Friday, January 27, 2006

IP sites

Sometimes you may have to check your IP number. Why? You may read some articles and comments showing IP addresses and you wonder who are the people. Or you might be concerned about your own privacy on the internet.

I have been using No-IP free package for some time and I have been quite happy, but I could not stand continuous hopping of my ISP provider which used to force IP change every 36 hours. It's Belgium, you know ;) So I dropped it and went for a paid webhosting solution.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Copying hidden images

The CSSinsider weblog recently posted an interesting article on protecting images from copying. For me as a freshman in CSS it was very informative, but as I'm a hacker an explorer in my heart, I could not resist in an attempt to hack explore the subject indepth.

I decided as a scientastic project to copy and print some pages from "you-know-whose" scanned book service. Normally it is available just for reading and I appeciate that very much, but when I want to print out some page that has the interesting facts it appears to be impossible (for general public, but I pretend I am not the one)! ;)

So, let's start hacking You-know-whooom ;))

First as an example try to find a page that might be of interest to you. I just browsed to "Essential blogging". OK, let it be page 1.

Get the size of the page, I mean properties. Oh, dear, can't you right-click? Well, read my blog first, and continue here.... I'll be waiting, but maybe you-know-who won't!

You're back? Then find the image size and note it. In my example, it is 575 x 775 pixels. Now it's the time to hunt for it.

Skip to the source, i.e. view source. If you were smart, you should be able to get to it now. CTRL-F and look for 575. As soon as you find one, just return a little bit back and look visually for .pgimg and URL after it. That's what you need. Copy everything what is between the quotes into your browser and have an image on a separate screen to be viewed without any restrictions.


Now I can't avoid saying a few morals here ;)

The information has to be used wisely, carefully and honestly. Do not make money with that and don't steal intelectual property. Some people have worked hard to create it and if you print all the book for free instead of buying the rights at the publishers, you would be stealing. Of course, If you read it online, you can always rewrite it and reprint by hand, or capture the screen and nobody would say anything because the quality of the image is not "letter-quality" or "near letter quality" (NLQ), as it was in the era of dot matrix printers, so it is far from the original. Anyway, what matters are ideas, and if you can read them, you may keep it and no copyrights can rip it out of your minds, right? I just offer you a small back-up of a part of your brain.

P.S. Oh, I almost forgot to remind. If you liked this, maybe you'll like also other links on the blog.. khm... khm... ;)
P.P.S. And once more - it's not a HACK, it's just a hack (I owned Amiga once, so that's where my hacks come from). This trick does not show you copyrighted material and especially those annoying half-pages. For those just pay a visit to the library and have a look there. And you still will have to logon to see the pages before saving them, unless you really hack it. So have phun ;)

Monday, January 23, 2006

The latest news about the million dollar homepage is that it has been completed and all pixels worth 1 US dollar each were sold for about 1 million 38 thousand dollars. The difference arose because of the auction on eBay for the last 1000 pixels.


What an idea - a poor student needs money for education and here you are - a brillian fundraising idea which really worked out! Unfortunately for all the rest of us who would like to repeat it - great business ideas work only once and for the first time :(

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Fighting with right mouse clicks

Recently I found such an amazing thing as CSS.

I know it is silly to be proud of it, but when I started my "carrier" on computers about 20 years ago on a mainframe SM-4, many things have evolved since. No perfocards, no 15" disks and 11" disquettes... Wow...

Anyway, I discovered CSS and started to learn. First I searched the big G and bumped onto cssinsider.com. It has many resources for the beginner like me and tutorials to start with. The next step in learning is to grasp knowledge from works already done. Like painter students were copying their masters' works, I decided to get hold of CSS files, too.

I know, there are many G hacks around that find the files you need, like this:

http://www.google.lt/search?hl=lt&as_qdr=all&q=css+filetype%3Acss&meta=

but I decided to do that visually, that is to look at the code of the pages I like. But then I encountered problems with some of the pages that did not allow to make right mouse clicks. Without that it is almost impossible to view source or do copy/paste.

A research on the net brought me to a tip on tech-recipes.com. According to them,
there are two basic methods how to get over it:

  1. When visiting the offending website, type the following into the URL bar of your browser:
    javascript:void(document.oncontextmenu=null)
  2. If a dialog box opens whenever you right-click, could can often get around it by the following sequence:
    Hold the right mouse button, hit enter to close the dialog box, and then release the right mouse button.

Amazingly, all that works and I can investigate the complex world of CSS code.

Hello world!

Hello world!


Those were the first words that were typed by a computer. As some links suggest, "Hello World" is the first thing a program usually writes when we learn a new programming language.