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Showing posts from March, 2015

How to clean up your Blogger Reading list

How to clean up your Blogger Reading list and stop following old blogs you no longer want to follow: If you tried to stop following blogs using the gear icon next to the Reading list in your Blogger home page, you will now get this error: We are unable to load your FriendConnect data at this time. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please try again shortly. There is no need to try again shortly, because FriendConnect was partially shut down in 2011 and this broke its integration with the Reading List feature of Blogger. Fortunately, there is another way to clean up your reading list and remove those antique blogs you no longer care about: Go to Google Friend Connect http://www.google.com/friendconnect/user/overview Click on one of the Settings links next to the blogs. A pop-up will appear. If it asks to sign-in, sign in with your Google account. If you had to sign in, the pop-up will close. Click on the Settings link again to re-open the pop-up. On the left side, click on &q

Setting up a local Oracle XE database and importing DMP file

The experience of setting up a local Oracle Express Edition database is not a straight-forward as it should be. The following is supposed to outline what could go wrong and how to go about it the right way. It also includes importing a DMP file (a dump) from another system. First of all, download the installer from Oracle website . You will need to sign-in to download - the account creation is free. Be sure to choose the correct bit as per your computer (x64 or x86). Extract the download and install XE by running DISK1\setup.exe (and feel nostalgic of the floppy disk era) . During installation, you will need to choose a new password. There will also be some details displayed after you enter the new password, such as folders and ports. Be sure to save both password and details in a text file for future reference. I saved it as C:\oraclexe\details.txt . Save password only if it's generic and you are likely to forget. The installation will take a while, but usually, no rest

WhatsApp Web is on Firefox... still nothing for iOS

WhatsApp Web has expanded to Mozilla Firefox, and possibly other browsers too. iPhone and iPad users are still out of luck, as Apple's technical restrictions made it difficult for the Web client to work with iOS version of WhatsApp. When WhatsApp Web was launched, it was only available for Google Chrome. WhatsApp Web took advantage of Chrome's push notification system, citing it as ideal for the product (ref) . However, it is now available on Firefox as well, a browser that still remains popular among many, despite all the recent flak it received. Many Chrome users had switched back to their old favorite Firefox after Chrome unveiled a new "security update" that essentially destroyed their ability to have custom add-ons - Chrome was now locked to work only with add-ons approved on the Chrome Web Store. A lot of such users will be happy to finally get rid of Chrome altogether, if they had still been running Chrome to use WhatsApp Web. That being said, I found tha