Windows, at times, denies you the right to delete a file or a folder. I’ve noticed this happening especially when you copy the contents of the folder to empty it and later try to delete it. At this moment, you’ve got to ask yourself if you’ve got the necessary permissions to do so.

If you’re like many, you have admin privileges to your machine but you still can’t delete it. This is because Windows’ permissions table for this directory is broken and as a result, is denying you access. You can right click the folder, go to properties and look

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Earlier this week, I was maintaining a web-application when I noticed something weird. Some images were not shown on my browser at times. The application dynamically displayed images based on certain conditions using java script and every once in a while, an image would disappear. This only happened to me and would occur on Safari and Chrome.

Looking at the dev console told me that the browser couldn’t set new images to the img tag on the page since it “disappeared”. Investigation showed that the image that the tag disappeared after the image tag tried to show “ad.gif”.

I kept

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Custom resources allow you to store server side values that are available to different J2EE applications on your server. This is an extremely useful feature that one should use.

Head on over to the Glassfish admin panel (should be at localhost:4848 for most of you), go to Resources > JNDI > Custom Resources and create a new entry which looks like the following:

It is important to note here that if the name isn’t “value” (exactly), you will not be able to read this value via a InitialContext lookup in your Java code. You

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Most people don’t know about this but if you head on over to the Google I/O, their 2013 event website shows big I/O images that you can click and it reads out the letters ‘I’ and ‘O’. Enter the right code and you get nice effects. Here’s a list of codes you can try out.

• Cat Mode: IIIOOIII

• Space Mode: OOIOIOIO (doesn’t work on Android)

• Pong Mode: IOOOOOOI

• Bacon Mode: IOOIOOOO

• Simone Mode: IIOIOOII

• Eightbit Mode: OIOIOOII

• Synth Mode: IOOOIOOO

• Song Mode: IIOIIOII

• ASCII Mode: OIIIIIII

• Bowling Mode:

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TeraCopy is an amazing tool for Windows which allows users to queue up copy requests, pause them, re-order them and change copy file lists at run time. It’s got a lot of power and great integration with Windows. It’s a tool which I highly recommend.

Go check it out! I bet that you’ll love it so much that you wouldn’t mind paying $20 for it! ;)

There used to be a slightly long way to do this earlier but I found a simple one line command to do it. It is probably old but it’s one I didn’t know of.

convert L: /fs:NTFS

This converts L: to NTFS without removing any data from the drive. This process, all in all, requires less than 3 seconds.

I noticed that my old file list generator page didn’t have a valid link any more. Since I’d go through and upload it again, I guess it would be worth it to add some minor documentation and make the path variable optional as well :)

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Oh yes, it’s time I started uploading some of my old code to github. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while. For those unaware, I use Soccer Scraper to quickly view Manchester United’s schedule in IST. The base source code (circa 2008+minor fixes) is now on GitHub.

There are tons of things that need to be made configurable but first, I’d rather finish the SMS code that I had partly developed a while back along with the functional e-mail notification script. The only issue with the SMS functionality code is that it’s not stable since I scrape data onto

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I realize that over the past 3 and a half years I haven’t blogged as much as I used it. It’s not because I had nothing to say but was mainly because most things I had worked on were things I wasn’t allowed to talk about in public (thanks to NDAs and policies I needed to abide by). Since then, I’ve moved out of my previous organization and shall soon start working at a new place. Though the NDAs will continue, I am still allowed to pass along general learnings, which I’m keen to do.

More posts, coming soon!

If you’re having issues buying anything on XBox 360 and doesn’t even let you login to xbox.com and it keeps kicking you out, there is a chance that one of the credit cards you have stored on record is invalid.

If you read the XBox help on how to remove a payment option, they ask you to go to “Payment & Billing” and this site won’t be accessible either.

Your best bet is to go to commerce.microsoft.com and then to their “payment options” page. Here, you will see your credit card. Click on it and click remove. Add a new

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