Harald Kraft

Disable compressed folders in Windows Vista and Windows 7

Oct 192009

When you’re using an “external” tool for handling ZIP archive file (and the likes), it can be really annoying when you double-click on such a file in Windows Explorer (or other file browsers) and Windows treats the file as a compressed folder and doesn’t start the external application even though file associations are correctly set.

Some tuning tools like XP-Antispy are able to disable the functionality of compressed folders, however it didn’t work for me on Vista the last time I tried.
After a while of research I found the solution how to edit the registry, so that double-clicking associated files will truly be opened with the external application:

The Big Bang Theory – Intro (frame by frame)

Life and People, Science 86 Responses »

Sep 212009

After a few weeks (actually, a few months) of procrastination and research, I finally finished my “project” to split up the intro of the TV-series The Big Bang Theory frame by frame and find out what each snapshot meant.
I organized all 109 snapshots in a list with a short label of what the snapshot shows. Maybe community and fans will help to complete the work and compose nice descriptions.

You can find the list on a separate website here: http://www.haraldkraft.de/thebigbangtheory/

Enjoy 🙂

UPDATE (09/29/09): As I am in Toronto atm without proper internet access, I will update all your comments and emails within the next two weeks.

UPDATE2 (09/29/09): To avoid further comments on the same issues, I updated the page (spending the last 2 hours in an Apple store 😉 ).

WebCalendar is not working with Lightning or Sunbird

Technical 3 Responses »

Sep 182009

After using WebCalendar for quite I while, I finally got to the bottom of the problem, why it wasn’t working as a remote calendar in Mozilla Sunbird or in the Thunderbird extension Lightning.

Following the official description how to subscribe to a remote calendar did add the calendar successfully, but showed a yellow warning sign with the caption

The calendar foobar is momentarily not available

Use customized shortcut keyboard setup in Opera browser

Life and People, Technical No Responses »

Sep 032009

Throughout these past weeks, I’ve installed Opera on a few new systems (with various operating systems btw) and had to make (just) a few adjustments. One of them included setting my own keyboard setup. Even though making my custom shortcut settings was easily done each time (via Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Shortcuts -> “Keyboard setup” Duplicate + Edit, see Tamil’s blog for a nice description), embarrassingly I had forgotton how to actually “enable” the modified keyboard setup.

Invalid command ‘Script’ in Apache configuration

Technical 2 Responses »

Aug 032009

While I was trying to allow some tool’s PHP file to perform the HTTP command PUT, the tool’s manual said to put the following code in the httpd.conf Apache configuration file:

<Directory /foo/bar> Script PUT /some.php </Directory>

And so I did. But when I tried to reload Apache’s configuration (/etc/init.d/apache2 reload), Apache complained with the following message:

Invalid command ‘Script’, perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration
failed!

File association for certain filenames without file extension under Windows

Technical 1 Response »

Jul 242009

Recently I was facing the issue whether it’s possible to associate files with a certain filename to be opened with a particular program in Windows operating systems. These could be files named TODO, README, INSTALL, LICENSE and the likes, as they are widely common in the unix world.

BCDboot and BCDedit

Technical 4 Responses »

Jul 082009

After the first complications with the quadruple boot, I was facing new ones when I tried to do everything again on a new hard drive.
The installation order was 1. Windows XP 2. Windows 7 (which recognized the “old” XP and integrated it in the boot loader) 3. Ubuntu 9.04 4. OpenSolaris 2009.06
(for detailed partition info see quadruple-boot blog entry).

The boot process would then be like this:

load OpenSolaris GRUB from third primary

boot OpenSolaris from third primary
load Microsoft bootloader from first primary
load Microsoft bootloader from second primary

boot Windows 7 from C: (as first primary)
boot Windows XP from E: (as second primary)

boot Ubuntu (several entries for different kernels) from logical

Twitter PHP script

Life and People, Technical 7 Responses »

Jun 292009

I wrote this PHP script in order to include the latest tweets from my Twitter on my website. It retrieves the RSS feed, parses it and pastes a number of tweets (along with timestamp and link) to HTML.

[[ OLD:
Before I can / want to release it under some free software license, I would appreciate it if some of you PHP nerds could review the code. I am mainly concerned about security issues rather than formatting and coding style. Since I am no pro in PHP coding, I will probably have done some things quite clumsily.

So please point out security problems as well as other major issues. (For example, if anybody knows how to stop parsing after max items were dealt which, please let me know 🙂 ).
]]

[UPDATE 07/08/2009]
(HTTP) Links are now made clickable.
[/UPDATE]

[UPDATE 15/12/2009]
The script was released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License today.
Download the PHP code at http://blog.haraldkraft.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/parsetwitter.php_.txt and feel free to reuse and tweak my script (along with mentioning my name as suggested in the license information in the code).
[/UPDATE]

Email me at blog {at} haraldkraft(.)de (or comment)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Quadruple boot

Technical 1 Response »

Jun 272009

Setting up my new computer (AMD Phenom II X4 810 (Deneb), 4×2.6GHz, 8192MB RAM, 500GB WesternDigital, GeForce 9400GT, 1GBit+54MBit) was a bitch. Especially since I wanted a very specific OS setup.

The primary targets were Windows XP (SP3) and Ubuntu (9.04) for coding purposes, secondly Windows 7 RC for testing purposes and OpenSolaris for experience.
I did a lot of installing and reinstalling this past week, until I finally managed to get all four systems working and accessible.

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