Activating Microsoft Office 2013 with a new serial key

I had a lot of trouble activating Office 2013 Professional because the activation key I used during installation was invalid. After installation, it would ask me to activate it again. But the activation window would never allow me to enter a new serial key. It would use the same serial key I used during installation and obviously complain that it was invalid.

The workaround for this is (without having to activate over the phone) is to use command prompt. So much for Windows being a GUI OS.

Run command prompt and enter the following commands:
(The path should match to your installation directory on Windows)

cd C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15\
cscript ospp.vbs /inpkey:YourKeyHere
cscript ospp.vbs /act


The second command replaces the serial key on file with the new one you enter. The third command activates it with this new serial key.

Installing android apps on Blackberry Playbook without jailbreaking

I bought a Blackberry playbook (Don't ask me why!) and was shocked to see the lack of apps on the Blackberry App World. It practically rendered my tablet useless. Until I found that you can install Android apps on the playbook. Now, there are ways to even jailbreak your playbook and install the whole Android Play Store on the table. But, if you aren't comfortable taking such extreme measures, you can follow these simple steps to install android apps on your playbook.

You will need a Chrome browser for this. A great plus is you don't need to use the official Playbook Manager, thus allowing you to install apps on non Windows platforms as well.

1. Install the chrome plugin BB10/Playbook app manager.
2. Convert the android apps (.apk format) to a .bar format (BB app format) using this site.
3. Install the converted bar files on your playbook using the Chrome plugin.

Voila! You have your favourite android apps on your playbook now.

I installed Kindle, Quora, Google maps etc. All working fine.

PHP Navigator: The Web based file management system

This is a brilliant tool I recently came across. PHPNav is an onlne file manager, very useful when you wish to edit your web pages on your server. It has a Windows Explorer style look and feel and lets you view/edit pages with ease.

For starters, you can download PHPNav here. Decompress the folder on your server where your website is hosted (for me, it was /htdocs/cloudplayer). The folder name would be phpnav. You can rename it to anything you want. Now, configuring it is pretty easy. Follow the steps below.

1. Ensure that the PHPNav folder is now in the directory containing the index page (landing page) of your site.

2. Inside your PHPNav directory, open the config.php file for editing. Search for the line $compress=true. After that line, add the following lines.

$mysql_server="xxxxxx"; //your SQL Server name
$mysql_user = "xxxxx"; //your SQL server username
$mysql_passwd = "xxxxx"; //your SQL Server password
$mysql_db = "xxxxxxxx"; // database name
$mysql_table = "xxxx"; // main table name in the database. for me it was called users

3. You can edit the login info for your PHPNav by changing the values of $user and $passwd.

You are good to go now. Enter the path of your PHPNav folder and login!

Xampp: another mysql daemon is already running

XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl.

I used XAMPP a lot without any issues. However, this weekend I got my hands into Ruby (on Rails). I installed a lot of stuff and went through a lot of configurations and then MySQL on XAMPP stopped working.

The issue was when I start XAMPP using the command
sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

I got the following output:

Starting XAMPP for Linux 1.5.3a...
XAMPP: Starting Apache with SSL (and PHP5)...
XAMPP: Another MySQL daemon is already running.
XAMPP: Starting ProFTPD...
XAMPP for Linux started.

The Mysql port was already in use by some other application because of which it was not available for xampp. XAMPP comes packaged with it's own MySQL server and I already had another one (after my Ruby on Rails work) taking up the port. This prevents you from using anything which uses Mysql like phpMyadmin or any CMS on your server.

A workaround this wold be typing the following command in your terminal.

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop

This stops the Mysql daemon because of which the port is now available for xampp. Start xampp again and you are good to go.

However, you need to start/stop the mysql instance using the port depending on which application you need to use. It would be brilliant if there was a way to have XAMPP-MySQL not conflict with MySQL instance that you use for any other application say Ruby.

Makefiles: The perfect tool to build your projects

You have created a project and you have a lot of source files. Now, each time you wish to compile you specify all the source files for compiling. Imagine, you make a small change. Now. you repeat the whole compilation process again. Very tedious, right? No worries :) Help is coming your way in the form of Makefiles.

Forgive me, if you already know this and are laughing at the fact I just came across this only now. For the others like me, makefiles are files which help you compile your projects with ease.And the best thing, incase of a small change in your code, only the file with the change is recompiled. Obviously, all this depends on how you write your makefiles. A brilliant tutorial is provided here. The make documentation can be found here.

How to export facebook contacts and albums and more to Google Plus!

Google Plus, the new kid on the block is making waves (no pun intended GWave) and FB users are clamouring for invites. It won't be long before Google takes over the world. A nice UI, Google Plus looks like its here to stay.

But, a major reason why it is going to take time before Google+ becomes mainstream is the fact that your whole online life is pretty much on FB. No worries. A google chrome extension called Move your Photos is there to help you take your first step. It allows you to export FB albums directly to Picasa after which you can share them with your circles.

Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

The official Google Code blog: Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

I came across this tool and it looks really promising considering the fact that lot of browsers now support HTML 5. Flash had been an irritating feature for most browsers. Looks like Swiffy is here to take care of it.