I added the shared items of Google Reader to the sidebar of this blog - check it out and read what I enjoyed to read. Some days ago there was a new feature added to Google Reader that allows to add shared items of friends to your list- now need my friends to shared their feeds with me.
There is even a nice page that lists all my shared items.
I want to use this chance to recommend using Google Reader as your RSS reader again - I am loving it!
Sometimes you have to accomplish work on a windows PC where you do not have administrator privileges. This can be quite frustrating if you are a power user and you are used to your shortcuts and tools. Here are some tips to get rid of useless limitations some system administrators may have configured to your workstation.
To adapt the system to your needs you have to use two tools:
The group policy editor. To open it run gpedit.msc from the command line.
"Prevent access to registry editing tools" under User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System to Disabled.Most of the following changes can be done by using the Group Policy editor or the registry editor, choose your preferred method.
No “Run…” entry in your start menu - I do not ask myself why this should be disabled but all you have to do is to open the registry and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer. There change the value of NoRun to 0. In the group policy editor you have to set "Remove Run menu from Start Menu" under User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Start Menu and Taskbar to Disabled.
One of my favorite keyboard shortcut is Windows-Key + E to launch the Windows Explorer. I found out that it not work if the Control Panel is not shown in the Start Menu. To enable the shortcut go to User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Control Panel in the Group Policy editor and disable “Prohibit access to the Control Panel”
To allow you to configure the Internet Explorer if you need it for testing web applications you can enable the Internet Options dialog under User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windwos Components -> Internet Explorer -> Internet Control Panel
Personally I bought myself this T-shirt some years ago but I do not wear it as often as I should. The holiday season is coming fast and we should be prepared for parents, cousins and other family members asking us for help.
ZDNet has a nice article on this subject. The best tip in my opinion is the Keyfinder software that allows you to view registration information of almost any software installed in Windows. This could be very useful if you have to reinstall anything and the original information got lost.
Every windows user has experienced that the Windows Explorer sometimes hangs when accessing network drives of removable media. There is a kind of timeout after you can work again or in the worst case you have to kill it.I had this behavior on my notebook very often the last few weeks even when accessing local directories on my harddisk. My first guess was that it must have something to do with connected network shares because it did not happen when working offline.
I did a lot of web searches and then I came across this blog post of Mark Russinovich. There are many other articles around linking to this site talking about similar issues. Mark created some Windows tools for Sysinternals which was bought last year by Microsoft (see Wikipedia).
I did not need to use the Process Explorer to find out which process slows down my system. So I downloaded the Filemon and fired it up. After creating a filter that showed me only the Explorer process I was able to see every file access made by it. While working throgh the generated list I found something suspicious: There were many accesses to the shell32.dll and most of them looked in c:\windows\system32 for it - where it exists. The problem was that some of them tried to get it from other directories like c:\windows or my home directory. See the following screenshot:
When connected to the domain of my company the Z: drive is mapped to a share and defined as my home directory - this causes the explorer to search it for shell32.dll to and every time there is a problem with the network my whole systems is on wait.
I do not why the Explorer tries to search these directories for the dll file but it causes the hangs of my Windows Explorer. It seems to be a workaround to copy the shell32.dll into the windows folder.
Additionally I found some articles about the strategy how Windows searches for dll files. But it seems my behaves a bit different than described here in this MSDN article.
Some weeks ago I wrote a post about how to disable the zip file handling of Windows XP. I found out that Windows somehow re-enables this feature and I had to unregister the dll again and again. Today I got completely rid of this “feature” by deleting the zipfldr.dll file.
To do so you first have to delete the backup of this file in C:\WINDOWS\system32\dllcache. Then make sure that you do not use the Windows Explorer to list zip files and delete the file from C:\WINDOWS\system32. If the dll is loaded try to restart and delete the file from the command line.
Now I am able to register my preferred program for opening archives (which is WinRAR) as the default program for zip files.
Do you know iFixit? I found it through this Lifehacker post about a Powerbook owner who repaired his broken LCD screen. On his blog he describes how he got the display and provides a link to the step by step how to on iFixit. The how to is great! I would love to have such how to sites for other things - not only mac stuff.
Today I found a nice service for downloading streaming videos (youtube, …) to your PC: http://vixy.net/
You just have to enter the URL and select the preferred video format. The service loads the video, converts it and presents you a link where you can download the finished video file. Nice!
Today my brother had a strange problem: He tried to write on a 1GB SD card but was not able to, because the operating system always said “… The disk is write-protected”. The strange thing was: the card was not write protected, to hardware lock was not activated.
A quick google search found a strange solution: All he did was to put a piece of tape over the switch on the SD card - and it worked!
I am using CVS since about five years for my daily work. Some may ask why I do not use Subversion which is newer and has more features - the reason is that Eclipse has much better CVS support built in than any third party Subversion plugin offers.
For one of my current projects I am using (or have to use 
) Microsoft Visual Studio and Subversion. First I was shocked that there is no built in support for Subversion (is that a strategy?). So I tried tortoisesvn and was quite satisfied with its features.
It did not take very long and I had to find out that I need a plugin for Visual Studio to support Subversion operations inside the IDE. Renaming or moving files has to be done with the Subversion tool to make the repository aware of the changes and if I used tortoise the Visual Studio project did not recognize the changes. So I installed AnkhSVN.
Another one or two days later I still was not satisfied with my solution. So I read some web pages about SVN usage and came across many people using Eclipse just as SVN client even if they work with other development tools. And so I came to the best solution for me: AnkhSVN in combination with Eclipse and subclipse.
Subclipse allows me to synchronize with the repository as I am used to inside Eclipse, let me view the changes and compare files in a superb way, see the history of files and much more. Is it just because I am used to or is it the best solution?
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