Uninstalling Oracle 10g Manually from Windows XP

List of additional steps to do for cleaning the system completely after uninstall using universal installer.
# Stop any Oracle services that have been left running.

Start->Settings->Control Panel->Services
Look for any services with names starting with ‘Oracle’ and stop them.

# Run regedit and delete the following keys (some may have slightly different names in your registry):



HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\ORACLE

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORACLE

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet Services\EventLog\Application\Oracle.oracle

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet Services\OracleDBConsole

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet Services\Oracle10g_home

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet Services\OraclService

Note that the services control panel will still show the old services until you reboot.

# Delete the Oracle home directory
C:\Oracle

# Delete the Oracle Program Files directory:
C:\Program Files\Oracle

# Delete the Oracle Start Menu shortcuts directory:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Oracle*
Where * indicates the name of your install. Look for and remove all Oracle directories from that location.

# Remove Oracle refereces from the path. To edit your path go to:

Start->Settings->Control Panel->System->Advanced->Environment Variables

Edit both of the environment variables user PATH and system PATH. Remove any Oracle references in them.
# Remove Oracle.DataAccess and any Polic.Oracle files from the GAC which is at:
C:\Windows\assembly\

Ways to Identify Safe Websites on the Internet

On the whole Internet, there are approximately more than 150 million active websites up and running. As a result, it often becomes a real challenge for the users to identify safe websites that are trustworthy and reputed. Have you ever wondered to know the reputation of a website before placing the order? Need to know whether a given website is child safe? Well, here are some of the ways to identify safe websites on the Web.

WOT or Web Of Trust (www.mywot.com):

WOT is a great place to test the reputation of your favorite website. WOT gives real-time ratings for every website based on the feedback that it gets from millions of trustworthy users across the globe and trusted sources, such as phishing and malware blacklists. Each domain name is evaluated based on this data and ratings are applied to them accordingly. 

In most cases, the WOT ratings are found to be highly accurate. To check the reputation of any given website, just visit www.mywot.com type-in the address of your favorite website and click on “Check now”. This tool alone can tell you a lot about the reputation and safety level of a website. However, in addition to this, I am giving you another 3 handy tools to identify safe websites on the Web.


McCafee SiteAdvisor:

McCafee SiteAdvisor is a free tool that is available as a browser add-on. It adds safety ratings to your browser and search engine results. You can download it from www.siteadvisor.com.


StopBadware:

Using this tool, you can check whether a given site is said to have involved in malware activity in the past. To check this, go to http://www.stopbadware.org/home/reportsearch and enter the URL or domain name of a website and click on “Search Clearinghouse ”. If the search does not return any result, that means the site was never involved in any of the malware activity in the past.

Google Pagerank:

Google PageRank is another great tool to check the reputation and popularity of a website. The PageRank tool rates every webpage on a scale of 1 to 10 which indicates Google’s view of importance of the page. If a given website has a PageRank of less than 3, then it is said to be less popular among the other sites on the Internet.


However, PageRank will only tell you how much popular a given website is and has nothing to do with the safety level of a website. So, this tool alone cannot be used to evaluate a website’s safety and other factors.


PageRank feature is available as a part of Google Toolbar. You can install Google Toolbar from http://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/toolbar/ie/index.html.

CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA or Captcha (pronounced as cap-ch-uh) which stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” is a type of challenge-response test to ensure that the response is only generated by humans and not by a computer. In simple words, CAPTCHA is the word verification test that you will come across the end of a sign-up form while signing up for Gmail or Yahoo account. The following image shows the typical samples of CAPTCHA.
What is CAPTCHA and How it Works?


Captcha



Almost every Internet user will have an experience of CAPTCHA in their daily Internet usage, but only a few are aware of what it is and why they are used. So in this post you will find a detailedinformation on how CAPTCHA works and why they are used.

What Purpose does CAPTCHA Exactly Serve?

CAPTCPA is mainly used to prevent automated software (bots) from performing actions on behalf of actual humans. For example while signing up for a new email account, you will come across a CAPTCHA at the end of the sign-up form so as to ensure that the form is filled out only by a legitimate human and not by any of the automated software or a computer bot. The main goal of CAPTCHA is to put forth a test which is simple and straight forward for any human to answer but for a computer, it is almost impossible to solve.


What is the Need to Create a Test that Can Tell Computers and Humans Apart?

For many the CAPTCHA may seem to be silly and annoying, but in fact it has the ability to protect systems from malicious attacks where people try to game the system. Attackers can make use of automated softwares to generate a huge quantity of requests thereby causing a high load on the target server which would degrade the quality of service of a given system, whether due to abuse or resource expenditure. This can affect millions of legitimate users and their requests. CAPTCHAscan be deployed to protect systems that are vulnerable to email spam, such as the services from Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail.

Who Uses CAPTCHA?

CAPTCHAs are mainly used by websites that offer services like online polls and registration forms. For example, Web-based email services like Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail offer free email accounts for their users. However upon each sign-up process, CAPTCHAs are used to prevent spammers from using a bot to generate hundreds of spam mail accounts.


Designing a CAPTCHA System

CAPTCHAs are designed on the fact that computers lack the ability that human beings have when it comes to processing visual data. It is more easily possible for humans to look at an image and pick out the patterns than a computer. This is because computers lack the real intelligence that humans have by default. CAPTCHAs are implemented by presenting users with an image which contains distorted or randomly stretched characters which only humans should be able to identify. Sometimes characters are striked out or presented with a noisy background to make it even more harder for computers to figure out the patterns.

Most, but not all, CAPTCHAs rely on a visual test. Some Websites implement a totally different CAPTCHA system to tell humans and computers apart. For example, a user is presented with 4 images in which 3 contains picture of animals and one contain a flower. The user is asked to select only those images which contain animals in them. This Turing test can easily be solved by any human, but almost impossible for a computer. 


Breaking the CAPTCHA

The challenge in breaking the CAPTCHA lies in real hard task of teaching a computer how to process information in a way similar to how humans think. Algorithms with artificial intelligence (AI) will have to be designed in order to make the computer think like humans when it comes to recognizing the patterns in images. However there is no universal algorithm that could pass through and break any CAPTCHA system and hence each CAPTCHA algorithm must have to be tackled individually. It might not work 100 percent of the time, but it can work often enough to be worthwhile to spammers.

Convert A PowerPoint 2010 Presentation Into A Video With One Click Unknown Trick

Convert A PowerPoint 2010 Presentation Into A Video With One Click Unknown Trick

Creating a video from a slideshow isn’t something new. It has been a pretty common activity thanks to the clutch of PPT to video converters. But thanks to the latest edition of Microsoft Office, you can do away with third party tools…at least for a basic video conversion job.

Microsoft Office 2010 has come in with a slew of user-friendly new features. One of the new features in PowerPoint 2010 helps you convert Powerpoint presentations to video with just a click.

Here are the steps that start with a normal presentation file.

    After creating a presentation, select the File tab from the ribbon.

Click on Save and Send – Create a Video under File Types.

A few optional settings help to further tailor your video creation process.As the screenshot below shows, you can record and time voice narration and laser pointer movements in your video effectively creating a screencast. All other animations and transitions are also preserved in the converted format.

Two dropdowns fine tune your ‘production’ for the media it will be displayed on. It also determines file size. For instance, opting for Portable devices reduces the resolution. I find this quite handy if I have to carry along and watch a presentation on an iPod or a smartphone.

You can also add the recorded timings and narration to the video. You can also specify the time that will determine the transition from one slide to the next.
Finally click on the large Create Video button and choose a location to save your video as a WMV file. 

As the conversion to .wmv format begins there will be a progress bar displayed in the lower right corner of PowerPoint that indicates the pace. The time taken for the conversion will of course depend on the size of the PowerPoint file. My 15-slide sample presentation took about eight minutes to turn into a movie.


PowerPoint 2010 supports only one video format. A few more choices like MP4, FLV etc would have been real handy. For that, you still have to depend on third-party conversion tools. Also, the highest resolution that’s on offer is 960×720. Higher resolutions (and commonly available) like 1,280×720, 1,920×1,080, or 1,920×1,080 are not available.

Make an Heart sign on Facebook and other special characters ? ? ?

Make an Heart sign on Facebook and other special characters ? ? ?

Signs like ?, ¤, ? make the typeface less monotonous. But how can you add these characters,emoticons and symbols to your status updates, comments and chats? Check it out:


Characters by key sequences (ALT-Symbols)





For example:
Alt + 1 ☺
Alt + 2 ☻
Alt + 3 ♥
Alt + 4 ♦
Alt + 5 ♣
Alt + 6 ♠
Alt + 7 •
Alt + 8 ◘
Alt + 9 ○
Alt + 10 ◙
Alt + 11 ♂
Alt + 12 ♀
Alt + 13 ♪
Alt + 14 ♫
Alt + 15 ☼
Alt + 16 ►
Alt + 17 ◄
Alt + 18 ↕
Alt + 19 ‼
Alt + 20 ¶
Alt + 21 §
Alt + 22 ▬
Alt + 23 ↨
Alt + 24 ↑
Alt + 25 ↓
Alt + 26 →
Alt + 27 ←
Alt + 28 ∟
Alt + 29 ↔
Alt + 30 ▲
Alt + 31 ▼

Remove unwanted software during startup

Have you ever experienced that when you switch on your computer there are loads of software which come up on the screen before you can start using the computer.
For eg Yahoo Messenger,G Talk,Skype etc..just come on to the screen.Here is a simple way to remove all the unwanted software coming on the screen.

1.Click on start->run

2.Type msconfig

3.Click on startup button on top

4.Uncheck all the software you do not want to show during startup

5.Click ok and restart the computer.



Hope You all enjoyed!!