Category Archives: Technology
mssign32.dll
With CAPICOM deprecated, MSDN suggests using the mssign32.dll functions. There are two fundamental problems with this: No example code whatsoever is provided. No header file is provided. Well, at least I can do something about #2. Here is a minimal … Continue reading
Posted in Authenticode, Cryptography, Technology
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Make MSDN Website Load Faster
The MSDN website sucks. It loads extremely slowly, and is visually cluttered. It turns out that MSDN has a low-bandwidth (“loband”) option. This will cause MSDN to render using much simpler HTML, which loads much more quickly and has a … Continue reading
Craigslist Blocks Yahoo Pipes
Craigslist is one of the greatest sites in the world, and the entire Bay Area seems to revolve around it. Sadly, Craigslist’s search facility is extremely bad, seemingly only capable of searching within a price range and neighborhood. Craigslist supplies … Continue reading
Posted in Internet, Technology
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Weirdness With Echo and Parentheses Within Conditional Statements
The if command in Windows batch files has some strange implications. One problem is that parentheses take on special meaning. I first ran into this problem because my batch file would terminate shortly after showing, “folder unexpected at this time“. … Continue reading
Posted in Technology
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Organizing Files by Date Using Find
I had taken pictures using a friend’s SD card. He copied all the files to my flash drive, but this left me without a nice, tidy directory structure. Normally, I organize my photos like: 2008 2008_06_27 2008_06_28 2008_06_29 First off, … Continue reading
Posted in Scripting, Technology
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Extracting a Version Number From a Text File Using Batch Files and Cygwin
We have a version.h file. It contains lines such as: #define VERSION_MAJOR 3 #define VERSION_MINOR 1 By piping this through grep, I can get the line I’m looking for: c:\>grep “VERSION_MAJOR” version.h #define VERSION_MAJOR 3 But what I really want … Continue reading
Posted in Scripting, Technology
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Installing Graphviz Dot Without Root Access
I want to install Graphviz on a machine in order to get access to the dot diagram generator. However, I don’t have root access on this box, so I want to install it in my home directory, under ~/bin/graphviz. To … Continue reading
Posted in Technology
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Linking to XML Stylesheet Stored on Local Server in Firefox
Problem I created an XML stylesheet which I wanted to place on a local Samba share. In the XML file to be transformed, I placed a file:// URI in the xml-stylesheet tag, but it wouldn’t work in Firefox. Internet Explorer … Continue reading
Posted in Technology
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Mouse Scroll Wheel in Ubuntu in VMware
I’m running VMware Workstation 6.5 under Windows Vista. I have Ubuntu 8.04 installed. I found a tip on how to enable the mouse scroll wheel, but I found that it switched my mouse over to Ubuntu control. That is to … Continue reading
Posted in Technology
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CoCreateInstance Fails With “Class Not Registered”
Recently, I had a problem unique to my test machine. Attempting to call CoCreateInstance on a COM class provided by one of our DLLs resulted in HRESULT 0x80040154, which corresponds to “Class not registered”. This was a mystery since regsvr32 … Continue reading
Posted in COM, Technology, Win32, Windows
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