Have you ever wanted to monitor a web page or URL and then automatically get notified when the page is updated? Probably you are using some software that you cannot live without and it has a terrible bug. You’ve reported the bug to the author of the software but is only promised to be fixed within 1-2 months time. Manually checking the website or changelog page daily is just a waste of time. Or perhaps you would like to get notified when a raffle is running on our website so you won’t miss out any chances in winning a free license. Website-Watcher, in my humble opinion is one of the most powerful if not the most powerful webpage monitoring software but it is a shareware and requires to run on a computer with an internet connection. If you don’t want to install a software just to monitor one or a few web pages for changes, you can give ChangeDetection a try.

ChangeDetection is a page change monitoring and notification services offered for free to internet users worldwide since 1999. All you need to do is specify the website page that you want to monitor and your email address for them to send the notification when ChangeDetection detected changes on the monitored website page.

A video demo is obviously much better if compared to a step-by-step instructions in text with screenshots. However, the video demo has to be recorded in a comfortable level of clarity so that the viewer is able to easily see what is on the video. Other than that, creating a video demo is also more time consuming because you need to edit the video by fast forwarding or cutting off useless frames, adding overlays to censor some parts that you don’t want to show and uploading it to a video hosting site such as YouTube. A much convenient method is to just share your screen in real time to the other party probably to show the error that you’re experiencing or a demo on how to configure some settings on a third party software.

There are many software that we can use to allow other people to view our computer screen and one of my favorite is TeamViewer. However TeamViewer requires to download a software to run it on a computer where some users may not be comfortable in doing that. Probably one of the easiest method to share your screen is by using Screenleap. Screenleap is an online service where both the viewer and sharer don’t need to install any software to view and share the computer screen.

The fact is no antivirus will ever achieve 100% detection with 0 false positive. Even if it does, it won’t maintain at that perfect score in the next test. Therefore you should not fully trust your antivirus but use it only as a reference. One good example is a Remote Administration Tool such as DarkComet encrypted to bypass antivirus detection. I am glad that some of you found and clean the DarkComet infection from your computer using the DarkComet RAT Remover tool when your antivirus failed to detect it in the first place. So if your antivirus says that your computer is clean, don’t think that your computer is definitely free from any malware. It is always better to play safe by using a password manager or a keystroke encryption software to prevent from any possible keylogger capturing what you type on your keyboard.

Another way to increase the detection rate of malware on your computer is to scan with other antivirus engine. For example, if you have Kaspersky Anti-Virus installed on your computer, you should be using a different brand of antivirus engine to scan instead of using the standalone Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool because both Kaspersky Anti-Virus and Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool uses the same virus definition and scanning technology. Obviously you are going to get the same results.

One suggestion is to use the free Sophos Virus Removal Tool that works alongside your existing antivirus. The Sophos Virus Removal tool is capable of scanning memory, including system memory on 32-bit Windows, registry, all local hard drives and offers to remove when any infection (viruses, spyware, rootkits, fake antivirus) is found.

3 years ago Raymond.cc won the Chapeau’s Best Technology and Most Brilliant Blog, thanks to all the votes that you’ve casted. Today I am again asking for your help to vote raymond.cc for the Fave Tech Head category for the WWWOW Internet For All Awards 2012.

To vote for Raymond.cc at DiGi WWWOW Awards, all you need to do is:

1. Visit the voting page

2. Click on the yellow VOTE NOW button

3. You will need either a Twitter of Facebook account to cast your vote. If you’re not logged in to either of the services, you will be forwarded to a page that asks you to login. Simply click on the Connect with Facebook button to vote using your Facebook account, or click the Sign in with Twitter button to vote using your Twitter account.

The voting procedures may be a bit complicated to some users. To determine that your vote is counted, make sure that the VOTE NOW button changes to VOTED. If it still shows VOTE NOW, then you will need to click the VOTE NOW button again.

The voting closes one week from today which is on 13 May 2012. Do get your families and friends to vote for me and help make this site win the Fave Tech Head award! Thanks!

VOTE FOR RAYMOND.CC

Web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera are considered very fast due to the cache. For example, if you’ve previous visited raymond.cc and then when you re-visit raymond.cc from a bookmark or manually typing it in the address bar the next time, you will notice that the webpage loads very quickly, thanks to the web browser automatically loading the files from the local cache for most of the requests instead of redownloading the images, javascripts, CSS and etc. It is possible for the webmaster to configure the expiration date of the cached files so that your web browser will automatically recheck if the files are modified upon reaching the expiration time and will automatically pull the latest version if it is newer than the cache stored locally on your computer. The cache used by web browsers is truly a useful technology to save both time and bandwidth resources for the user and for the server as well.

We all know that every web browsers comes with a refresh or reload button but do you know exactly what it does when you click on that button? Do you also know the difference between a soft and hard refresh? Well I recently wanted to know the refresh webpage function myself so I’ve done some research and testing to understand more about this.

If you need to test some PHP script, template designs, plugins or even making minor changes on the code, it is always advisable to do it locally on your computer rather than doing it on your production site which could probably annoy some of your visitors if they encounter problems caused by the modification. In order to test it locally, you cannot just run the PHP script from Windows Explorer. You will need to install a local webserver, either IIS or Apache and probably MySQL for database support for some scripts such as WordPress that requires it. The easiest way to have a webserver, database and FTP running on your computer is by using XAMPP. Just download the portable version, extract it on your computer, run the control panel program (xampp-control.exe) from the XAMPP folder and click the Start button according to the services that you want to run.

Recently I encountered a problem in starting the Apache server from XAMPP. Whenever I click on the Start button for Apache, the log window shows Apache start [Port 80] but the program does not show that Apache is running. I tried to access the localhost address from my web browser and it reports that the link appears to be broken. I was able to start the MySQL service without problems.

The first thing that came to my mind was port 80 is being used by another program because different services cannot share the same port number. I ran the netstat command and found that Skype was using both port 80 and 443.

DarkComet is a remote administration tool that opens an invisible backdoor giving the controller full access to the computer including access to the hard drive, activating webcam and sound capture, keylogging to steal username and passwords by capturing keystrokes and many more. DarkComet is one of the very few free remote administration tool that has been in development for such a long time. About 2 months ago CNN reported that the Syrian government was using a free and publicly available remote administration tool called DarkComet to spy on the supporters of the Syrian opposition. When the coder of DarkComet got to know about this, he quickly created a remover for his own tool to fix what the Syrian government did to the opposition movement.

Since DarkComet can be downloaded publicly, the server file that is generated from it is obviously fully detected by most if not all antiviruses. So anyone with the intention of infecting another person’s Windows computer will have to make the server file fully undetectable by crypting it to bypas the antivirus detection. What makes DarkComet RAT Remover special is the ability to detect DarkComet’s presence even if it is virtualized, packed, encrypted, compressed or obfuscated.