Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Misc : Setting up and adding your gravatar

What is a gravatar? As per the site, "A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things".

As per Wikipedia, "A Gravatar avatar can be up to 512 pixels wide, is always square and is displayed at 80 by 80 pixels by default. If the uploaded avatar is larger or smaller, the avatar is scaled appropriately".

I wanted to add one to Stack Overflow.

So I searched Google Images for a small image and saved it to my hard drive as a .jpg.

Then I used the ubiquitous Paint to open it. Under "Image / Attributes", it showed as:

Width = 60, Height = 40.

To keep it square, I needed to make the width 40. Simple maths shows that I needed it to be reduced by a third. So "Image / Stretch/Skew" and type 67 (i.e. 67 %) into the "Horizontal" box for "Stretch".

Another "Image / Attributes" showed it was pretty much as required. Save on the hard drive.

So logon to Gravatar. "My Account / Manage" Click "Add a new image". Browse to where the file was saved, select the file, crop as appropriate (I just dragged the box to fit the image), select the content type (hopefully it's "G"!) and you're done.

Now any site that uses gravatars will display your new image.

Enjoy!

Monday, February 16, 2009

XP : DOS equivalent of Traceroute

I've used Traceroute often to trace the path between two hosts and highlight potential bottlenecks.

But it is not a Windows program. However, "PathPing" is a network utility in XP.

"It combines the functionality of Ping with that of Traceroute (in Windows: tracert), by providing details of the path between two hosts and Ping-like statistics for each node in the path based on samples taken over a time period".


C:\>pathping

Usage: pathping [-g host-list] [-h maximum_hops] [-i address] [-n]
[-p period] [-q num_queries] [-w timeout] [-P] [-R] [-T]
[-4] [-6] target_name

Options:
-g host-list Loose source route along host-list.
-h maximum_hops Maximum number of hops to search for target.
-i address Use the specified source address.
-n Do not resolve addresses to hostnames.
-p period Wait period milliseconds between pings.
-q num_queries Number of queries per hop.
-w timeout Wait timeout milliseconds for each reply.
-P Test for RSVP PATH connectivity.
-R Test if each hop is RSVP aware.
-T Test connectivity to each hop with Layer-2 priority tags.
-4 Force using IPv4.
-6 Force using IPv6.


Or (as above), use tracert.


C:\>tracert

Usage: tracert [-d] [-h maximum_hops] [-j host-list] [-w timeout] target_name

Options:
-d Do not resolve addresses to hostnames.
-h maximum_hops Maximum number of hops to search for target.
-j host-list Loose source route along host-list.
-w timeout Wait timeout milliseconds for each reply.


Enjoy!