Grafton Falls News

Microsoft Alt Codes

Easter Eggs and Viruses

Given that Microsoft is the biggest software company out there, it’s no surprise that the company and the concept of Easter Eggs go hand and hand. 

By the way, an Easter Egg is actually a piece of computer code  that is deliberately hidden by its creator, usually within a software application, as a source of amusement. It was said to have originated with early computer code programmers, many at Microsoft, who would surprise their colleagues with weird messages, or events, set to occur at certain times; a sort of weird geeky in-joke. The term was coined after the pastime of hunt the Easter Egg. 

And Easter Eggs are not computer viruses. Although they share some of the same characteristics, Easter Eggs are basically a well-meaning joke. They do not set out to damage, cause mayhem, or steal money, or personal details.  

Mind you, one man’s Easter Egg might be another man’s virus, so when it comes to computer software – especially downloads for your computer – always be careful what you are using. Always make sure you have an up-to-date anti-virus checker and if you’re in doubt, then don’t risk it. 

Remember that Easter Eggs are usually embedded and are hard to find – that’s the idea behind them. So anything that proclaims itself to be an Easter Egg, is not an Easter Egg.  

But lets have a quick look at the history of the Easter Egg and Microsoft.  

One of the earliest known examples was the Microsoft Bear which became the mascot of the team of programmers who wrote the code for Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. The simple bear drawing actually acted as an icon for a number of system files and files without a function, apart from naming top Microsoft executives. It was rumoured though that the Bear was actually a virus and although it was actually a harmless joke, it did start the belief in many peoples’ minds that Easter Eggs and viruses are one and the same thing.  

In Windows 95, more animals cropped up, with the Bunny joining the bear. And although again they were quite harmless bits of code, the 32-bit Bunny as it was lovingly described (you have to possibly be a computer programmer to get the joke), could operate various functions on the Windows 95 interface.   

Word for Windows 2 contains a WordPerfect Monster which although nowadays is a very simple piece of animation, centred around a fireworks display, it did actually require a 486 computer (remember those?).  
 

Within Office 6.0’s Excel, things got a bit more sophisticated, with a mini-computer game called The Hall of Tortured Souls putting in an appearance. Close to the Doom genre, it was certainly a surprise to those that came across it.  

And by the time Office 97 was launched, the tradition of hiding games within an application had been established. Tucked away inside 97 Excel was a flight simulator and inside Word, a pinball game.  

With Office 2000, things began to hot up, with Excel 2000 containing a game called Dev Hunter. It’s a 3-D game, based on Spy Hunter and is controlled using the arrow keys, the spacebar and the H and O keys. 

Now, in the tradition of Easter Eggs, it’s always more fun to discover them by accident. But, to give an example of how they are accessed, here’s the secret route behind Dev Hunter, part of Excel 2000. Right, concentrate a moment: 

• firstly, open a new Excel book;
• secondly, find File Menu and pick Save as Webpage;
• you’ll see a dialog box for Save As. Choose Selection: Sheet and then check the Add Interactivity box;
• then click Publish (don’t worry about file name)’
• a Publish dialog box appears – click the Publish button again;
• a .htm file should have been created in Internet Explorer – open it and you should have before you a blank page, complete with an Excel spreadsheet;
• right, nearly there. Go to the cell in row 2000, the WC column;
• now this cell should be the first cell on the left, so align the spreadsheet accordingly;
• then select the whole row, with the WC column cell sub-selected. Note that it should be white, whereas the remainder of the row will be light purple in colour;
• finally, left-click on the Office logo whilst holding down the Shift, Control and Alt keys;
• and there you have it.

Right, so Easter Eggs have a strong tradition and are contained within many genres, not just computer software. But, when it comes to an application that you either load via a CD, or download off the net, just make sure your anti-virus programme is helping you not to be stuck with an Easter Egg in wolves clothing.  

This article was written by eCommerce Associates Limited for eCommerce Associates for Mcafee Downloads Internet Security

About the Author

eCommerce Associates work with some of the UK's top merchants and brands in
the affiliate market. eCommerce eCommerce Associates work with some of the UK's top merchants and brands i the affiliate market. eCommerce Associates have three blog sites http://ecommerce-associates.info/ , http://leisure-activities.blogware.com/blog and http://financial-news.org.uk/ where all of our articles can be viewed.

Microsoft Works Word Processor codes?

im writing a essay for spanish and i only know one code like the alt+168 is a upside down ? so i wanna know the rest of these code or at least were i could find them?

Here they are. These should work in any Windows word processor, text editor, browser or email client.

1.Make sure your keyboard is in NumLock mode.
2.Hold down the ALT key and enter the number on the numeric keypad. (Note that many laptops have a blue FN key that changes a set of keys, also with blue numbers on them and usually in the 7-8-9-U-I-O area, into a numeric keypad.)

Spanish Set

for é 130
for á 160
for í 161
for ó 162
for ú 163
for ñ 164
for Ñ 165
for ¿ 168
for ¡ 173
for Á 0193
for É 0201
for Í 0205
for Ó 0211
for Ú 0218

Hope that helps.

Microsoft Alt Codes
♥♦♣♠ How To Make Alt Codes 1 ♠♣♦♥

Murat Yasar - Asp.net Application Warm Up By Using Windows Service

When you make a request for a page from any Asp.Net application, it takes server some time to respond your request. During this waiting period, some server side tasks happen.

Application Life Cycle in General According to MSDN:
1-)User requests an application resource from the Web server.
2-)ASP.NET receives the first request for the application.
3-)ASP.NET core objects are created for each request.
4-)An HttpApplication object is assigned to the request.
5-)The request is processed by the HttpApplication pipeline.

When a request is made to an application the first time, ASP.NET compiles application items. This first request's response can be slow due to compiling process which is being done by ASP.NET. After this compilation process, the subsequent requests can get faster response than the first time response.

But if any of the following happens, this compilation process takes place again, in other words they will cause an application restart.

* When you modify the source code of your Web application.
* When you add, delete or modify assemblies from the application's Bin folder.
* When you add, delete or modify localization resources from the App_GlobalResources or App_LocalResources folders.
* When you add, delete or modify application's Global.asax file.
* When you add, delete or modify source code files in the App_Code directory.
* When you add, delete or modify Profile configuration.
* When you add, delete or modify Web service references in the App_WebReferences directory.
* When you add, delete or modify the application's Web.config file.

Take a look at the following links to get more information about this life cycle:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178473.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb470252.aspx

All pending requests will be served by the existing application domain and the old assemblies before restarting application domain, if an application restart is required.

Other than above items, an application pool can be restarted according to its own settings.

When this application restart happens, we have to wait for some time to get response from the server if we hit it the first time. Waiting can be tolerable in some cases but not all the time. The application could be very important or just annoys us to wait to get response from the application. Furthermore, do you think the visitors are patient enough to wait?

There is a good news for this situation. If you use ASP.NET 4.0 and IIS 7.5 you can set a few variable and it is done.
"ASP.NET 4 ships with a new feature called “auto-start” that better addresses this scenario, and is available when ASP.NET 4 runs on IIS 7.5 (which ships with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2).  The auto-start feature provides a controlled approach for starting up an application worker process, initializing an ASP.NET application, and then accepting HTTP requests."
The above line from http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/09/15/auto-start-asp-net-applications-vs-2010-and-net-4-0-series.aspx page where Scott Guthrie talks about this specific issue.

If you serve your application from shared hosting environment and do not have much control over application pool settings, moreover you can not set isolated application pool for your application and other application causes to restart the application pool you are in and as a result you have to wait after each application pool restarting in the server. There is a solution they can offer you but what if you do not want to pay extra money for this..

While I was thinking possible solution for this, I thought if I could create a request periodically to my application, I would not get a late response. Because I might be able to warm up my application without waiting the first request to hit my app.

Afterwards I started thinking about a way of creating request automatically. I thought that a windows service might be very useful. What I did was basically I built a windows service which creates a request to URL's. The URL addresses is read from an xml file called settings.xml.

Not very efficient but you can kind of get an information about your web application up time by inspecting logs that the service keeps. If you look at the source code you will see that a status code returns from each requests. If certain code is not returned, we take them as error and wrote its code into log.

Even though the solution seems appropriate, there is one drawback. We need a machine which will run continuously with an internet connection.

Now, I am going to try to explain each step I have taken and you should as well if you want to apply this solution. All files, executables, images used in this article are downloadable and you can see those files at the end of this writing.
This settings.xml file should be at the same path where service's executable file stays. You can write as many URL addresses as you want create request to, enable or disable logging, specify how often we should create request to URL.

All these settings can be done inside settings.xml file.

I wrote this windows service by using;
----------------------------------------------------
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
Version 9.0.30729.1 SP
Microsoft .NET Framework
Version 3.5 SP1
on Windows Vista Home Premium Service Pack 2

Following is the settings.xml file that the service are reading from.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
<xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<MySettings>

<!-- If we want to keep the log files, we should set 1 otherwise 0. -->
<EnableLogging>
<Enable>1</Enable>   
</EnableLogging>

<!-- Write the web site URLs that you want to warmup periodically. -->
<WhichSites>
<WebSite>http://www.yasarmurat.com</WebSite>  
</WhichSites>

<WhichSites>
<WebSite>http://www.microsoft.com</WebSite>   
</WhichSites>

<WhichSites>
<WebSite>http://www.google.com</WebSite>
</WhichSites>

<WhichSites>
<WebSite>http://www.xyz.com</WebSite>
</WhichSites>

<!-- How often warmup process will work. (In minutes) -->
<HowOftenAreWeGoingToCheck>
<HowOftenInMinutes>3</HowOftenInMinutes>  
</HowOftenAreWeGoingToCheck>

</MySettings>

You can add as many web sites as you like by adding following tags into settings.xml file.
<WhichSites>
<WebSite>http://www.yasarmurat.com</WebSite>  
</WhichSites>

Main part of this service is below. It simply creates a web request and takes response from the server.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
//WarmUpAspNetApp section.

System.Net.HttpWebRequest request = (System.Net.HttpWebRequest)System.Net.WebRequest.Create(Convert.ToString(hashWhichSitesSpecification[@"WhichSites_" + i.ToString()]));
request.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
request.Method = @"GET";
request.UserAgent = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.0.3705;)";
System.Net.HttpWebResponse response = (System.Net.HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

if (response == null || response.StatusCode != System.Net.HttpStatusCode.OK)
{
writeIntoEventViewer(@"The request which was made for [" + hashWhichSitesSpecification[@"WhichSites_" + i.ToString()] + @"] returned [" + response.StatusCode.ToString() + @"] as the status code.", System.Diagnostics.EventLogEntryType.Error);
}
else
{
if (Convert.ToInt32(hashEnableLoggingSpecification["AreWeGoingToLog"]) == 1)
{
writeIntoEventViewer(@"[" + hashWhichSitesSpecification[@"WhichSites_" + i.ToString()] + @"] gave response successfully.", EventLogEntryType.Information);
}
}

response.Close();

//WarmUpAspNetApp section.

You can download either Visual Studio Solution File or just the necessary files to install and use this service. If you want to download solution file click on WarmUpAspNetApp.rar or just want to download the necessary files click on AspNetWarmUpService.rar from the link at the end of this writing.

Before starting install the service I assume that you have copied the necessary folder into root of C drive as follows.
C:AspNetWarmUpService
Following are the files which are needed to be inside this folder.
C:AspNetWarmUpServiceinstallService.bat
C:AspNetWarmUpServiceuninstallService.bat
C:AspNetWarmUpServiceWarmUpAspNetApp.exe
C:AspNetWarmUpServiceWarmUpAspNetApp.pdb
C:AspNetWarmUpServiceWarmUpAspNetApp.vshost.exe
C:AspNetWarmUpServiceWarmUpAspNetApp.vshost.exe.manifest
C:AspNetWarmUpServicesettings.xml

Now, we can install the windows service as follows:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
C:WINDOWSMicrosoft.NETFrameworkv2.0.50727InstallUtil.exe C:AspNetWarmUpServiceWarmUpAspNetApp.exe

Here I assume that you have already installed .NET framework and placed the folder named AspNetWarmUpService under C drive.

In case you need to remove this service, the following is the way to do this. Uninstalling service:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C:WINDOWSMicrosoft.NETFrameworkv2.0.50727InstallUtil.exe /u C:AspNetWarmUpServiceWarmUpAspNetApp.exe

As you can guess, this is command line where we run above lines. If you use Vista you need to open cmd.exe with Administrator privilege. If you do not, you will not be able to install or uninstall the windows service successfully. To be able to run command line with administrator privilege, you can do one of the followings:

Method A-)
1. Press the Win keyboard key or click on Vista Start button.
2. Type cmd into the Start Search textbox.
3. Press Ctrl+Shift+Enter keyboard shortcut. Ctrl-Shift-Enter is the general keyboard shortcut that triggers elevation to “Run as Administrator”.
4. Press Alt+C or press Continue to confirm the UAC elevation warning prompt.

Method B-)
1. Click on Vista Start button.
2. In the Start Search box, type in “Cmd” (without quotes).
3. Right click on the Command Prompt in the search result listing.
4. In the right click menu, click on “Run as Administrator” menu item.

After installing the windows service, we need to set up some properties of this service in order to run it properly.
* Click on Vista Start button.
* In the Start Search box, type in “services.msc” (without quotes).
* If warning prompt appears, say continue.
* Go to bottom and find WarmUpAspNet service.
* Right click on it and choose properties.
* Make sure startup type is set to Automatic. (It should be by default.)
* Go to Recovery section and choose "Restart the Service" for first, second and subsequent failures.
* Click Apply and OK.
* Right click on the service and choose "Start" for starting the service.

Setting "Restart the Service" for 3 type of failures is very important. If you do not do this, service will not be able to restart itself, if something goes wrong while it is being runned. Also every 10 hours, service is being restarted in case any memory leak.

These 3 has to be set "Restart the Service" otherwise the service will not work as it is expected.

After waiting the time you specified in settings.xml file between 3 tags, you should be able to see the log inside event viewer with the key "WarmUpAspNetApp Service". Again I assume you have enough privilege to write into event viewer. I use Windows Event Viewer to keep log on these requests. You can implement some other mechanism while you have the source code. Writing into txt file, or sending an e-mail when an error occurs or something else you appreciate with.

If you do any changing in settings.xml file, you must restart the service manually in order to take effect those changes. Otherwise, it will take effect after the service restarted by its logic.

I have explained each step I have taken here with screenshots in the following link. You can also download the solution file, only necessary files to install the service and the screenshots from this link as well.

http://www.yasarmurat.com/Blog/33/asp-net-application-warm-up-by-using-windows-service.aspx

Have a great day.

About the Author

My name is Murat Yasar.

I was born in Istanbul, in 1976 and have been living here since then.

I work as a .NET developer in a company.

http://www.yasarmurat.com

Microsoft Alt Codes