Archive for the 'How To' Category

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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Here’s a super great tip I learned from an article at Lifehacker.

My laptop here at work, a Lenovo ThinkPad, has a tremendously loud beep (through headphones, it will nearly blow your ears out). This beep occurs every so often when I’m typing faster than the computer thinks I should, and I end up pressing several keys on the keyboard at once. Thankfully, there’s now a way to disable this annoying sound!

To temporarily disable the beep: net stop beep
To permanently disable the beep: sc config beep start= disabled

In the latter command, note the space between the equals and the word ‘disabled.’ I’m not sure if that’s necessary or not, but including it worked for me. The space is indeed required (thanks Dustin). I had no idea that a Windows service was responsible for this annoyance!

I recently ran into a problem on my system where all the HTML document icons had been reset to the generic default icon:

Apparently, the Minefield build of Firefox had at some point corrupted this icon. I found that I was unable to change or reset the icon through the Folder Options » File Types dialog in Windows Explorer. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t restore the icon, and it drove me nuts. Then I figured out what to do, thanks to this forum post at MozillaZine:

1. Open RegEdit.
2. Browse to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\FirefoxHTML registry branch.
3. Delete the ShellEx\IconHandler registry key entry.
4. Close RegEdit.
5. In Windows Explorer, browse to the Documents and Settings\{username}\Local Settings\Application Data folder.
6. Delete the iconcache.db file. It’s hidden, so you may need to tweak your Windows Explorer settings to see it.
7. Reboot.

Problem solved!

I bought a Linksys WRT54GL today, to replace our aging DLink DI-624 (it had been acting pretty flaky as of late). The Linksys router supports open-source firmware, and our first course of action was to flash the highly recommended DD-WRT distribution. I have to say that I am very impressed with this firmware. There are lots of options available and it reports lots of interesting information.

Setting up the router wasn’t difficult, but my dad and I ran into problems getting our IBM laptops connected wirelessly. All of our other machines were able to connect without any problems, so it was clearly a problem with either the ThinkVantage Access Connections application or the IBM wireless adapter. We spent quite a while trying to get things working, and finally found the issue. We had originally set the Wireless Network Mode option in the router basic setup to “G-Only” mode since we intended to use 802.11g only around our house. But for whatever reason, the IBM laptops didn’t like that. Switching the option back to “Mixed Mode” cleared up the problem immediately, much to our delight. Hopefully this little tidbit will help out someone else facing the same problem.