What if I told you that to craft your own guitar, all you need is a shovel, a drill, a few bits of guitar hardware, and some patience!? I wasn’t able to find out the original crafter’s name because the source is in Russian, but the series of pictures and accompanying Youtube video were straightforward enough. Here’s the final result:
The article where I found this only had a series of pictures and I’m by no means a skilled guitar crafter, so I’ve added descriptions where I could.
Sometimes I need to migrate a large amount of shared files on a network from one drive or system to another for better organization, more space, security concerns, or whatever the reason might be. However, a migration like this can interrupt network users who need access to those files. In this post I’ll show you a better method for file migration, which is now a staple in my IT arsenal, as it has proven useful many times.
Contrary to what RIM and other people might have you believe, it is very possible to install and run Blackberry Enterprise Server (including BES Express) on a Windows XP Professional computer. To further complicate the problem, these same folks will also tell you that there is no way to install the Exchange System Manager using the Small Business Server 2003 CD’s.
Of course, all of this is simply not true, and the setup is smooth as long as you know what to do. RIM won’t provide technical support for this configuration, but we don’t really care, now do we?
At the company where I work, we use a software program called MaxView to perform bid take-offs for large construction projects. We have configured several custom symbols in MaxView which we use to count items in large mechanical prints, and it takes about an hour to configure these symbols. Rather than configure these symbols individually for each new user, or an existing user who lost his settings, we needed a simple way to export the settings from one computer/user to another.
There’s a problem with Bank of the West’s EDS Pro software: it doesn’t assign the necessary permissions to the registry keys it creates for the OCR plug-in component during installation, effectively locking out any user from running the software except for the user who originally installed the software.
Anyone who wants to build a professional looking add-in for Microsoft Outlook knows that it’s important to make their add-in appear flush/stock/standard/factory, which means implementing the add-in functionality directly into the native Outlook interface via the toolbar/ribbon/menu/property pages/etc. An important part of this is understanding how to use IPictureDisp, because this is the only image type that Outlook will allow you to use for CommandBar controls.
This tutorial is part of a series: Part 1 | Part 2
In Part 1 of this tutorial series, I presented a way to use the .NET TreeView control as a file browser similar to Windows Explorer in functionality. As we navigate through this TreeView, the BeforeExpand event is handled so that each node is dynamically populated as soon as it gets expanded.
The second part of this tutorial focuses on displaying the native system icons for each file and folder in the TreeView.
Broken Website = Unhappy Client
I read an interesting article today which had some useful feedback on when and why WordPress users were updating to the latest major version, WordPress 3.0. Based on the comments in the article, I noticed a few trends as well as some good insight.
If you have a shared web hosting plan like I do with 1&1 Webhosting, you most likely do not have direct access to the computer which your website is hosted on to install and configure the mod_rewrite plugin for Linux/Apache or the ISAPI_Rewrite plugin for Windows/IIS, either one of which is required to get Permalinks working in WordPress.
However, there is another way to this by editing the .htaccess file in your root WordPress directory.
Many of the Move Comments plugins for WordPress do not seem to work properly in WordPress 3.0, so I needed a way to move comments around from one post/page to another, as well as retain any threaded/nested comments. One could always move comments by modifying the database directly with phpMyAdmin or something similar, and this is what I had to resort to. Modifying your WordPress database directly isn’t something you want to do every day, but sometimes it is completely unavoidable. It took me all of 5 minutes to figure this out, so it shouldn’t be too difficult for you either.
I touched on this subject before in my previous article titled WordPress Tip: the_category Without Links, which focuses on the WordPress get_category function, but I decided to write this article so I can focus more on the general implementation of PHP functions with WordPress, and so that people will have an easier time locating these tips via a web search.
Some WordPress plugins require you to add shortcodes to your pages/posts to utilize the plugin, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you were already using shortcodes. Whether or not you’ve had any experience using WordPress shortcodes, this tutorial has what you need to get started.
You see, the_category template tag outputs the name of every category a post belongs to, but the category names are linked to respective category pages that I do not want my visitors accessing. Here on GlassOcean.net I try to obscure the category pages that WordPress generates because they are not as customizable as I would like. Therefore, I needed a way to list the categories that a post belongs to without the links.
A Google search for “wordpress the_category without links” returned an article by Robert Mirabito titled How to remove link from the_category in WordPress, which led me to the understanding that I would need to use the get_the_category template tag instead of the the_category template tag. However, Robert’s example inserts a space character as the delimiter, and changing this delimiter to something else results in the delimiter appearing after the very last category. So if you used a comma character as the delimiter, you would end up with something like “Posted in Blog, Services,” which looks bad. This led to some more searching.
In my previous article From WordPress to Joomla and Back Again, I wrote about how I made the switch back to WordPress after giving Joomla a long trial run.
My migration plan back to WordPress was fairly simple: I had Joomla installed in my website’s root directory (glassocean.net) and I installed WordPress in a subdirectory (glassocean.net/wordpress) where I could begin setting up, customizing the theme, and migrating articles from Joomla.
While the Moving WordPress instructions in the WordPress documentation were easy enough to follow, it wasn’t until I noticed that the SexyBookmarks plugin wasn’t rendering properly in my articles that I must have done something wrong. I tried reinstalling the plugin, but it kept hanging up during the “Unpacking contents of package” phase.
Windows Explorer's familiar tree navigation.
This tutorial is part of a series: Part 1 | Part 2
As a developer I am often faced with the task of creating a tree-style file browser for navigating the file system similar to Windows Explorer. VB6 provides the DirList and FileList controls, but VB.NET does not provide a control with similar functionality, let alone a full fledged file browser control. It does however include a very nice TreeView control, and with a bit of code you can leverage this powerful control to navigate your file system similar to Windows Explorer.
The idea is pretty simple:
In the first part of this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a simple re-usable File Browser Tree Component by letting the TreeView control do most of the work. In the second part of this tutorial, I’ll show you how to add several features (icons, context menus, drag/drop, etc.) that will spice up your TreeView File Browser Component and bring it more up to par with Windows Explorer.
At the company where I work, we run a client portal web app that gives our clients access to their files through a password protected website that dynamically generates content individually for each client. We wanted to provide a secondary method for our clients to access their files should anything happen, so we opted for creating an FTP site in IIS with the option Isolate users using Active Directory, since our Win2K3 servers support it out of the box. Our idea was to have the client portal web app add the user accounts and home directory properties to Active Directory automatically so we wouldn’t have to configure these things manually using scripts. To date, our solution has been working very reliably.
Setting up a user FTP should be a straightforward Windows administration task, but you might find that the Isolate users using Active Directory option doesn’t work as you would expect. While IIS allows you to select this user isolation mode during the creation of a new FTP site, it obscures some of the configuration that is essential to making everything work properly. This article focuses on those hidden essentials.
Right after you logon to your computer, have you ever just wished you could pause everything else that seems to be going on, just for 10 seconds so you could fire up your internet browser and start surfing the web before your computer chugs along for an extra 5 minutes – sometimes completely unresponsive – while it tries to load up everything else all at once?
Or maybe you just want a way to control the order and delay for your startup programs. A company by the name of r2 Studios has the solution.
Folder Options
This tutorial explains how to code a simple, reusable Shell Icon Manager component in VB.NET. Windows maintains registered file types and associated icons as seen in the Folder Options dialog box, but there is no way to access them through managed (.NET) code, so we must use Win32 API functions to access them through the Windows shell.
This shell icon manager is useful if you need to:
Glass Ocean is Perry Butler's Blog, Music Productions, Services, and Software Development.
