LONG ISLAND WEB HOSTING

Enabling Remote Desktop in Windows 7 or Windows Vista

Remote Desktop is disabled by default in Windows 7 or Vista, but it’s easy
enough to turn it back on. If you need to access your Vista PC remotely, it’s
an essential thing to turn on.

Important note: Remote desktop is only included in the Professional,
Business, or Ultimate versions of Windows. Home editions do not have remote
desktop.

To get to the configuration page, you can either right-click the Computer
icon and choose properties, or you can type in system into the start
menu search box, and then find the entry for System.

Now you’ll want to click the Remote Settings link on the left hand side:

Now you can finally turn it on:

To connect from another Vista / Win7 PC on the same network, click the
bottom radio button. If you need to connect from an XP/2k machine, click the
“Allow connections from computers running any version of Remote Desktop” radio
button.

Don’t worry about setting up firewall rules, Vista or Windows 7 does that
for you automatically.

Note: This should work for both Windows 7 and Vista.

Enabling Remote Desktop On Windows XP

Remote Desktop Protocol (aka RDP) is a method to remotely connect to your
machine, and be provided the same Windows GUI that you’d be accessing if you
were sitting at that computer.  You can perform any task that you could
perform if you were literally sitting in front of that machine. 
Unfortunately you’ll be required to have Windows XP Professional to enable this
protocol for use.  Below are the Microsoft steps to enable this on your
machine.

You need three things to create a remote location:

To set up the Remote Desktop, start with the host computer, which in this
example is your work computer.

Next, make sure you have Windows Firewall set up to allow exceptions.

NOTE:  You may have trouble connecting if your host computer is behind
a router.  I suggest enabling DMZ-Host on your router and/or port
forwarding port # 3389 on the host computer to avoid the router firewall from interfering. 

Connect your remote computer to the host computer

To connect your home computer, which is the client (or remote) computer to
your work (or host) computer, follow these steps:

To end your Remote Desktop session:

Installing Windows From a USB Thumb Drive

I don’t know about you, but I always manage to lose my operating system install discs.  I could burn 10 of them and tape them to the ceiling and for one reason or another, lose them one at a time until they’re gone.  Always have someone asking for a copy, since I’m the guy everybody calls.  I have a solution to this, and it’s just as quick as burning a new XP ISO Image.

There have been a couple of USB Boot methods to install Windows from a thumb drive.  Some are better than others, but most of them have normally required that you be somewhat savvy with the keyboard.  I recently came across a tool called WinToFlash, which basically cuts out any need to prepare your USB thumb drive like the other software I’ve seen.  You simply format the drive, load the install image, and you’re all set.

The beauty of this is quite obvious.  You don’t have to worry about losing your discs (my main concern), you don’t have to worry about scratching them, and you can carry a thumb drive on your key chain if you wanted to.  This software supports Windows 2003, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.  You can either supply a retail disk, a burned copy, or you can extract a downloaded image file to your hard drive and use that directory for the source.  It’s very simple and can end up saving you money and time in the long run.  I highly recommend setting up one of these bad boys for a rainy day.  You never know when you’ll need it.

You can download this app by clicking here, the software is fairly self explanatory.  NOTE:  I did run into an issue with a thumb drive that was not formatted to begin with.  WinToFlash told me the drive “could not be locked”.  I solved this issue simply by doing a manual format from My Computer, by right clicking the drive, selecting “format”, and performing a “quick format”.

The WinToFlash Homepage
Alternative USB Windows Boot Method

Removing Footer Encryption From Wordpress Themes

Many WP Theme designers will choose to encrypt the footer in base 64 for promotion purposes. They’ll shove a link to their web address or maybe just tag the job as their own for advertisement. Regardless, Wordpress is open source, so designing a theme and locking the user out of aspects of it is frowned upon. All these themes are released under the GPL and thus all kinds of modifications are allowed in these themes. If you have read some literature from the designer stating that you cannot remove links, be aware that it is just a tactic to fool you. You can even play with the entire Wordpress code if you know how to.

Encrypting a footer with base64 will give any user the runaround when trying to configure the theme, but I have a solution to these encryptions. This is mostly because it’s not TRUE encryption. PHP can be converted to base64 (I’ll show you an example in a minute) however it’s interpreted by the web browser in HTML, therefore your average joe can decode/decrypt/undo this little trick and find the footer in php instead of ancient hieroglyphics.

Below I will show you, with screen shot examples, how to bypass this nonsense:

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Here are the steps that you need to follow:
First of all you need to navigate to the theme editor on your control panel. It is located under the Design menu. Once you are there follow these steps.

Find the index.php file. Click on it to open it.

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Now you need to find the footer include code. In most of the cases the code would look like this

<?php get_footer(); ?>

and would be at the end of index.php file.

If you are finding it hard to locate use Ctrl +F in your browser and paste the above code there. The browser will do it for you.
Now we need to add two simple codes one on the top and another on the bottom of the footer include code. These codes mean nothing but they will indicate to us the start and the end of the footer.
Adding these two codes will not make any difference in the functioning of the theme.

These codes are:

<!--THE FOOTER STARTS-->

&

<!--THE FOOTER ENDS-->

You can write anything you want between <!– and–>

Now our code would look something like this.

<!--THE FOOTER STARTS-->

<?php get_footer(); ?>

<!--THE FOOTER ENDS-->

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Now open your site in the browser and view the page source. In most of the browsers you can view the page source by right clicking on the mouse and then selecting view source. In Mozilla the shortcut Ctrl + U works great.

In the source code you have to find the code that you have added at the top of the original code.You can safely scroll all the way down to the bottom to find these codes.

Copy all the code that is between the codes that you have added. This is the actual footer code.

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Copy this code and replace the original footer code (encrypted one) with this particular code. Now you can  change the footer the way you like.

Site News

Happy new year everyone, just converted to Wordpress.  Every year I change the site up a little bit, this year we’ll be blogging.  Stay tuned.