Restricting Login times

The article on how to restrict logon time for XP is found here.

Snippet is as follows:

To add a new account type: net user "account name" /ADD * (do not use the quotes). The asterisk is to prompt you to provide the password for the account.

Using "net user" solitary, with no parameters, you will get the list with all the users on the computer. To delete an account, just use the syntax with /DELETE parameter:

net user TEST /Delete

How to configure logon hours for a user

Now that you are familiarized with the command, it's time to learn how to add parameters in order to limit logon access for a time interval.

Let's suppose the account for which we want to define the time interval access already exists. The command will look like this:

net user "user account" /time:M-F,14:00-16:00

Replace the text between the quotes with the desired account. Using the above command line, the user has rights to access its account between 14 and 17 every day from Monday to Friday. In case your son/daughter comes home from school around two o'clock he/she will be able to logon until 16 o'clock (when you come back from work).

Please notice that only sharp values are accepted. You can choose any hour but not subdivisions like 14:15 or 15:36.

You can even setup time intervals for different days as following:

net user softpedia /time:W,10am-5pm;T,2pm-3pm;F-Sa,9:00-16:00

One more thing, the week days' abbreviations are M, T, W, Th, F, Sa, Su.

Information on how to do it for Windows Vista is found here. Much easier since it is all GUI.

Learning Oracle - good website

Just found the following blog which contains a very rich information on how to manage Oracle:

http://msutic.blogspot.com/

Converting MP4 to MPEG/AVI

Recently, I started taking videos using my handphone (PDA Phone). Videos taken using the phone defaults to MP4 format. However, I faced a problem of not being able to use Windows MovieMaker to edit and join the videos together.

I downloaded a few free video editor programs but most of them do not support MP4 format either. Finally, I came across Pazera Free MP4 to AVI converter which allows you to convert to MPEG-1 - which can then be used in Windows Movie Maker.