Gems Education GLG (Gems School, UAE learning gateway) Navigation for

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Akash Jain

Well if you are thinking what is GLG, you can skip this blog.

it’s the LMS website of Gems Education group , UAE.  Yesterday after spending 1 hour, clicking through every link to find the assignment and progress report, i decided to write where I found it someplace safe and document it for other parents.

For some strange reason, they have made the interface very confusing, and there is no logical dashboard when you login.

The information I was looking for ( that you should see regularly like notifications, circulars and daily assignments) was hidden behind 5 clicks.

1.  Go to https://www.gemslearninggateway.com and login

2. Don’t get lost with all the menu here. There is a very small link on the top right side, called “My Site” Click on it
3. Now Click on School
4. Again lots of tabs here. Look for a tab called Community site
5. Now click on the corresponding class that your kid is in.

So the information that should have been available on the main page is 5 links deep, all full of confusing menus.

Hope it saves you a lot of time and frustration.

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PHPLIST Configuration on Bluehost

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Akash Jain

Phplist is one of the best open sources mailing list program out there. However the configuration sometimes may put a few users off.

Here is my email throttle settings of PHPLIST, that should work for you also if you are hosted with bluehost.

define(“MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE”,100);
define(“MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD”,300);

Essentially it’s sending 120 mails every 300 seconds. This way it can’t send more than 1,200 email an hour.  They give you 1,500 Emails per hour for Pro accounts and 150 for Basic Account

If you are on The basic hosting, you can use a Batch_period of 3600. It’s always better to keep a few relays of your regular emails so don’t let the system send the maximum number of emails allowed per hour.

If you exceed the limit you start getting “could not instantiate mail function”

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Quick fix Vulnerability in Word press

Posted on April 22, 2012 by Akash Jain

Though everyone knows  it’s important to keep updating your scripts, look for and fix vulnerability and be security conscious, one hardly does any of these till the calamity strikes.

I noticed today that google won’t let me access my website. It was a listed attack site.  Without being too technical, it meant that someone had been able to inject some malicious code into a vulnerable script.

Generally these kind of things are hard to fix, more so for people like me who have no programing skills to look for the vulnerabilities, but guess what.

There are some good people who created Anti Malware plugin for wordpress that works like charm. Just like an antivirus, hit scan, let it show you the problem and click fix button.

It even lets you undo what you did, if fixing the script breaks your site. And did I mention that they are giving it out for free. Offcourse, you should donate, if you like their plugin.

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Solution: Quickbooks Save as PDF very Slow or Hangs

Posted on April 21, 2012 by Akash Jain

Quickbooks uses a printer called “QuickBooks PDF Converter” to save any document as PDF.  It’s a very convenient function for sending invoices, quotes, estimates or Purchase orders in PDF format right from Quickbooks.

However manier times, Quickbooks gets stuck when you choose save as PDF option. Mine was getting stuck all the time.

The solution is to make the QuickBooks PDF Converter as default printer, before you save a document as PDF.

1. Click on Start button
2. Select settings > printer and faxes
3. Right click on QuickBooks PDF Converter, and click on Set as Default Printer.
4. Now use the “Save as PDF”. It will take just a second before you get the save prompt screen.
5. Set your default printer back again.

To make things easier, I have made batch files with command to toggle printer using rundll32.  The command that sets QBW printer as default is

RUNDLL32 PRINTUI.DLL,PrintUIEntry /y /n “QuickBooks PDF Converter”

 

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Playing .mkv files on Samsung TV through QNAP and Twonky

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Akash Jain

I had this mkv file that wouldn’t play on Samsung smart TV.  Since my Qnap is a basic one with ARM processor, it doesn’t have enough processing power to transcode the file either. So the only option was o trancode it on PC, or fix the problem.

Well the solution turned out to be very easy. I realized that on Samsung TV, .mkv was supported. I verified it by playing an mkv file through USB. Twonky also supports .mkv, so the problem was somewhere in Twonky communicating to Samsung.

What was happening was that Twonky didn’t know that the device it was connected to was a Samsung TV, it rather recongized it as “Generic Device” .  All I had to do was to tell Qnap that the device it knows as “Generic Device” is actually a Samsung Smart TV, and once I do that twonky would know that Samsung can play .mkv

1. Switch on the device that you want to play the .mkv file on, and let it play any file on QNAP device.

2. Log in to your Twonky Server. ( http://yourqnapip:9000) by default.

3. Click on Media Receivers in Advanced Setup. here you will see the IP address of your device ( Samsung Smart TV in my case). Against the IP address the name should NOT read “Generic Device”

4. If it says Generic Device, drop down the list and choose your device.

5. Hit Save Changes.

That’s it. Your .mkv compatible player can now play .mkv files from Qnap too.  Hope it helps.

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Gettting Magnet torrent Links to work on Qnap

Posted on April 7, 2012 by Akash Jain

If you want to download ( legal) torrents on your Qnap but are put off by lack of magnetic link support, here is news. There are  2 very easy and fast ways to do this. There is  very quick workaround to convert your magnet torrent link to a regular .torrent file using your favorite bit torrent client.  And the other option is to install transmission using QPKG center and let it handle your magnetic link.

Both the options are simple click and install, there is no complicated scripting involved.

A Quick Workaround : to get the torrent file for magnetic link, which you can feed to your Qnap download station.

This is the easiest workaround.
1. Install your favorite torrent client ( mine is mutorrent) on your PC
2. Click on the magnet link
3. let the magnet link open with your torrent client
4. Let it start downloading and Pause
5. Go to the application directory of your torrent client and find the .torrent file there.
6. Feed this file as you would have to your download station.

Quick install transmission using QPKG and start downloading

Qnap has a QPKG for transmission which is very easy to install.

1. Login to your Qnap
2. Click on Application Server > QPKG Center
3. Click on Available Tab.
4. Click on Transmission and click install. Alternatively you can download the IPKG from http://eu1.qnap.com/Storage/QPKG/ARM/Transmission_2.22_arm-x19.zip and install using QPKG center.
5. Once it’s installed, you will see a link to Transmission on installed tab.
6. Click on Transmission icon. It will take you to the Admin Center.  The user name and password is the same as your QNAP user name and password .

7. Click on the webinterface link

Transmission Admin Panel

Transmission Admin Panel

8. Here your user name and password are admin/admin. Click on add/upload torrent and paste your magnetic link here. ( You can get your magnetic link by right clicking on the link and selecting copy link location)

Transmission webinterface

Click on Add and paste your torrent magnetic link here

8. It starts downloading .

Wasn’t it Super easy ?

Update : Thanks to the admins of magnets2torrent.me, here is a website that can convert your magnet Link to a torrent file.
How it works is that you visit http://magnet2torrent.me/ , enter your magnet link and let it convert it to a .torrent file. It takes a couple of seconds before it converts the file, ready to be downloaded, but it’s very easy to use. If you want a quick conversion, this might just work.

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Importing opening balance and transactions into quickbooks

Posted on March 24, 2012 by Akash Jain

While Everyone agrees that a large quickbooks file poses performance issues, it’s often difficult to cut down the size. The various option for trimming the filesize are

  1. Verify and Rebuilt
  2. Save file as Accountant’s version and restore it.
  3. Clean up company data prior to a date.

What if none of these work for you. We had a company file the size of 800MB that was a result of 6 years of data. We not only had performance issues but also the reports were inconsistent. when several rebuilds didn’t help, we realized it was time to split the file.

Strangely the Clean up company data didn’t work for it. It would always be stuck halfway. The only way out was to create a new company file and transfer the data.

The Utility that came to rescue was from http://www.q2q.us . We used 3 utilities

  1. Beginning balance transfer utility. (PAID)
    This utility helps you transfer the begning balance.
  2. Data Transfer utility (PAID)
    This utility transfers your lists and transactions
  3. Add reference number to bills (Free)
    If you don’t use unique reference numbers for your transactions, this will be helpful.

The utilities make it easy for you to transfer the data, but it’s still a herculean job to transfer the data. It took us 3 weeks to transfer, reconcile and repost the 2 years data.

here are a few mistakes that I made.  I hope it would save you weeks of trouble if you decide to tranfer quickbooks data using these utilities

  1. Before you start importing data into your new file, import all the custom templates you may have in your old file. the utilities will not transfer the templates for you. If the templates do not exist in the new file and there is a transaction that uses the template, you will get transfer error.
  2. The utility can’t transfer inventory adjustments/stock adjustments from quickbooks file to quickbooks file. You must export the inventory adjustments to iif file and then import into your new file
  3. For us it failed to transfer several deposits. It could be just us, it may work for you. But it took us a while to reconcile and realize that the deposits were not transferred. If your bank balance are not matching, look for the deposits that were not transferred
  4. Pay special attention to deposited funds. Refer to the transfer strategies to learn more about this.
  5. Learn vlookup. Without this, it would be impossible to reconcile. We had nearly 25 pages of transactions under 1 account head and reconciling without exporting to excel and using Vlookup would be impossible.
  6. If your reference numbers are not unique, you can’t use Vlookup. In that case, use CONCATENATE to join several fields and get a unique key.

I wish that after paying so much for quickbooks, they had included a utility for easy transfer of data from one file to another. Thanks God that there are other third party utilities available to do the job.

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Quick Resolution : Thunderbird Incoming server already exists.

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Akash Jain

“Incoming server already exists” is an occasional hiccup you get trying to configure a new email id.

Without fiddling with your inf settings, you can easily add your email account manually by adding a fake account and clicking on manually change settings.

Here is how

1. Click on Tools >> Account settings

2. Account Action ( Button at the bottom) >> add email account

3. Put here some information like

Name :aaaa@abafdll.com ( on anything rubbish)
Email : aaaa@abafdll.com
Password : kaflsdjklsfdjl

4. Click on Continue

5.  Wait till it says thunderbird failed to find settings for your email account

6. Click on Manual Setup

7. Now you will see in your account list that the new account is created already. Fill it up with your correct server information.

That’s it. What you just did was created a fake profile and edited it later.

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How to Remove XP Antivirus 2012

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Akash Jain

When I saw a screen named “XP Antivirus 2012″, I knew this was a virus. It wouldn’t let me go any further, and made the PC extremely slow.

Finally the Rkill.exe utility by Bleepingcomputers came to rescue. I downloaded it from a clean PC, took it on a flash drive and Ran it on my PC. It worked like a charm and took hardly any time in finding the infected files .

Removal of XP Antivirus 2012

1. Download Rkill.exe on a Clean PC.
2. Get Rkill to infected PC, and run it.
3. wait for it to finish killing the processes and take a note of the processes it killed. It gives you a list of processes at the end.
4. Delete the infected files using windows explorer.
5. Reboot the System and run Rkill.exe again, to see if it finds any other infected files.

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Resolution : 550 #5.1.0 Address rejected on Godaddy

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Akash Jain

On Godaddy hosting, I was not able to get the emails. Everytime someone sent me an email, they got a 550 error.

72.167.238.201 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 #5.1.0 Address rejected  somebody@somedomain.com
Giving up on 72.167.238.201.

I realized that many users are getting this error message with Godaddy. There is a simple resolution. Their customer service was very fast to respond. The Resolution is to Update your MX Record.

1. In the My Products section, click Email.
2. On the Manage Email page, click Manage Account next to the account you want to change. The Email Control Center displays.
3. Go to the Domains tab.
4. Select the email account you want to verify MX records for, and then click Server Addresses.
5. Click Update my MX records for me to automatically update your MX records.

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