It’s about 15 years, give or take, I’m working with computers and believe me yesterday was the first time I attempted to update my computer bios!

During this process, I’ve experienced some amazing stuff and I’m going to share them with you too.

My laptop is a HP G62-a22SE and I like it a lot. I do lots of things with it such as programming, listening to music, surfing the web and gaming sometimes. Yesterday, a friend of mine, suggest me to update my laptop’s bios because it will increase the computer’s performance. So I decided to update it!

I searched for “drivers and support downloads” for my laptop in HP website and found the latest bios update for it which was released in December, 2011. I downloaded and executed the bios update and after it finished, my laptop’s LCD just died!!! It took about 5-6 hours of hard working to get back to normal!!! So because it was a pain in the neck, I highly recommend keeping these tips in your mind before attempting to update your PC’s bios.

Backup your files

It’s necessary to backup your computer before start updating your bios. Also, it’s important to backup in an external drive because your hard drive won’t be accessible if anything wrong happened during update process.

Don’t execute the update app without knowledge

Bios update is not like other applications. When you run the updater, there’s no way to reinstall or uninstall it. Also, most of software updates DON’T get the confirmation for starting the update task and they start immediately after your execute the updater!

Update your PC’s bios only if it’s necessary

All in all, it’s so important to keep in mind that updating your bios is not necessary at all! If your computer is working OK, so you don’t need bios update!

Hope it helps

It’s about six years I’m blogging my life and using BlogEngineto publish my posts; because I believe it’s the best blog engine ever. As a matter of fact, BlogEngine is doing everything I need as a blogger and sometimes more than that. I highly recommend using it if you’re blogger!

But this post is not about BlogEngine itself! In this post I’m going to introduce a new theme for BlogEngine which is so cool!

Note: If you don’t know BlogEngine yet, please check out its website at: http://dotnetblogengine.net.

It was about five months I was going to change my blog’s theme to a new one that includes latest web standards such as HTML5 and CSS3 but I didn’t have time for that. Yesterday, I decided to change my blog theme and it took about 12 hours to create a new one. In fact, I didn’t create the theme from scratch!

The ELEGANTBLUE Theme

ElegantBlue originally designed by freecsstemplates.organd I’ve changed it a lot to get it compatible with BlogEngine. Here’s the list of things I’ve changed:

HTML5 & CSS3

Everybody is talking about HTML5 and CSS3 these because it’s awesome! It’s about a year that I’m using these in my projects. HTML5 and CSS3 give me lots of capabilities I didn’t have before and help me create user-interfaces like never before. Also, they help search engines to index your website faster than before! For example, with the new <header> HTML5 tag, search engines can recognize where your website’s header is. The ElegantBlue theme for BlogEngine is a HTML5 and CSS3 theme so search engines can find your blog contents faster and the user interface is much cooler!

Razor View Engine

In BlogEngine 2.5, you can create themes and extensions using Razor view engine. Here’s a brief explanation about Razor:

The Razor syntax is a template markup syntax that enables the programmer to use an HTML construction workflow and is based on the C# programming language. Instead of using the ASP.NET .ASPX markup syntax using <%= %> blocks to indicate code blocks the Razor syntax starts of a code block with Razor using a @ character and does not require explicit closing of the code-block.

I totally used Razor view engine in ElegentBlue theme for BlogEngine.

Note: In order to implement Razor view engine, BlogEngine has RazorHost directory in the theme folder of the application. RazorHost folder is like a default template for Razor themes. If you’re going to use this theme in your website, you need to change the DOCTYPE to HTML5 in “site.master” file because it’s set to XHTML 1.0 by default. Besides, I include this change in the download file at the end of this post.

Download

You can download the theme right from here.

 ElegantBlue.zip (352.05 kb)

Hope it helps.

As you may know, I’m one of the Apple’s fans and love to use my iOS gadgets (iPhone and iPad) in every type of tasks. Many of iOS users are using their iPhones/iPads in enterprise environments and want to connect to their company’s network while at work. In some cases, network administrators set a proxy server so users must connect to that proxy in order to access internal websites and more. As you know, iOS is currently supports HTTP proxy but it’s not enough for many users because their company’s network administrators set SOCKS proxy instead of HTTP!

By the time, there are some applications that can be installed in order to use SOCKS proxy in an iOS device but these apps are only available for jailbroken devices so other users can’t install them!

In this post I want to tell you how to use SOCKS proxy in an unjailbroken iOS device.

Note: In this example I’m using an iPhone to demonstrate the steps but you can use any iOS device; there’s no limitation at all!

The first thing you need is a web server (or any computer which has access to the internet). In this example my webserver is a PC with Windows 7 ultimate installed but you can use any type of web server you want. We use this web server in order to upload a .pac file!

The .pac file

A proxy auto-config (PAC) file defines how web browsers and other user agents can automatically choose the appropriate proxy server (access method) for fetching a given URL.

A PAC file contains a JavaScript function "FindProxyForURL(url, host)". This function returns a string with one or more access method specifications. These specifications cause the user agent to use a particular proxy server or to connect directly.

For more information about PAC files Click Here

Now you need to create a PAC file like the following:

function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
{
  return "SOCKS 192.168.0.1:3128";
}

After you’ve created the PAC file, upload it to your webserver.

Finally, you have to configure your iOS device. In the Setting app, tap on the Wi-Fi and then tap on the arrow in the right side of your selected access point:

Then set HTTP proxy to “Auto” and then enter the URL of the PAC file you’ve uploaded to the webserver in the URL text box.

You’re done! Now you can access to your SOCKS proxy server!

If you have any question about this post, please leave your comments down below and I’ll answer them as soon as possible.

Hope it helps.