Category Archives: Uncategorized

Favorite FireFox Extensions

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I’ve seen a few “Best tools” lists over the years, but haven’t ever stumbled across a Best Tools for FireFox list.

So, in the grand tradition of probably reinventing the wheel, but not Googling about it first<g>….

Here’s my (quite short, but sweet), list of Favorite FireFox Extensions:

  • Theme: MacfoxIIGraphite 2.1.4
    OK technically not an extension, this theme really makes for a clean, uncluttered FireFox.
  • Tab Mix Pro 0.3.6
    What tabs in FireFox should have included from the start. Forcing popups to open in tabs is something I can’t do without now.
  • DownLoad Them All 0.9.9.10
    Ok, it’s technically not polite to snarf gobs of files from a site all at once. But, well, sometimes, rude is the word, I suppose.
  • IETab 1.3.3.20070528
    Essential if you want to stay away from opening IE but still need it for those nasty IE only sites (Parature, anyone).
  • DOM Inspector 1.8.1.9
    Quite handy for ripping into an existing webpage to see how it ticks.
  • FireBug 1.05
    Another handy little script debugger as well as CSS editor/debugger . I haven’t used it much to this point, but it seems to work quite well. Maybe there’s a better one someone can clue me in on?
  • Web Developer 1.1.4
    More CSS/DOM spelunking goodness

You can find them all by clicking Tools/Addons in FireFox and then click the Get Extensions link at the bottom right of that screen.

So how about it? Anyone with thoughts on any other really useful FireFox Addons?

This Device Cannot be Started (Code 10)

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I had opened up my machine to reformat a spare Harddrive last night. When I buttoned everything back up and restarted, I get network errors.

So I opened up My Computer, Device Manager and lo, my network card was “failing to start” with that wonderful code 10.

My machine has an Intel 975XBX2 motherboard, with those cool blue flame heatsinks<g>.

Pretty much best of breed stuff, and a gigabit net card is built in; swapping out cards was a “only if I absolutely have to” option.

Have you ever noticed that for virtually any other problem on a machine, you can just jump on Google, find the answer and be on down the road? But if your network card goes sour, ouch.

I tried all the obvious stuff, uninstalling the drivers, reinstalling them, using the “Update Drivers” option from Device manager, etc.

I’d almost given up, but then I decided to try one more thing.

The internal LAN adapter can be enabled or disabled through the system BIOS, so I rebooted, got into the BIOS, performed a “Load system Defaults”, then restored all those settings that I had to (like the RAID settings, Numlock off on boot, you know, important stuff), and then set the LAN card to disabled (it’s under Advanced/Peripherals).

Rebooted into Vista and sure enough, now it didn’t see the LAN adapter at all. Good sign.

Shutdown, power off, and restart. Back into the BIOS, reenable  the LAN adapter, save settings, and restart.

Boot back into Vista. Lo and behold, back in business.

Now, if only that 120 gb Western Digital Harddrive I picked up as a spare, would recognize properly and not as just 32gb, I’d be done with hardware (for a few days at least).

Vista and the Phantom Floppy Drive B

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Ok, yeah, it’s probably, um, quaint?, to even have a floppy drive in a Core 2 Duo based machine, but still, that’ no excuse for Vista to mysteriously change my floppy drive to Drive B.

You can’t fix this with the Drive Management dialog, and I couldn’t find any place else to assign a drive letter to the floppy. And there’s no jumpers on floppies, so what the hell?

On a whim, I opened up the Device Manager and started looking for any drive letter controls on the floppy devices.

There weren’t any.

But then, I started wondering if just uninstalling the drivers and letting “scan for new hardware” do it’s thing would work. It usually does for network cards.

So I right-clicked on each and uninstalled the drivers for both the Floppy Drive and Controller:

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Then right clicked on my computer and chose “Scan for new hardware”. In reality, just rebooting would also work.

A few seconds later, I’m back in the land of the whopping 1.4mb Drive A floppy!

Hey, you can get about a second and a half of HD Video on one of those things. Awesome.

Setting up a USB Memory Stick to Boot in VMWare

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You might think such a thing would be insane to attempt. And why bother?

Here’s a shot of GParted (a Linux based partition editor) booted from a USB stick (in the host machine). It’s quite handy in that it seems to work about as well as Partition Magic. It’ll copy partitions as well.

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The main reason for all this is that it’s awfully handy to test USB bootable key configurations from a VM instead of having to constantly reboot a real machine. And why a bootable USB configuration? Well, if you’re in IT, you often find yourself sitting at a machine that won’t boot or that needs to low level lovin’ to get it back on track. And things like GParted, Partition Magic, Partition Commander, or SysInternal’s NTFSDOS, not to mention SPintrite can be awfully handy to have swinging from a gold chain around your neck.

One caveat to this. Make SURE you DON’T access the USB key from your host machine while you do this. Doing so will likely trash the formatting on the key. You have been warned, young jedi.

Ok. Here we go…

Make sure you’ve inserted the USB Key and Windows “sees” it (doncha love that bong sound).

Start VMware (it will see the USB if it’s inserted, but it might not see it if you insert the USB key AFTER you’ve started VMWare).

Make sure the virtual machine in VMware is turned off.

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Click on the virtual machine settings and click Add:

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Choose “Hard Disk” from the device type list, then “Use a Physical Disk”, since we’ll be booting to the USB Key.

Here’s the important part. You should get a window like this:

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See that drop down list with the PhysicalDrive0 in it? If you drop it down, you should see at least one other drive (Physical Drive 0 is typically the C: drive in your host machine, you DON’T want to use that drive!). In mine, it was PhysicalDrive5. Select which ever one is your USB Key drive.

And select “Use Entire Disk” (unless you’ve partitioned your USB Key drive).

Finally, give it a filename for the vmdk file (that’s a little config file that VMWare uses to keep track of what physical drive is mapped to what virtual drive).

Fire up the VM, and be quick about pressing F2. That’s how you get into the VMware bios for the vm.

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It might take a few tries to get it, but eventually, you should get to the BIOS screen. Move over to BOOT and press Enter to expand the hard drive options:

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On my system, that “VMware Virtual Scsi Hard Drive (0:0) entry was listed 3’rd. Use the “+” key to move it up to the top of the boot priority list.

Then save your changes.

If you did everything right, when you reboot the VM, you should boot to your USB drive.

How did I get GParted to actually be able to boot from a memory stick?

I’ve blogged about getting USB memory stick drives bootable here, and here.

But for GParted, there’s a little more wizardry at work. You’ll need to use fat32format to format the drive, then use SYSLINUX to make it linux bootable, then copy the GParted ISO contents to the stick. See the above links for details.

Finally, you’ll need to move a few files.

The root of the GParted image look like this:

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Nav into the syslinux folder and move all the files there, down to the root of the drive.

Then nav to the boot folder, and move the gparted and gparted.igz files down to the root of the drive.

That should do it. Fire up a VM and give it the boot.

So what have you done with your USB key today? (absconding with company secrets doesn’t count, shame on you!)

No Nonsense Touch Utility

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I have to force timestamps so rarely, I just can’t justify spending money on such a utility.

But writing a little code to do it is annoying, so I went on a little hunt today to find a package that’s simple, quick and easy with little to no installation, drag and drop functionality (command line touch utils are a dime a dozen, after all), and straightforward date entry.

WinTouch fit the bill perfect for what I was looking for.

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You can drag files to that top list box, set the date/time and go. It’s no Directory Opus, but then, it’s not 85$ either.

Unleash the Fury

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I’m generally not one to pass on those annoying joke emails, but this one (from here) I just can’t resist.

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A Modern Undo

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I happened across an interesting post about Undo this afternoon.

The author is the guy behind “e – Textmate for Windows“, which looks to be a pretty slick little editor.

Now, I can’t say much to the editor (at least not yet, but I plan on taking a closer look).

But his comments on Undo struck me as particularly prescient.

I’ve had a nagging feeling for years that Undo (even of the “unlimited” variety that’s in just about every app out there now), was not really what it could or should be. The Undo Visualization is particularly nice, as is the idea of branching. I’ve seen something similar in graphics packages before (though I can’t remember which ones off hand). Never seen anything like it in a text editor or IDE, though.

His solution and implementation really points out the inadequacies of the typical modern undo. Granted, some of it might be a little advanced for a casual user. But for a casual user, the standard Ctrl-Z multi level undo should continue to work just fine anyway.

Throwing out the Wheel

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No, I’m not converting my blog here to Craig’s List or anything, but I figured I’d throw out first crack to anyone that reads here.

An Force Feedback wheel is the only way to play driving games IMO. Driving with a freakin’ thumb controller just seems so….dirty.

But I’m giving up on making my Force Feedback Wheel work with Vista.

It’s USB, it’s a HID device. But the drivers just hate Vista. No idea why. I’m guessing that if I knew how to isolate the USB device ID, I could modify the INF files that come with the latest Thrustmaster drivers for Vista and get it functional. I just don’t have the wherewithal, and I’m not a device driver writer by trade, so it’s a tad more research that I want to bite off right now.

Works great in XP, though. Has paddle shifters, strong force feedback, good pedals and a thick wheel with rubber grips.

It’s a Guillemot wheel, and from what I can tell online, that’s actually Thrustmaster under the covers.

Wheel1a Wheel2a

If you’re in the Dallas, Ft Worth area (that’s Texas), let me know if your interested.

I’d let it go for cheap (say 50$ obo).

Video Game Idea (or has this already been done)

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I was chatting today when the new game Portal from the Half Life guys came up (thanks, Ralf!).

Now, what does this have to do with Visual Basic? Well, nothing. But development ideas can come from the strangest sources so it’s good to keep your horizons open.

At any rate, I’d read about something similar in Wired several months ago, but apparently the concept got picked up by the Half Life team and fleshed out fully. (disclaimer: I have no idea whether I’ve got the backstory straight or not, that’s just how I remember reading it)

Essentially, you wield a interdimensional portal generator, but just think of it as a gizmo that you fire once at a flat surface to open one side of a tunnel, and fire it at another surface to open the other end. Then you step through one end and end up at the other, complete with all the inertia you had going in. You can see the portals in this screenshot:

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(image from the wikipedia entry)

Pretty slick idea and it opens up a ton of puzzle possibilities in a game.

But it reminded me of a concept I had years ago, but to date haven’t seen it implemented, but then, maybe I live in a bubble.

Basically, I see the game as a typical first person shooter, land based (like Quake, not like Descent), but the trick is that all the walls, and the ceiling exhibit gravity, either consistently or in varying amounts and not just a few, but all of them. Hence, you can walk not only on the “ground” but on the walls and ceiling, which effectively means there are no walls or ceilings. If you ever read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, the battle training sequences described there would give a pretty good picture.

Surely, it’s been done before, but does anyone know by whom?

2^16 Gives Excel 2007 Heartburn

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And in the “Oow, I’m glad I’m not in that department” department.

The latest Woody’s Office Watch reports that Excel 2007 can’t format 2^16 or 2^16-1 properly, instead deciding to show it as “100,000”

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Heh. It’s not too bad. According to Microsoft, the bug only affects 12 numbers (or is it 2, I’m not sure, but the quote says 12) out of a virtually infinite number space. From Woody’s; “They (Microsoft)point out that Excel can use ” 9.214*10^18 different floating point numbers ” but the bug only affects 12 of that incredibly large number of possibilities”.

Oh man. Can I use that one with my next off-by-one mistake? (hey, I don’t make ’em much anymore but still…).