Williamo's Blog

CyberNotes: Create Your Own Smart Bookmarks in Firefox 3

I know I’ve deleted this bookmark folder myself a couple times…

Just a few weeks ago we showed you how to quickly restore the default Smart Bookmarks that come with the browser, but did you know that it’s also possible to make your own? Thanks to the new bookmarks backend that Mozilla has implemented it’s actually pretty easy for you to create your own Smart Bookmarks once you understand how they work. An extension will inevitably come along that makes this a no-brainer, but it will take you no time to catch on to manually creating them.

The first thing we’re going to do is show you the steps needed to create a new Smart Bookmark, and then we’re going to give you an overview of the query syntax you’ll want to use to take things up a notch.

(CyberNotes: Create Your Own Smart Bookmarks in Firefox 3 via LifeHacker)

[g++] warning: deprecated conversion from string constant to ‘char*’

Just stumbled on to this problem/fix while writing some C++ code for my CS courses…

warning: deprecated conversion from string constant to ‘char*’

I hadn’t really thought about this much, as previous versions of g++ (such as the 3.4.3 version we’re using on our university systems) never complained about this issue, but g++ 4.2.3 does. The fix, as I found from multiple posts around the web, is to change all function arguments that will be expected to take a string constant from “char *” to “const char *”. For example:

Function Call:

class.someFunction("");

Original Function Prototype:

void class::someFunction(char *);

Updated Function Prototype:

void class::someFunction(const char *);

I’m somewhat new to C++ (OSU taught Java and I code in C# for the day job), so please give me a bit of slack on this one if you’re a seasoned pro. 😉

As always, comments and questions are welcome via my comment box. Thanks for reading!

Firefox 3 / Ubuntu 8.04 – Large Fonts Fix

Update: Here’s a list of more tips for Firefox 3 on Linux, including how to make your bookmarks toolbar text smaller, and remove the down arrows from bookmarks folders! Super Awesome Firefox 3 Tips! (Linux)

For those of you seeing strange and unreasonably large font sizes in Firefox 3 on Ubuntu 8.04, try setting the “layout.css.dpi” (via about:config) to 72 or 96. Either of those values should set all fonts to a reasonable size.

Ubuntu Forums, via tumblr.wolffmyren.com

DJ Q-bert’s Wave Twisters

I can pretty much guarantee that this is the craziest shit you will ever see. Yep.

Hack Attack: How to set up a personal home Subversion server

Great article from LifeHacker (and very useful, as I’m just about to set one up myself) about how to set up your own Subversion server:

Subversion is open source version control software used primarily by developers that keeps every revision of important, frequently changing files. However, Subversion can be useful for many different purposes, whether you’re a web developer or a novelist – especially if you like to work in plain text.

Think of Subversion as a wiki-like repository for your files. Each time you make a change to a file or group of files that you’re happy with, you can commit those changes to your Subversion repository. If you don’t like where the changes got you, Subversion can compare your current version with any previously-committed version and pick out the best of the best so you never have to worry about finding your way back to a good or working version of a file.

In this first of my two-part Subversion series, I’ll show you how to set up and run your own Subversion server. Next week, we’ll get into the nitty gritty of using Subversion.

(via Hack Attack: How to set up a personal home Subversion server)

Unnecessary Quotation Marks

(Found at photobasement.com)

This makes my day. I cannot express strongly enough how much using quotation marks for emphasis pisses me off. It’s right up there with cold ketchup (don’t get me started on that).

To my delight, it seems that someone else shares this hatred (or humor) of unnecessary quotation marks: http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/

Pretty funny stuff there. 😉

Madness: Trapped in Elevator Car 30

Fascinating and creepy article about being trapped in an elevator for 41 hours:

The control panel made a beep, and White waited a moment, expecting a voice to give information or instructions, but none came. He pressed the intercom button, but there was no response. He hit it again, and then began pacing around the elevator. Time passed, although he was not sure how much, because he had no watch or cell phone. He occupied himself with thoughts of remaining calm and decided that he’d better not do anything drastic, because, whatever the malfunction, he thought it unwise to jostle the car. As the emergency bell rang and rang, he began to fear that it might somehow start a fire. Recently, there had been a small fire in the building, rendering the elevators unusable. He began hearing unlikely oscillations in the ringing: aural hallucinations. Before long, he began to contemplate death.

(via disembedded.wordpress.com)

Channel9 (MSDN): Windows XP on Flash-Based Ultra Low Cost PCs

Great post from Channel9 with video about Windows on ULPCs, like the Asus Eee:

How does Windows perform on ultra low cost PCs with less than 2GB of storage? Mark Light and Bohdan Raciborski from the Unlimited Potential Group discuss the challenges and opportunities with flash-based storage and getting Windows XP and Office 2003 up and running—surprisingly quickly—on this new class of devices, including the Asus Eee PC. Today Microsoft also released design guidelines to help hardware manufacturers enable a quality Windows experience for this emerging class of low cost computing machines that will help to democratize personal computing by providing a powerful and full version Windows-powered device for low income markets.

(via Windows XP on Flash-Based Ultra Low Cost PCs)

Lifehacker: Top 10 Ways to Trick Out Your Desktop

From Lifehacker:

For something that you look at every day of your working life, your computer desktop doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves. That’s too bad, considering that the desktop can do a lot more than display wallpaper and hold shortcut icons. From widgets to workflows, from calendars to computer stats and beyond, you can do a whole lot on your desktop without manually starting up a single program. Hit the jump for our top 10 list of applications and tweaks that make your desktop a truly useful place to land.

(via Top 10 Ways to Trick Out Your Desktop)

Autoblog: RWD Scion tC coming to Formula Drift

Wonderful news from Autoblog for all you Scion tC drivers/fans (like me!):

We’ve enjoyed our fair share of front-wheel-drive hijinks in empty parking lots with our right hand firmly grasping the e-brake, but in the end, tail-out antics are always more enjoyable behind the wheel of something with the proper wheels driven. “Proper,” however, isn’t the way we’d describe how Scion decided to go about campaigning a tC in this year’s Formula Drift series.

With backing from Toyota, the aftermarket firm RS*R converted a run-of-the-mill tC into a rear-wheel-drive monster utilizing a BEAMS-built 3S-GE engine and taking advantage of the Toyota Avensis/Caldina all-wheel-drive chassis on which the tC is built. RS*R ripped out the abysmal 2AZ-FE 2.4-liter four-pot from the stock car, fabbed up a series of new mounts to facilitate the transverse to longitudinal conversion and dropped in the 3S-GE after fitting the four-cylinder with an HKS GT3037 turbo, intercooler, Blitz dual SBC boost controller and an AEM EMS engine management system. Approximately 400 hp is now routed to the rear wheels through a Tilton triple carbon clutch and a G-Force, five-speed sequential gearbox. RS-R coilovers keep things suspended on all four corners, and are hidden by the custom wide-body kit and Enkei RPF1 wheels wrapped in Toyo Proxes R1R rubber.

(via RWD Scion tC coming to Formula Drift)

P.S. For those of you unfamiliar with the replacement engine (as I was before I wiki’ed it), here’s a link to the Wikipedia article for the 3S-GE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_3S-GE, and here’s one for the original, the 2AZ-FE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_AZ_engine#2AZ-FE

Color Differences

This little experiment was inspired by a photo posted from _Neverletmego_, in which she highlighted the differences in color space between Firefox and Safari on the Macintosh. I was inclined to carry out a similar experiment with three Windows browsers, Safari, Internet Explorer 7, and Firefox. Not surprisingly, Safari has richer and more saturated color (same as on the Mac).

P.S. I’m curious to see how this screenshot looks to users with other browsers than those tested above. =)

Linkback: "Visual Studio 2008 C# IDE is Slow … Really slow."

Here’s a MSDN forum article that links back to my post about the VS2008 hotfix:

I believe there are known issues with VS2008 and web development. This article contains a link to some hotfixes for VS2008 web development. Maybe it’ll fix your problem: https://blog.wolffmyren.com/2008/02/11/performance-and-editor-fixes-for-vs2008/

(via forums.microsoft.com/MSDN)

Multi-Targeting VS2005 and VS2008 Web Application Projects, a Gotcha!

Great post on how to share a solution between VS2008 and VS2005, from stevenharman.net/blog:

One of the things I’m most excited about with Visual Studio 2008 is it’s ability to target various versions of the .net framework, a feature known as multi-targeting.

I recently rebuilt a (hand-me-down) laptop for use at developer group meetings, conferences, and coding from the couch. When building out the machine I decided to only install VS2008 and make use of multi-targeting to work on my various .net 2.0 projects… like Subtext. Today I finally got around to loading Subtext up in VS2008 and I was expecting some heartache.

But I did a little research first and luckily came across Rick’s great post explaining how VS2008 and VS2005 can be made to play nice together, allowing you to work with your projects in either IDE. The gist is, the project files (i.e.- your .csproj files) will work in either environment, but you’ll need to maintain separate solution files. Not a huge deal as most of the churn is usually in the individual project files, and not the solution.

(via Multi-Targeting VS2005 and VS2008 Web Application Projects, a Gotcha!)

The Mosaic Communications Universe

From jwz.livejournal.com:

Until now, home.mcom.com and all URLs under it just redirected to netscape.com, then redirected a dozen more times before taking you to some AOL portal page. The old URLs that were baked into the toolbar buttons of the original web browsers didn’t work any more. But now, if you fire up a copy of Mosaic Netscape 0.9, and click on the various toolbar buttons, they will work again! For example, in the old browsers, when you clicked on the “What’s New” toolbar button, it went here.
home.mcom.com is now a snapshot of that web site from 21-Oct-1994.

Regarding Base-64: Trying to solve an ASP.NET issue…

Update: Thanks to WordPress.com automagically linking related posts to each other, I think I may have found a potential solution to this issue here: Invalid character in a Base-64 string (ASP.NET)

The problem seems to be with the ViewState. The ViewState is encrypted, and when an attempt is made to decrypt it on postback, the error is triggered. The solution is actually quite simple: in the web.config file, set the ViewState not to be encrypted, like this:

<system.web>
<pages viewStateEncryptionMode=”Never”>
</pages>
</system.web>

You should really check out the rest of that article; it looks like it’s got a great explanation for what is actually occurring.

Also, this seems to be related to another message, “Invalid Viewstate.”

My original article is below the fold…

Base64 Valid Character Set

I found this on a forum post, and just wanted to verify that this information is correct:

for base64 the valid charset is:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwx yz0123456789+/
the = is used as filler for the last bytes, as the length must be mulitple
of 3

(via thescripts.com/forum)

The charset looks reasonable, but must the length be a multiple of 3? (Seems like a multiple of 4 would make more sense.)

Comments very much appreciated!

Lifehacker: Copy and Paste Without Switching Windows

Here’s a great tip from Lifehacker about how to set up an AutoHotkey script to copy/paste without manually switching windows:

I have one very simple AutoHotkey script which I use when I need to do some massive copying and pasting work, which simplifies the task into just one keystroke: Win+C.

With this script, I run Notepad (or any program to paste the content into), browse through some web sites, select text or pictures, and hit Win+C to capture the content—without leaving my browser. The script switches to the destination program (Notepad or otherwise), pastes the information, and returns me to my browser automatically. Check out the video for how it works. It’s good for transferring bits of data between two programs like compiling a list of email addresses. It’s also customizable—instead of entering a new line, it can move on to the next cell in the spreadsheet.

(via Copy and Paste Without Switching Windows)

True-Color GIF Example

The mistaken belief that GIF has a limit of 256 colors probably comes from the way GIF was first used when it came out. In the late 1980’s, PC video cards generally supported no more than 256 colors. Image exchanges were becoming popular among BBS systems and the Internet and viewer programs were quickly produced. No one tried or needed to generate images with more than 256 colors since they could not be viewed on anything less than high priced graphics workstations. Programs that converted images to GIF worked up a number of methods to reduce the number of colors to 256 or fewer. Some actually did a very good job. GIF files were constructed with just a single image block, even though the GIF standard placed no limit on the number of blocks. Since there was no use for more than 256 colors, there was no use for more than one image block. This practice became effectively ingrained into the computer culture and eventually everyone “knew” that GIF supported no more than 256 colors. The fact is, the programs that generated GIF files supported no more than one image block, and thus didn’t have a means to deal with more than 256 colors. The top image shows that a GIF file really can have more than 256 colors.

(via http://phil.ipal.org/tc.html)

GooSync – Nokia N73 Configuration

Here’s a post I found at the GooSync forum about how to manually configure GooSync on a Nokia N73, which should also work the same way on the Nokia N95:

To manually configure your Nokia N73 device please use the following steps.

Open the main menu

Locate and open the Synchronisation application by selecting Menu then Tools

Select the Options menu and select the New sync profile option

Provide this profile with a name

Select Applications and then the Calendar option

Set the Include in sync option to Yes

Provide a Remote database name of Calendar

Leave the Synchronisation type set to Normal

Return to Applications and select the Contacts option (only for Premium accounts)

Set the Include in sync option to Yes

Provide a Remote database name of Contacts

Leave the Synchronisation type set to Normal

Return to the sync profile menu and select Connection settings

Enter the settings as shown below:

Server version: Ensure this is set to 1.2

Server ID: Leave this blank, this will be provided by the GooSync server during the first sync

Data bearer: Set this to Internet

Access point: Select the required access point for your mobile device account

Host address: Set this to http://sync.goosync.com/

Port: Leave this set to 80 for standard connection or 443 for SSL connections

User name: Set this to your GooSync username

Password: Set this to your GooSync password

Allow sync requests: Leave it set to Yes

Accept all sync reqs.: Leave this set to No

Network authentic.: Leave this set to No

In order to synchronise you need to highlight your sync profile from the Sync application and select the Synchronise option from the Options menu.
Please note: some users have reported that there may be a bug in the URL retrieval algorithm of certain devices. Because of this we recommend that you enter the trailing ‘/’ character at the end of the sync server URL.

(via GooSync Forums)