Chrome Application Shortcut

So, long time no post! No-one reads this anyway, but just thought I'd store it here for history's sake!

Chrome has a rather useful option to make a weblink an application shortcut, which can be launched/selected from the TaskBar. This is highly useful for web-applications which function like the real thing (e.g. Grooveshark, Gmail).

My rather ill-executed attempt to install my free HDD

Just taking a break from implementing my final year project, an Automated Student Attendance System, and relaxing by blogging! Anything to relieve the boredom!

As some of you may know from reading my Twitter, I got a free 250GB IDE HDD from my Dad. What you may not know is that my motherboard only has 1 IDE slot which are taken up by my optical drives. Luckily (I then thought) I have an IDE>SATA Converter which will do what it suggests it does. So I install that (after realising that it can be installed wrongly, despite the little notch) and happily boot up my system only to find that it runs an actual 10x slower! Now, file transfers usually average around 30MB/s. This converter was only giving me 3MB/s! Meaning that something that could've taken 6 minutes was taking an hour!

I realise about here that this is an extremely tedious blogpost. So I'll cut this extremely dull story short:

• I sacrificed the use of my optical drives to enable me to use the extra hard drive while my PCI IDE Controller is on order from eBay
• I then rejigged my drive layout using Acronis PartitionExpert

And now this blog has bored me more than my project. I'll write some better stuff later!

A long overdue update

Hello there veritable plethora of Blogger readers and friends! (Yes I realise only about 2 people, if I'm lucky, will read this; but it stops me from getting bored at 04:34 as I'm too cold to be tired)

As you may have guessed, I'm cold and tired and blogging. "What's brought this on?", I don't hear anyone say. Well, I have signed up to Twitter and I noticed that you can add a Blogger widget! Ham-azing.

Too many things have happened since (feigns checking last post date since I've actually remembered it after previewing what damage the Twitter widget did) December 2007 to go over in detail, so I'll try and keep it short, snappy and interesting (my thesaurus skills are lacking tonight, but my interjection technique is bang on).

I'm getting a heap of stuff from my dad, including a 42" LCD HD Ready TV! Flippin' Nora!
I have dual monitors and an Xbox 360! Ownage!
I have uninstalled Vista and reverted back to XP! Relief!
I tried out Opera but found it uncompromisingly unintuitive and so went back to Firefox and Thunderbird after a brief email export/import scare! Good for me!
I'm looking forward to implementing the Automated Student Attendance System for my Final Year Project! Great!
I've formed and play (badly) in a 6-a-side football team! Healthy!
I still have World Domination aspirations! Doubleplusgood!

And, over the course of the 1 and a bit years, I have found many a program and extension which has helped me on my merry technological way. Here are a few of them now in fact!
CmdHere PowerToy for Windows XP
Link Shell Explorer Extension
"Open File Location" Explorer Extension
Process Explorer
QTAddressBar Explorer Extension
Speed Dial for Firefox
Ultramon
Unlocker Assistant
VistaVG Skin for XP

There's quite a few there. I'll go over them in subsequent posts, just to give me something to blog about. Fun times.

1000! And jovialities.

Just randomly staying up, and thought I'd check out my blog, to see if there was anything new. Found out I had passed 1000 views! I feel cool and famous.

Joviality: http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s27potentatematt&v=26&r=9&vlr=11&pg=61&d=129

This has got to be the most random thing ever... Who on earth searches for "Matthew Hayward and Zippy" ?!?

Post over.

Junction Link Magic

Junction Link Magic. What the heck does that mean?!

I didn't get it at first either. But now that I've used the program, it really is like magic, and has links/junctions to boot!

What this basically does is link one folder to another. What's the big deal with that? Well! It allows you to do some pretty nifty stuff like easily reroute your documents to another drive for example, whilst fooling the computer and programs into thinking it's still buried in C:\Documents and User Settings\[YOUR_NAME]\My Documents.

Or, if you're a partitioning kind of guy, or girl, and have run out of space on your system drive, the solution is easy! Just move everything to a fresh hard drive, then create a new junction/linking folder where the original Program Files was and point it at the fresh drive! All the old programs work fine and you don't have to keep selecting another drive when you install something new!

This program is well deserving of a Gold Star Award!

Just don't do crazy things like linking the System32 folder into the Recycle Bin...

I'm sure you can probably find many more uses for it, I'm just alerting you to its existence. Sorry for the unusually unhumorous post, I am quite tired

The Great Facebook Plague of '07

Anyone who's anyone uses Facebook. And anyone who uses Facebook knows of the creeping, unrelenting plague that is slowly grinding down Facebook into a MySpace-like mush.

You all know what I talk about! What I fear! What I dread!

It's the epitome of evil, the example by which Satan is measured, the darkest of.. you get the picture. I'm talking Facebook Apps.

Well after spending a fair amount of time scrolling thru endless "Harry Potter Sorting Hat", "iLike" and "What Friends Character Am I?" apps, I eventually got a bit peeved. So off I went on a merry Google adventure and found myself some gems.

Gold Star Award!
Without further extraneous lexical intercommunication I give you:
Greasemonkey - install this before attempting to install the next ones

Facebook Profile Cleaner,
Minimize Display Facebook Requests
Remove Facebook Application Icons and last but not least
No Facebook Ads

Greasemonkey is a Firefox addon that allows custom code to be applied to webpages and needs to be installed before the user scripts.

Of course you'll need a proper browser like Firefox if you want to have a hope in hell of using this frankly Facebook-saving bit of code.

Bit of a short post I know, but it's quality and not quantity this time.

Update and a little Haiku

I haven't updated this for a while, and for good reason! I haven't really been bothered ever since the hectic Haloscan activity. It was quite nice getting more than 1 hit a month. Anyway, an update on my current technological situation. Ahem...

The desktop which I was (and still am) quite proud of is still here! [shock horror, it hasn't been upgraded]. It's specs are as follows, in case you didn't get it from my previous Ode:

Asus P5B Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo e6600 2.4GHz OC to 2.7GHz
OCZ Platinum 2GB 667MHz Memory
BFG 8800GTX 768MB Nvidia GFX
300GB 7200rpm Internal HDD
Windows Vista Home Premium

Which is just about adequate for my needs. I've also recently bought a laptop to fulfil my dualscreen and mobile computing fetishes. It's an old HP Compaq n620c. The nice people I bought it from gave me a free upgrade, it was supposed to be a 933MHz Pentium, but they gave me a 1.3GHz one instead. Much happiness!

Gold Star Award! To go back to my dualscreen point, I found a very nifty program called Synergy2. It allows you to use a secondary computer as if it was another monitor of the primary computer. What this means is that I can play Bioshock on my desktop (Bioshock is teh orsm) and chat to random friends on MSN using the same keyboard and mouse! Pretty awesome stuff imho although it's not totally like dualscreen, in that you can't drag a window across to the other screen. That would require a massive amount of coding and would be a waste of resources, like having two browser windows open on the same page.

I found out a very annoying thing about Vista Home Premium, it won't let me Remote Desktop Connect to it. Very annoyed... Oh well! I'll get around it somehow.

Oh Windows Vista
You cost me the world and more
And yet you still crash

Ode to a desktop

Farewell to my MacBook Pro
And a fond and joyful Hello
To my new Intel Core 2 Duo
With an 8800GTX
With 2GB Platinum OCZ
My computer is now teh sex

:)

Oh and it has Vista

Another most annoying thing about Windows

One screenshot should do the trick

NO DAMN YOU!!! NO for the NTH TIME!!! NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Damned inherrent, unfixable flawed focus stealing... I HATE IT WITH SEVERAL PASSIONS.

I apologise for the uselessness of this post, but I needed to vent.

Getting Haloscan to work in Blogger Beta

NOTE: These instructions appear to have been broken when Blogger Beta un-Beta-rized. I have had 2 or 3 reports of people failing to successfully implement them, of course it may only be for one or two template layouts, but I'm not to know

So try the following but try and understand what you're doing at each stage rather than blindly following orders.

ORIGINAL POST:

http://logicalphilosopher.blogspot.com/2006/09/getting-haloscan-to-work-in-beta.html

Deserves most of the credit for my working solution. The solution above is a bit buggy in that it doesn't handle single and multipost comments very well.

Which is where I come in.

Here is what you need to do to get Haloscan happily accepting 3000 character comments from your adoring blog-readers. WITH TRACKBACK. w00t.

NOTE: Due to HTML constraints and the Planck Constant, the HTML code isn't provided with indentation, so feel free to indent as much as you feel necessary. I would also advise you to use an external tool such as Notepad2, GEdit or Smultron (depending on your OS) when editing and finding stuff

1. Sign in to Blogger Beta
2. Goto Dashboard > Your Blog > Template > Edit HTML
3. Select the Expand Widget Templates marker
4. Find:
   

   <b:includable id='comments' var='post'>

   and delete everything after that tag and up to the next
   

   </b:includable>

   but keep those two mentioned tags. This will have the effect of stopping Blogger comments appearing. Make sure you don't overshoot otherwise you'll wreck your Template
5. Delete:
   

   <b:include data='post' name='comments'/>
   

6. Delete:
   

   <dl class='comments-block' id='comments-block'>
   <b:loop values='data:post.backlinks' var='backlink'>
   <div class='collapsed-backlink backlink-control'>
   <dt class='comment-title'>
   <span class='backlink-toggle-zippy'> </span>
   <a expr:href='data:backlink.url' rel='nofollow'><data:backlink.title/></a>
   <b:include data='backlink' name='backlinkDeleteIcon'/>
   </dt>
   <dd class='comment-body collapseable'>
   <data:backlink.snippet/>
   </dd>
   <dd class='comment-footer collapseable'>
   <span class='comment-author'><data:post.authorLabel/> <data:backlink.author/></span>
   <span class='comment-timestamp'><data:post.timestampLabel/> <data:backlink.timestamp/></span>
   </dd>
   </div>
   </b:loop>
   </dl>

7. Delete:
   

   <span class='post-comment-link'>
   <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != "item"'>
   <b:if cond='data:post.allowComments'>
   <a class='comment-link' expr:href='data:post.addCommentUrl' expr:onclick='data:post.addCommentOnclick'><b:if cond='data:post.numComments == 1'>1 <data:top.commentLabel/>
   <b:else/><data:post.numComments/> <data:top.commentLabelPlural/>
   </b:if>
   </a>
   </b:if>
   </b:if>
   </span>

8. Find:
   

   <div id='main-wrapper'>
   <b:section class='main' id='main' showaddelement='no'>
   <b:widget id='Blog1' locked='true' title='Blog Posts' type='Blog'>
   <b:includable id='postQuickEdit' var='post'>
   <b:if cond='data:post.editUrl'>
   <span expr:class='item-control " + data:post.adminClass'>
   <a expr:href='data:post.editUrl' title='Edit Post'>
   <span class='quick-edit-icon'>
   </span>
   </a>
   </span>
   </b:if>
   </b:includable>
   

   And paste
   

   <a name='comments'/>
   <b:if cond='data:post.allowComments'>
   <script src='http://www.haloscan.com/load/XXXX' type='text/javascript'>
   </script>
   <a expr:href='javascript:HaloScan(" + "\"" + data:post.id + "\"" + ");' target='_self'>
   <script type='text/javascript'>postCount('<data:post.id/>');
   </script>
   </a>
   <a expr:href='"javascript:HaloScanTB(" + "\"" + data:post.id + "\"" + ");"' target='_self'>
   <script type='text/javascript'>postCountTB('<data:post.id/>');
   </script>
   </a>
   </b:if>

   before the </b:includable> but after the </b:if>.
   Replace XXXX with your Haloscan username
9. !!!OPTIONAL!!! Only if you have previously tried hacking it with the top link, delete:
   

   <span class='post-comment-link' >
   <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != "item" '>
   <b:if cond='data:post.allowComments'>
   <script src='http://www.haloscan.com/load/XXXX' type='text/javascript'>
   </script>
   <a expr:href='"javascript:HaloScan(" + "\"" + data:post.id + "\"" + ");"' target='_self'>
   <script type='text/javascript'>postCount('<data:post.id/>');</script></a>
   </a>
   </b:if>
   </b:if>
   </span>

10. !!!OPTIONAL!!! Have fun with your Haloscan comments