Yahoo! Sirius Tuner Widget Skin Modification
Probably my favorite Yahoo! Widget is the SIRIUS Satellite Tuner by Tanner Jepsen. He does a really good job keeping it up-to-date and fixing problems that crop up when Sirius changes their online streaming code—which seems to be too often.
Using this widget, I don't need to worry about loading up Sirius' online streaming site and using their clunky interface. The widget behaves just like the actual radio units. Since it's right on my desktop, it's always just a click away. I'm able to quickly fire up Sirius radio in the morning when I start working.
One of the many features it offers is custom skinning. My favorite skin is the Sirius Black skin:
The problem with this skin is that the target area for each "button" was limited to just the visual blue element. This is because the skin only uses the non-transparent portion of the skin images to calculate the clickable areas. This makes clicking some of the buttons like the "1" channel or the "-" (decrease volume) button very difficult to click.
To fix the problem I modded the skin and added a colored background to each button image to increase the target click space. Feel free to download my modification of the Sirius Black skin.
Running IIS and Apache on the same Windows 2003 server
Today I was working on server and need to run Apache v2.2 and IIS6 on the same Windows 2003 server. Whenever I would try to start the Apache service with any Virtual Host and listener configured to port 80, it would give me an error like the following in the Windows Event Viewer:
The Apache service named reported the following error:
>>> (OS 10013)An attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden by its access permissions. : make_sock: could not bind to address 127.0.0.1:80 .
It was then followed up with another error message:
Oh no! Outlook crashing on ntdll.dll! Whew, problem fixed!
So I woke up this morning and Outlook had crashed on me. Every time I'd try to restart Outlook, I'd get the same crash error—even rebooting didn't help. The error was in the ntdll.dll.
I figured maybe there as something in my POP3 account that Outlook was having problems reading, so I snagged a tool to allow me to read the headers and delete messages. In my POP3 account were some messages with some Shift-J encoding—so I thought for sure that was the cause of the crash. However, even after deleting those messages I was still getting crashes.
After over an hour of troubleshooting, I was getting pretty frustrated. I figured at this point it was either some Windows Update that installed itself or a add-on causing the issue.
Mobile Live Search v2 Released
The Live Search Team just released released Mobile Search v2. Windows Mobile Live Search is one of the few programs I frequently use on my Windows Mobile 5 phone. I'd recommend this as one of the first applications you install when you get a new Windows Mobile phone.
Here's a list of some of the new and improved features as defined by the Live Search Team:
- Movie Showtimes: Want to see a movie but don’t know what’s playing? Get Movie Showtimes near you and be on your way!
- More Local Data with Reviews: Want to go out for dinner but not sure which restaurant to pick? Let your fellow restaurant goers help you out — make a decision based on user ratings.
- Maps: View Mobile Virtual Earth maps wherever you are. For improved performance, pop in your storage card to enable the large cache option. Street maps, Aerial and Hybrid are supported.
- Directions: Lost? Get found with better support for GPS integration and improved turn-by-turn navigation. We’ll even prompt you to auto-reroute if you get lost!
Apple releases Safari for Windows v3 Beta 3 Today...
Apple has released a beta version of Safari 3 today. The biggest news is that it includes a Windows version of Safari. Hopefully they're aren't substancial differences between the Mac & Windows versions. I'll be glad to finally be able to test sites in Safari, without having to get to a Mac.
Go get Safari v3 for Windows (Beta) now.
Pittsburgh Steelers WM5 Theme
I just posted this in my last blog entry, but I thought I'd it deserved a separate post.
I finally decided to share my Windows Mobile v5 Pittsburgh Steelers Theme. Here's what the theme looks like:
Pittsburgh Steelers WM5 Theme
Maybe I do like my Windows Mobile 5 Phone...
I have to admit, a few times over the past two months or so, I've been tempted to throw my Windows Mobile phone out the car window. It was locking up on my with increasing frequency. I was to the point where I had to soft reset at least once a day, and I was lucky to make it through the day w/out it locking up on me. The worst part about it locking up, is you have no idea the phone is dead until you go to use it. I was also lucky to get through the day without the battery draining on me. It really was all very frustrating.
I finally decided I'd try to do a hard reset on my phone to see if that would improve things. I figured if it still acted the same way, it had to be a hardware problem. I knew I had installed and removed a lot of software after getting my phone—while in the pursuit of getting the phone to work the way I needed it to. Having read various Windows Mobile forums, I also learned that I had done several things that could cause lockups. So I was really hoping the hard reset would fix things.
So, almost 2 weeks ago, I spent the day doing a hard reset and then getting my phone back to working order. I am happy to say that my phone is working better than ever.
USB Cable Slowing Down My PC...
Ok, this might be the weirdest PC performance issue I've ever seen. Starting sometime yesterday, my laptop starting running extremely slowly. Since it was nearly the end of the day, I just assumed some application (figured it was IE7) had just leaked some memory, and since I was shutting it off soon, didn't give it much thought.
However, this morning I was having the same issue. So I opened up Process Explorer to try and seeing what was eating all the CPU cycles. The only thing eating CPU was the Interrupts and DPCs. This really had me scratching my head. What the heck would be causing my PC to slow down so much?
A quick search on 'Net lead me to a forum post that indicated USB issues could cause DPC CPU spikes. So, I look over at my laptop and notice I still have a USB cable plugged in to my laptop, that is not plugged into anything.
Windows Live Search for Windows Mobile is way cool!
Work recently purchased me a Verizon XV6700 Pocket PC (running Windows Mobile 5) so that I could better keep in touch w/our server farms. It's been an interesting 2 weeks playing w/the phone. I'm still learning the ins and outs of it using a PDA phone. It's definitely powerful, but it lacks a lot of "normal" cell phone functionality out-of-the-box. I'm planning on writing a full review later.
Anyway, Microsoft has released a version of Windows Live Search for the PPC. It's pretty darn slick. It's a shame you can't use aGPS with the mapping functionality, but this program runs very well on WM5. I'd definitely recommend checking it out.
I've heard the J2ME version doesn't work as well as Goolge Maps for J2ME, but the version designed especially for Windows Mobile runs exceptionally well (at least so far, I can't say there aren't any slow memory leaks w/my limit usage.)
17-Year-Old High School Student Creates Nuclear Fusion...
I found this pretty remarkable. A 17-year high school student, Thiago Olson, from Michigan has created nuclear fusion in his parent's basement—using a machine he built with some help from his father. He apparently is the 18th amateur in the world to actual generate nuclear fusion.
Pretty damn impressive. I was too busy fiddling around with my Amiga 1000 at 17 to actually do anything truly remarkable. :)
Mozilla Firefox v2.0 Released
In response to Microsoft releasing Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla has released Firefox v2.0. You can download the English version of FF2 for Windows at http://www.mozilla.com/products/download.html?product=firefox-2.0&os=win&lang=en-US.
I haven't installed this yet. I may actually do a completely clean/fresh install of FF2 (just because I haven't done a clean install in a long time of Firefox) and then just migrate my settings over.
My Impression of IE7
Ok, so everyone is blogging about IE7—and probably rightfully so. It's been 4 years since a major release of Internet Explorer. I was a huge fan of Internet Explorer from 1998-2003. While IE4 went against the W3 spec in a lot of ways, it was a far better environment for building interactive web applications than any release of Netscape version 4. The only thing I thought Netscape managed to do better back then was w/their JavaScript debugging tools—which were immensly more useful.
However, back in 2003 I started testing early betas of Firefox. While I had tested the Mozilla browser and even Netscape v6, I really wasn't in love w/the Gecko engine (which is what all those browsers are based on.) Despite all the promise I kept reading about, I still found it slower and less responsive than IE. Firefox changed that though. The one of the original goals of Firefox was to cut out all the bloat that Netscape had been building into their browser (e-mail clients, HTML editors, etc.) and you definitely noticed the difference. Switching to Firefox as my main browser came unexpectantly to me—happening almost over night. I've really been using it as my main browsers since the v0.7x releases. It still shocks me how quickly I switched to Firefox, since I was such a huge proponent of Internet Explorer.
So, I've really been looking forward to seeing Internet Explorer v7 in a final state—just to see if they can make it worth it to switch back. Unfortunately, I've been really unhappy w/the new release. I really find the new UI unintuitive. Maybe this will change over time, but I think people used to using IE6 will be lost. Novice computer users don't adjust well to change. They're used to doing things in a certain fashion and radical change is hard for them to adjust to. I'm really surprised Microsoft didn't include an IE6 skin that could at least be selected for people who want the old look.
Free Windows MD5 Checksum Application
I downloaded the ColdFusion v7.0.2 Updater this morning. Since I've had some problems recently with downloading CF updates from Adobe.com, I decided I'd verify the MD5 checksum. This made me realize I didn't have a good Windows application for verify the MD5 checksum. After searching Google for a few minutes, I came across a very small (97k) application called MD Checker v2.20.
Using the program is very straightforward—just unzip to a directory and run the md5.exe executable. No installation required. To compare a checksum against a file's checksum, select the "Verify an MD5 checksum" (which is the default option.) Next, copy the MD5 checksum into your clipboard and click the "Paste" button—this will put the MD5 checksum value to verify against in an uneditable control. To verify the checksum of a file, click the "Browse" button and find the file on your hard drive and click the "Open" button. The application will then report the checksum found in either a green (if the values match) or red (if the values differ) box.
This program is very straightforward and best of all, it's free.
Sony Should Embrace Homebrew Flash-based Applications
I own a Sony Playstation Portable (PSP). It's a great handheld gaming device—blows away everything else I've seen. However, the one big battle that PSP owners have had w/Sony is wanting to run "homebrew" applications (these are unsigned applications written by users for the PSP and not officially released software.) The original firmware 1.2 had some holes in it that allowed you to pretty easily bypass the mechanisms Sony built-in to allow only signed content to play.
Every since hackers figured out a way to hack the PSP's firmware, it's been a battle between Sony and the hackers. Sony releases a new firmware that fixes the holes and hackers try to figure out another way to bypass the Sony security mechanism to only allow signed content to play.
Each time Sony releases a new firmware, they've generally added some new functionality to the unit. The original PSP firmware didn't include a browser—which was added in the 2.0 release (I believe.) Anyway, Sony tries to entice users to upgrade by offering new features and even having newer games force a user to upgrade. Some hackers are living on old firmware just so they can continue to run their "homebrew" applications.
British used "rock" to spy on Russia...
CNN's running a story about the British used "rock" to spy on Russia. Pretty interesting story and something I've never really given much thought to. It would be really easy to hide something in a rock that used bluetooth (or some other short range transmitter) to exchange data. I would have thought they'd have placed the rock next to a bench or something though.