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One of the newer updates to Pidgin made it a little harder to use GTK+ themes in the application (I like mine to look like the window below). You can follow the instructions from this link to get Pidgin looking decent:

http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using%20Pidgin#win32_gtk_theme

Once you’ve modified your Pidgin install, you will want to place your themes into <Pidgin Installation Directory>\Gtk\share\themes. My favorite Pidgin/GTK theme is ClearLooks DarkLime. It’s awesome for both Pidgin and Ubuntu.

Posted in Windows | No Comments »

Lately I’ve been really bothered by a weird bug where Chrome looses focus after scrolling via the mouse scroll wheel. The problem is with KatMouse, a simple program that makes the scroll wheel applicable to windows that are not focused, similar to how it works in Linux. Fortunately, the fix for this strange behavior is really easy and simple.

1. Open the KatMouse settings and navigate to the Classes tab.
2. Click the target window icon and drag it over an open Chrome window. Make sure you release the mouse when the cursor is over the main Chrome window (not over the tabs, for example).
3. The Chrome window class should now appear in the KatMouse classes grid as shown below. Click Apply or OK and you should be golden.

I don’t know why this works, but I’m glad that it does. KatMouse is an awesome little tool that fixes a huge Windows annoyance.

Posted in Windows | 1 Comment »

I’ve been messing around with some Firefox Stylish user styles for a while now and today I finally got them all onto userstyles.org. Check them out here:

http://userstyles.org/users/52050

Posted in Internet | 2 Comments »

My newest board game addiction is Puerto Rico, a great strategic game that is similar to Settlers of Catan. Puerto Rico hits a great balance of deep strategy, good interaction, and interesting gameplay. There’s nothing about it that seems out-of-place or awkward. The only thing it lacks is the inability to play with only two players. After searching around on the Internet, I found an official two player variant and then an adaption of that variant that addresses some of its shortcomings. Mindy and I played it last night and we think it is perfect. I created a Word document with the rule adaptions for two players. Enjoy!

Posted in Games | No Comments »

I’m a huge fan of AutoHotKey. AutoHotKey has the power to make your keyboard do amazing things. I use it on a daily basis to open programs and folders, manage windows, and edit text amongst many, many other things. I use it so extensively that I find it frustrating to use a computer without it. AutoHotKey has the power to transform you into a computer ninja. I highly recommend its use.

Recently I released a part of my AutoHotKey script to the Internets and called it Kommand. Kommand remaps your keyboard and enables VIM-like key bindings that are useful for scooting around a document and making changes. I’ve found it very useful for coding. The nice thing is that since it is an AutoHotKey script, it is application independent and works wherever text input is needed. In addition to text editing, Kommand provides many keyboard shortcuts that help in window management. You can close, restore, maximize, minimize, and move windows around the screen really easily and quickly.

Kommand is very early software and I am only putting it out there to see if anyone is interested. More information about it can be found in the AutoHotKey forums here:

http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=281279

Kommand can be downloaded from the following link. The source AutoHotKey script is included along with a few files and executables that are useful for integrating it with Windows. If you use it, please let me know what you think!

http://www.kylirhorton.com/kommand.zip

Posted in Programming | 15 Comments »

If you are running a beta or release candidate of Windows 7 or if you’ve turned test signing on (like me) and you would like to remove the annoying watermark from the corner of your desktop, downloaded and run the following small executable. I’ve used it without any problems on Windows 7 64-bit RC (Build 7100) and the retail version of Windows 7 64-bit (Build 7600). It works like a charm and my machines no longer have the ugly “Evaluation Copy” or “Testing Mode” text sitting in the bottom corner of my desktop.

http://www.askvg.com/how-to-remove-windows-7-rc-watermark-build-info-from-desktop/

Posted in Windows | 3 Comments »

I’m a Gentoo newbie. Actually, I consider myself a newbie to Linux in general. The other day while putting together my own system using Gentoo, I ran into problems every time I tried to emerge something. While portage was calculating dependencies, it would suddenly stop and spit out a cryptic error trace that ended with:

cPickle.PicklingError: Can't pickle <type 'method-wrapper'>: attribute lookup __builtin__.method-wrapper failed

None of my Gentoo geek buddies knew what was up. After trying a few things, I came up with a good solution: manually reinstall emerge/portage. I found an excellent tutorial on how to do this at gentoo.org:

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/portage/doc/manually-fixing-portage.xml

Posted in Programming | No Comments »

Vista got a lot of things right. It also got a few things wrong. The naggy UAC “are you sure you want to do this” prompts is one example. Another annoyance is the sudden dialog that interrupts what you’re doing to tell you that less than 25% of your RAM is free. This warning would probably be warranted and helpful on systems with a small amount of RAM, but on mine 25% free memory is hardly anything to worry about – it means I have at least 1 GB of memory left.

Fortunately, like most things, there’s a fix.

1. Open the registry editor. (Click the Windows orb, type “regedit”, and hit enter.)
2. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WDI\DiagnosticModules\.
3. Export the following folders. This is your backup in case something goes wrong.
   {5EE64AFB-398D-4edb-AF71-3B830219ABF7}
   {45DE1EA9-10BC-4f96-9B21-4B6B83DBF476}
   {C0F51D84-11B9-4e74-B083-99F11BA2DB0A}
4. Take ownership of the each folder mentioned in step 3. (You can take ownership by right clicking the folder and then hitting permissions. Click the advanced button and change owner to your user. Click OK and then give full control to your user group. Hit OK again.)
5. Delete the folders from step 3.
6. Reboot and enjoy.

Update: After doing the above steps, you should know that once memory runs out, it is out. You will have no warning. Once your memory gets maxed out, programs will behave very erratic and suddenly crash without warning. I’ve decided that this side effect can be just as annoying as the popups. If you consistently push your machine’s memory to its limits, you should think twice about disabling the low memory messages. Having said that, I still prefer using my machine without Vista’s nagginess.

Posted in Windows | 14 Comments »

I began having problems with the Axialis icon editing toolbar in Visual Studio a few weeks ago. It would appear as a short, empty, ugly little toolbar within Visual Studio. I would remove it, even delete it out of Visual Studio, and it still hung around and appeared there every time I started up. Fortunately for me, this problem has a simple fix.

If you’re using a x86 machine, edit the following within the registry:
Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\AddIns\IconWorkshopAddin.Connect
Set value CommandPreload to 0×00000000 (0).

If you’re using a x64 machine, edit the following within the registry:
Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\AddIns\IconWorkshopAddin.Connect
Set value CommandPreload to 0×00000000 (0).

References:

http://www.axialis.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2179

Posted in Programming | 4 Comments »

Today I’ve been working on creating a simple WPF application. As a part of this application, I want to store some user-defined preferences. This post briefly details how I went about doing this using C# and Visual Studio 2008.

First, make sure your application has an App.config file. If it is missing, add it by going to Project > Add New Item… and then selecting “Application Configuration File” from the pop up. Visual Studio will then add a blank App.config file to your application. Open it and make it look something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
<appSettings>
<add key="PreferenceToRemember" value="DefaultValue" />
</appSettings>
</configuration>

In order to write to this App.config file, you will need to add System.Configuration as a project reference. And of course you’ll need to have the appropriate usings statements on the right forms. Once all that is done, you can write to the App.config file with the following:

Configuration oConfig = ConfigurationManager.OpenExeConfiguration(ConfigurationUserLevel.None);
oConfig.AppSettings.Settings["PreferenceToRemember"].Value = "NewValue";
oConfig.Save(ConfigurationSaveMode.Modified);
ConfigurationManager.RefreshSection("appSettings");

The last line in the code above refreshes the current in-memory configuration with what is saved inside the App.config file. To read from the App.config file, just use this:

string strPreferenceToRemember = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["LastProject"];

As a final note, I noticed that nothing seemed to be written to the configuration file while debugging within Visual Studio, but once I published the application it worked as expected. I don’t know why this happens, but I’ll modify this post if I find out.

Posted in Programming | 1 Comment »