Using watermarks in word documents looks really cool. But the problem occurs when the documents become too big. In such cases, the document becomes exceedingly slow to react to scrolling. Adobe PDF conversion is an even bigger problem.
To remove the watermark it is simple enough : Format -> Background -> Printed Watermark. Then click on “No watermark” and you are golden (or you should be golden).
I’ve observed that the watermark does not get removed many times when you have too many sections in the document.
In such cases: Goto View -> Header and Footer. Click on “Show/Hide Document Text”.
You should see that all your text has disappeared except the watermark. Click on the watermark and you should be able to select it like a floating image. Press the “delete” key and lo! behold! the watermark is gone.
This took me a while to figure out and it was quite frustrating. I hope this post helps someone!

Ever since I installed Tortoise SVN I saw that the right-clicks on my Windows XP SP2 had been terribly slow. It seems like Tortoise performs a whole lot of caching. Every time you right click all the cache entries are browsed and updates are sought. Although, the interface provides ways to disable this overlay caching, it seemed to me that the caching was being performed regardless. I had to uninstall the client to restore the sanity of my right-clicks. I guess software designers should make design decisions such that the UI responsiveness is not compromised for Windows Shell extensions.

I like using dcfldd for creating the raw images, because it shows a nice status…it’s interesting to see progress.

dcfldd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/sdb1/filename.dd hash=md5 md5log=hashfile.md5 conv=noerror,sync bs=4096

It’s the ‘bs’ (stands for bytesize) that makes the difference (…always does doesn’t it ;-).

Autopsy – The forensics browser always uses the ~/.autopsy as the base directory for storing the files from the cases. The following command is helpful in changing the directory in which the cases should be stored:

./autopsy -d /mountpoint/dirname

The exiftool is a cool application that can read meta-information to determine the different types of files.

I was using the vpnc the other day on my Backtrack 4 R2 system to log in to VPN. I noticed that there was nothing that would give me the status of whether or not the tunnel was up. So I wrote a small one-liner to help me:

while [ `ps aux |grep vpnc|grep -v grep|awk '{print $2}'` ] ; do printf "Connected\r"; done


The introduction of low-cost flying alternatives in the Indian skies is a good thing for the Indian consumers as one would reckon. However, the consumers only stand to gain if they get a service which at least gets them their money worth.
Sadly though, the quality of service provided by these low-cost airlines is also “low-grade”. The business principle seems sound that people who want food/refreshments in flight buy it but that does not necessarily mean that one gets hard pressed to board the flight itself. The airline management needs to rethink that low-cost does not mean high tension. My flight experience was as follows:
I was to board the flight from Delhi – Mumbai at around 9:00 pm. However, until 10:30 pm there were no announcements which made me ponder about the very existence of the flight itself. At about 11:00 pm it was announced that the entry would be from Gate # 3. The people rushed in like a horde of animals trying to get into a DTC (Delhi Transport Corporation) bus. Then a technical snag – the key was unable to open the gate # 3 – occurred to make the matters worse. The gates were changed to Gate # 1 resulting into a new frenzy of people trying to reach gate # 1. In what ensued, there were a series of announcements for passengers to board the flight, however, there was a slight problem. The officials on Gate # 1 were not ready to let passengers through. The flights like “Air Deccan” have given a new meaning to the term “fight to the finish” as your fight to get a seat in the flight never ends!

Now I’ve no problems considering that the population of India is huge. However, I do have a problem when seemingly intelligent (?) people do not display basic intelligence. Air Deccan issues unique numbers on it’s boarding passes when people check-in. Why these numbers are not used for seat assignments is a question that only Air Deccan can answer. Apparently, they use these numbers to identify which passengers have / have not boarded the flight.

Unitl these companies realize that cheap tickets should not mean cheap quality the consumers will continue to remain at a loss in these airlines which are advertized as a “high value for money”.

I’ve been struggling to find the best working version of John so that it can crack MS Cache outputs from Cachedump (of course, this functionality is now included in fgdump). Running fgdump gives two files host.pwdump and hostname.cachedump. I’ve found 127.0.0.1.pwdump and 127.0.0.1.cachedump files upon using fgdump without any parameters.
So now you have the Cached credentials but then comes the big problem of cracking those. So there’s the jumbo patch for john-1.7.2.
Following commands need to be executed to get this patch going:

$ tar zxvf john-1.7.2.tar.gz
$ cd john-1.7.2/
$ wget http://www.openwall.com/john/contrib/john-1.7.2-all-9.diff.gz
$ gzip -d john-1.7.2-all-9.diff.gz
$ patch -p1 <john-1.7.2-all-9.diff
$ cd src/
$ make linux-x86-sse2

You get some warnings upon compilations but the executable works very well.

Go ahead and get cracking:
$ cd run/
$ ./john –format=mscash