How to use Skydrive folders in Windows Explorer

I am a big fan of free online storage for my backups. So far Microsoft Skydrive seems to be the best one in terms of space. But the one thing which I hate about Skydrive is its incompatibility with any application. Ideally I would have liked to use the online folders as easily as my local folders. For example had the folder been openable in Explorer, then we could have used the “copy-paste” and “save in” features available for any local directory. Surely the latency would be higher, but at least there would be no need to do thing separately.

Anyways, here is a hack (not yet perfected but works so far) devised from various sources which allows anybody to mount his/her Skydrive folders in a local directory. This is formally called network mounting. The trick is simple enough for novice users too. Just follow the simple steps:

1. Log-in to your sky-drive account from http://skydrive.live.com/
2. Look into the address bar, you should see something like “https://cid-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.skydrive.live.com/”, where the ‘x’s would be replaced by your unique customer-id. Copy the 16 characters of customer-id.
3. Now open Notepad and do the following very carefully:
   1. and paste this 16 characters
   2. Note down the name of the folder that you would like to mount, say “MyOwn”
   3. In notepad create this URL (without quotes): “\\docs.live.net@SSL\xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx\MyOwn”, replace the ‘x’s by your unique 16 character customer-id and replace “MyOwn” by the folder name (as it appears in Skydrive) that you want to mount.
   4. If you are trying to mount the default folders “Public” or “Documents”, then you have to use “^2Public” and “^2 Documents” in place of “MyOwn”.
   5. Now copy the final URL that you made.
4. Open Explorer
5. On the left side-bar, right click on “Network”, and select “Map network drive”
6. Paste the URL you copied from Notepad.
7. Select a drive letter, preferably something at the end of the English alphabet like “Z”, and hit the “Finish” button.
8. You would be asked for your Windows Live-ID and password, which you must provide.
9. Voila, you can now see the contents of that drive inside explorer by going to the drive you selected.
10. Now you can use this folder just like any other local hard-drive folders. Open files from this drive by double clicking, save files, cut-copy-paste files to and from this directory.

Try it out, I’m sure you will stop using the online version after using this trick.

Now, a word of caution. This is NOT an official method, so Microsoft does not give you any guarantees of any kind for this method to work. So one fine morning this method might just give a lot of errors and rendered ineffective. But till then (and I believe chances of that happening is quite slim), utilize this feature.

Lastly the file size restriction still applies (50Mb per file). So unless you are felling adventurous, do not try this out with files lager than 50Mb. Sadly this thing does not work for non-Microsoft OS (Linux, to be specific). If I get something working on Linux, I will post it here.

If you have any questions/recommendations please post it here. I usually reply within a day.

Why India is still a Developing Country ... a short story

An Old Story:

The Ant works hard in the withering heat all summer building its house and laying up supplies for the winter. The Grasshopper thinks the Ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the Ant is warm and well fed. The Grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.

Indian Version:

The Ant works hard in the withering heat all summer building its house and laying up supplies for the winter. The Grasshopper thinks the Ant's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the shivering Grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the Ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. NDTV, BBC, CNN show up to provide pictures of the shivering Grasshopper next to a video of the Ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.

The World is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be that this poor Grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Arundhati Roy stages a demonstration in front of the Ant's house.

Medha Patkar goes on a fast along with other Grasshoppers demanding that Grasshoppers be relocated to warmer climates during winter .

Mayawati states this as 'injustice' done on Minorities.

Amnesty International and Koffi Annan criticize the Indian Government for not upholding the fundamental rights of the Grasshopper.

The Internet is flooded with online petitions seeking support to the Grasshopper (many promising Heaven and Everlasting Peace for prompt support as against the wrath of God for non-compliance) .

Opposition MPs stage a walkout. Left parties call for ' Bengal Bandh' in West Bengal and Kerala demanding a Judicial Enquiry.

CPM in Kerala immediately passes a law preventing Ants from working hard in the heat so as to bring about equality of poverty among Ants and Grasshoppers.

Mamta Bannerji allocates one free coach to Grasshoppers on all Indian Railway Trains, aptly named as the 'Grasshopper Rath'.

Finally, the Judicial Committee drafts the ' Prevention of Terrorism Against Grasshoppers Act' [POTAGA], with effect from the beginning of the winter.

Kapil Sibbal makes 'Special Reservation ' for Grasshoppers in Educational Institutions & in Government Services.

The Ant is fined for failing to comply with POTAGA and having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, it’s home is confiscated by the Government and handed over to the Grasshopper in a ceremony covered by NDTV.

Arundhati Roy calls it ' A Triumph of Justice'.

Mamta calls it 'Socialistic Justice '.

CPM calls it the ' Revolutionary Resurgence of the Downtrodden '

Koffi Annan invites the Grasshopper to address the UN General Assembly.

Many years later ...

The Ant has since migrated to the US and set up a multi-billion dollar company in Silicon Valle. 100s of Grasshoppers still die of starvation despite reservation somewhere in India.

AND

As a result of loosing lot of hard working Ants and feeding the grasshoppers, India is still a developing country !

Last Words

Usually I stay away from publishing other people's contents on this blog. However, this post actually breaks the rule. The above is an email forward sent to me by my my uncle Dr. Tamal Deb. I do not know the original author, but the story made a lot of sense to me.

How to ssh to Mac

Ever since I got my Mac Book Pro, I have been trying to ssh into it. Unlike Fedora, Ubuntu and RHEL, Macs do not have this ssh switched on by default. Here is the step-by-step procedure for doing so (note that this is for the machine to which you need to connect, not the one from which you would connect) :

1. Go to "System Preferences"
2. Select "Sharing"
3. Unlock the lock symbol at the bottom-left corner
4. Check "Remote Login"
5. Now close this window and try out ssh-ing to your machine. In case you do not know the IP of your machine, type "ifconfig" in the terminal to get it.

One could have also modified the ssh configuration file located at /etc/sshd_config for the same. Initially I had also done the same. However the method that I described above is completely GUI based, so even non-geeks can try it out. Besides this interface also allows one to tweak a lot of other things as well.

Disclaimer: I am a Mac newbie, its only since last one week that I have been using it. The above procedure is what I figured out after some attempts in my Mac Book Pro running OS X. I do not really know if it would be the same for other Macs as well.
 

IEEE formatting in LaTeX

I had to write one of my recent reports in IEEE format. Although IEEE does provide all the necessary files and guideline, I had to spend quite sometime to get the things working with LaTeX. So here is a step by step procedure on how to use the IEEE template in LaTeX in Ubuntu and Fedora.

1. Download the template from the IEEE Manuscript Template page. Presently the file-name for Unix is "IEEEtran2.tar.gz".
2. Extract this file in a folder IEEEtran.
3. Within that create a subdirectory "bibtex"
4. Download the bibtex file "IEEEtranBST1.tar.gz" from the same IEEE Manuscript Template site to this directory and extract.
5. For Ubuntu users:
Move IEEEtran directory to /usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/
6. For Fedora users:
Move IEEEtran directory to /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex
7. Run "texhash", (this would require root privileges) or use sudo if its available.

That is it. Now you are ready to directly use this template file for your LaTeX reports. A couple of more things for LyX users:

• After following these steps, you have to restart LyX.
• Go to Lyx > Tools > Reconfigure
• Restart LyX
• To use this template just select IEEEtran from the Document Settings.

If you have been benefited by this short tutorial, please drop by a comment.

How to print from an iPad?

Here's a simple way to print things from Apple iPad: