The Disk Cleanup utility that comes as a part of Windows has an annoying feature. As a part of its scan procedure, it tries to figure out how much space you’d save by “compressing old files.” This step takes a ridiculously long time to complete, and is highly annoying. Thankfully, disabling this feature is simple, though it involves editing your Windows registry. As always, be very careful during the editing process.

To disable the “Compress Old Files” operation, navigate to this registry key, and delete it:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Compress old files

Once you’ve deleted the above key, start up the Disk Cleanup utility and marvel at how much faster it loads!

My dad has just posted some details on how he’s reducing the humidity under his house. It’s a pretty cool solution that utilizes ‘SmartVents’ (essentially a vent with some muffin fans and the appropriate sensors). Head on over to the article to get the full details.

About this time last year, I noted that our build machines at work were way out of sync in their respective local times. As a result, we were seeing a bunch of “clock skew” warnings when building our code. To fix the problem, I figured out how to use NTP on a private network. Imagine my surprise when, while performing a build today, I noticed more clock skew warnings! I checked our setup, and NTP was still functioning as expected. The problem, it turns out, was that some of our build machines had not yet changed over to Daylight Savings Time (DST), something NTP doesn’t assist with. Only the oldest machines were affected, which wasn’t surprising, seeing as Congress feels the need to change the DST rules every few years.

Thankfully, updating time zone information is easy to do. Here’s how:

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In my previous article on Unicode, I discussed a little bit of background on Unicode, how to prep PHP to serve UTF-8 encoded content, and how to handle displaying Unicode characters. There’s still a bit more we need to talk about, however, before we can truly claim internationalization support.

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I ran across another weird and subtle bug in Visual Studio 2005. If you’ve got a solution with many project in it, you can set one of those projects to be the default project at startup (i.e. when you open the solution file). But this setting apparently resides in the user options file (.suo), which is something we don’t keep in our code repository (since it differs for every user). So how can you set a default startup project that affects anyone working with your code? Simple: hack the solution file.

Thankfully, the solution file is just plain text. Apparently, if there’s no user options file for a given solution, Visual Studio 2005 simply selects the first project it comes across in the solution file. Here’s a quick example of what a solution file looks like (wrapped lines marked with »):

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Dustin and his wife recently uncovered an interesting limitation of my Monkey Album software: characters outside of the ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) character set don’t render properly. This comes as no surprise, seeing as I didn’t design for Unicode. Being a rather egregious display error, I decided to set out and fix the problem. In the process, I learned quite a lot about Unicode, and how it affects web applications. This post will be the first of two detailing how to add Unicode support to a web application. I will only be exposing a tip of the Unicode iceberg in these posts. The ideas and practices behind Unicode support can (and do) fill the pages of many books. That said, let’s jump in.

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At work, I’m in charge of 20 individual build systems for one of our larger software project (18 Linux systems and 2 Windows systems). Every machine is connected to a private network that cannot see the outside world. As you might expect, the occasional “clock skew” warning would be thrown by gcc, since some of the source files had date stamps in the future. To fix this, I set out to learn about configuring NTP on a private network. As is typical of the Linux world, there was little useful documentation to be found. After gleaning little bits of information from a number of sources, I figured out how to do it, and I’m writing it down for everybody’s benefit.

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Google recently enabled “Search Suggest” at their official home page. I find this feature annoying, and I wanted a way to disable it. Thankfully, the solution was very simple:

1. Visit the Search Preferences page
2. Set the Query Suggestions option to “Do not provide query suggestions in the search box”
3. Save your preferences

I wish Google had made disabling this a little clearer, rather than quietly adding the preference to the preferences page.

By default, Windows Explorer opens up in the “My Documents” folder, which is far from useful (assuming you don’t store all your documents there). Just today, I figured out how to get Windows Explorer to open in a folder that you specify. Here’s how to do it:

1. Right click the Windows Explorer shortcut and select Properties.
2. Make sure you are on the “Shortcut” tab.
3. Clear the Start in: field. Contrary to what you might think, Windows Explorer seems to ignore whatever you type here (which seems stupid to me).
4. Change the Target: field to the following:
   %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /n,/e,{Desired_Path}. For example: %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /n,/e,C:\. Note that the commas are required!
5. Accept your changes.

Now, each time you open Windows Explorer, it will point to your desired location. This is an incredibly useful tip that will now save me two clicks for every explorer window that I open!

A little over a year ago, I inherited a productivity tool at work that allows users to enter weekly status reports for various products in our division. The tool is web-based and is written entirely in Perl. One of the mangers who uses this tool recently suggested a new feature, and I decided to implement it using cookies. Having never implemented cookies from a programming perspective, I was new to the subject and had to do some research on how to do it in Perl. It turns out to be quite easy, so I figured I would share my newfound knowledge:

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