So without further ado, here’s my list (note there’s actually 36 items – I added extras to improve my chances of success):

1. Make a 30B430 goal poster (Here’s how the final image turned out)
2. Have 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 best week chains
3. Do 7 “Weeks of Cool”
4. Paint the kitchen cabinets
5. Make a personal and family mission statement
6. Build a shed in the back yard
7. Create a large painting
8. Hike from Snowbird to Lone Peak
9. Make a custom chain calendar
10. Go camping 4 times
11. Volunteer at the Road Home
12. Make tikka masala and pad thai
13. Write the first 25 pages of Dark War
14. Participate in 4 endurance sporting events
15. Go skydiving
16. Redo blog
17. Clean up music, contact, and photo collections
18. Rebuild savings
19. Learn 2 new programming languages
20. Read 20 books
21. Get a technical certification
22. Learn 10 new software programs
23. Recreate first date
24. Go on a road trip
25. Hike Timpanogos at night
26. Finish the garage
27. Sell artwork online
28. Make a video game
29. Invest in the stock market
30. Begin the adoption process
31. Improve Kommand
32. Finish the laundry room
33. Grow a garden
34. Make an arcade machine
35. Create an iPhone icon set
36. Dunk a basketball

That’s right – I’m gonna be a dad, again! Yeah! I am very excited. I think the timing is perfect and everything else seems to be in order for a new member to be added to our family. I also think this is a great time to renew my determination to be the best father and husband that I can be. I know that the little tyke that’s coming will be brought into a family that will love and take care of him/her. It’s going to be great!

Now, if we could just do something about the pesky nine month ordeal that is ahead of us…

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

The trip was to celebrate Bryana’s graduation, birthday, and to give her a chance to see her old friend Cody. Cody is a mustang that Bryana took care of for three years. I hear he’s got quite the attitude and a set of bad habits to match, kind of like Rook (our dog).

Aside from the beautiful scenery and the general good times, one interesting event occured. On the trip back home we decided to hit I-15 and get back as fast as we could. While traveling through Montana, I passed an RV going 20 mph over the speed limit—which means I was at 90. And of course, I got pulled over. The police officer recognized that I was passing and so he kindly reduced the ticket to just 10 mph over. He then said, “Now you can either appear in court on this date… or you can pay your fine right now. It is $20.” That flabbergasted me. I dug around the car and eventually Bryana spotted me the cash. I then ponied up and paid my ticket right then and there. Honestly I felt like I was paying off the cop, not the fine. And who knows, maybe he enjoyed a good lunch because of me.

Anyway, the trip was great. I’ve attached some of the photos that we took along with a map of where we drove. Enjoy!





View Larger Map

(#([0-9A-Fa-f]{3,6})\b)|

(aqua)|(black)|(blue)|(fuchsia)|

(gray)|(green)|(lime)|(maroon)|

(navy)|(olive)|(orange)|(purple)|

(red)|(silver)|(teal)|(white)|(yellow)|

(rgb\(\s*\b([0-9]|[1-9][0-9]|1[0-9][0-9]|2[0-4][0-9]|25[0-5])\b\s*,

\s*\b([0-9]|[1-9][0-9]|1[0-9][0-9]|2[0-4][0-9]|25[0-5])\b\s*,

\s*\b([0-9]|[1-9][0-9]|1[0-9][0-9]|2[0-4][0-9]|25[0-5])\b\s*\))|

(rgb\(\s*(\d?\d%|100%)+\s*,\s*(\d?\d%|100%)+\s*,\s*(\d?\d%|100%)+\s*\))

Just as a recap, a valid CSS color can be represented as a…

1. named color, such as “red”, “green”, “blue”, “black”, etc.
2. hexadecimal value, such as #ff0000 (red), #00ff00 (green), #0000ff (blue), #000000 (black), etc. Some hexadecimal values can be reduced to just three characters. For example, red is #f00 and green is #0f0.
3. triplet consisting of the color’s RGB values, such as rgb(255,0,0) for red and rgb(0,255,0) for green.

The Regular Expression listed above should be able to handle any of the variants that a CSS color can throw at it.