Apple Magic Mouse

I've been using the Apple Magic Mouse for over a month now, and I must say that I really like it.  Make sure that you use it with BetterTouchTool.  With BetterTouchTool, you can program the mouse to do different things to your liking.  ButterTouchTool has a "windows snapping" feature like Windows 7 if you like that.

Acer Aspire 5732z Touchpad Not Working

Problem:  

A friend asked me for help.

Acer Touchpad suddenly stopped working.  Tried Fn+F7 as suggested, not working.  Tried uninstalling/reinstalling driver, not working.

Solution: 

On the left of the power button (where you turn your laptop on and off), there is a little button.  It's the on/off button for the touchpad.  Make sure that it's on.  Simple as that.  Took me a while to figure that out.  Since it wasn't my laptop, I didn't know all of its functions.  Hope this helps someone someday.

Removing Sweat Sheen With Photoshop

1. Create a new layer and "darken" for blending mode
2. Choose the brush and set "opacity=20%"
3. Alt (keyboard) to pick the area without the sweat and apply to the sweat area

Reference:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEZgawNrt2E

HmacSHA1 in Java and C#

Java:

byte[] password = "password".getBytes();

SecretKeySpec keySpec = new SecretKeySpec(password,"HmacSHA1");

Mac hmacsha1 = Mac.getInstance("HmacSHA1");

hmacsha1.init(keySpec);

byte[] hash = hmacsha1.doFinal("test".getBytes());

String hashBase64 = new String(Base64.encodeBase64(hash));

System.out.println(hashBase64);

C#:

System.Text.ASCIIEncoding encoding = new System.Text.ASCIIEncoding();

byte[] password = encoding.GetBytes("password");

HMACSHA1 hmacsha1 = new HMACSHA1(password);

byte[] hash = hmacsha1.ComputeHash(encoding.GetBytes("test"));

String hashBase64 = Convert.ToBase64String(hash);

Console.WriteLine(hashBase64);

Base64 Encoding String in Java and C#

Java:

String base64 = new String(org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Base64.encodeBase64("test".getBytes()));

System.out.println(base64);

C#:

System.Text.ASCIIEncoding encoding = new System.Text.ASCIIEncoding();

string base64 = System.Convert.ToBase64String(encoding.GetBytes("test"));

Console.WriteLine(base64);

Convert String To Hex in Java and C#

Java:

String hex = new String(org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Hex.encodeHex("test".getBytes()));

System.out.println(hex);

C#:

System.Text.ASCIIEncoding encoding = new System.Text.ASCIIEncoding();

string hex = System.BitConverter.ToString(encoding.GetBytes("test")).Replace("-", string.Empty);

Console.WriteLine(hex);

Parse XML String in Java

Here are a couple of easy ways to parse an xml string in java:

String xml = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?><string xmlns=\"http://playingtreee.blogspot.com/\">4654ebd75e9cbd8a4823e964f0dceef0</string>";

Example 1:

DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();

DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();

Document doc = builder.parse(new InputSource(new StringReader(xml)));

System.out.println(doc.getFirstChild().getTextContent());

Example 2:

DOMParser parser = new DOMParser();

parser.parse(new InputSource(new StringReader(xml))); 

Document doc = parser.getDocument();

System.out.println(doc.getFirstChild().getTextContent());