kooshmoose

When Shockwave/Flash Breaks in Chrome

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Thu, 26 May 2011 13:21:00 +0000

Just a tip, if Shockwave/Flash breaks in Chrome, you can restart just that plugin and refresh your pages (no need to restart all instances of Chrome).

When Chrome is in focus, press shift-esc, find the plugin "Shockwave Flash", click on it and press "End Process". Reload your page and you should be good to go.

Windows 7 New Folder Lag - Solution

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 16:28:00 +0000

Recently at work I've been doing tasks that require me to download files into specifically named folders. Creating new folders from the download dialogue was really frustrating as it would take up to a minute from the point of clicking "New Folder" to the time I got the prompt to name it. This issue only cropped up after the first time my computer hibernated (which is every evening).

A little Googling later and here's the solution:

In an Explorer window, make the Menus visible by clicking Organize - Layout - then checking Menu bar.
Now click the Tools menu and select Folder Options...
Click the View tab.
Scroll down and check [ ] Launch folder windows in a separate process.

Go ahead and uncheck your Menu bar to get back to normal looking folders.

SMTP Development Solutions

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 21:01:00 +0000

I needed to send mail for a user control I was writing and since the move to Windows 7, I hadn't yet figured out what to do about W7's lack of a SMTP server.

Here are two solutions that I found and I'm kind of on the fence about:

The first is a full blown local SMTP server called, Free SMTP Server and I've used it in the past. Not much to say here. It just works.

The second, smtp4dev, is interesting in that it doesn't actually send email messages. This is great, for when you are just testing the format of a message and would typically go through multiple revisions that you'd then have to delete. Sure, it's a minor irritation to find those emails peppered among your other daily messages, but another benefit is that smtp4dev sits in your system tray and can be configured to display the "email" as soon as it is received instead of you having to browse to your email client and open the message. My only wish is that there could be a "we'll do it live" switch that would actually send the email for those cases when your email needs to be processed by another system. I don't like the idea of installing two SMTP servers.

MD Hands-Free Details

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 20:26:00 +0000

In case you were wondering about the new hands-free law as I was:

Prohibiting a driver of a motor vehicle that is in motion from using the driver's hands to use a handheld telephone except to initiate or terminate a wireless call or to turn on or off the handheld phone; providing that a violation of the Act may be enforced only as a secondary violation; establishing penalties of $40 for a first offense and $100 for a second offense; prohibiting a driver of a school vehicle or a holder of an instructional permit or provisional driver's license from using a handheld phone while driving; etc.

Source: http://mlis.state.md.us/2010rs/billfile/SB0321.htm

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:09:00 +0000

Ooh, Lala.com has 2SJ! http://ping.fm/rwO6O's

Vim Non-Greedy Search

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:49:00 +0000

Just a self-post here to help serve as a reminder that the non-greedy search operator for vim is .\{-} instead of the .*? in most languages. This was useful when attempting to replace bad image paths for a template file that contained lots of images that were hosted on various servers and I wanted to consolidate them to get around security warnings. The search command string in vim then ends up as:

:/src=\".\{-}\.$gif\|png\|jpg$\"/

This can be combined with a search and replace command as:

:%s/src=\".*$\/.\{-}\.\(gif\|png\|jpg$\)\"/src=\"myimagelocation\1\"/gc

Oh, and a super nice thing to know is that you can copy and paste from the cmd line in vim by hitting ctrl-f to open a new cmd window. This is great for saving thost extremely wordy vim regexes that you need to type over and over.

MyBrute

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 04:14:00 +0000

Come get some! (and other Army of the Dead references)

http://kooshmoose.mybrute.com/

I need to learn Vim

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:34:00 +0000

Today I stripped out lines not containing a certain string, removed all text but the codes I cared about from every line, sorted the remaining lines while removing duplicate lines and it only took 3 commands.

In short, I need to learn Vim.

8-bit Holiday Cheer

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 15:13:00 +0000

Love 8-bit NES-style music? Love Christmas tunes? Well, in another Reese's moment, you just got your 8-bit in my holiday cheer.

Just in time for Christmas, it’s the full version of 8-Bit Jesus: Classic Christmas Songs in the Style of Classic NES Games. This full release contains 18 tracks total, including improved variations of a few of the original nine!

[DoctorOctoroc.com]

Selling 32GB 1G iTouch

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:53:00 +0000

Anyone looking to pick up a slightly dropped 32 GB 1st generation iTouch? I'm going to post it on eBay if no one's interested.

Ever have one of those days...

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:57:00 +0000

... where after talking to a friend at lunch you go back and listen to the first album your band ever recorded and you think, "I'd sure like to get the band back together!"?

Yeah, me too.

Star Trek

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:29:00 +0000

Wasn't that excited about this until I saw the 2nd trailer!
http://ping.fm/pFJKi

Outlook 2007 Search and RDS Ctrl-Alt-End

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:00:00 +0000

I don't know why this is so hard for me to remember, but maybe blogging about it will help.

Searching a date range in Outlook 2007 can be accomplished with the following syntax:
received d:(>=08/01/2008) received:(<=08/31/2008)

Sending a ctrl-alt-delete key combination to the machine you are remoting into is accomplished by pressing ctrl-alt-end.

Quiz me later!

Vista WS4 Bug

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:06:00 +0000

I ran into a bug in Vista this weekend. This is really the first major bug I've seen (if you don't count the EXTREME slowness in IE 8b with the Google toolbar loaded) and after hours of troubleshooting I was tempted to go buy another license of XP. The problem was only cropping up when I tried to create a folder, move a file or delete a file. Only. In any of those instances, the Explorer window involved would hang. The file operation would complete, but the prompt or window would stay unusable. If I killed the Explorer process and ran a new instance, then the computer ran just fine until the next rename, move or delete. Then I'd have to kill Explorer and kick off a new process. In short...this really stunk up a weekend where I had several hours of development that needed to be done.

I spent several hours revering to various restore points, but the problem always remained. It wasn't until early this morning that I found a forum post that indicated that Window Search might be the problem. In the case of the forum poster it was an upgrade that solved his problem. For me, I downgraded by uninstalling Windows Search 4. My initial test delete worked like a champ so I went to bed. I really hope that fixed the problem and I can get back to work this evening.

SQL: Replace strings for TEXT datatype

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 02:28:00 +0000

There might be a simpler way to do a replace of all occurences of a string in a SQL TEXT field, but this is the solution I came up with way back when. I needed it again tonight so I figured I might as well pin it to the interwebs.

-- UPDATE [TableToUpdate]
-- SET  [Column] = cast(replace(cast([Column] as varchar(max)),'[StringToReplace]','[ReplacementText]') as text)
-- WHERE [Column] like '%[StringToReplace]%'

Google Chrome

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:18:00 +0000

Downloading and installing Google's new web browser, Chrome.

http://www.google.com/chrome/

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 02:08:00 +0000

Prius crisis averted. It's too much money and the Element looks brand new (to me) again after a weekend of cleaning.

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:13:00 +0000

I need an intervention, otherwise I might start payments on a Prius this weekend...

The New Doh!lar

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:05:00 +0000

Wouldn't it be cool if our money looked like this? When your currency looks this cool and can be modded in such a way, it's just all the more reason to support the switch to the Euro...
http://ping.fm/346rX

Fast Food Internet

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 15:33:00 +0000

Sitting in McD's doing client work instead of blinding people on the beach with my no-tan tan. Doh!!!

And now the explanation:

Well, long story very short (edited: not really)... I was waiting approval for a change on Friday, but it didn't come until after we were already on the road to OC. So... we were looking for open wireless connections on the way over but the lag on the iPhone's wireless selection screen was a bit too much for the speed I was driving. It was already after midnight by the time we arrived and my client's contract with another company bound them to posting content by midnight on the West coast.

So, I had to buy the wireless that OC provided to the condo and it was absolutely terrible. I actually had to leave the condo and sit on the front steps at 1:30 AM all the while watching my ever-draining battery indicator slip down to below 30%. My connection was so bad that I wasn't able to fully test the work on the production server before the laptop died and I had to crash.

The next morning I got up early and went in search of a better internet connection near an outlet and the waiter from breakfast said that McDonald's internet was the best on the 100+ side of OC. From my experience, I'd have to say he was correct. Also, since my client asked me to post a 20+ MB quicktime file to their homepage and I wasn't able to test the site under so poor conditions that I realized I needed to looking into some sort of streaming host. After a little research I discovered that for $30+ I could use QuickTime Pro to create a reference movie that allows QuickTime players to begin playing without having to download the entire .mov file. That's pretty much the definition of streaming. Another bonus of purchasing QTP was that I could finally resize the movie to make it fit on their home page properly.

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:01:00 +0000

Ping.fm is now pwning my blogs. We're officially one step closer to SkyNet.

My MySQL Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 14:55:00 +0000

I've been doing a bit of development with MySQL for a client and I've had to do a bit of work under the hood since the original developer had made quite a mess of the database. One of the biggest issues/roadblocks I had to deal with was the fact that two database were using two different collations and were therefore not available for table joins. Not only that, but they were duplicating effort of managing two sets of records between the two databases. One table contained an important id value while the other didn't.

I don't have time now, but I will blog the solution that I had to implement in order to configure both databases (and their columns) to use the same collation. Perhaps someone who manages to find that post can direct me towards a better solution in the future as the one I came up with is slightly less than ideal due to the need to manually run each MySQL MODIFY statement. I know that there is a better solution.

Episodic Strongbad on Wii

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 17:29:00 +0000

Seems that the Brother's Chap are throwing their hat into the episodic gaming ring on the Wii and with the backing of Telltale Games (Sam & Max), it seems like a perfect match to me (rhyming was unintentional)!

"Telltale has been rejecting my ideas for green text adventures for years," laments thousandaire gadabout Strong Bad, "but we finally reached a compromise with this puffy 3D point-and-click-em-up adventure. They claim all the coding was done with green text, so I guess that's pretty cool."

[Telltale Games Press Release]

Chefography

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:20:00 +0000

Combining my love of documentaries with my love of Food Network chefs...I present to you, Chefography. Gin and I watched the Julia Child episode last night and found it completely enthralling. I can't wait for the episode on Duff.

Rosabelle Claire Smith

noreply@blogger.com (Kooshmoose) — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:47:00 +0000

Rosabelle Claire, my 2nd niece, was born at 11:08 p.m., on the Twenty-Seventh Day of January, the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eight.

Height: 21.0 inches
Weight: seven pounds, 14 ounces

Can't wait to see her tonight!