Not everyone in the world uses Windows Media Player, for reason of their own choosing. Some refuse to use it for it’s sound quality and lack of custom settings in controlling it, others find it’s lack of codecs a painful reminder of how bad a mass developed music player can be. Personally, my choice of using AIMP2 is due to how Windows Media crashes over the simplest things, and can not handle the entire volume of my music as it is in a multitude of different formats, from FLAC to OGG to MP3 to WAV.

However, over previous months, I have always wondered how come Windows Live users and MSN users had to use WMP for their ‘Now Playing’ to work, but no other media players could work out of the box. It’s been a feature that has upset me and eluded answer for a while, as I’d like to show off what I’m listening to, too. Shouldn’t we all be allowed to share our favorite tunes? While this isn’t something that a lot of people might want to consider, there is a way to make the mass majority of the players out there work with Now Playing.

If you live in a big city such as Kuala Lumpur, I am sure you’ve lost your way before while looking for the destination that you’re trying to get to. Moreover the city itself is so big and sometimes when someone tells you a location, you don’t even know where it is. If you have a GPS unit, you don’t need to worry about it because it can definitely guide you to the destination that you set. If not, what you can do is to call up your friends, ask them if they know the place or you can bring out a map and try to see if you can find the location.

Another way is to install Garmin MapSource, try to look for free maps and then do your homework before you leave to your destination. Using MapSource to find a location and driving directions is way easier than using the paper maps because a good map file allows you to “search” for the name of the place, address, and etc. I’ll show you how easy it is to find a location and driving directions using MapSource.

I hope you still remember the 13 antivirus rescue CDs that I’ve tested and here is another one from ESET. Even RISING Antivirus has officially included a rescue CD into their latest 2009 release. Actually I wanted to test ESET’s rescue disk when it was still in BETA but it turns me off because it requires me to download a file that is over a gigabyte in order to create the Rescue LiveCD.

ESET SysRescue is a new feature that you can find in the latest ESET NOD32 Antivirus v4 and ESET Smart Security v4. ESET SysRescue is a utility that enables you to create bootable media such as a CD, DVD or USB flash drive. Users can boot an infected computer from this recovery medium to both scan and clean the system. The main advantage is that ESET Smart Security can run independent from the host operating system with direct access to the disk and the entire file system, making it possible to remove infiltrations that normally could not be deleted (e.g., when the operating system is running, etc.).

It enables users to diagnose and recover compromised systems more easily. Customers build their own system rescue CDs, which can be used to clean up and repair systems compromised by malware without reimaging the system. Here’s how to create a SysRescue CD together with my simple review on it.

The latest ESET v4 comes with SysRescue which is a Live CD to. However when I wanted to create SysRescue Live CD, I was asked to download and install Windows Automated Installation Kit first. The size of the file is shockingly huge at 1.34GB! After finished downloading, I thought it was a setup file where I could run and install the required WAIK. Then I found out that it was an ISO file. No big deal because I normally use PowerArchiver to extract the ISO file so I can access the files without burning it to a disc. It took merely 2 seconds to extract and there is only 1 README.TXT file in the extracted folder. In the text file it says “This disc contains a “UDF” file system and requires an operating system that supports the ISO-13346 “UDF” file system specification.”

Looks like PowerArchiver doesn’t support extracting ISO-13346 (UDF) images. I’ve even tried using Universal Extractor to extract the ISO-13346 UDF image but failed. I certainly don’t want to burn that ISO to a disc so the next solution to access the files in the ISO image is to use Virtual CD/DVD-ROM emulator to mount the image file to a drive letter.

Here are 10 free virtual CD/DVD emulator that you can use to mount images. Some are very simple and small that are just meant for mounting image files but some has more features such as allowing you to create images from a CD/DVD.

Usually an installation file comes in one setup file. When you run it to install the software on your computer, it actually extracts a lot of files to a default location, normally in Program Files. Some will even drop a few critical driver files in Windows folder. At the same time, it will add some keys in your registry if the software is programmed to read the settings from registry. When you want to uninstall the software, it has an uninstaller to automate the process but if the uninstaller is corrupted, manually deleting the software from Program Files can cause instability to Windows.

There are third party uninstall utility such as Revo Uninstaller but I never use it because I know for a fact that it is not a perfect uninstall utility that works all the time. The best way is to monitor and track the file and registry changes when you want to install the software. There are a few popular registry and file changes monitoring tool such as SysTracer, RegSnap, Tracker, WhatChanged and fileWATCH but they all cost money to buy the license key. I also don’t like to use FileMon, RegMon or Process Monitor because it logs everything and can be confusing. As an alternative, here are 5 free software that can be used to track file and registry changes.

I got an email asking me is it possible to decrypt MD5 hashed strings and if yes, how? Usually I ignore these kind of question but since MD5 is used in WordPress, I thought it might be useful to write a little about it in case you’ve forgotten your WordPress password. In cryptography, MD5 (Message-Digest algorithm 5) is a widely-used cryptographic hash function with a 128-bit hash value. MD5 was designed by Ronald Rivest in 1991 to replace an earlier hash function, MD4. As an Internet standard, MD5 has been employed in a wide variety of security applications.

Before we ask how to decrypt MD5 strings, we should first ask is it even POSSIBLE to decrypt it. I am no PRO in encryption because I hated mathematics, but I manage to find out how it works.

Have you ever wonder how does people easily extract emails or some part of information from a file or website? An example is whenever I organize a software giveaway, one email is considered as one entry. I can’t be copying and pasting thousand over emails one by one, so what I did was use regular expressions to search for an email string and extract it to a file.

A regular expression (regex or regexp for short) is a special text string for describing a search pattern. You can think of regular expressions as wildcards on steroids. You are probably familiar with wildcard notations such as *.txt to find all text files in a file manager. The regex equivalent is .*\.txt$.

Regular expressions can be also used in online forms to make sure you submit the correct information. You can write a regular expressions to check for the correct email format, phone number where it uses all digits/numbers and etc. I was trying to fill up a form but no matter how I tried, the form wouldn’t accept the phone number format. When I viewed the HTML source code, I found that it uses regular expressions to check for the valid phone number format. Sounds easy but analyzing how regular expression works is not easy. After a little research, I found 2 ways that is able to decode and explain the analyzed regular expressions.