Curiculum Vitae of Sky Chew

Here is a cool and simple way to lock your files from prying eyes. Without using any software ,it is just a technique.

If you are Using Windows XP open any folder and and click on the

Tools>Folder Option>View>
and unselect the Hide Extensions of known file types.

This will release the file extension which is by default is hidden.( File extension means .txt, .jpg , .doc etc.)
By renaming the file extension ,automatically Windows Xp and most windows would not recognize the file. Even an unexperienced spy would ignore the file . Eg : renaming your secret text files that contains your credit card details to filename.mpg or filename.dll or something you like ,like filename.sky

One more cool example would be renaming your files into .zip or .rar files. The spy would try to unzip it but... its not even ZIP! haha cool huh (zip means compressed file).

This is a very weak protection but is a very good protection.There are a few ways to break this .

1) If its a video file just force load it on VLC media Player. VLC media player doesnt care what extension it uses if it is a video file with format it knows it will play it.

2) If its a text file, doesnt matter if its Microsoft .doc or .pdf you can just force open with notepad. Text file are harder to lock with this method but will make it harder to find. because any file can be open as text file and if it is in some kind of text format it can be viewed with notepad, without the formatting of course ,infact those formatting would appear like jibberish. Try opening .doc in notepad. Therefore it is safer to save your text documents in image files, using bitmaps or any image editor with text writing capabilities.Or you could take an image of your document using print screen and paste in microsoft paint.

3) load the files in Macintosh operating systems. the Mac OS doesnt use files extension systems like the windows but rather reads the header of files to identify its class.There is also away to lock this.

Besides reading extensions of files Operating System and applications also read HEADERS of the file.Usually the beginning of every files there is a header sometimes text introducing it self. Telling applications and OS what file type,size and etc. about it self. Try opening a video file with a notepad to see for yourself,but becareful not to open large files. Notepad has a file size limit. Get wordpad or other more powerful text editor and you might be able to open those larger video files. Also you could use a HEX editor. Anyway what im trying to say here is but cutting out the header of these files you would add another level of security to locking your files. These header you could save it in another file .If you want to send sensitive information then you could send this file separate from your main file.

Actually the method discussed here is not a lock Rather its a way to make your file NOT RECOGNIZABLE to your operating system and application, by taking out data that tells the computer what data it is.

There is more complexity you could add to this system, which could make it feasible to be used more generally. But i havent had the time nor the need to write up a program. ;)

This is a program made in Microsoft Access which requires Visual Basic programming.It is made for a company called Aspirasi Awansari based in Malaysia doing advertising merchandise. The company was in many years saving its database of quotations in hardcopy (paper+folders) and saving its documents in word and on a systematic folder systems.But because their database has grown too large to handle in that system and searching for data is a pain in the arse.Therefore they were looking for a new system.Which lead me to research and design Qsearch(quotation search). Not only that , i have also developed a JAVA program called Qextractor that scans thru all their word documents folder by folder and extract data from the document and saves it into a few text files in CSV(comma separated value) format. Therefore enabling MSAccess assimilate with the old database.Please refer to Qextractors post for more details

Because the employee was familiar with the way they worked on the quotation which was using MSWord so i also included a print to MSword button that enables them after inputing data on new quotation into acces then transfer those data in word in a standard format then let them edit the document with necessary changes before sending in to their customers.

Below is the link to the MSACCESS file. Please refer to Qextractor for the java program.

>> Qsearch [Download]

*Note remember to press shift when clicking on open when opening Qsearch to enable editing mode.
(made on MSACCESS 2003)

This is a program built with Java j2sdk 1.4.2. in support of Qsearch. Its purpose was to extract data from MsWord based files stored in a very large folder base database.

The main problem was that these word documents based database didnt exercise a strong format. Thus files out of format must be detected fixed or added as a pattern into the search.

The data extracted is to be outputed in text files in the CSV(comma seperated values) format as this was a format that MSAccess could import.


An example of the word document it was made to scan:

The program in action.. with some results in those text files.



The challenges i had while writing this program was: