Recover a Lost WordPress Password

Recently I had a client contact me and tell me they lost their WordPress password and couldn’t get into their account. I guess they had the wrong email in there and couldn’t use the ‘Lost Password’ feature either. Luckily, there’s a ‘not too difficult’ method for resetting your password (or more than likely your favorite client’s password).

I’m going to be using cPanel and PHPMyAdmin for this, but you should be able to do it with whatever system your host is using to allow you to manage your DB’s.

1. Login to cPanel and look for phpMyAdmin
   
2. Look for your database to the blog you forgot the password to on the left hand side
   
3. Look for the ‘wp_users’ table and click the ‘Browse’ button
   
4. Find your username/user ID and click the edit button next to it
   

Rename Multiple Files With a Few Clicks

Have you ever needed to rename a ton of files? This has to be one of the most tedious tasks I’ve ever come across in all my years of computing. About six months ago I was faced with the chore of renaming 5,000+ files for a website from .htm to .php. After renaming 100+ files, my eyes glazed over and my mind shut down. There had to be a better way.

Enter Ant Renamer. Normally the aforementioned task would have taken me hours to do (if not a couple days). After some searching, I found an amazing app called Ant Renamer. Instead of hours, this task took me a couple seconds. Here how to use it.

This is just one of the uses for it. There isn’t any naming convention that you can come up with that this app can’t do.

Check out Ant Renamer

Remove Tabs From Adobe Photoshop CS4

I’m just going to cut to the chase: The tabs in Photoshop SUCK. This is coming from the guy who wants tabs everywhere. In explorer/file browser, my browser, my text editor…can you imagine how easy the universe would be to navigate if all the planets were simply tabs? Want to go to Mars? Just CTRL + Tab over to it. Simple right?

With all of this love for tabs, I am completely dumbfounded by the use of tabs in Photoshop. I really tried to like it, but it’s just not intuitive and it’s mind blowing that this was made the default for such an amazing product. Here’s how to turn them off, and actually start getting some work done again.

Go to ‘Edit’ –> ‘Preferences’ –> ‘Interface’

Now uncheck the ‘Open Documents as Tabs’ option

VirtualBox VERR_VM_DRIVER_NOT_INSTALLED (rc=-1908) Error

I recently installed the updated kernel in Ubuntu 8.10. Everything seemed to go fine until I tried to open my Windows XP Virtual Machine inside of VirtualBox. I initially got an error that said ‘Failed to open a session for the virtual machine Windows XP’. This error was immediately followed by another error dialogue box with the error:

VERR_VM_DRIVER_NOT_INSTALLED (rc=-1908)

There’s two ways to fix this. I would try the first method first, and the second only it that didn’t work.

Method 1 – Simple Command

Simply open a terminal window and type ‘sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup‘. This will take a little bit of time, but once it’s done, you should be able to open your virtual machines like normal. If for some reason this doesn’t work, try the second method below.

Method 2 – Uninstall/Reinstall

Go to ‘System’ –> ‘Administration’ –> ‘Synaptic Package Manager’ and search for ‘virtualbox’. Uninstall whatever is installed. Once it’s removed, reinstall it.

Finding Popular Company Logos For Design Use

I was looking for a logo the other day and all my Google Image searches returned results of some crappy gif that had been resized and pixelated all to hell. After some searching I came across AllFreeLogo.com.

You can find logos for a ton of high profile companies like Sony, HP, YouTube, Apple, BMW and Adidas, all in vector format. The only thing that sucks is you have to sign up for an account if you want to download anything. Small price to pay, however, if you want to use a logo that’s actually recognizable after you get done with it.

I know there are a ton of other logo resources out there. What do you use?

YUI Compressor Gets An Awesome Online GUI

I use YUI Compressor to compress all my JavaScript files and up until now, they only way to do it was via the command line. While this is fairly easy for me, I think the majority of people don’t compress their JS files because they’re not sure how (or this practice hasn’t permeated the masses of average web developers).

Rodolphe Stoclin has come up with an incredibly useful online tool that takes the YUI Compressor and adds a web GUI to it, making it dead simple to use. It looks like he’s using jQuery to do everything on the fly with no page reload and it even tells you the compression ratio.

I tested the tool with an uncompressed version of MooTools and it works exactly as you would expect. If you’re not compressing your JavaScript files, now’s the time. It’s not going to get any easier than this.

Connect Ubuntu 8.10 to a Windows 7 Share

So I’ve been playing around with Windows 7 today. Figured I’d throw a quick tutorial on how to connect an Ubuntu machine to a Windows 7 share. Quick note, I’m running the first beta of Windows 7, build 7000. Since the network stack has changed very little from Vista, I’m assuming this will work the exact same way once Windows 7 actually ships.

Setup Windows 7 Share Folder

1. Create a new folder wherever you want your share to be. I’m going to put mine on the desktop. Easiest way is to right click and choose ‘New’ –> ‘Folder’
   
2. Name your share. This is going to be where you will connect, so I would recommend not using any weird characters or spaces. I’m calling mine ‘myshare’
   
3. Now we need to enable sharing on this folder. Right click the folder and choose ‘Properties’
   

Installing TrueCrypt 5.1a & 6.1a On Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10 or 9.04

TrueCrypt was finally made available for Linux with the release of version 5.1a. Here’s how to install it.

**Update**
I have been made aware by Onopoc in the comments section that this same tutorial will work with TrueCrypt 6.1a as well. Simply change the name of the file in the respective spots where the exact file name is used

Installing TrueCrypt

1. Open a terminal window and type: ‘wget http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads/truecrypt-5.1a-ubuntu-x86.tar.gz’
   
2. Once that is done, type: ‘tar zxvf truecrypt-5.1a-ubuntu-x86.tar.gz’
   
3. Now go to ‘Places‘ –> ‘Home Folder‘ and look for a file called
   ‘truecrypt-5.1a-setup-ubuntu-x86‘ and double click on it
   
4. You should get a dialog box asking you what you want to do with it. Choose ‘Run in Terminal‘
   
5. You should now see another dialog box with the option to ‘Install TrueCrypt‘ at the bottom. Choose this.
   

Encrypting Thumb Drives With TrueCrypt

Last week I wrote a post on how to encrypt entire hard drives with TrueCrypt. We all know how easy it is to have your laptop lost or stolen and how important it is to protect sensitive data. However, something that is even easier to lose and often has just as sensitive data on it is thumb drives. I know personally I’ve lost a couple of them over time.

Today we’re going to learn how to encrypt these drives to keep them from prying eyes.

Setting Up

Just a few things to get you prepared for the encryption process.

1. Grab TrueCrypt if you don’t already have it.
2. Make sure your thumb drive is plugged in and move everything on it to your desktop. This is important because TrueCrypt is going to format the drive during the encryption process.
3. Open the main TrueCrypt window
   

Using Truecrypt to Encrypt Your Entire Hard Drive

If you’re as paranoid as I am, you more than likely appreciate the advancements that the TrueCrypt team has made with version 5.0. For me, the greatest thing they did was making whole disk encryption dead simple. Here’s how you do it.

Getting Started

1. First you will need to visit the TrueCrypt site and download and install it on your system. I’m going to be using Windows XP for my demonstration, but they have since released very good and stable version for Mac OSX and Linux.
2. Next, go ahead and open the main window by clicking on the TrueCrypt logo in the system tray. The window should look like this
   

Setting Up the Encryption Settings

3. Click the the ‘Create Volume ‘ button
4. On the next window, choose the radio button next to ‘Encrypt the system partition or entire system drive ‘