up I came across an interesting article by Chris over at solo-technology talking about Compression v/s Speed. It talked about a related issue but the same capability could be used for handling large files.

The best tool for doing this is 7Zip. It is an awesome freeware by Igor Pavlov handling a large number of compression formats. Check it out over here.



http://www.7-zip.org/


That aside, by using the command line version of this you could zip you file. When we started the zip file took 5 hours to finish just 30 % of compression. On check the task manager, I found that the whole process was just running at 100 % on a single thread of the 24 cores available on the server.

By using the following options,

I was able to compress the 100 GB SQL Server 2008 database backup file to just 16 GB ! in just 1 Hour !!!

This was way beyond my expectations :) Here is that technical syntax to use this


7z a -tbzip2 -mx=9 -mmt=on backup.zip backup.bak


"7z" is the program to initiate
"a" is to append the file
"-tbzip2" is to use the bzip2 format, this is important as only this format allows for multithreading for both the compression as well as the decompression
"-mx=9" is the number of passes, this is optional, I didn't use it, the system defaults this to 5
"-mmt=on" is to turn on the multithread capability, again this works only for the bzip2 format
"backup.zip" is the file that will get created
"backup.bak" is the file that needs to get backed up.

You could read through the technical literature available with 7zip to get a better hang of the application. This were just the specific options that are required to manage this requirement.

One other note, I did read the the bzip2 format has a restriction that it can include only 1 file at a time. I didn't try for multiple files.

Hope this helps in saving you precious bandwidth !!!

Microsoft Association Rules / Data mining in SQL Server 2008

Since the release of SQL Server 2005 Microsoft has dabbled quite a bit with Data mining models. While I have read that Data mining capability has been available with one of the later releases of SQL Server 2000, I haven't been able to come across too much material on the same.


First up I would like say the best place to start if you are serious about learning about Data mining is to go get yourself this really good book on the topic. Its extremely easy to read and the examples used are quite practical.

The book is

Data Mining with SQL Server® 2008

by
Jamie MacLennan
ZhaoHui Tang
Bogdan Crivat


Back to original reason of the post, being a techno functional individual, I was keen to see how we could effectively cross sell products to stores since we had their complete sales history. Ensuring that our consumers never left the store without the products they wanted goes a long way in ensuring consumer loyalty and company performance.

Having most of the data already available in SQL Server 2008 I was keen to see what we could use to help identify these gaps. In SQL Server 2008 Microsoft has the following Data Mining Models

Microsoft Naıve Bayes
Decision Trees Algorithm
Time Series Algorithm
Microsoft Clustering
Sequence Clustering
Association Rules
Neural Network and Logistic Regression

The best fit for the requirement I had was the Microsoft Association Rules. It allowed me to build the model utilizing the classification of outlets that we already had.

I built the model using three classifications we had for our outlets along with products that the outlet already sold. In order to do this I needed to create a nested table for the products as one outlet could sell multiple products. Also important to note that the data types for Data mining objects are slightly different from the data types that are used by standard SQL queries. The DMX I used is below.




Post creating the structure , I applied the Microsoft Association Rules Algorithm requested the prediction of the product utilizing the standard support and probability the model is generally used with.



The next step was to feed in data into the model to let it build the association rules. This was done using the following syntax. Am important point to note here is that the key data needs to be sorted. Sometimes in spite of sorting it still gives errors saying the data most probably is not sorted. The solution for this is to ensure that the key that is used is specifically a nvarchar source data type. I faced a problem when my key happened to have numeric data as well as string data. Needed to convert everything before I could successfully load the data into the mining structure.




Once the data is loaded into the model, the last step is to retrieve out the recommendations that the model would generate. I have done this for the store ABC by passing the store along with the products that the store purchased into the model and asking it to return 5 recommendations based on the model as well as the classification of the store and the products that the store sells.
This is done through the following DMX statement.




In case you want this data in the standard query windows you could always create a Linked server to OLAP where the Data Mining model exists.

Do let me know if you have any comments !

Acer eMachine E725 XP Drivers

Since this laptop is bundled with Linux, you need to have all the drivers in place before you can install XP on this E725 Laptop.

Acer has the drivers as part of the E720 release and you could get all of them on the below ftp site of acer itself

ftp://ftp.work.acer-euro.com/notebook/.em/E720/XP%20SP2/


Incase you want to do Vista on the Acer eMachine E725 instead , go to this location

ftp://ftp.work.acer-euro.com/notebook/.em/E720/Vista%20SP1/

Hope that helps, do leave a comment !!

Nokia 5230 Free Navigation / Maps

Recently Nokia made Navigation free atleast in India. However if you now tried to connect for free navigation it still asks for you go to the store. The reason for this is that Nokia has allowed free Navigation using Ovi Maps only on the new version of the software.

So if you have bought your phone couple of weeks ago there is a very good chance you are on the old version. What you need to do is go to the Nokia site and upgrade your version of Ovi maps to the latest version.

There are two ways of getting this done, one is to download the software on your computer and then Sync with your phone which would then automatically upgrade the version of Ovi Maps that is present on your phone.

The second option is to directly download the software to your phone and run it from there. However this would require a data connection from your service provider.

The link for downloading the software is here

If you want to get the map data stored directly on your computer you should go through this post.

http://piglings.blogspot.com/2010/01/nokia-5230-maps.html