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• PHP Beginner - Create a Random Text Generator

  In this beginner PHP article, learn how to create dynamic text on a web page that is different for each visit. This simple trick used the PHP rand() function and the PHP array(). Don't miss this simple but powerful tip.

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• Windows file association for README, INSTALL, LICENSE and the like [closed]

  - by Lumi

  Possible Duplicate: How to set the default program for opening files without an extension in Windows? Many files originating in the UNIX world come without file extension. Popular examples include README, INSTALL, LICENSE. We know for a fact that these are text files. It is therefore a bit disappointing not to be able to just double-click them open in Explorer and see them in Notepad (actually, Notepad2 because of the UNIX line endings which silly Microsoft Notepad doesn't render correctly). Does anyone know of a way to create a file association for, say, README files without extension? This could then be replicated to cover the most frequently occurring file types, and then double-clicking them open would work. Update (Sort of in response to all your comments.) Thanks, folks, your comments and answers have helped me. @Indrek, yes, I was under the assumption that you could somehow create an association for just README or Makefile, and couldn't do so for files without extension. Turns out the contrary is true, and yes, that is a workaround that neatly solves the issue. Ultimately, I just want to be able to double-click to open a README or Makefile, that's all. @Sampo, the SendMe trick is also useful, although usability is not as great as a straight double-click. (I'm really lazy sometimes.) Turns out the following trick using ftype and ftype from an Administrator prompt does the double-click enabling job: assoc .=no_ext ftype no_ext=%SystemRoot%\system32\NOTEPAD.EXE %1 :: You can see it created some entries in the registry: reg query hkcr\no_ext /s reg query hkcr\. /s

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• Running phpmyadmin xampp Ubuntu 12.10

  - by Luigi Tiburzi

  I know it is a common problem and there are many solutions on the web but I'm trying everything and anything is working, I can't have phpmyadmin running on my machine. I installed XAMPP through: sudo tar xvfz ./Downloads/xampp-linux-1.8.1.tar.gz -C /opt then I did the chmod trick supposed to make an end to access issues and I change the default location to my php projects from /var/www to Dropbox/php. Then I started XAMPP in the usual way: sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start When I tried to run one of my php projects the output on the web is fine but if for example I try to write localhost on my browser I get: It works and not the usual XAMPP interface and most of all when I try to access localhost/phpmyadmin I get the login page, insert username (root) and password and I get: You don't have permission to access /phpmyadmin/index.php on this server. Apache/2.2.22 (Ubuntu) Server at localhost Port 80 I tried the Required all granted trick and some others but nothing is working. I even tried to uninstall phpmyadmin and reinstall it but this is not working too. I don't know hot to proceed. Thanks for your help.

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• Windows 7 Media Center: sometimes no sound on a TV channel

  - by torbengb

  Problem Sometimes, recorded TV shows have no sound. This is of course very annoying because the recorded show is worthless. Also, when switching channels while watching live TV, sometimes a channel has no sound. This is always solved by switching channel again and then back (most often, once will do the trick). Media Center doesn't do this trick by itself when recording of course, so that's the bigger issue - but the cause is certainly the same. Details The computer is running a newly installed Windows 7 and Windows Media Center. It has 2 different tuner-cards installed. Both are installed with signed and up-to-date Win7 drivers and appear OK in Device Manager. Both tuners get the same antenna signal, from a split cable from the wall. The cable delivers analog cable TV (40+ channels) and digital cable TV (4 channels) at the same time. Both tuners have been configured to receive both analog and digital channels. This only happens with analog channels. How can I fix the no-sound problem? Update: I've now spent some time with the computer to try and pinpoint the problem, but I've had little success so far: I flipped through the channels until one didn't have sound, then I disconnected the antenna cable from one of the tuners. It was the right one because then the video also went away. I flipped lots more channels to see if the other card also would come up mute once but I never had a channel without sound. It might still be possible, I don't know. Then I disconnected the "good" tuner and connected the "bad" tuner and again flipped lots of channels but again I never had a channel without sound. It seems to me that the problem is erratic. It happens on any channel, and I haven't ruled out yet that it only happens on one tuner.

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• Edit Text in a Webpage with Internet Explorer 8

  - by Matthew Guay

  Internet Explorer is often decried as the worst browser for web developers, but IE8 actually offers a very nice set of developer tools.  Here we’ll look at a unique way to use them to edit the text on any webpage. How to edit text in a webpage IE8’s developer tools make it easy to make changes to a webpage and view them directly.  Simply browse to the webpage of your choice, and press the F12 key on your keyboard.  Alternately, you can click the Tools button, and select Developer tools from the list. This opens the developer tools.  To do our editing, we want to select the mouse button on the toolbar “Select Element by Click” tool. Now, click on any spot of the webpage in IE8 that you want to edit.  Here, let’s edit the footer of Google.com.  Notice it places a blue box around any element you hover over to make it easy to choose exactly what you want to edit. In the developer tools window, the element you selected before is now highlighted.  Click the plus button beside that entry if the text you want to edit is not visible.   Now, click the text you wish to change, and enter what you wish in the box.  For fun, we changed the copyright to say “©2010 Microsoft”. Go back to IE to see the changes on the page! You can also change a link on a page this way: Or you can even change the text on a button: Here’s our edited Google.com: This may be fun for playing a trick on someone or simply for a funny screenshot, but it can be very useful, too.  You could test how changes in fontsize would change how a website looks, or see how a button would look with a different label.  It can also be useful when taking screenshots.  For instance, if I want to show a friend how to do something in Gmail but don’t want to reveal my email address, I could edit the text on the top right before I took the screenshot.  Here I changed my Gmail address to [email protected]. Please note that the changes will disappear when you reload the page.  You can save your changes from the developer tools window, though, and reopen the page from your computer if you wish. We have found this trick very helpful at times, and it can be very fun too!  Enjoy it, and let us know how you used it to help you! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Edit Webpage Text Areas in Your Favorite Text EditorRemove Webpage Formatting or View the HTML Code When Copying in FirefoxChange the Default Editor From Nano on Ubuntu LinuxShare Text & Images the Easy Way with JustPaste.itEditPad Lite – All Purpose Tabbed Text Editor TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

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• Edit Text in a Webpage with Internet Explorer 8

  - by Matthew Guay

  Internet Explorer is often decried as the worst browser for web developers, but IE8 actually offers a very nice set of developer tools.  Here we’ll look at a unique way to use them to edit the text on any webpage. How to edit text in a webpage IE8’s developer tools make it easy to make changes to a webpage and view them directly.  Simply browse to the webpage of your choice, and press the F12 key on your keyboard.  Alternately, you can click the Tools button, and select Developer tools from the list. This opens the developer tools.  To do our editing, we want to select the mouse button on the toolbar “Select Element by Click” tool. Now, click on any spot of the webpage in IE8 that you want to edit.  Here, let’s edit the footer of Google.com.  Notice it places a blue box around any element you hover over to make it easy to choose exactly what you want to edit. In the developer tools window, the element you selected before is now highlighted.  Click the plus button beside that entry if the text you want to edit is not visible.   Now, click the text you wish to change, and enter what you wish in the box.  For fun, we changed the copyright to say “©2010 Microsoft”. Go back to IE to see the changes on the page! You can also change a link on a page this way: Or you can even change the text on a button: Here’s our edited Google.com: This may be fun for playing a trick on someone or simply for a funny screenshot, but it can be very useful, too.  You could test how changes in fontsize would change how a website looks, or see how a button would look with a different label.  It can also be useful when taking screenshots.  For instance, if I want to show a friend how to do something in Gmail but don’t want to reveal my email address, I could edit the text on the top right before I took the screenshot.  Here I changed my Gmail address to [email protected]. Please note that the changes will disappear when you reload the page.  You can save your changes from the developer tools window, though, and reopen the page from your computer if you wish. We have found this trick very helpful at times, and it can be very fun too!  Enjoy it, and let us know how you used it to help you! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Edit Webpage Text Areas in Your Favorite Text EditorRemove Webpage Formatting or View the HTML Code When Copying in FirefoxChange the Default Editor From Nano on Ubuntu LinuxShare Text & Images the Easy Way with JustPaste.itEditPad Lite – All Purpose Tabbed Text Editor TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

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• Remove Programs from the Open With Menu in Explorer

  - by Matthew Guay

  Would you like to clean up the Open with menu in Windows Explorer?  Here’s how you can remove program entries you don’t want in this menu on any version of Windows. Have you ever accidently opened an mp3 with Notepad, or a zip file with Word?  If so, you’re also likely irritated that these programs now show up in the Open with menu in Windows Explorer every time you select one of those files.  Whenever you open a file type with a particular program, Windows will add an entry for it to the Open with menu.  Usually this is helpful, but it can also clutter up the menu with wrong entries. On our computer, we have tried to open a PDF file with Word and Notepad, neither which can actually view the PDF itself.  Let’s remove these entries.  To do this, we need to remove the registry entries for these programs.  Enter regedit in your Start menu search or in the Run command to open the Registry editor. Backup your registry first just in case, so you can roll-back any changes you make if you accidently delete the wrong value.  Now, browse to the following key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software \Microsoft \Windows \CurrentVersion \ Explorer \FileExts\ Here you’ll see a list of all the file extensions that are registered on your computer. Browse to the file extension you wish to edit, click the white triangle beside it to see the subfolders, and select OpenWithList.  In our test, we want to change the programs associated with PDF files, so we select the OpenWithList folder under .pdf. Notice the names of the programs under the Data column on the right.  Right-click the value for the program you don’t want to see in the Open With menu and select Delete. Click Yes at the prompt to confirm that you want to delete this value. Repeat these steps with all the programs you want to remove from this file type’s Open with menu.  You can go ahead and remove entries from other file types as well if you wish. Once you’ve removed the entries you didn’t want to see, check out the Open with menu in Explorer again.  Now it will be much more streamlined and will only show the programs you want to see. Conclusion This simple trick can help you keep your Open with menu tidy, and only show the programs you want in the list.  It can be irritating to accidently open files in programs that can’t even read them.  This trick works in all versions of Windows, including 2000, XP, Vista, and Windows 7. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Remove ISP Text or Corporate Branding from Internet Explorer Title BarRemove the Username From the Start Menu in XPKeep Start Menu From Closing After Opening ApplicationsRemove PartyPoker (Or Other Items) from the Internet Explorer Tools MenuUninstall, Disable, or Delete Internet Explorer 8 from Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 OpenDNS Guide Google TV The iPod Revolution Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app

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• Experience the iPad UI On Your PC

  - by Matthew Guay

  Want to test drive iPad without heading over to an Apple store?  Here’s a way you can experience some of the iPad UI straight from your browser! The iPad is the latest gadget from Apple to wow the tech world, and people even waited in line all night to be one of the first to get their hands on one.  Thanks to a simple JavaScript trick, however, you can get a feel for some of its new features without leaving your computer.  This won’t let you try out everything on the iPad, but it will let you see how the new lists and pop-over menus work just like they do in the new apps. Test drive the iPad’s UI from your browser Normally, the Apple iPhone developer library online looks like a standard webpage. But, on the iPad, it looks and feels like a full-blown native iPad app.  With a nifty JavaScript trick from boredzo.org you can use this same interface on your PC.  Since the iPad uses the Safari browser, we ran this test in Safari for Windows.  If you don’t already have it installed, you can download it from Apple (link below) and setup as normal. Now, open Safari and browse to Apple’s developer page at: http://www.developer.apple.com   Now, enter the following in the address bar, and press Enter. javascript:localStorage.setItem('debugSawtooth', 'true')   Finally, click this link to go to the iPhone OS documentation. http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/iPad/ After a short delay, it should open in full iPad style! The left menu works just like the menus on the iPad, complete with transitions.  It feels entirely like a native application, instead of a webpage.  To scroll through text, click and pull up or down similar to the way you would use it on a touch screen. Some pages even include a pop-over menu like many of the new iPad apps use. Note that the page will be rendered for the size of your browser, and if you resize your window the page will not resize with it.  Simply press F5 to reload the page, and it will resize to fit the new window size.  If you resize your window to be tall and narrow, like the iPad in horizontal mode, the webpage will change and the left menu will disappear in lieu of a drop-down menu just like it would if you rotated the iPad. This works in Chrome as well, since it, like Safari, is based on Webkit.  However, it didn’t seem to work in our test on Firefox or other browsers. We’ve previously covered how you can experience some of the iPhone’s UI with the online iPhone user guide.  Check it out if you haven’t yet: View Mobile Websites in Windows with Safari 4 Developer Tools Conclusion Although this doesn’t let you really try out all of the iPad’s interface, it at least gives you a taste of how it works.  It’s exciting to see how much functionality can be packed into webapps today.  And don’t forget, How-to Geek is giving away an iPad to a random fan!  Head over to our Facebook page and fan How-to Geek if you haven’t already done so. Win an iPad on the How-To Geek Facebook Fan Page Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Want an iPad? How-To Geek is Giving One Away!Why Wait? Amazing New Add-on Turns Your iPhone into an iPad! [Comic]The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and TutorialsShare Your Windows Vista Experience Index ScoreAnother Blog You Should Subscribe To TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Awesome Lyrics Finder for Winamp & Windows Media Player Download Videos from Hulu Pixels invade Manhattan Convert PDF files to ePub to read on your iPad Hide Your Confidential Files Inside Images Get Wildlife Photography Tips at BBC’s PhotoMasterClasses

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• Old School Wizardry Tip: Batch File Comments

  - by jkauffman

  Johnny, the Endangered Keyboard-Driven Windows User Some of my proudest, obscure Windows tricks are losing their relevance. I know I’m not alone. Keyboard shortcuts are going the way of the dodo. I used to induce fearful awe by slapping Ctrl+Shift+Esc in front of the lowly, pedestrian Windows users. No windows key on the keyboard? No problem: Ctrl+Esc. No menu key on the keyboard: Shift+F10. I am also firmly planted in the habit of closing windows with the Alt+Space menu (Alt+Space, C); and I harbor a brooding, slow=growing list of programs that fail to support this correctly (that means you, Paint.NET). Every time a new version of windows comes out, the support for some of these minor time-saving habits get pared out. Will I complain publicly? Nope, I know my old ways should be axed to conserve precious design energy. In fact, I disapprove of fierce un-intuitiveness for the sake of alleged productivity. Like vim, for example. If you approach a program after being away for 5 years, having to recall encyclopedic knowledge is a flaw. The RTFM disciples have lost. Anyway, some of the items in my arsenal of goofy time-saving tricks are still relevant today. I wanted to draw attention to one that’s stood the test of time. Remember Batch Files? Yes, it’s true, batch files are fading faster than the world of print. But they're not dead yet. I still run into some situations where I opt to use batch files. They are still relevant for build processes, or just various development workflow tools. Sure, there’s powershell, but there’s that stupid Set-ExecutionPolicy speed bump standing in your way; can you really spare the time to A) hunt down that setting on all machines affected and/or B) make futile efforts to convince your coworkers/boss that the hassle was worth it? When possible, I prefer the batch file wild card. And whenever I return to batch files, I end up researching some of the unintuitive aspects such as parameters, quote handling, and ERRORLEVEL. But I never have to remember to use “REM” for comment lines, because there’s a cleaner way to do them! Double Colon For Eye-Friendly Comments Here is a very simple batch file, with pretty much minimal content: @ECHO OFF SETLOCAL REM This is a comment ECHO This batch file doesn’t do much If you code on a daily basis, this may be more suitable to your eyes: @ECHO OFF SETLOCAL :: This is a comment ECHO This batch file doesn’t do much Works great! I imagine I find it preferable due to the similarity to comments in other situations: // or ;  or # I’ve often make visual pseudo-line breaks in my code, and this colon-based syntax works wonders: @ECHO OFF SETLOCAL :: Do stuff ECHO Doing Stuff :::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :: Do more stuff ECHO This batch file doesn’t do much Not only is it more readable, but there’s a slight performance benefit. The batch file engine sees this as an invalid line label and immediately reads the following line. Use that fact to your advantage if this trick leads you into heated nerd debate. Two Pitfalls to Avoid Be aware of that there are a couple situations where this hack will fail you. It most likely won’t be a problem unless you’re getting really sophisticated with your batch files. Pitfall #1: Inline comments @ECHO OFF SETLOCAL IF EXIST C:\SomeFile.txt GOTO END ::This will fail :END Unfortunately, this fails. You can only have whitespace to the left of your comments. Pitfall #2: Code Blocks @ECHO OFF SETLOCAL IF EXIST C:\SomeFile.txt (         :: This will fail         ECHO HELLO ) Code blocks, such as if statements and for loops, cannot contain these comments. This is ultimately due to the fact that entire code blocks are processed as a single line. I originally learned this from Rob van der Woude’s site. He goes into more depth about the behavior of the pitfalls as well, if you are interested in further details. I hope this trick earns you serious geek rep!

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• Too Clever for My Own Good

  - by AjarnMark

  Yesterday I caught myself being a little too clever for my own good with some ASP.NET code.  It seems that I have forgotten some of my good old classic HTML and JavaScript skills, and become too dependent on the .NET Framework and WebControls to do the work for me.  Here’s the scenario… In order to improve the User Interface and better communicate to the user when something is happening that they need to wait for, we have started to modify some of our larger (slower) pages to display messages like Processing… or Reloading… while they are cycling through a postback.  (Yes, I understand this could be improved by using AJAX / Callbacks and so on, but even then, you need to let your user know that they need to wait for that section to be re-rendered, so for the moment these pages will continue to use good ol’ Postbacks.)  It’s a very simple trick, really.  All I want to do is when some control triggers a postback, first run a little client-side JavaScript to hide the main contents of the page (such as a GridView) and display the appropriate message.  This lets the user know, “Hey, we’re doing something, don’t click another link or scroll and try to take action right now.” The first places I hooked this up were easy.  Most common cause of a postback:  Buttons.  And when you’re writing the markup or declarative code for an ASP:Button control, there is the handy OnClientClick property which is designed for just this purpose…to run client-side JavaScript before the postback occurs.  This is distinguished from the OnClick property which tells the control what Server-side code to run.  Great!  Done!  Easy! But then there are other controls like DropDownLists and CheckBoxes that we use on our pages with the AutoPostback=True setting which cause postbacks.  And these don’t have OnClientClick or OnClientSelectedIndexChanged events.  So I started getting creative, using an ASP:CustomValidator control in conjunction with setting the CausesValidation and ValidationGroup settings on these controls, which basically caused the action on the control to fire the Custom Validator, which was defined with a Client Side validation function which then did the hide content/show message code (and return a meaningless IsValid setting).  This also caused me to define a different ValidationGroup setting for my real data entry validator controls so that I could control them separately and only have them fire when I really wanted validation, and not just my show/hide trick. For a little while I was pretty proud of myself for coming up with this clever approach to get around what I considered to be a serious oversight on the DropDownList and CheckBox controls declarative syntax.  Then, in the midst of my smugness, just as I was about to commit my changes to the source code repository, it dawned on me that there is a much simpler and much more appropriate way to accomplish this.  All that I really needed to do was to put in my server-side code (I used the Page_Init section) a call to MyControl.Attributes.Add(“onClick”, “myJavaScriptFunctionName()”) for the checkboxes, and for the DropDownLists (which become select tags) use “onChange” instead of “onClick”.  This is exactly the type of thing that the Attributes collection is there for…so you can add attributes to be rendered with the control that you would have otherwise stuck right into the HTML markup if you had been doing this by hand in the first place. Ugh!  A few hours wasted on clever tricks that I ended up completely removing, but I did learn a lot more about custom validators and validation groups in the process.  And got a good reminder that all that stuff (HTML, JavaScript, and CSS) I learned back when I wrote classic ASP pages is still valuable today.  Oh, and one more thing…don’t get lulled into too much reliance on the the whiz-bang tool to do it for you.  After all, WebControls are just another layer of abstraction, and sometimes you need to dig down through the layers and get a little closer to the native language.

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• Ask HTG: How Can I Check the Age of My Windows Installation?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Curious about when you installed Windows and how long you’ve been chugging along without a system refresh? Read on as we show you a simple way to see how long-in-the-tooth your Windows installation is. Dear How-To Geek, It feels like it has been forever since I installed Windows 7 and I’m starting to wonder if some of the performance issues I’m experiencing have something to do with how long ago it was installed. It isn’t crashing or anything horrible, mind you, it just feels slower than it used to and I’m wondering if I should reinstall it to wipe the slate clean. Is there a simple way to determine the original installation date of Windows on its host machine? Sincerely, Worried in Windows Although you only intended to ask one question, you actually asked two. Your direct question is an easy one to answer (how to check the Windows installation date). The indirect question is, however, a little trickier (if you need to reinstall Windows to get a performance boost). Let’s start off with the easy one: how to check your installation date. Windows includes a handy little application just for the purposes of pulling up system information like the installation date, among other things. Open the Start Menu and type cmd in the run box (or, alternatively, press WinKey+R to pull up the run dialog and enter the same command). At the command prompt, type systeminfo.exe Give the application a moment to run; it takes around 15-20 seconds to gather all the data. You’ll most likely need to scroll back up in the console window to find the section at the top that lists operating system stats. What you care about is Original Install Date: We’ve been running the machine we tested the command on since August 23 2009. For the curious, that’s one month and a day after the initial public release of Windows 7 (after we were done playing with early test releases and spent a month mucking around in the guts of Windows 7 to report on features and flaws, we ran a new clean installation and kept on trucking). Now, you might be asking yourself: Why haven’t they reinstalled Windows in all that time? Haven’t things slowed down? Haven’t they upgraded hardware? The truth of the matter is, in most cases there’s no need to completely wipe your computer and start from scratch to resolve issues with Windows and, if you don’t bog your system down with unnecessary and poorly written software, things keep humming along. In fact, we even migrated this machine from a traditional mechanical hard drive to a newer solid-state drive back in 2011. Even though we’ve tested piles of software since then, the machine is still rather clean because 99% of that testing happened in a virtual machine. That’s not just a trick for technology bloggers, either, virtualizing is a handy trick for anyone who wants to run a rock solid base OS and avoid the bog-down-and-then-refresh cycle that can plague a heavily used machine. So while it might be the case that you’ve been running Windows 7 for years and heavy software installation and use has bogged your system down to the point a refresh is in order, we’d strongly suggest reading over the following How-To Geek guides to see if you can’t wrangle the machine into shape without a total wipe (and, if you can’t, at least you’ll be in a better position to keep the refreshed machine light and zippy): HTG Explains: Do You Really Need to Regularly Reinstall Windows? PC Cleaning Apps are a Scam: Here’s Why (and How to Speed Up Your PC) The Best Tips for Speeding Up Your Windows PC Beginner Geek: How to Reinstall Windows on Your Computer Everything You Need to Know About Refreshing and Resetting Your Windows 8 PC Armed with a little knowledge, you too can keep a computer humming along until the next iteration of Windows comes along (and beyond) without the hassle of reinstalling Windows and all your apps.         

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• Sitting Pretty

  - by Phil Factor

  Guest Editorial for Simple-Talk IT Pro newsletter'DBAs and SysAdmins generally prefer an expression of calmness under adversity. It is a subtle trick, and requires practice in front of a mirror to get it just right. Too much adversity and they think you're not coping; too much calmness and they think you're under-employed' I dislike the term 'avatar', when used to describe a portrait photograph. An avatar, in the sense of a picture, is merely the depiction of one's role-play alter-ego, often a ridiculous bronze-age deity. However, professional image is important. The choice and creation of online photos has an effect on the way your message is received and it is important to get that right. It is fine to use that photo of you after ten lagers on holiday in an Ibiza nightclub, but what works on Facebook looks hilarious on LinkedIn. My splendid photograph that I use online was done by a professional photographer at great expense and I've never had the slightest twinge of regret when I remember how much I paid for it. It is me, but a more pensive and dignified edition, oozing trust and wisdom. One gasps at the magical skill that a professional photographer can conjure up, without digital manipulation, to make the best of a derisory noggin (ed: slang for a head). Even if he had offered to depict me as a semi-naked, muscle-bound, sword-wielding hero, I'd have demurred. No, any professional person needs a carefully cultivated image that looks right. I'd never thought of using that profile shot, though I couldn't help noticing the photographer flinch slightly when he first caught sight of my face. There is a problem with using an avatar. The use of a single image doesn't express the appropriate emotion. At the moment, it is weird to see someone with a laughing portrait writing something solemn. A neutral cast to the face, somewhat like a passport photo, is probably the best compromise. Actually, the same is true of a working life in IT. One of the first skills I learned was not to laugh at managers, but, instead, to develop a facial expression that promoted a sense of keenness, energy and respect. Every profession has its own preferred facial cast. A neighbour of mine has the natural gift of a face that displays barely repressed grief. Though he is characteristically cheerful, he earns a remarkable income as a pallbearer. DBAs and SysAdmins generally prefer an expression of calmness under adversity. It is a subtle trick, and requires practice in front of a mirror to get it just right. Too much adversity and they think you're not coping; too much calmness and they think you're under-employed. With an appropriate avatar, you could do away with a lot of the need for 'smilies' to give clues as to the meaning of what you've written on forums and blogs. If you had a set of avatars, showing the full gamut of human emotions expressible in writing: Rage, fear, reproach, joy, ebullience, apprehension, exasperation, dissembly, irony, pathos, euphoria, remorse and so on. It would be quite a drop-down list on forums, but given the vast prairies of space on the average hard drive, who cares? It would cut down on the number of spats in Forums just as long as one picks the right avatar. As an unreconstructed geek, I find it hard to admit to the value of image in the workplace, but it is true. Just as we use professionals to tidy up and order our CVs and job applications, we should employ experts to enhance our professional image. After all you don't perform surgery or dentistry on yourself do you?

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• View all ntext column text in SQL Server Management Studio for SQL CE database

  - by Dave

  I often want to do a "quick check" of the value of a large text column in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). The maximum number of characters that SSMS will let you view, in grid results mode, is 65535. (It is even less in text results mode.) Sometimes I need to see something beyond that range. Using SQL Server 2005 databases, I often used the trick of converting it to XML, because SSMS lets you view much larger amounts of text that way: SELECT CONVERT(xml, MyCol) FROM MyTable WHERE ... But now I am using SQL CE, and there is no Xml data type. There is still a "Maximum Characters Retreived XML" value under Options; I suppose this is useful when connecting to other data sources. I know I can just get the full value by running a little console app or something, but is there a way within SSMS to see the entire ntext column value? [Edit] OK, this didn't get much attention the first time around (18 views?!). It's not a huge concern, but maybe I'm just obsessed with it. There has to be some good way around this, doesn't there? So a modest bounty is active. What I am willing to accept as answers, in order from best-to-worst: A solution that works just as easy as the XML trick in SQL CE. That is, a single function (convert, cast, etc.) that does the job. A not-too-invasive way to hack SSMS to get it to display more text in the results. An equivalent SQL query (perhaps something that creatively uses SUBSTRING and generates multiple ad-hoc columns??) to see the results. The solution should work with nvarchar and ntext columns of any length in SQL CE from SSMS. Any ideas?

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• Programmatically set the DPI from a .net 2.0 WinForms application

  - by Stef

  I want to run my application on 96dpi, no matter what the dpi size from Windows is set to. It is possible ? ' Edit ' I found that using the Scale() method and resizing the font will almost do the trick. public class MyForm : Form { private static bool ScaleDetected = false; const float DPI = 80F; protected override void OnPaint(PaintEventArgs e) { base.OnPaint(e); if (!ScaleDetected) { Graphics g = e.Graphics; float factorX = DPI / g.DpiX; float factorY = DPI / g.DpiY; SizeF newSize = new SizeF(factorX, factorY); AutoScaleDimensions = newSize; AutoScaleMode = AutoScaleMode.Dpi; Scale(newSize); Font = new Font(Font.FontFamily, Font.Size * factorX); ScaleDetected = true; } } } However when using this 'trick' in a MDI application using Janus Controls, the main form is resized, but for some other forms, the scaling + changed font are not applied.

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• how to handle base tag target attribute in iphone uiwebview to open new window

  - by user217428

  When the links are supposed to open a new window, iphone uiwebview won't trigger an event when user click these links. We had to use javascript to do some trick to the target attribute of the links. I can handle 'a' tag to open in the '_self' window with the trick without problem. But when I do it the same way with the 'base' tag. it doesn't work. I believe the base target is set by the javascript. But the base tag is in the head, which may be handled by the uiwebview before my javascript executed, so the target change may not reflected in the webkit engine. Could someone please give some suggestion, so I can open the link in the same uiwebview? The following is the sample HTML opened in the uiwebview <html> <head> <base target='_blank'> </head> <body> <a href='http://google.ca'>google</a> </body> </html> The following is the code to be executed in the (void) webViewDidFinishLoad: (UIWebView*)webView static NSString* js = @"" "function bkModifyBaseTargets()" "{" "var allBases = window.document.getElementsByTagName('base');" "if (allBases)" "{" "for (var i = 0; i < allBases.length; i++)" "{" "base = allBases[i];" "target = base.getAttribute('target');" "if (target)" "{" "base.setAttribute('target', '_self');" "}" "}" "}" "}"; [webView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString: js]; [webView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString: @"bkModifyBaseTargets()"];

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• how to atomically claim a row or resource using UPDATE in mysql

  - by Igor

  i have a table of resources (lets say cars) which i want to claim atomically. if there's a limit of one resource per one user, i can do the following trick: UPDATE cars SET user = 'bob' WHERE user IS NULL LIMIT 1 SELECT * FROM cars WHERE user IS bob that way, i claim the resource atomically and then i can see which row i just claimed. this doesn't work when 'bob' can claim multiple cars. i realize i can get a list of cars already claimed by bob, claim another one, and then SELECT again to see what's changed, but that feels hackish. What I'm wondering is, is there some way to see which rows i just updated with my last UPDATE? failing that, is there some other trick to atomically claiming a row? i really want to avoid using SERIALIZABLE isolation level. If I do something like this: 1 SELECT id FROM cars WHERE user IS NULL 2 <here, my PHP or whatever picks a car id> 3 UPDATE cars SET user = 'bob' WHERE id = <the one i picked> would REPEATABLE READ be sufficient here? in other words, could i be guaranteed that some other transactions won't claim the row my software has picked during step 2?

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• how to know location of return address on stack c/c++

  - by Dr Deo

  i have been reading about a function that can overwrite its return address. void foo(const char* input) { char buf[10]; //What? No extra arguments supplied to printf? //It's a cheap trick to view the stack 8-) //We'll see this trick again when we look at format strings. printf("My stack looks like:\n%p\n%p\n%p\n%p\n%p\n% p\n\n"); //%p ie expect pointers //Pass the user input straight to secure code public enemy #1. strcpy(buf, input); printf("%s\n", buf); printf("Now the stack looks like:\n%p\n%p\n%p\n%p\n%p\n%p\n\n"); } It was sugggested that this is how the stack would look like Address of foo = 00401000 My stack looks like: 00000000 00000000 7FFDF000 0012FF80 0040108A <-- We want to overwrite the return address for foo. 00410EDE Question: -. Why did the author arbitrarily choose the second last value as the return address of foo()? -. Are values added to the stack from the bottom or from the top? apart from the function return address, what are the other values i apparently see on the stack? ie why isn't it filled with zeros Thanks.

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• Cross-domain data access in JavaScript

  - by vit

  We have an ASP.Net application hosted on our network and exposed to a specific client. This client wants to be able to import data from their own server into our application. The data is retrieved with an HTTP request and is CSV formatted. The problem is that they do not want to expose their server to our network and are requesting the import to be done on the client side (all clients are from the same network as their server). So, what needs to be done is: They request an import page from our server The client script on the page issues a request to their server to get CSV formatted data The data is sent back to our application This is not a challenge when both servers are on the same domain: a simple hidden iframe or something similar will do the trick, but here what I'm getting is a cross-domain "access denied" error. They also refuse to change the data format to return JSON or XML formatted data. What I tried and learned so far is: Hidden iframe -- "access denied" XMLHttpRequest -- behaviour depends on the browser security settings: may work, may work while nagging a user with security warnings, or may not work at all Dynamic script tags -- would have worked if they could have returned data in JSON format IE client data binding -- the same "access denied" error Is there anything else I can try before giving up and saying that it will not be possible without exposing their server to our application, changing their data format or changing their browser security settings? (DNS trick is not an option, by the way).

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• BASH: How to count all the human readable files?

  - by user1687406

  I'm taking an intro course to UNIX and have a homework question that follows: How many files in the previous question are text files? A text file is any file containing human-readable content. (TRICK QUESTION. Run the file command on a file to see whether the file is a text file or a binary data file! If you simply count the number of files with the ".txt" extension you will get no points for this question.) The previous question simply asked how many regular files there were, which was easy to figure out by doing find . -type f | wc -l I'm just having trouble determining what "human readable content" is, since I'm assuming it means anything besides binary/assembly, but I thought that's what -type f displays. Maybe that's what the professor meant by saying "trick question"? This question has a follow up later that also asks "What text files contain the string "csc" in any mix of upper and lower case?". Obviously "text" is referring to more than just .txt files, but I need to figure out the first question to determine this!

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• Backquote on iPhone keyboard

  - by lc

  Is there a backquote (backtick) on the iPhone keyboard, and if so, where is it? When I'm writing a post here or on any of the sister sites (especially SO), I want to use the backquote for inline code blocks. Under the single quote key, I've found two curly/angled quotes, but those (’ and ‘) don't seem to do the trick...

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• Huawei E170 doesn't work with Windows 7

  - by torbengb

  I've got a "Huawei E170" (HSDPA broadband modem USB stick) with a driver CD for Windows XP & Vista, but now I got a netbook with Windows 7, and the driver installer won't run. I've called the telecom, but they just offered to sell me a new stick :-( Is there really no Win7 driver available for the E170 stick? Or can I trick it into installing anyway?

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• Deleting a single file from the trash in Mac OS X Snow Leopard

  - by SteveTheOcean

  In earlier versions of Mac OS X one could delete a file from the trash by opening a terminal window and typing rm ~/.Trash/file_i_want_to_delete. See this previous post. Unlike earlier versions in Mac OS X Snow Leopard one can "put back" a file from the trash into its original directory. Will the rm trick still work? Testing shows it does delete the file but what happens to the "put back" information that specifies the directory from which the file was deleted?

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• Macports Apache not starting at Mac OS X snow leopard boot [closed]

  - by greg

  I've done the launchctl load command, the symlinks point to my /opt/local/etc/LaunchDaemeons/org.macports.apache2/org.macports.apache2.plist, but it never starts. I can start it manually, works fine after that. Just won't load on startup. My server is named in my /opt/local/apache2/conf/httd.conf, I had read that sometimes makes a difference. I've done the launchctl unload and load trick, all with no results. I'm out of ideas.

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• How do I configure the number of worker threads used by SqlServer 2005 Agent

  - by Decker

  How can I increase the limit of worker threads from the default 10 for SQL Server 2005 SqlAgent? I have 9 jobs that run almost continuously and that leaves only one available thread for the rest of the scheduled jobs. Oftentimes, when no thread is available, I will see the jobs in "Waiting for worker thread" state. I'd like to increase the number to about 12 (which should do the trick for me). Any idea where this is set?

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• Can I use LGA775 heatsink on LGA1156 CPU?

  - by Ghostrider

  Will cooler that is designed to LGA775 CPUs install on LGA1156 CPU or are they mechanically incompatible? I'm building my first 1U server and surprise-surprise - Intel stock cooler doesn't fit (unless I'm willing to keep the case open). Places that I prefer to buy stuff from are currently out of stock on 1U 1156 heatsinks so I'm wondering if LGA775 would do the trick.

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