Archive for December, 2007
Netbeans has become my IDE of choice for Ruby on Rails, and boy, is it an excellent choice.
However, I was opening a project I was working on when this prompt came up.
How does the question … “Do you really want to open it?” have only one option for a response?
Clearly, the right set of options should be
- open it/don’t open it
- skip file/open it (I prefer this because it tells the user that the process will not terminate)
- no/yes (not as good as the others)
Don’t make me think Netbeans team … a tiny spot on an otherwise fantastic product.
December 30th, 2007
Just a quick note to help folks who want to get rid of the annoying restart prompt that keeps popping up after an automatic update has installed.
- Press the windows button and R (windows button + R) for the run prompt
- If you’ve done this before the command will be pre-filled … if it isn’t then type in
- net stop “automatic updates” <——— note the quotes?
Remember … you really should restart your computer after an update has installed. So make sure you do that eventually.
PS: Starting certain applications will cause the automatic update service to start running again and the nag will come back. Just Rinse and repeat 
December 19th, 2007
This is a neat little feature in the new Windows Live Mail.
For those who don’t know, Windows live mail is the Microsoft’s email replacement for Outlook Express 6.
I love this feature so much because now, my email client won’t corrupt my contacts with a ton of useless entries (if you use craigslist a lot you’ll know what I mean).
Its exellent logic, because if I exchange emails with a person a couple of times, then its a pretty good bet that I want that person in my contact list but am too lazy to do it manually. Now Live Mail does it automagically, so you don’t have to … thats called an “intelligent default”. Makes for excellent application design because it “doesn’t make me think”
What would be even better would be the ability to set the threshold number manually.
December 19th, 2007
Microsoft just released an update to IE6’s JavaScript engine. It was in response to problems with its (jscript 5.6) garbage collection that would cause poor performance with Large Ajaxy applications … like Gmail. It probably also helps their hotmail web ui too, since that uses ajax as well.
I would personally have liked to see more done with this update (its only a “minor” update), but I suppose you don’t want to give people a reason to hold on to IE 6 right? Hopefully this stops Feed Demon (my RSS reader) from freezing on CNN’s pages?
Read more about the update here
December 19th, 2007
Safari for Windows (3.0.4) became my current favorite browser by (to my trained eye) slaughtering Opera in Javascript performance.
Hopefully that changes with Opera 9.25. Of late though, I’ve been having trouble with it. Safari initially broke on my Windows Laptop a few weeks ago, popping up a debugger prompt and closing immediately if I cancelled out of it.It kept running on my main workstation, however … that is until this evening, now its doing the same on my desktop.
I realize how poorly supported this browser is, because there is no place to file a bug report except from in the browser itself. Shouldn’t there be an active bug database or something for Safari on windows?
If anyone knows how to fix this please let me know … I want my super fast javascript back!
[Click on Images to see bigger versions]
December 19th, 2007
Trust microsoft to make me look stupid on the rare day that I wade in to defend them in this unfair pile-on (5 lame exuses from people still using hotmail for email).
Hotmail is inaccessible today … and I’m ripping my hair out.
The url says something about being unable to access my user data file?!?!
sigh … I have a gmail account too, BUT I can’t remember the last time they had an outage.
December 18th, 2007
This tongue in cheek article perfectly sums up why no one should be trying to move to windows Vista.
Warning: Geek sense of humor required to read 
“Upgrading” to Windows Xp from Vista
December 17th, 2007
I started work on a web app that makes extensive use of zip codes recently.
The trouble was, I couldn’t get my hands on a good listing of all the zip codes in the United States without paying $20 or more at some fly-by-night website.
See for yourself here
Eventually … after much google-batics … I found a tiny link at the bottom of this wikipedia entry on zip-codes.
It went to this geocoding website and right there, was the link I had been looking for!
A FREE CSV file of all US ZIP codes including zip, city, state, latitude, longitude, and county.The date says it was last updated on September 20, 2007, which gives me hope that the file is frequently updated.
Many Thanks to ibegin! Enjoy!
update: The list was updated January 18th 2008
December 14th, 2007
For all you php debuggers out there losing time looking up xdebug settings in xdebug’s difficult-to-look-up documentation …
now you have this …
A well documented and well commented xdebug.ini by Gaetano Giunta.
December 7th, 2007
So … I’m running Windows XP on a 17″ Macbook Pro with Bootcamp …
Every now and then, when I put the laptop on Standby and try to resume work from where I left off, the USB devices stop responding all together.
This is a big problem for me, since
- I put my laptop in and out of standby several times a day
- work off an external 250GB Hard drive.
- am pretty hopeless without a wireless mouse
I poked around online, but didn’t really find anything on Google or at the Apple bootcamp forum.
So I decided to try fixing it on my own.
What I found curious about the problem, was that everytime the usb devices stopped working, I’d get this message in the Event Viewer.
Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the AppleOSSMgr service.
So I simply restarted the “Apple OS Switch Manager” service and after allowing it to complete … it would fail, but my usb devices would be operational again.
Here’s how to accomplish it, and I hope this helps someone out.
From the command line
- Hit the Apple btn + R … the run prompt should come up
- type in “
cmd“
- type in [
net stop "Apple OS Switch manager"] (note the quotes)
- wait for that to complete
- then type in [
net stop "Apple OS Switch manager"]
Visually
- Hit the Apple btn + R … the run prompt should come up
- type in “
services.msc“
- scroll down until you find “
Apple OS Switch Manager” (sort the columns by name to help you find it a bit more easily)
- Right Click on it and select “
Restart“
- wait a while … it will take a bit of time to complete and it should actually fail, but after its done you should be able to use your usb device again.
December 7th, 2007