I recently purchased a digital multimeter from Maplin which was on sales at that time: Precision Gold N56FU. Being a full sized autoranging multimeter with computer interface, this meter £44.99 seems to worth every penny. Of course, Maplin didn’t make this meter. Some Chinese dudes did. Maplin just rebranded the meter because E-SUN sounded too lame =P

No purchase is complete until it is disassembled!

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Ever wanted to grab the output of a command via C++?

In PHP, we are all very familiar with @exec and popen, but what about C++?

Try this:

string cmd = "/usr/bin/netstat -na";
string OutString;
FILE *FileStream;
char stdbuffer[1024];
FileStream = popen(cmd.c_str(), "r");
while (fgets(stdbuffer, 1024, FileStream) != NULL)
        OutString.append(stdbuffer);
pclose(FileStream);

• The first 3 lines are variable declarations.
• This is followed by popen command which opens a pipe to the external program. r here means to read from the program output.
• We will now use a 1024 character buffer to read the pipe until a null terminator is encountered.
• Remember to close the process pipe once you’re done!

You ask: “What if I want to have the stderr captured as well?”. No problem! Just add:

2>&1

to the back of your command, just like how you would do it in BASH.

This article gives a graphical and guided tutorial on how to deploy and configure a Microsoft SharePoint Services (SPS) 3.0 with Service Pack 1 on Microsoft Windows Server operating system for a company extranet.

What You’ll Need:

1. Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 or Windows Server 2008
2. Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0.
3. Internet Information Services 6.0 or 7.0 configured and functional.
4. Microsoft SQL Server 2000, 2005 or 2008. (Recommended)

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Users of Firefox 3 might find it extremely slow when resolving DNS addresses when compared to Google Chrome, or even Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer 8!

The problem lies with Firefox 3′s implementation of IPv6. By default, Firefox 3 would try IPv6 first. If your network is not IPv6, where 99% of us belongs to, then Firefox 3 would wait for timeout and try with IPv4. You might have lost lots of miliseconds just waiting for IPv6 to timeout. The delay is even more apparent when accessing localhost or LAN sites.

The solution, for now, is to set the following setting to false in “about:config“:

network.dns.disableIPv6 = false

Restart Firefox 3 and enjoy the magic!

Problem: Even on a fairly modern PC running Core i7, Internet Explorer 8 seems to take significant time to load if anti-malware softwares that relies on Internet Explorer’s Zones to block sites (> 100,000+ records). Since Windows Explorer is tightly integrated with Internet Explorer, it slows down significantly as well.

Solution: There are no permanent solutions at the moment other than deleting all the keys under zone maps set by your anti-malware software: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\