Don’t you hate it when windows start flashing in the background while you’re working? it could be due to popups pop-unders and the likes, but those are slowly becoming extinct. But, this type of annoying user interface behavior is still very much prevalent with messaging programs like Live/MSN, Digsby, and others.

Can we reduce the annoying blinking flashing behavior? Is there any way to take we take care of that? 

If you want this behavior, but would like to decrease the flashing count, here’s a tip from Seven Forums:

Here's How:

1) Type regedit in your start menu search bar and open up the Registry Editor.
2) Navigate to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\CONTROL PANEL\DESKTOP

3) In the right pane, right click on ForeGroundFlashCount
4) Click on Modify, and select Decimal.
5) Change the Value to a higher number to however many flashes you want.

Setting a Value of 1 will give you a single flash.

Setting a Value of 0 will give you indefinite flashes.

6) Close Regedit
7) Log off and Log on or Restart the Computer to apply the changes.

That's it...

If you’d like to disable the whole thing all together,  TuneUp Utilities 2010 has an option that helps solve the issue :

You can download a free 15 days trial and take care of the problem.

Know of any other method? let me know.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^subdirectory/(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,NC,L]

This means that all files like www.yoursite.com/subdirectory/yourfile.htm would now be redirected to their equivalent location on root like www.yoursite.com/yourfile.htm .

Just a quick note to help someone who was struggling with that issue. Hope that helps.

What is it that I’m looking for in an FTP client and why is it so hard to find? The features I need are :

• SFTP connections. (Webdav all the better)
• Multi-segment downloads/uploads to make large files transfer as fast as possible.
• Transfer auto-resume - If the connection breaks, the software shuts down, the transfer queue is automatically resumed upon a restart.
• Direct server to server transfers (FXP) – since I run a few servers on multiple locations, this makes it a breeze.
• File edit online – automatically download the file, open in an editor, and resume once file changes are saved. I do a lot of changes to files, and this feature is a must.
• File/directory comparisons – what’s missing? what’s changed? where?
• Free.

So what’s wrong with the alternatives? FileZilla doesn’t maintain the queue and resume upon client/connection restart as well as breaking some of the files, CuteFTP doesn’t have multi-segment download (not to mention it’s not free), and WinSCP is very slow at batch and large files, doesn’t maintain directory location and has a lousy bookmark feature. And these limitations are just a few examples.

Try it out, let me know what you think. If you something that’s better, I’m interested.

There are simpler solutions:

• Line Break Removal Tool is an online tool that will adjust the copy-paste for you.
• If you have Adobe Acrobat, not the reader version, then you can take advantage of the accessibility options for adding tags to make sure Adobe copies the text without the line breaks. Here’s a very clear and simple guide on how to do that.
• Another option is to save the PDF as an RTF and work with a different word processing application (like Microsoft Office Word).

Happy Copy Pasting!

When I was using Firefox, this usually took care of that in terms of Adobe Acrobat:

Firefox > Tools > Options > Applications > Adobe Acrobat Document > Save to File

But other browsers, like Chrome, don’t provide as much customization options, so that calls for an Adobe Acrobat settings :

Acrobat > Edit > Preferences > Internet > Web Browser Options > Display PDF in browser

This should take care of it in all browsers.

[Silly little post, but… family asked, so maybe others need this]

In the following example, I had the Qualtrics date/time for the date+time the participant began to take the survey as well as the time the participant finished the survey. The goal was to get the number of minutes it took the participant to finish.

To do that it’s best to use Excel’s string parsing. Take a look at the following example where C2 and D2 hold the start and finish time for the second participant. Since Qualtrics outputs date and time in the same box we’ll separate those into different boxes for date and time. E2 and F2 parse the date (C2 and D2 respectively), while G2 and H2 hold the time (same). Excel then makes it very easy to calculate the time difference between the two time boxes.

E2=VALUE(MID(C2,6,2)&"/"&MID(C2,9,2)&"/"&LEFT(C2,4))

 

G2=VALUE(MID(C2,12,2)&":"&MID(C2,15,2)&"/"&RIGHT(C2,2))

So, essentially, it’s about using the functions left(), mid(), & right() to parse the text.

To make it appear the right way, the parsed boxes should be set to the right date/time display (right-click->format). Another simple example can be found in “Convert Dates To Excel Formatted Dates”. Once done with Excel, copy paste the results into SPSS and you’re done.

(post written as a guide for a colleague who was struggling with this)

Took me a while to figure out why websites were breaking in some pages, till I was finally able to figure out that Internet Explorer has a bug where it can handle only pages with under 30 CSS files. Anything above that and the page would go dead.

Don’t believe me? check Microsoft’s “All style tags after the first 30 style tags on an HTML page are not applied in Internet Explorer”

All style tags after the first 30 style tags on an HTML page are not applied. Occasionally, you may also receive the following error message:

The page you are looking for might have been moved or had its name changed.

If you use a network monitor tool to capture network traffic, you may notice that a TCP reset occurs when Internet Explorer is receiving the page. Internet Explorer then generates another POST request if the original request was a POST request. Or, Internet Explorer may send a GET request instead.

You’d think that Microsoft would fix such a bug, but looking at the Internet Explorer versions that are affected, the list starts back at version 4.0 and goes up all the way to the most recent version as of today – Internet Explorer 8. Brilliant.

If you’re developing Drupal based websites, 30 CSS files are nothing, especially with the more advanced themes and modules. It’s enough that you include the theme, views and panels to easily top this limit.

But, there are a few things that might help.

For one, the IE Unlimited CSS module saved me with the Drupal 6 installations.

In some cases, though not all, the built-in Drupal CSS aggregation/optimization may help (if it’s aggregated already, that is).

How to enable Drupal CSS file aggregation

1. Log in as your Drupal site’s administrator.
2. Go to the Administer » Site configuration » Performance page.
3. Check the Enabled checkbox for Optimize CSS .
4. Click the Save configuration button.

Another option, if you’re not in Drupal is using a CSS optimizer solution. Here’s from Nadeau Software’s list, and although they claim it won’t speed up by much, it might save you from IE.

CSS optimizers

Hand-editing CSS to make it more optimal is tedious. Instead, use a CSS optimizer application. Here's a few of the many available:

• Blumentals Software's CSS Toolbox (freeware)
• CSS Drive's CSS Compressor (freeware)
• Michael Bianco's CSS Optimizer (freeware)
• Robson's CSS Compressor (freeware)
• Lottery Post's CSS Compressor (freeware)
• CSS Tidy (freeware)
  • CleanCSS (freeware)
  • Code Beautifier (freeware)
  • CSS Formatter and Optimiser (freeware)
  • CSS Code Formatter and Optimizer (freeware)
  • ... and many more based upon CSS Tidy

It never ceases to amaze me how a serious company as big as Microsoft, with all the resources available to it, keeps getting the whole browser thing wrong. What’s even more remarkable, is that there are those among us who still use that thing.

WordPress sometimes has the most annoying little bugs. Ones that don’t get fixed in minor version updates, ones that developers don’t seem to care about much but they could drive you crazy.

WordPress 2.9 failed cron jobs and missed schedules are one such bug. This hasn’t started in WordPress 2.9. Searching for “missed schedule” with “Wordpress” keywords, you’re bound to find endless forum threads about that.

WordPress 2.9’s minor updates (upto WordPress WPMU 2.9.1.1) didn’t seem to take care of that.

And the fix is so simple – it consists of modifying the timeout in wp-includes/cron.php.

Approximately around the line number 205 change :

wp_remote_post ($cron_url, Array (' timeout' => 0.01, ' blocking' => false)); 

To 20 seconds:

wp_remote_post ($cron_url, Array (' timeout' => 20, ' blocking' => false)); 

The simplest solution, assuming you don’t want to tweak this by hand or worry about future bugs overriding your changes is use one of the useful plugins that would check for missed scheduled posts like “Missed Schedule”.

This has been reported … again and again… take a look at the WordPress bug tracker :

cron stopped working with standard configuration

Hi Guys,

After the update to wp 2.9 (from 2.8.6 where everything worked just fine) my cron-jobs stopped working. Looking inside the cron-array with crontrol http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-crontrol/ it looks like they are not executed at all. So I end up with all cron jobs waiting for execution (which seems to consume quite a bit of time on every page call). In crontrol this behavior is shown as all cron jobs have the execution status now.

I found the work-around in Otto's reply in this post http://wordpress.org/support/topic/296236which seems to work but produces dirty rewrites in the browser's address bar...

As my server configuration didn't change at all I assume that something else changed (e.g. could the statement Increase timeout on cron-based requests when checking for upgrades mentioned in http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.9 be the reason?)

greetz, berny

More? here…

• WordPress 2.9: three bugs, and how to fix them
• 2.9 Schedule Posts "missed"
• WP-Cron not working in 2.9

Hope that helps.

To tackle that, I would suggest setting Yahoo’s crawl rate to something very slow and blocking CUIL and Baidu altogether (unless you have a Chinese site).

To set a lower crawl rate for Yahoo’s slurp crawler and block their useless adcrawler, add this to your ROBOTS.TXT file :

User-agent: Slurp
    Crawl-delay: 300 

User-agent: Yahoo!-AdCrawler
    Disallow: / 

Please note that this sets the crawl rate to one page every 300 seconds. That’s very very slow and will impact how your new pages appear on Yahoo. But, since Yahoo doesn’t bring in that much traffic, I’d say that does matter. Still, if you’re concerned about it, set it to something lower, perhaps between 20-50

To block CUIL altogether add this :

User-agent: twiceler
    Disallow: /

Baidu ignores robots.txt and so you have the following options (source):

Block the Baidu IP range (list)

if you have mod_write on your apache enabled, add this to your .HTACCESS :

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^baiduspider [NC] RewriteRule .* - [F]

or this to you httpd.conf

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Baidu" bad_bot
    <Directory /> 

Order Allow,Deny 

Allow from all 

Deny from env=bad_bot 

</Directory>

Hope that helps, let me know if you ran into this problem and if you have any others way you tackle that.