Archive
Tag "Tips/Tricks"

Have slow load­ing Word doc­u­ments, or pass­word pro­tected Excel spread­sheets for which you have for­got­ten a pass­word? Who'd have thunk of this solu­tion to your MS Office woes..

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Hav­ing tried a bunch of PDF writ­ers like Acro­bat Stan­dard itself, and PDF Cre­ator, PDF 995, Desk­top PDF etc, many of which sit as Acro­bat Dis­tiller printer mod­ules, here is a sim­ple tip.

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If not to make things sim­pler for you, then for the sheer delight of it, it's kind of fun to make your Win­dows PC look like a Mac. A full theme from Fly­aki­teOSX, sounds and all, makes it a breeze.

Want a Mac look on your Win­dows machine? Skins and themes would be nice, but there's more to that when you want to REALLY emu­late a Mac OSX inter­face entirely. There are plenty of pro­grams avail­able to emu­late spe­cific fea­tures of OSX, e.g. Finder, icons, etc [exam­ple].

But Fly­akite OSX is a project that's look­ing mature, and it comes with a very com­plete theme, includ­ing sounds and mouse cur­sors and Explorer cus­tomiza­tion, things you don't typ­i­cally expect from a sim­ple 'theme'.

Down­load Fly­akite OSX here

The web­site goes for a Mac look itself, which is a bit painful, but it's worth the download.

Before you go for it, some caveats

  1. The per­for­mance of your machine in gen­eral may be affected, of course. Not too much though.
  2. The theme does fun­da­men­tally change some core files like Explorer.exe but (a) it makes a backup so you can go back with a sim­ple unin­stall, and (b) it doesn't screw up any addi­tional func­tion­al­ity like my Groove but­ton on my Explorer bar.
  3. I don't like shad­ows under my win­dows, but that seems to built-in in the skin.
  4. Some things like Win­dows Media Player will not change. WMP has its own skin, which remains untouched.
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Unin­stall or upgrade ASAP

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NYT is run­ning a mis­lead­ing (to put it politely) arti­cle titled "Cor­rupted PC's Find New Home In the Dump­ster" which basi­cally advo­cates throw­ing out your old PC and get­ting a new one if you get infected by worms or viruses. Yeah right and so forth

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Com­bi­na­tion of Gmail's RSS read­ing func­tion­al­ity and Bit Tor­rent files avail­able through RSS files. So you have no excuse now not to use all that gap­ing stor­age space in your Gmail account.

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Lat­est Cpanel updates are break­ing Mov­able type instal­la­tions, wreak­ing havoc with 500 Server Error mes­sages and caus­ing core dumps all over the place. Here's the kludg­ish workaround, that, well, works.

Lat­est Cpanel updates are break­ing Mov­able type instal­la­tions, wreak­ing havoc with 500 Server Error mes­sages and caus­ing core dumps all over the place. Here's the kludg­ish workaround, that, well, works.

A user on MT forums sug­gested that down­grad­ing to DBD::Mysql 2.9007 should do the trick. It does. Six Apart seems to be aware of it.

Here's a lit­tle script for Cpanel/WHM users to exe­cute on their SSH shells. Save it as, say, "dbidowngrade.sh" in your root folder, CHMOD it to 755, and exe­cute it with "./dbidowngrade.sh" at the com­mand prompt.

Impor­tant Note:

Yes, some peo­ple will have prob­lems with Cpanel updat­ing their DBD::Mysql with the /upcp script, in which case you should prob­a­bly set up a cron job to exe­cute the above script on a reg­u­lar basis. I have it up as hourly and it takes just a few sec­onds. I have com­mented out the lines in green because you don't need to down­load the file from CPAN more than once.

Please remem­ber, this is merely a tem­po­rary solu­tion. Mov­able Type should of course have an update soon, and Cpanel should shortly start pro­vid­ing the 3.0001 ver­sion in the near future.

Update: July 8, 2005

The lat­est update of DBD::Mysql, 3.0001_3, works for me. So here's the new code:

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#!/bin/sh
cd /usr/src
 
wget -O dbd.tar.gz "http_//search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/C/CA/CAPTTOFU/DBD-mysql-3.0001_3.tar.gz"
gzip -cd dbd.tar.gz | tar xf -
rm -rf dbd.tar.gz
 
cd DBD-mysql-3.0001_3
perl Makefile.PL
make
make install

Update: July 6, 2005

Looks like the DBD::Mysql author has released a 3.0001_2 devel­oper update. I haven't been able to install it, it gives me a bunch of errors but that's par for the course from 'devel­oper' ver­sions of soft­ware. YMMV. I'll stick with the 2.9007 for now.

Orig­i­nal method: Down­grad­ing surely works

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#!/bin/sh
#---------------------------------------------
# Script to downgrade to DBD::mysql 2.9007
#---------------------------------------------
cd /usr/src
wget -O dbd.tar.gz "http_//www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/DBD/DBD-mysql-2.9007.tar.gz"
gzip -cd dbd.tar.gz | tar xf -
rm -rf dbd.tar.gz
cd DBD-mysql-2.9007
perl Makefile.PL
make
make install
 
# Clean up
cd /usr/src
rm -rf DBD-mysql-2.9007
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Copy DVD Movie to DVDR, with­out copy pro­tec­tion rigmaroles.

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Some really, really nifty stuff here.

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So you have PHP4 work­ing on your server, and have heard that PHP5 may break things. Here's how to have both run­ning alongside.

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