6 Facebook Hack Codes & Tips To Show Off Your Geeky Skills

The very first thing I should mention is that when it comes to Facebook, there’s really no such thing as “hack codes.”  The title of this article is  partially tongue-in-cheek, because with Facebook, the rules change so often that one “Facebook hack” code that works today will likely not work tomorrow.  Facebook designers change links and features at whim  and you’re left trying to guess  why your link or plug-in no longer works.

#1 – The Konami Code Lens Flare Hack

This is a rather silly hack, but if you’re visiting friends who may not be very computer savvy – this is a very easy way to impress them with your hacking skills. Borrow their computer (or bring your laptop), log into your Facebook account, and then on the computer keyboard just type the following key sequence of arrows and letters exactly: UP-UP-DOWN-DOWN-LEFT-RIGHT-LEFT-RIGHT-B-A-<Enter>

Then, click around on your Facebook page, or scroll up and down the page (this seems to work best), and you’ll discover a pretty cool display of lens flare effects.

Oddly, the effect isn’t horribly annoying because it disappears pretty quickly when you really need it to. It isn’t the most impressive hack though, because it’s probably the most common one mentioned across the net – but it’s still kind of cool and fun to play around with.

#2 – Aye, Make Yer Profile a Pirate’s Page You Landlubber!

The second profile hack is also one of the easiest to implement. Facebook offers users the ability to transform their Facebook pages into any language that they like. If you scroll down to the lower left corner of your profile page, you’ll see your current language setting. Click on this, and you’ll have a list of all languages available to you. Notice the English Pirate option?

Ahoy matey – yer now a Cap’n! Now as you go through your profile page you’ll notice some pretty hilarious pirate variations.

Now, the wall is the Plank, your profile is the Cap’n's Log, and you can now either click a post as pleasin’ to me eye (like) or blabber t’yer mates (comment).  It certainly removes the “boring” factor from your old standard Facebook pages.

#3 – Upside Down Status Updates

If you’ve been on Facebook long enough, you’ve probably noticed a few people posting upside down status updates. They sure do think they’re clever don’t they?!  Yes, you too can be the envy of all of your friends and family by posting your updates so that people have to look silly by tilting their heads upside down so they can read it.

Most of the people you’ve seen doing this have likely installed a Facebook app just to do so. However, I dislike installing apps because you always have to provide permissions to those applications to access your profile. A better approach is to use the free online application at FlipText to generate your upside down status update.

Simply copy the upside down text from the lower text box, paste it into your Facebook status box and post!

#4 – Download Complete Photo Collections From Your Friends’ Profiles

If you have a lot of friends on Facebook, you may not have the time to keep up with all of the new family photos they’ve posted – but you are very interested in them and would love to have them stored in your own private photo collection to review later. Well, thanks to a very cool FireFox plug-in called FacePAD, you can do just that. The add-on is awesome, and I would recommend that anyone with the resources to do so should send in a contribution toArthur Sabintsev for his efforts.

After you install the FacePad plug-in, make sure you select Tools->Add-Ons, and configure the options for FacePad so it has your correct Facebook language. Then, all you have to do is go to your friend’s photo albums, right-click on the title and select “Download Album With FacePAD.”  That’s right, you’re not downloading a single picture – but an entire album.

Once you do, FacePad downloads every single image within that album into the download folder you’ve configured in FireFox. Don’t forget to organize all of those photos usingJetPhoto, as recommended earlier by Jeffry.

#5 – Schedule Facebook Status Updates With Sendible

Do you like to keep your Facebook profile active, but you’re coming down with a cold and may be offline for a few days?  Maybe you’re taking a trip and won’t be anywhere near a computer for a week. Or maybe you’ll be playing hooky from work and traveling, but you want your colleagues and boss to think you’re stuck at home sick. Accomplish any of these wishes by using Sendible to schedule your Facebook status updates. This is an application Daniel covered earlier, so check out his article for more details.

But for Facebook specifically, once you sign up with Sendible, just click on Facebook and provide your Facebook login details. Sendible connects directly with your Facebook account. The, under “New Messages” click on “Status Updates“.

On the next page you can schedule out as many updates as you’d like! This service is awesome – and you can distribute scheduled updates to a number of social networks including MySpace, Blogger, Twitter and more.

#6 – Hide Your Online Status From Certain People

Look, don’t feel bad about it. When I first joined Facebook I left my online status wide open. After a couple of weeks of getting inundated with nonstop chat requests, I simply turned off my online status completely. Problem solved. Except, there really were certain people I wouldn’t mind hearing from – is it really fair for a few chatterbox buddies to ruin your chances for communicating with everyone? Well, there is a way for you to selectively block your online status from certain people.

All you have to do is open up your chat icon in the lower right corner of your Facebook display, click on Friend Lists, and create a new list called “BlockList.” Make sure after you create it that it’s configured under “Display these lists in Chat.”

Now, all you have to do is either click “edit” and add the friends you want to block, or if they’re already online, just click their name and drag them under this new list. Once you’ve got everyone there who you want to block from see your online status, hover your mouse over the green dot to the right and click on “Go Offline.” Now, you appear offline to only thosecertain friends.

Facebook, unlike MySpace, is not really easy to tweak – which is actually a good thing. Gone are the days of those horrid eye-bleeding pages with pink flashing backgrounds and instant music that you can’t turn off. However, the tweaks and plug-ins in the list above offer at least a few ways to customize your Facebook account and usage to suit your life and your personality.

C++ - Discovering Memory Leaks

If you are working on a serious project, you will propably use a sophisticated memory manager which will also discover memory leaks (along with their exact position in the code), but if you just want to do a quick test in a small program, there is an easy way to let the debugger check for memory leaks:
- Include crtdbg.h in your project (this file is included in the Microsoft Platform SDK)
- At the beginning of main() or WinMain () put this code:

int flag = _CrtSetDbgFlag(_CRTDBG_REPORT_FLAG);
flag |= _CRTDBG_LEAK_CHECK_DF; 
_CrtSetDbgFlag(flag);

This works in Visual C++ ( i don't know about other compilers though ) and, if you run the programm in debug mode, it will report memory leaks in the debug output window ("Immediate Window" in the latest Visual Studio version).

C# - Non-blocking Per-Pixel Painting in Windows Forms

WinForms gives us the PictureBox control, into which we can easily load images of different formats, have them scaled for us, etc.
But, unfortunately, PictureBox gives us no obvious way to paint it ourself via some SetPixel method.
In this article i will thus show you how to implement your own SetPixel method. As you will know, when you directly execute a long-running function, the user interface will be unresponsive (you won't be able to move the window, or click anything on it) until the function has finished running. When painting something, your paint method might be very long running (for example if you do raytracing), so we will do our painting in a background thread. This will only add a few lines of code, but keep the application running smooth.
Also, since there are different ways to achieve our goals, i will split this article up into two parts, showing you different methods of how to achieve the same effect.

For the rest of this article, i assume that we have a Windows Forms project, and that the form contains a PictureBox named pictureBox1, and a Button (named button1), which will start our test-rendering.

C# - How to Reverse a Unicode String

Perhaps due to the lack of a built-in String.Reverse method in the .NET Framework, it's very common for implementations of such a method to be posted.

Unfortunately, most of these implementations do not handle characters outside Unicode's Basic Multilingual Plane correctly. These supplementary characters have code points between U+10000 and U+10FFFF and so cannot be represented with one 16-bit char. In UTF-16 (which is how .NET strings are encoded), these Unicode characters are represented as two C# chars, a high surrogatefollowed by a low surrogate. When the string is reversed, the order of these two chars has to be preserved.

Here's our method that reverses a string while handling surrogate code units correctly:

C# - How to Reverse a String

Unfortunately, C#'s string class is missing a Reverse() function, so here are three ways to reverse strings:

1. Manual Reversal

The most obvious way is to reverse a string by manually walking through it character for character and building a new string:

string input = "hello world";
string output = "";
for (int i = input.Length - 1; i >= 0; i--)
{
    output += input[i];
}

Note that if you take this approach in a serious program, you should use StringBuilder instead of string, since in the above code, a new temporary string is created each time you add a single character to the output string.

C# - Booleans Without Short-Circuiting

C# implements the boolean AND and OR operations like C/C++ with the operators && and ||.
The 'single character' versions of these (& and |) are used in both languages for bitwise AND and OR operations.
But in C# the single character versions can be used for boolean logic too, but with a twist.
The standard boolean operators (&& and ||) try to make your code as efficient as possible, by employing short-circuiting, to skip evaluation where possible.
If we have a boolean AND expression with two arguments, we know that the expression as a whole is false if one (or both) of the arguments is false. Thus when the first argument is false, the end result is known, and the second argument is never evaluated.
With OR it's the other way around: if one argument is true, the whole expression is true. Thus if the first argument evaluates to true, the second argument isn't evaluated.
Consider this sample class:

C# - Efficiently Looping Over An Array

This tip can improve the speed of programs that spend a lot of time looping over arrays.

Propably you know from experience, that when you try to access an invalid array element (say, index 11 in an array of size 10) you will get an IndexOutOfRangeException. To be able to generate this exception and prohibit the dangerous access of memory beyond your array storage, the runtime performs an array bounds check everytime you access an array, which checks that the index you supply is lower then the array size.
For example, take a look at this code:

How to Optimize a Wireless LAN Card

A wireless LAN card or wireless adapter is a device that allows a computer to connect to wireless Internet signals. Wireless Internet speeds can vary based on the strength of the wireless signal that the wireless adapter detects. You can take steps to optimize your wireless adapter to improve signal strength and to obtain a faster Internet connection. There are a few different ways to improve a wireless adapter’s connectivity.

10 Tips For Improving Your Wireless Network

Having trouble getting a good signal with your wireless network? Before you dropkick the kitty, consider these ten tips on how to improve your signal range and strength.

1. Position your wireless router (or wireless access point) in a central location.
When possible, place your wireless router in a central location in your home. If your wireless router is against an outside wall of your home, the signal will be weak on the other side of your home. Don't worry if you can't move your wireless router, because there are many other ways to improve your connection.

How to set Apache not to log requests for images or javascript

Having around 100 visitors per day could make your apache logs very large and this would not be very pleasant for any web server admin. One thing you could do is to configure apache not to log requests for Images, java scripts or any other extension.