Tom's Blog

Starting the Website Administration Tool in ASP.NET.

2011-04-25T17:16:00.006-10:00

1) If roles will be used, make sure <rolemanager enabled="true"> is set in Web.config.
2) Set Internet Explorer as your default web browser. Stupid, but necessary.
3) Click on Project->ASP.NET Configuration.

Getting the Alt Key to Activate Menus in a Solaris 11 Guest Under VirtualBox

2011-04-12T11:02:00.004-10:00

System->Preferences->Windows
Change Movement Key setting to "Meta."

My Favorite Applications

2011-04-11T17:35:00.004-10:00

This list will be expanding as I get time.

Cropper
http://cropper.codeplex.com/

This is a handy tool for taking screen shots when you don't want the entire screen in the shot. You basically crop the screen before you take your snapshot, hence the name. It allows you to output the snapshot to a file (in various formats), to the clipboard (very handy) or directly to the printer!

It's written in C# (my favorite language) and it's totally free, light-weight and open-source. It's very handy for blogging or posting stuff on facebook when you only want to capture part of the screen (or a window).

Also of note: Since this tool captures just about anything on the screen, it can be used quite effectively with guest operating systems running in VirtualBox's Seamless Mode to capture images of it's windows, straight into the host operating system.

Blogging in 2011

2011-04-11T16:00:00.007-10:00

I was just going back and looking at some of my old posts. Almost all of them are junk now because I linked to stories that are "no longer available" or videos that don't work anymore. In one case, a copyright holder deleted the image that I had posted (even though I wasn't deep-linking) and replaced it with a link to the homepage of the site, eliminating the entire context of the post. The funny thing was that even though the image was technically copyrighted by them, it was a positive review of their product! Unbelievable. I suspect they had help from Google, since there's no way they could have done it themselves. It would have been nice if Google had bothered to tell me that they were doing it!

I think I'm going to have to start blogging on my OWN site at some point if I seriously want to be able to keep my posts intact long-term. I would rather deal with DMCA take-down notices myself than be treated the way Google is treating me.

I'm also going to have to start creating 100% original content, rather than linking to stories or videos that I find interesting, since everything is so fleeting these days and no one sees the value in archiving their stories on-line.

Getting Lucky with the AwesomeBar

2011-04-11T10:18:00.016-10:00

I used to use the Google toolbar in Firefox, back in the day. It had a nice feature that allowed you to type a search into the box and press a modifier key (may CTRL?) when hitting return to get an automatic "I'm feeling lucky" Google search. The benefit to this was that if you knew for sure what you were entering was sufficient to get the page you wanted as the first result, you could skip Google all together and go straight to the site. I loved this feature for things like Wikipedia.

You can (almost) always do a Wikipedia search from Google simply by prefixing your search with "wiki." For example: "wiki bon jovi" in a Google search box shows Bon Jovi's Wikipedia page as the first result. Combining this with the shortcut that I mentioned earlier and you're got yourself a Wikipedia search box on your web browser for zero screen real estate. This holds true for other things as well–"foxnews tech" would take you straight to the FoxNews Science & Technology page, for example. It's been a long time since I've had the Google toolbar (Google stopped developing it years ago) and I have missed this feature. Today I just enter my search into the Firefox search box and bring up the Google results page.

There's a feature of modern browsers that I, as an old-school purist, have never liked. It is the feature that allows you to type a non-URL into the address bar of modern browsers and have a search done by default. I used to turn this feature off because, as a purist I felt that the address bar was for URLs. If I typed an invalid URL into the address bar, I expected to see a 404 error. Overloading it with search functionality (while it made it easier for computer novices to get around the web) didn't make sense to me–the address bar was for addresses, the search bar was for searches. Google, with their Chrome browser, has abandoned the idea of a separate address bar and search bar. Firefox has also adopted this model as well but still sports a search box by default, probably to make people like me feel more comfortable. Also, as they allowed the user to turn off the "AwesomeBar" functionality (as they call it), a search box would make a lot of sense.

UPDATE: Upon further research, I discovered that there are some things that you can only search for from the search box (or going to the Google homepage) with Firefox. This is not the case with Chrome's "Omnibox" (their version of the "AwesomeBar"), it allows you to do this type of search within it. I'm referring to any search which contains a colon (:). For example, if you type (in a Google search box) "define:NAS" you will be taken to the Google definitions page for "NAS." Also, the "site:" tag that's used to search a particular domain will not work. This is because Firefox considers anything with a colon to be a transport protocol specifier. Again, this is why I always thought that address bars and search bars should be separate. I'm not sure what algorithm Google uses to overcome this, but it can't be simple.

Well, today I decided that I wanted my "I'm feeling lucky" shortcut back, and I set out to find a way to add the functionality back into the search box. The Firefox search box is not nearly as powerful as the one that the Google Toolbar provided, but I had hoped that there was a modifier key (shift, control, alt, etc) that would do an "I'm feeling lucky" search. Alas, this was not the case. I did, however, stumble across a way to achieve the result I was looking for. Sadly, it involves the AwesomeBar. *sigh*

OK, so here's the deal. The AwesomeBar does a search by default when you enter a non-URL. The thing is, you can modify the parameters of the search by changing some things "under the hood" of Firefox. Using this, we can instruct Google to return not the results page, but rather the first result, exactly what we want! While I still have issues (as a purist) with overloading the address bar like this, I can live with it if it means getting my "I'm feeling lucky search box back.

Here's a page that describes how to achieve this will all browsers:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=25cf5ea2bc5a2744&hl=en

It erroneously states that Firefox provides this by default, but this did not appear to be the case with mine, so I changed the "keyword.URL" setting (in about:config) to the following:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=en&gfns=1&q=

UPDATE (20 Apr 2011): I later discovered that it worked on my laptop, I don't know why the configurations were different.

The key seems to be the "gfns=1" setting. The previous setting for my installation was:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=en&q=

So now when I type "wiki bon jovi" into my address bar (oops, I mean AwesomeBar), I get my Bon Jovi Wikipedia page. Whew. And... if I hold down the "Alt" key while pressing return, my "lucky" page opens in a new tab–the same functionality as with URLs.

I'm posting this as a blog entry so that it will forever be findable on the World-Wide-Web, for when I re-install my system, forget how to set this up again and can't find the aforementioned page. That and in the event that anyone else out there is as lazy (or efficient–as I like to claim) as I am. :-)

-Tom

UPDATE (12 Apr 2011): Here's a potentially handy tip: "man {command}" for Linux man pages or "solaris man {command}" for Solaris man pages. Ex: "solaris man ls"

Learned something new, and facebook sucks.

2010-12-08T13:01:00.003-10:00

So I wanted to set my facebook status to this:

Learned a new word today, "majuscule." Also learned some interesting history behind the terms uppercase and lowercase:

"Western European languages have long made use of capital (or majuscule) letters and minuscule letters. The more familiar terms—uppercase and lowercase—arise from the early days of typesetting when the type slugs for majuscule letters were kept in the upper cases of large racks containing all the characters used to make a printing plate. Beneath them were the cases, or boxes, that stored the minuscule letter slugs."

But facebook wouldn't allow it because it's over this arbitrary size limit that they've set. It used to be much larger, but we all live in the Twitter world now, where brevity is king and words are despised. No time for punctuation or grammar. No time for adjectives--hell, don't even get me started on adverbs, those are all but dead.

So, I tried to publish a "Note" on facebook. I cut my failed attempt at a status update and pasted it into Notepad. Then I tried to paste my missive into the body of the note. At this point a pop-up window appears (generated by facebook) saying that the "The page you requested was not found." This really frustrates me. Now, in all fairness to facebook, I am on an old crappy computer with all kinds of stuff disabled and locked down. It's entirely possible that it's just my system and not facebook's fault, but I'm doubtful. I've never encountered this problem on any other site.

Why can't anything ever be easy these days?

Note to self (and anyone else with a stubborn, stuck print job).

2010-07-14T21:31:00.005-10:00

To get rid of a stuck print job that won't delete:
On the computer hosting the printer (not the client if this is a shared printer), restart the Print Spooler service. That's it!

If you need help with restarting a service:

Click "Start" or the Windows logo if you're running Windows 7
Type "services" and press enter
Find the "Print Spooler" service in the list
Right-click and select "Restart"
Close the Services window.

This isn't the first time I've had this happen, so hopefully by taking this (public) note, I'll remember. And shoot, maybe it'll help someone else.

Blackout

2008-12-27T12:01:00.002-10:00

UPDATE (11 Apr 2011): Embedded videos and Associated Press story removed, due to broken links.

Anyway... so power went out around 8:45 last night, thought the cable went out like 30 minutes prior to that. Power was finally restored here around 3:15 am but we're close the the power plant so the more eastern parts of the island will take longer, some are still without power.

The really funny part about this is that I had just gotten home from seeing "The Day the Earth Stood Still" when this happened.

I need to go stock up on some emergency supplies. Glow sticks at the very least, they're not a fire hazard and they don't run down batteries. Maybe I'll look at generators again.

Cable's still out as is my cable Internet. I'm getting online with my EVDO modem now. Sure am glad I have that--and sure glad the company pays the $60/month bill!