Now with such a good machine, one would be surprised to find out that it could not run a 64bit guest operating system because the virtualization features of the processor are disabled by default in the computer’s Basic Input Output System(BIOS). A simple solution to this problem would be to go to the BIOS and enable the processor’s virtualization features; I mean, it should be a simple toggle setting – either enabled or not. Well, lets just say that it is NOT that simple, and thus the point of this post.

Many HP Laptops come with what I like to call ‘bloatware’. These are add-on software packages that you will find installed on your new pc in addition to the operating system. More often than not, most of these are trying to upsell you some service or product. Trial versions of commercial antivirus software are commonplace in this scenario. Sometimes though, quite some useful software is added onto the system, and these are the software packages that work well with specific hardware features of your computer; take for example HP Connection Manager that lets me easily manage all my networking devices.

In as much as I appreciate software that makes computing easier, the rule that a simpler a system is to use, the more complex it is to build and maintain, seems to have held, at least in as far as HP ProtectTools is concerned.

HP ProtectTools is a lovely piece of software that offers enhanced security for your HP Notebook while also managing your passwords and other credentials (fingerprints, face recognition, e.t.c.), device access, users and password recovery options (what HP likes to call the Spare Key). It is also a major headache if you intend to work with your BIOS. This is because it will in-avertedly prevent your from being able to edit your BIOS settings.

How does it do this? If the BIOS administrator password on your notebook is not set (which it wont be since your computer will be new), and HP ProtectTools security is enabled in Security Manager (which it is by default on new computers), then you will not be able to enter the Computer Setup utility at startup as a BIOS administrator who can make changes. You will only be allowed to enter the setup as a ProtectTools user with limited access.

Now, there is a way of solving this problem. It has taken me the better part of a month, and hours of chatting with HP support staff (who were not much help) to find the hidden customer advisory support communication that provides a solution. A solution to a problem that HP creates itself by installing bloatware on new pcs. For details on the fix that finally allowed me to enable virtualization on my machine, click here. In the mean time, check your PC and see if you can edit your BIOS. You never know when you (or your resident geek) might require it to sort out an issue with your PC or peripheral.

Over the last couple of weeks and for the foreseeable future, there has been and will be quite a bit of talk concerning G-Pange and Shuga. Just this morning, that was the main topic of discussion for a clean hour on the morning show of a famous local radio station that does not have a website but has a whole television station named after it. Now, seeing as I and many other people are bound to have missed the premier of the second season of the show maybe because it screened on a station that yenyewe for some reason since they moved to UHF my TV (and I suppose many others) simply cannot get clearly (KBC – Kenya Broadcasting Cooperation – does KBC2 still exist? Someone holla in the comments) or maybe because people simply do not watch KBC. Anyhow, luckily, the MTV Shuga guys are on point, and they do post entire, add free episodes of their show on Vimeo. Kudos to them for doing that. The only problem is in as much as they have availed the show (or at least the first episode) free to watch via their website, streaming is still something that our bandwidth, even with nearly all mobile networks having 3G (and 4G on the way on some networks), cannot handle very well and watching jerky videos off your browser is just seriously annoying.  So, how do you get the video off Vimeo and onto your hard disk (or flash drive) using office net so that you can enjoy it later, at home without pauses or adverts?

Userscripts! And Firefox of course. Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows for installation of mainly JavaScript based userscripts that interact with the webpages loading on your browser as you surf. So, all one has to do to easily download the first episode of Shuga season 2 (and the others, when they eventually release them) from Vimeo is follow the simple instructions below.

1. Download and Install Firefox from here if you do not have it.
2. Run Firefox (the below instructions assume that you are now reading this blog post from Firefox. If not, go to this post on Firefox.)
3. Download and install the Greasemonkey Firefox extension from here (Click on the green Add to Firefox button on the webpage that loads)
4. Download and install the Free Youtube! user script from here. (Click on the Install button on the top right corner of the webpage that loads).
5. Go to the MTV Shuga website here.
6. Look for and locate the video that you want to download.
7. Right click on the video and select the ‘Watch on Vimeo’ option. This will open the video on the Vimeo site and there will be a download either in place of the video (if you have unsupported players) or under the video (if you have supported players).
8. Click on the Download link and you are good to go.

Now, should you know how to achieve this same feat on other browsers, please advise and I will update the instructions to cater for those who prefer other browsers to Firefox.

As a mathematician, there was no way I could support Zambia because yenyewe the odds were stacked up against them. So, seeing as neither of the countries there were Kenya or Uganda, not all my heart was there but I must say, congratulations to the Zambian bullets. As for akina Drogba, who should have won this tournament, better luck next time, and for crying out loud – can you all learn how to take penalties! I am not the biggest fan of soccer but I do not like supporting the technically better and greater but losing side.

In other news, we won a ‘plate’ and beating Argentina in Las Vegas this weekend. Someone please advise me if this is a good thing or bad thing. I am truly not too sure between the cup, plate and shield, which we really should be wanting to hold. All in all, we won so, Congratulations Rugby Team!

NB: Just realized, shortest post so far….hmmm….

Whitney Houston is dead. How sad is that. Well, as Dr. Gregory House keeps on reminding us, for those who watch House…’everybody lies’  and if we twist that just a little bit, we get another truth, so to speak…’everybody dies’. So do rest in peace Whitney.

I will leave that there seeing as a quick Google search reveales 604 million results and several thousand news related articles on the topic so for more details on that, click here. Now back to some interesting news I was tracking on the twitter-verse concerning the takedown of the CIA site via DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service Attack). Many people are saying that if the CIA website can be attacked and taken down, then seriously, is there a site that can’t be brought down? And to that question, I answer – probably YES!  Bring me the guy(s) who take down Google, Yahoo, and Facebook (Twitter is not on that list because it normally does a good enough job of taking itself down from time to time) and I will literally kneel in front of them and kiss their feet! Why do I say this? Read on.

So the CIA site was down. That should represent a great feat that one was able to get though the mighty defenses of the CIA. But it does not and here is why.

The CIA is not about its site. They do not wake up early in the morning and check if their site is up and chase all those people who are trying to hack it. I am sure that their web server is nowhere close to the servers that hold sensitive data and stuff. In short, their website is NOT their core business, and they most certainly have other things at the top of their to-do list.

So their site goes down, what is the worst the could happen? A few people doing some searches or research wont find out the telephone numbers for their nearest CIA office from the official CIA site. At which point, all they would have to do is look at search result number two or three in the provided search results from the engine they are using, and they would be good to go with credible info from various 3rd party websites that most likely also carry the info being searched or researched.

Guess who spends every waking hour ensuring their websites are up and running?  Google. And I bet you so does the ten billion dollar website, better known to everybody as Facebook. I can give several other examples, but my point is these sites I believe, cant be brought down by a simple DDOS attack maybe because normal operations to them would be regarded as a DDOS attack on another smaller site seeing as they are constantly getting traffic from all over the place and are normally able to handle it with relative ease.

I gather it would be nearly impossible to bring down sites whose core business is the site. And therefore, until Anonymous or whichever other hacking group bring down a site worthy of praise, then I suppose all the praise they put on themselves is a load of bullocks. And the thought that the internet is in one way or another doomed or unsafe just because a few people were able to bring down a small website like the CIA one is quite preposterous.

So to all who think that these hackers are the greatest, I say to you, think again. Its easy to look good when you publicly go after small fish and present only that side of the story. Let Anonymous catch some big fish and come back to us. Only and only then will I recognize them as the hackers they claim to be.

PS – I do hope though, that they do not come after this site.

I used quite a few of the extensions I recommended in my earlier post converning Firefox’s memory leaks; I finally settled one extension as a viable solution to the problem. Memory Fox. It is small, simple, easy to configure, and works like charm. In fact, you do not even notice it and that is what I love about it. Simple tool, doing great work in the background. That is how good software should behave. So far, I have not had issues with it, even when doing upgrades and that sort of stuff. I normally hate it when an extension I depend on for one reason or another suddenly loses compatibility with the version of Firefox installed, especially in light of the fact that Firefox nowadays frequently updates itself to newer versions. And seeing as I am on the Beta channel, those updates tend to break installed extensions. But not Memory Fox .(Now that I think about it, could Mozilla maybe have finally fixed the memory leaks in Firefox? It does not help their case that they have had leaks consistently since version 3. I am on Firefox 11 Beta and I still assume that Memory Fox is still doing its work though I am not too sure if it has to. If you know something I don’t, holla at me in the comments. ).

Now that I have fixed your Firefox issues, can someone help me fix my banking issues! Is it just me or are sales people in banks the worst carder of people to deal with. This is the promise I got, or rather, the information that the bank gives you when you try to open a Business Account.

“It takes 5 working days to open an account upon submission of all required documents”

This is what the bank should be saying

“It actually takes a minimum of two weeks before you have a hope of getting a functional  business account, but just to be on the safe side, wait three weeks. In the mean time, we shall not communicate to you any progress in the opening your account, and do not bother coming to the bank to enquire because our customer care staff at hand will not be able to assist you and the sales person who is handling your account will conveniently be on assignment in the field.”

KCB, seriously! Style up! It’s a wonder why they take so many personal details from their clients only to never use them unless they are charging you while utilizing your details. The only time the bank will send you an SMS is when you will have subscribed to their paid SMS service. They will only come to your residence when you need a loan and they want to know where you live (so that they can carry away your television and set of sofas if you fail to pay back the loan) or to value of the house you are putting down as collateral; and they will even charge you for that by the way.

If you have had any bad bank experience, feel free to share here. KCB! Arghhhhhhh!

Linux

Step 1: Obtain your desired .img  or .iso file

Step 2: Obtain software for writing images to USB drive. I currently know of two application, namely SUSE Studio Image Wrtier (if you are using SLE of openSUSE – you may install using YaST. For other distributions, you may be required to do some searching) or usb-imagewriter available for Ubuntu (use apt-get install usb-imagewriter if you do not have it installed or it did not come with your distribution. It can also be downloaded from Oliver’s PPA.

Step 3: Locate and open your image writing application (if required to become root, please do so)

Step 4: Insert your flash media

Step 5: Select the image file and flash device

Step 6: Click ‘Write’ or ‘Write to Device’ and wait for process to complete

Step 7: Safely remove your flash device when process is complete. You can now boot the image from the flash device.

Windows

Step 1: Obtain your desired .img or .iso file

Step 2: Obtain software for writing images to USB drive. You may use the windows version of SUSE Studio Image writer from here or you can also use Unetbootin whose latest version can be gotten here and run it. Image Writer for Windows is also an application you can use.

Step 3: Locate and open your image writing application (if required to become root, please do so)

Step 4: Insert your flash media

Step 5: Select the image file and flash device

Step 6: Click ‘Write’ or ‘Write to Device’ and wait for process to complete

Step 7: Safely remove your flash device when process is complete. You can now boot the image from the flash device.

Anyhow, for those who are not in the know of who were fortunate enough not be be stuck in traffic listening to trash, the gist of the story is that Maina Kagemi’s topic revolved around a lady who had left her husband for Duala, seemingly calling it quits on their thirteen year marriage and leaving him with two kids to handle.

As if that was not enough drama, one of the calling contributors turned out to be the accused woman, who foolishly introduced herself with both her names (must have been wanting to spite the husband) and says that she is not in Duala, but still here in Nairobi. She then continues to call the man out claiming he is a wife beating, insecure drunk that she just could not stand any more. Now, at this point, I was nodding my head thinking WTF and expected that story to end there but nooooooo…Kenyans just cannot fail in taking an opportunity to showcase the rot in society.

Anyhow, moving on. Maina’s next move was to call the guy back, to try and get him to answer to the accusation laid against him. I would have bet real hard money that the guy would not pick up or if he did, he would quickly realize his mistake and disconnect the call but to my amazement, a lot more crap happened!

First, I would have lost my money coz the foolish guy did pick up the call, and claimed that the woman who had talked was not his wife and that someone was speaking on her behalf. At this point, things now get interesting. Any man with some modicum of sense would have left it at that, count your losses and get off the air but again….nooooooo! This foolish man stayed on the line as the radio station called backed the wife, and his earlier claim that the woman was not his wife was thrown out in a sec. They then got into a tiff that just lasted too long. Now, the whole country knows that they are due on court this Friday, although not sure if it is for a divorce hearing, battery hearing, or custody hearing. WTF!

Now, my issue with this public display of crap is seriously, how STUPID can one get! If I get my count right, this fellow had quite a few chances to save his skin but he tried to argue with his agitated wife on air. That was just spectacularly stupid on his par. I wonder how the courts are going to handle their case now that it has just escalated to a media spectacle!

To all who may be reading this, please, PLEASE, do not call into your radio station, It is a waste of time and resources. And I think the censorship board of somebody with such authority should step in and prevent such crap from being aired on popular radio stations. I know there is rot in the society but seriously, we are not all that bad and focusing on the 2% that is that bad just presents an bad and false picture of society.

Now, back to work people! But just before you go….for those who have forgotten just how spectacular the OMG busted was, here you go.

Now, to think that this new one was even longer and maybe more spectacularly dreadful….I will update once I get a you tube link to it coz I know it will be up before the end of the day. Till then…back to work people!

This tutorial will show you how to hide the border around the Facebook Like Box. It takes advantage of negative margins and the overflow property of CSS to hide the border of the Facebook Like Box under a container div.

[UPDATE]

I compiled below changes into an easily installable Joomla module. So, find below a download link to the module for Joomla 1.7/2.5

Download JA Facebook Like Box Module with Remove Border Tweaks

This is what the Facebook Like Box looks if you apply the plugin code directly to your site without any modification. Note that I set “header” to false so it does not display the text “Find us on Facebook”.

Now, here goes the code to modify the like box to hide its borders

First, wrap the plugin code in two divs. Here I called the outer div “facebook-like-box” and the inner div “inner”.

<div class="facebook-like-box"><div class="inner">
<!-- Facebook Plugin Code --->
<iframe
src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?id=315708125131457&width=300&height=300&connections=10&stream=false&header=false”
scrolling="no" frameborder="0"
style="overflow:hidden; width:300px;height:300px; allowTransparency:true;"></iframe>
<!-- End Facebook Plugin Code –>
</div></div>

Next, increase the height and width of the Facebook Like Box by four pixels. In this example, I have increased the height and width from 300 pixels to 304 pixels. This will increase the size of the Like Box by two pixels in every direction.

<div class="facebook-like-box"><div class="inner">
<!-- Facebook Plugin Code --->
<iframe
src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?id=315708125131457&width=304&height=304&connections=10&stream=false&header=false”
scrolling="no" frameborder="0"
style="overflow:hidden; width:304px;height:304px; allowTransparency:true;"></iframe>
<!-- End Facebook Plugin Code –>
</div></div>

Finally, update your style sheet with the following modifications. Set the width and the height of the outer div to the original width and height, not the increased width and height from the step above. In this example, the original plugin code specified a width and height of 300 pixels. This will hide the Like Box border under the outer div.

.facebook-like-box {
width: 300px;
height: 300px;
overflow: hidden;
position: relative; /* For IE7 Compatibility */
}

.facebook-like-box .inner {
margin: -2px 0 0 -2px;
}

Once the aforementioned modifications are applied, you ought to end up with something that looks like this.

If you have any questions about this tutorial, please feel free to leave a comment.

Update

I have taken my own advise and used this tutorial to create a Facebook Likebox module with the above tweaks in the module. It is a simple module fashioned off  Joomlart’s JA Facebook Likebox Module for Joomla 1.7 – and I suppose 2.5 too! So seeing as this is a simple hack, I will not rebrand and try to submit all the code as mine coz frankly speaking, all I did was tweak one or two things here and there.

So, find below a download link to the module for Joomla 1.7/2.5

Download JA Facebook Like Box Module with Remove Border Tweaks

Things to Note:

1. Seeing as I simply edited the original code, this module will NOT co-exist with the original Joomlart JA Facebook Like Box module. You will be required to uninstall the Joomlart version and install this tweaked one.
2. I will not tweak a version for Joomla 1.5 simply because that system is coming to end of life sooner than I can say OMG and Joomla 2.5 is an LTS (Long Time Support) release so, it is about time we all made the shift to the newer code base.

Use JCE Editor instead of TinyMCE

Joomla Content Editor, or JCE, is an alternative editor to the default editors that come with an ordinary Joomla! installation. This editor features all the goodies of TinyMCE and adds an advanced Link Insertion Tool that allows for easy linking to Joomla! content. This is what the JCE Advanced Link plug-in looks like.

As you can see, this link plugin makes it possible to link text in the article or module or whichever extension is using the editor, to Joomla! content, contacts, menu items and even web links saved in the system. That ideally easily solves the problem of linking text to internal Joomla! articles, or resources.

To install the JCE editor, go to the JCE downloads page and download a copy of the editor, and then use the Extension Manager (Joomla! 1.6, 1.7, 2.5) or Install/Uninstall (Joomla! 1.5) tool in Joomla! to install the editor. You then need to go to your Global Configuration Page and change the default editor to JCE. If you do not find the option for the JCE editor in the Global Configurations, go to your Plugins Manager and ensure that the newly installed editor is enabled.

Manual Linking to Articles

This is a more direct method of linking and leverages knowledge of how Joomla! works. You may use this method on any WYSIWYG editor.

Step 1: Go to your article manager and find the article you want to link to.

Step 2: Note the ID of this article – This is normally the number of the last (right-most) column of the article you want to link to.

Step 3: Go to the edit page of where you want to insert the link of the article.

Step 4: Select the text to be linked to the article and click on the ‘link to’ button in the editor

Step 5: In the popup form, put the following text in the ‘link’ field

index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=<id>

Replace <id> with the ID number that you noted in Step 2

Step 6: Input other parameters of the link and insert it

And that is it. You will have manually linked to your desired Joomla! article. Clicking on the link created will take you to the linked article.

And people, there you have it. Now you should be able to link to Joomla! articles easily. Should you have any questions, please feel free to comment. Now, back to code!

Websites, blogs, and parasitic online presence on other sites is an organization’s or individual’s gateway to the world. And it is quite an obvious fact that you only have one chance to make a first impression so design is key! I know, many Kenyans do not like paying for good design but I believe the time is fast approaching when we will seriously have to consider design in any aspect of yourself or your organization that you are presenting to the entire globe.

As a web developer, I hope that the PesaDroid guys are looking at turning their website into a looker coz it just irks me that guys who can code that well are giving no thought as to the look, feel and functionality of their site.

**UPDATE**

I tried to email the PesaDroid guys in a bid to get them to maybe improve their site – and the email bounced! The one useful bit of information on their site – their email address – is not active! How unserious can they get! Damn!