BigSnowBall.com

The Radio Shark is a very nice, USB solution for record FM radio broadcasts. I pulled mine out of the storage box and tried to get it to work in Windows 7. The software installs, but it never produces sound.

After a bit of digging out the internet, I tried the recommended solution: Use a virtual machine of Windows XP.

I fired up my VMWare WinXP, installed the software and it worked right away.

Lesson learned: Having a virtual machine of Windows XP is not just a good way to learn about virtual machines. Its a mandatory tool to have in your belt.

So, I’m attempting to learn how to send encrypted email using Windows Live Mail (or Outlook). I’ve got the basics in place: self-signed root certificate with which I’ve signed my email certificate.

Problem is the encryption doesn’t work consistently. Sometimes the recipient will be able to read the encrypted message and sometimes he won’t.

I’ve discovered that if I can read the copy of my encrypted message saved in my Sent folder, then my recipient will not be able to read it. And if I cannot read my Sent copy, then my recipient will.

What does this mean?

http://blog.didierstevens.com/2008/12/30/howto-make-your-own-cert-with-o…

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754841.aspx

I have a web application built with jQuery Mobile that has an options page. The data is loaded for the options page in the pageshow event.

Ex.

  $(document).delegate("#options", "pageshow", function(event, ui) {
      $.restRequest({
        url : 'services/options/view',
        data : $.getOptionsForAjax("")
      }).done(function(response, textStatus, jqXHR, success) {
        if (success) {
 
          $("#motd").val(response.data.motd);
          $("#dueDate").val(response.data.dueDate);
 
        }
      });
  });

Last I checked there is still no bulk upload method for a Drupal 7 image gallery. I had used Node Gallery for Drupal 6 very happily until it broke, afer which I decided I wouldn’t use a non-core gallery solution ever again.

Drupal 7 Image Gallery

My “core” gallery solution in Drupal 7 is to create a content type called ‘gallery’ and add an Image file to it which accepts unlimited values. Very quick and straightforward. I do spend a rather large amount of time tweaking where the image files are actually stored, though, so I can recover later on if I have an issue. I want all the images for a single gallery to be in a separate folder so that, if I had to, I could recreate using the file system.

Using VMWare Player 4, getting the VMnet0 is down error.

I don’t have a VMNet0 network device, but that’s normal as I understand it. The LAN network device is the VMNet0 device. Does the fact that VMNet1 isn’t using the VMWare Bridge Protocol have anything to do with it?

Nope.

Drupal 7

Edit drupal7_theme_methods.php. Make your preprocess_page function look like:

function MyArtisteerTheme_preprocess_page(&$vars) {
  $vars['tabs'] = menu_primary_local_tasks();
  $vars['tabs2'] = menu_secondary_local_tasks();
 
// <meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1" />
 
  $vp = array(
    '#type' => 'html_tag',
    '#tag' => 'meta',
    '#attributes' => array(
      'name' =>  'viewport',
      'content' =>  'initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1'
    )
  );
  drupal_add_html_head($vp, 'viewport');
}

This java method cleans up common charset conversion issues. As I understand the issue, if you have utf-8 sequences and render them improperly as iso-8895-1, you’ll see these characters: Â  and ’. The utf-8 came from cut and paste from MS Word, in my case, so perhaps the form post wasn’t setting the charset properly? Unfortunately, IE renders these sequences properly even though the page’s charset is iso-8895-1, so the web site developers aren’t aware of the problem. I come in as a third-party consumer of the web site, so I have to live with their sins.

If you spend you day sitting behind a computer, let me recommend the best product I found in 2011 to improve the computing experience:

3PlaneSoft Animated Wallpapers

This is how Windows Vista and 7 was supposed to be.

Using SQLDeveloper with MySQL databases, you may see “Query execution was interrupted” errors.

To use SQLDeveloper to talk to MySQL databases, you need to use a specific version of the MySQL java driver. This is due to a bug in the driver. It is not an issue with SQLDeveloper.

Download mysql-connector-java-5.1.18.zip (or tar.gz) from MySQL and extract the *-bin.jar file from the root of the archive (or use this local link).

Put the *-bin-jar file wherever you like.