Redirect Your Blog to .com

1. Find the control panel on your domain registrar’s website, and locate your DNS (Domain Name System) settings. In order to link your blog to your custom domain, follow the instructions below to enter your "CNAME" and "A-records."
   CNAME
   Add two CNAME records. For the first CNAME, where it says Name, Label or Host enter "www" and where it says Destination, Target or Points To enter "ghs.google.com" . For the second CNAME, enter "2bcfmxj2hpem" as the Name and
   "gv-gnxhc2g7kpcxiya4w7vcjapbcwofi2gqonf2oegvihjn74w6fxvq.domainverify.googlehosted.com." as the Destination. See our detailed instructions on providing CNAMEs for various registrars. If yours isn't listed, or if you run into other difficulties, contact your registrar directly and they can help you out.
   A-records (optional)
   The following action links your naked domain (example.com) to your actual site (www.example.com). If you skip this step, visitors who leave off the "www" will see an error page.
   Enter your domain name in the format example.com, and list the I.P. addresses shown below in the "A" section. You'll need to create four separate A-records which point to four different Google IPs.
   216.239.32.21
   216.239.34.21
   216.239.36.21
   216.239.38.21
2. Update your Blogger settings
   Before you move onto this step, wait about an hour for your DNS settings to activate. If you attempt to change the publishing settings before the DNS changes activate, then we'll let you know with a warning message.
   Now it’s time to make sure Blogger knows about your custom domain so that Google can direct readers to your blog. Just head back to Blogger and update the information on your Settings | Basic tab. Find the area for "Publishing," and click the link to add a custom domain.
   Then, click on "Switch to advanced settings." Enter in the URL for your custom domain in the text box provided, and click Save. That’s it! Your blogspot.com address will soon redirect to your new custom domain -- be patient, as it might take up to 24 hours for the redirect to start working. Congratulations, you’re all set!
   
   Source: http://www.blogger.com/custom-domain-instructions.g?tokenName=2bcfmxj2hpem&tokenAddress=gv-gnxhc2g7kpcxiya4w7vcjapbcwofi2gqonf2oegvihjn74w6fxvq.domainverify.googlehosted.com.&domain=www.tipsoftechnology.com

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Auto Password / Unique id Generation

Overview:  
You might have come across sites, that generate a unique username or a randomly generated password for you, this script show you how to do the same with PHP.
It is a common practice for websites to issue you a randomly generated password and I will show how this can be done via PHP, this concept can also be used to generate random passwords, you can generated a new password via this method for a user that might have lost his password and email this new password to him.

Okay enough of talk now, I will show you how we will proceed to accomplish it, I will be using PHP built in functions uniqid and crypt to accomplish the task.

What basically ëuniqidí does is it generated a UNIQUE id based on the current time in microseconds and we use the ëcryptí function to do a one way encryption of the same.

The code given below will generate a random 10 digit id that can be used as a unique id or password. 

random_id.php

<?PHP
//set the random id length
$random_id_length = 10;

//generate a random id encrypt it and store it in $rnd_id
$rnd_id = crypt(uniqid(rand(),1));

//to remove any slashes that might have come
$rnd_id = strip_tags(stripslashes($rnd_id));

//Removing any . or / and reversing the string
$rnd_id = str_replace(".","",$rnd_id);
$rnd_id = strrev(str_replace("/","",$rnd_id));

//finally I take the first 10 characters from the $rnd_id
$rnd_id = substr($rnd_id,0,$random_id_length);

echo "Random Id: $rnd_id";
?>

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Make WAMPServer Run Automatically on System Start-up

 As with all web developers, it’s always important to test your projects locally before putting it out there for the entire web community to see. One must-have developer tool for this purpose is WAMPServer. We’ve all wished it’s automatically up and running when we need it. These easy steps will help you automate WAMPServer to run on system start-up.

For those unfamiliar with WAMPServer, it is a development package that lets you run web development projects locally. WAMP stands for Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python. It’s basically four programs packaged to work as one. WAMP basically turns any Windows PC into a localized web server. The Linux counterpart is called LAMP, obviously.

Once WAMPServer is installed in your PC, you’ll be able to test your web projects before putting it into the live environment. But I always found it a hassle to manually start the service every time I need it. With these easy steps, you’ll never have to manually start WAMPServer ever again.

   From All Programs, go to the Accessories folder and select Run. A shortcut for this is Windows Key + R.

   Type services.msc and click OK. This will open the Services Management Console.
   
   In Services Management Console, look for ‘wampapache‘. The Startup Type will be set to ‘Manual’ and so we’ll need to change this to ‘Automatic‘. Right-click on it and select ‘Properties’.

    In the properties window, select ‘Automatic‘ for ‘Startup Type‘. Then, click on ‘Apply‘ and then close the property window. We’ve just set the Apache side of WAMP to run automatically on startup.

   
   Still in Services Management Console, look for ‘wampmysqld‘. We’ll also set this to automatic, so right-click on it and select ‘Properties‘.

   
    Select ‘Automatic‘ for ‘Startup Type’. Click on ‘Apply’ and then close the Properties and Services Management Console.
  
   Restart your machine/PC.
   After the restart, log back in and open a browser. Type localhost (127.0.0.1) in the address bar. localhost is the address for the local installation of WAMPServer in your PC. If the Server Configuration page for WAMPServer loads – Congratulations, you’ve just successfully automated your WAMPServer startup.

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MySQL Server Crashed – Site was still online!

You don’t hear this often… MySQL server crashed and the sites hosted in that server went offline for hours together. But, when a similar thing happened to my VPS, it wasn’t the case. My site was still online, while I was troubleshooting the issue with MySQL server. Ultimately, I could not figure out the issue and I had to purge the entire MySQL installation. However, I was still cool during the entire process. You may ask how. Here is what happened and how you can prevent the same for your own VPS too…

First Things First

As part of regular tweaking of MySQL, I changed a few things in my.cnf, then restarted the mysqld. Bump! It didn’t start. I reverted the changes. Still it didn’t budge. Immediately I knew that MySQL server has crashed for unknown reason. Upon checking the log, here is what I found…

120525 06:54:11 mysqld_safe Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /var/lib/mysql
120525  6:54:11 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled.
06:54:11 UTC - mysqld got signal 11 ;
This could be because you hit a bug. It is also possible that this binary
or one of the libraries it was linked against is corrupt, improperly built,
or misconfigured. This error can also be caused by malfunctioning hardware.
We will try our best to scrape up some info that will hopefully help
diagnose the problem, but since we have already crashed,
something is definitely wrong and this may fail.

key_buffer_size=31457280
read_buffer_size=524288
max_used_connections=0
max_threads=100
thread_count=0
connection_count=0
It is possible that mysqld could use up to
key_buffer_size + (read_buffer_size + sort_buffer_size)*max_threads = 133850 K  bytes of memory
Hope that's ok; if not, decrease some variables in the equation.

Thread pointer: 0xffffffffbfb01d80
Attempting backtrace. You can use the following information to find out
where mysqld died. If you see no messages after this, something went
terribly wrong...
stack_bottom = ffffffffbfb03ab8 thread_stack 0x20000
/usr/libexec/mysqld(my_print_stacktrace+0x2d)[0x83b70e2]
/usr/libexec/mysqld(handle_fatal_signal+0x4a2)[0x829d156]
[0xb777c400]
/usr/libexec/mysqld(_Z18ha_resolve_by_nameP3THDPK19st_mysql_lex_string+0xad)[0x82a104c]
/usr/libexec/mysqld(_Z14open_table_defP3THDP11TABLE_SHAREj+0x1822)[0x82213c2]
/usr/libexec/mysqld(_Z15get_table_shareP3THDP10TABLE_LISTPcjjPij+0x197)[0x8169869]
/usr/libexec/mysqld(_Z10open_tableP3THDP10TABLE_LISTP11st_mem_rootP18Open_table_context+0x545)[0x817010a]
/usr/libexec/mysqld(_Z11open_tablesP3THDPP10TABLE_LISTPjjP19Prelocking_strategy+0x456)[0x8171683]
/usr/libexec/mysqld(_Z20open_and_lock_tablesP3THDP10TABLE_LISTbjP19Prelocking_strategy+0x54)[0x8171f86]
/usr/libexec/mysqld[0x81adf41]
/usr/libexec/mysqld(_Z11plugin_initPiPPci+0x8dc)[0x81b0db9]
/usr/libexec/mysqld[0x8133a34]
/usr/libexec/mysqld(_Z11mysqld_mainiPPc+0x42a)[0x8136cc8]
/usr/libexec/mysqld(main+0x27)[0x812ce33]
/lib/i686/nosegneg/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe6)[0xb7288ce6]
/usr/libexec/mysqld[0x812cd95]

Trying to get some variables.
Some pointers may be invalid and cause the dump to abort.
Query (0): is an invalid pointer
Connection ID (thread ID): 0
Status: NOT_KILLED

The manual page at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/crashing.html contains
information that should help you find out what is causing the crash.
120525 06:54:11 mysqld_safe mysqld from pid file /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid ended

I tried everything I could, for about 90 minutes. Then I gave up and purged the entire MySQL installation and installed it again. Viola! It started fine! Then it was only a matter of taking the latest database backup and putting it back.

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SCORP Robot

Today, robots are used for variety of actions, and if you’re looking for a surveillance robot, today we have a robot that comes from privately owned Swiss company.

 Micro Unmanned Ground vehicle is based on SCORP platform, and according to Novatiq, this surveillance robot is lightweight, so you can easily put it in your backpack. As for dimensions, SCORP robot is 4cm (13”) long, 27cm (10”) wide, and 12cm (4.7”) high with it weighs 3.5kg (7.7 pounds).

This robot features four different cameras, so user can see in all directions, and thanks to the IR illuminators, you can easily use this robot for night surveillance. SCORP robot can be remotely controlled from up to 500m (1,650 feet) and it can achieve speed of 8km/h (5mph), and thanks to the built-in battery, it can work for 2 hours, but you can also add an external battery.

 n addition to external battery, there are varieties of additions such as robotic arm, biochemical detector, firing explosive charges, and many more.

 SCORP robot is great for surveillance, and it should become available in March for $11,447.

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Flygrip

There is variety of accessories for your smartphone on the market, but if you’re looking for an accessory that can keep your smartphone safe, you might be interested in this latest accessory called Flygrip.


Dropping your smartphone is always a problem, especially if you don’t have rugged case that will protect it from damage, but luckily for you, there’s a Flygrip that should keep you from dropping your smartphone. If you usually use your smartphone with one hand, than you know that you can easily drop it and cause potential damage, but thanks to the Flygrip attachment that attaches to your smartphone, you should have a firm grip on your smartphone, even if you’re holding it with one hand. After you’ve attached Flygrip to your smartphone, you just need to slide your fingers into the “grip”, and you should have somewhat a better hold on your phone.

Flygrip is available in small, medium and large sizes, depending on the size of your fingers, and in regards to the price, each Flygrip costs $29.95.

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