Recover Lost Passwords with Free Tools

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ACCESS DENIED. Those two bone-chilling words are the last thing you want to see when you're trying to log into a system or open a file, but they're not necessarily a dead end. Several free tools can help you find lost passwords you can't remember or that your computer has saved but obscured. Let's take a look at a few free remedies for lost password panic when you're trying to log onto a computer, network, or just figure out what's behind that string of asterisks.

Before we start, two things: First, use the information and utilities below to recover your own passwords, or to help out your desperate relative or co-worker with their consent—not to snoop in other people's stuff. Second, to avoid these last-resort password recovery utilities forever, use an encrypted database to keep track of your passwords.

Windows

When you can't log into that old Windows PC you haven't touched in years, try booting up using the Ophcrack Live CD. Ophcrack will detect all the users set up on your Windows systems, and reveal their passwords—if the passwords are relatively easy to crack. See Adam's screenshot tour of how Ophcrack works, and which Windows passwords it was able to crack and which it wasn't.

Windows Applications

When you've saved a password in your FTP software, IM client, or any other application that boasts a password field filled with asterisks, you want a password reveal utility. Both Snadboy's Revelation (original post) and Nirsoft's Asterisk Logger can show you what's behind the ***** in most apps' password field.

Microsoft Outlook PST (Personal Folders) files: For that old email archive from three jobs ago that you locked with a password you can't remember, try PstPassword (original post). This free utility offers three possible passwords that can open the PST file.

Recover instant messenger passwords: Lost your MSN Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Trillian, Miranda, or Pidgin password but you're logged in and you've saved the password on your computer? MessenPass can unearth them for you.

Network and Wireless Router Passwords

See what passwords your computer is sending across the network to log into various services with SniffPass. The free SniffPass captures the passwords that pass through your network adapter, and displays them. SniffPass reveals passwords for POP3, IMAP4, SMTP, FTP, and HTTP (basic authentication passwords).

Reveal Wi-Fi network passwords: This one saved me when I arrived at Mom's newly wireless-enabled house, asked her what the password to log onto the network was, and got a blank look in response. The free WirelessKeyView (original post) reveals Wi-Fi passwords saved in Windows.

Default router passwords: Of course if you want to log onto a wireless router and think maybe the owner never changed the default, check out the router default password list to find the factory password for the router's model.

Mac OS X

While password crackers for the Mac are non-existent as far as I know (correct me if I'm wrong!), the Mac Keychain is the way to reveal many of the passwords you've saved on your system. Find the Keychain in your Applications/Utilities folder. You'll have to enter an admin password just to get into Keychain, but then you can click on any entry—like Wi-Fi networks or saved application passwords—to get details and see the passwords.

Firefox Saved Browser passwords

Finally, if you're saving web site passwords in Firefox, it's easy to reveal them as well. In Firefox, from the Tools menu, choose Options, and in the Security tab hit the "Saved Passwords" button. Then hit "Show Passwords." Alternately, if you're on a page with a password field filled in with asterisks, you can use the "View Passwords" bookmarklet to see them (#10 on that list). (Of course, here's how to secure your passwords in Firefox with a master password.)

Note: Much of the Windows software featured in this article is by Nirsoft, but the ones we mentioned are just the beginning. Check out Nirsoft's complete mother lode of freeware Windows password utilities.

What password recovery utilities have saved your bacon? Tell us about 'em in the comments.

Ref : http://lifehacker.com

Sync Thunderbird with Google Contacts

All platforms running Thunderbird: Thunderbird extension Zindus syncs your Google contacts with Thunderbird's address book. Just install the extension, give it your Gmail username and password (it supports both @gmail and Google Apps domains), and hit the Sync Now button to synchronize names, email addresses, phone numbers, IM handles, and more. Zindus does its best to handle any conflicts and walk you through resolutions, but you can also sync the contacts to a separate list if you just want to give it a try. The free, cross-platform Zindus is a fantastic solution for Thunderbird users jealous of Address Book's recent Google Contact Sync update.

GNOME Do 0.5

Do 0.5: “The Fighting 0.5″

Do 0.5: “The Fighting 0.5″. Without further ado, here are the main improvements and new features, accompanied by plenty of screen shots.

First off, the Open with… action has been re-enabled!

The biggest new feature in GNOME Do 0.5 is our new preferences window and plugin manager. You can now browse, download, install, and enable or disable all available plugins from right within Do thanks to Mono.Addins:

You can also visit a wiki page with information about each plugin, and you can do plugin-specific configuration. This means no more configuration files, and no more editing preferences through Configuration Editor (gconf). As an example, here is the configuration window for the Files and Folders plugin:

We’ve added a plugin category called “community plugins” that contains cutting-edge plugins written by many different contributors. If a developer were to write a great new GNOME Do plugin today, we could have it in the community plugins repository and available to Do users everywhere by tomorrow. That being said, community plugins are not rigorously screened or held to the same quality standards as official plugins, so users beware.

One of my favorite community plugins is the new Skype plugin, which allows you to make calls, initiate chats, change your status, and more. The Skype plugin is also fully integrated with Do’s contact system, so you can simply type a contact name, and then chose to send an instant message to that person with Pidgin, email them, or initiate a Skype chat or call:

There’s an awesome new plugin by Jason Smith called “WindowManager.” It lets you manipulate and rearrange windows on your desktop. You can focus, shade, minimize, maximize, tile, and cascade your windows. This plugin is so feature-packed, I don’t even know everything it does yet! Check out these screenshots, then try the plugin for yourself.

Minimize all Firefox windows.
Bring a GIMP window into focus by searching for its name.

Alex Launi has done some amazing plugin work, making great contributions to the Twitter, File and Folders, and Pidgin plugins to name a few. He also wrote new Flickr, Gmail contacts, and Google Calendar plugins. Here’s a preview of his work:

Twitter plugin now supports replying to Twitter friends.
Set Pidgin status (also searches saved statuses).
Upload images to Flickr
Search and create events on Google Calendar

These are only a few of the new features and improvements in GNOME Do 0.5. We’ve also fixed tons of bugs, and we’re going to have some intensive wiki-updating sessions over the next couple weeks to bring documentation up to speed. There are a few more changes that just barely missed the cut, so you can expect to see a 0.5.1 release within a few weeks. Special thanks to Alex Launi, Jason Smith, Chris Halse Rogers, Jorge Castro, Jason Imison, Jason Jones, Jacob Andreas, Guillaume Beland, Ken Simon, Mathieu Cadet, Rick Harding, and all the rest. Ubuntu users may get 0.5 packages from our Launchpad PPA, and you can find source packages on our downloads page.

Finally, GNOME Do is free software

Compared Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera 9.5, and Safari for speed, memory usage, script loading and startup time

Speed Testing the Latest Web Browsers

Read the hype on every new web browser released or due out this year, and you'll see claims that every one of them is "faster" than all the others. You could compare super-specific tests and decipher all the code-brain terminology, and you'd still be left wondering which browser starts quicker, uses less memory, and slides through dynamic interfaces like Gmail the fastest. Since our squadron of independent analysts had the week off, we ran the latest editions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera 9.5, and Safari for Windows through some unscientific but highly geeky tests ourselves on a plain old Windows computer. Take a look at the full (and somewhat unexpected) results after the jump.

The testing system

For the sake of rating all four of the latest new-and-improved browsers in the same environment, I tested the most current releases of Internet Explorer 7, Opera 9.5, Safari for Windows 3.1.1, and the third Release Candidate of Firefox 3 (which is pretty darned close to the final version dropping Tuesday) on my Windows Vista laptop. Each browser was installed completely fresh, and, in the case of Internet Explorer 7, re-set to its new-install settings.

Here are the specs of my test system, for comparisons and curiosity:

• OS: Windows Vista Home Premium (32-bit)
• Processor: 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
• Memory: 2 GB

I looked far and wide for free, easy-to-grasp benchmarking software that could cover all four of the browsers I wanted to test, which covered every major aspect, and came up short. Instead, I tested the browsers the way most people experience them—click, wait, then watch each page load. Using Rob Keir's simple but millisecond-accurate timer, I launched every action with a dual tap of the enter and "\" keys (pictured at right) to set the timer, then tapped the "\" key again when what I wanted to load had arrived. I re-ran tests when I thought I'd been slow, and each score below is an average of three or more trials.

Scientific and precise? Heck no. Easy to understand and free from selective prejudice? Very much so. I did use two tests assembled by inquisitive programmers for the more technical stuff, and noted that below. Now, onto the results!

Test 1: Startup time—Winner: Opera!

Taking a page from Mark Wilton-Jones' oft-linked tests, I timed each browser loading "cold" (straight off a re-start, not having run already) and "warm" (having run at least once that session). Vista can be very fickle at boot-up (at least on my system) and slow things down considerably, so I used each browsers' best times from launching to loading a locally-saved Google home page (which both cuts out network variations and explains the speedier boot times):

A pleasant surprise that Firefox 3 boots faster than 2 (from deep-seated memory, at least), as well as how quick Opera moves in general, at least compared to Safari in this test.

Next, I opened each browser two times and headed to a random bookmark to jog it a little. Here's their speeds at their next "warm" boot-up:

Surprisingly consistent—note that Firefox's seeming lapse is less than 0.2 seconds, which could certainly fall under margin of error.

Now for the real test. I placed a folder of eight links—from the super-clean Google homepage to the image and Flash-heavy Gizmodo and YouTube sites, and a few familiar stops in-between—in each browser, ran to the Lifehacker page and back to "warm" it up, then timed each browser's version of "open all in tabs" from first click until the last little circle stopped spinning. Opera, unfortunately, uses a more subtle coloration change to indicate load speed, so I had to rely on the status bar as well. The results:

You probably won't cry over a two-second delay when loading eight tabs, but Safari and Opera were surprisingly swift at multi-tasking in general (and we'll see why later).

Test 2: JavaScript & CSS—Winner: Safari!

JavaScript loading times get a lot of attention from folks like, say, Steve Jobs these days. That's because with the increasing prominence of AJAX interfaces on sites like Gmail, Twitter, and other webapps, a browser's ability to perform multiple quick computations can be far more important than a nanosecond advantage at text and table rendering.

You'll never get every browser team agreeing on what's a fair JavaScript test, as each platform has its own quirks and rules of working with it. Sean Patrick Kane's JavaScript speed tests has pulled attention from all over, however, not least because he's worked to make it more fair to all comers.

Here's the stats from Sean's test (in miliseconds):

I also tested each browser's ability to render Cascading Style Sheets, the design templates of a page, using nontropp's downloadable form:

I'm thinking Safari's big lead in CSS rendering is how it creates that everything-snaps-at-once feel when loading pages. And, for a browser that somewhat auto-loads with my OS, Internet Explorer has yet to bring a worthwhile statistic to the table.

At this point, you might certainly wondering just where Firefox 3's vaunted speed/performance/stability improvements might actually, you know, matter. Follow along, then, to the other side of speed.

Test 3: Memory use—Winner: Firefox 3!

Unless you're rocking a workstation with more memory than you can spare, browsers shouldn't be using all your RAM and slowing other apps to a trickle. Firefox 2 was notorious for bloating far beyond its fighting weight after steady use, but developers' hard work seems to have paid off, at least by my tests:

The blue portion is each browsers' memory use when first started, and the red extensions their size (according to Windows Task Manager) with those same eight tabs above opened. Again, few people will have eight tabs open, but I scaled it to see where the differences lie. I wanted to double-check Firefox's night-and-day improvement, so I closed and launched it again. This time, it was using 117MB—not a slim amount, but a still marked improvement over its peers. Of course, if you do have memory to spare, both Safari and Opera, as seen higher up, can put it to quick-footed use.

Conclusions

Let's re-emphasize that this was far from a scientific study, and your mileage will certainly vary on different systems. With Opera and Firefox especially, running a like-new version is somewhat of a cheat—almost any enthusiast is going to have a must-have extensions, features, and add-ons running, which throw off the speed and memory scales. Still, it was gratifying to actually sit down and measure all the major browser options on a human level, just a timer, a spreadsheet, and a few cups of nerve-boosting coffee. Thanks to x40sw0n for inspiring this post!

What's your take on the battle for browser speed? What essential tricks and tips have you used to whip your web software into shape? Let's hear your takes on all this data in the comments.

Kevin Purdy, associate editor at Lifehacker, feels like he just got home from a seriously nerdy five-way date. His weekly feature, Open Sourcery, appears every Friday on Lifehacker.

ref: http://lifehacker.com

integer to string in python

Converting from 1 to '1'
===============



X = 1

str(x)

Firefox locked on the linux

Go to the root level

change the directory and go to the .mozilla\firefox

go to the XXXX.default directory and remove the lock by

rm - r lock

start the firefox ..... that's it.



-Mihir Patel.

gcc plug-in: Error: Object file not found on expected location

This is one of the error that annoyed me for 2 hours. Man i was not able to find any documentation or solution on the internet. But i have solved this problem now... and you guy's are luck if your are visiting this page.

if you hit the error then you should set the environment variables as follows

Name Value
TMP C:\temp
TEMP C:\temp

and save this and restart the computer and that's it ... the problem is solved...

-Mihir Patel.

bash.exe: warning: could not find /tmp, please create!

If you are getting this Warning while compilation then

Set your two environment variable as

Name Value
TEMP C:\temp
TMP C:\temp

Save the settings and restart the computer and you should be fine.

-Mihir Patel.

Load a sequence of images into matlab

Following script allows a user to read images in a folder; in a sequence.
=================================================


%list all the files in current folder
filelist = dir();
images = [];

% the first two in filelist are . and ..
for i=3:size(filelist,1)

%filelist is not a folder
if filelist(i).isdir ~= true
fname = filelist(i).name;

% if file extension is jpg
if strcmp( fname(size(fname,2)-3:size(fname,2)) ,'.jpg' ) == 1
tmp = imread(fname);

% Concatenate images one after other ( in sequence)

images = [images tmp];
disp([fname 'loaded']);

end
end
end

Installting XMMS in ubuntu

To install xmms player in ubuntu fire the following command

sudo apt-get install xmms-xmmplayer

Note : nearly 19 MB download