a record of thoughts

If you have the 42″ Vizio HDTV and the HDMI ports are returning a “No signal” blue screen, use the procedure below:

1. Turn off all devices connected to the HDMI ports.
2. Turn off TV and unplug from the power outlet
3. Press and hold down the Power button on the side of the TV for 30 seconds, then release.
4. Together, press and hold down the Volume Down and Input buttons for 15 seconds, then release.
5. Power all equipment.
6. Plug the TV to the power outlet and power ON.

Hopefully, it works for you because it worked for me. Otherwise, call Vizio and deal with Tech Support.

UPDATE: The fix will cause inability to read mails.

I couldn’t let go of Google Chrome, so I checked bug reports and I found a temporary fix to the problem. For my future reference until Chrome devs fix the issue, here’s what needs to be done:

1. Right Click on the Google Chrome shortcut (Desktop or whereever you place it).
2. Left Click on Properties.
3. On the Target box, add the following line at the end:

--user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1 Safari/525.19"

Therefore, if you are running Chrome in Windows, your target should look like:

C:\path\to\chrome.exe --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1 Safari/525.19"

Close all instances of Chrome and open the browser again using the shorcut prepared above.

Since my thought (for an entry) escaped me, I’ll post a simple malware removal tutorial.

A few years ago, we called them annoying pop-ups and now we call them MALWARE. Virus is no longer trendy because it does not rake in revenue; malware does because it mostly contains advertising.

If you are a careless netizen and clicking on any pop-up that may appear in front of you, then you are the best malware victim. IT administrators should block all sites except for the ones that the company would need if their users do not abide by the usage policy. In the office, we are too scared to even use Google because internet usage is strictly prohibited unless needed and we can’t hardly slack because there’s too much work to be done.

One night I was victimized by a malware in my home PC. The site I used to frequent had a hidden malware injector through PDF. I’ve been removing malwares for others, so I’ll share the secret with everyone.

1. Download Hijackthis & SmitFraudFix (Google them)
2. Install Hijackthis.
3. Add an exception in your AntiVirus (add both softwares above).
4. Run Hijackthis & fix processes you don’t recognize.
5. Restart your computer in Safe Mode.
6. Run SmitFraudFix (option 2) and clean registry when prompted.
7. Restart your computer in Normal Mode.
8. Done!

To create a database and give a user privilege to that database:

mysql> CREATE DATABASE temp;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON temp.* TO 'bob'@'EEEPC'
    -> IDENTIFIED BY 'alice'
    -> WITH GRANT OPTION;

The privilege is full for Bob for all tables contained in the database called temp. Here, I explicitly defined the user’s host. That means Bob can only access the server if he used my Eee-PC. Even local access for Bob is not allowed because I did not add ‘bob’@'localhost’ in the GRANT command.

Given a cell Name containing two (2) words: First Name & Last Name in the format FIRST[:space:]LAST. We need to create a cell for the first name & another cell for the last name. If we are given hundreds of rows of names, a quicker way should be found. With the use of formula, we can easily extract the names in 2 minutes.

Let’s say that the FULLNAME is in ColumnA, we need to fill ColumnB=FirstName & ColumnC=LastName:

B1 = LEFT( TRIM(A1), FIND( " ", TRIM(A1) ) - 1)

C1 = RIGHT( A1, LEN(A1) - LEN(B1) - 1 )

Given you have no GUI client for MySQL, executing multiple CREATE/INSERT/UPDATE queries using the CLI would be troublesome. So preparing a valid SQL script file is advisable.  This command also works for dump files run for recovery or duplication.

mysql> source /path/to/source.sql;

To log command executions & results from MySQL CLI to an output file:

mysql > \T output.txt
mysql > DESCRIBE table;
mysql > \t