Cubic

I constantly hear/read complaints about Windows Vista's UAC dialog. The complaint usually goes something like this, "Whenever I do Administrative task X while logged in as an Administrator, Vista asks me if I really want to do said task X." UAC, also known as User Account Control, is designed to not stop users from doing stupid things so much as to stop automated programs from taking over the computer system. But users do get annoyed when they want to do a series of administrative-level tasks and see dialogs popping up in their face constantly asking if they really want to do those tasks. Which is where a tool I found comes in really handy. I don't run Vista, but I have found a solution for the #1 complaint I hear from those who do: http://www.tweak-uac.com/what-is-tweak-uac/ TweakUAC allows system administrators to do administrativey things without being annoyed by the UAC privilege elevation dialogs. Of course, most users who own Vista are usually logged in as A...

...And they end up on my blog. For some weird reason or other, this blog attracts the weirdest people. Not that it is bad, it just is weird. For instance, my last post caused a RentACoder troller to show up and start ranting, uh...trolling...about some RentACoder experience that happened years ago. I deleted the messages and turned on comment moderation. I figured normal people would show up but they haven't. Well, one exception: One of my posts _finally_ had a normal, everyday person who used it and actually appreciated the post. It was my "Lexmark Printer Driver Removal" post where I provided a tool (old-school batch file) to completely remove what Lexmark was unable to remove with their uninstaller. I suppose talking geek just automatically attracts the wrong crowd. If I started talking about how to use Windows Movie Maker 2 or did Photoshop tutorials on forum avatar creation (borderline geek) or how to safely lose weight (most weight loss programs are unsafe -...

Let me begin by saying, "100th post!!!!!!!!" And no one is probably going to read this now that I've trolled my own blog. A couple years ago I ran into a site called RentACoder, or more commonly seen on the site, RAC. RentACoder is a site where people can place bid requests and other people place bids for those bid requests and RentACoder holds escrowed funds until a software project is completed. Most requests have a cap put on them as to the limit of the bids. I've got a few hundred projects I would love to see done but don't have the time nor resources to do them. So, I decided to run a few small, semi-scientific experiments on RentACoder. My first project was for the coder to use MFC and several pre-made third-party open-source/freeware components and piece them together into a cohesive shell that will form the basis of a new software product. I'm pretty good at MFC, but it would have taken me weeks to figure each little library out. I paid $70 for ...

One of my major pet peeves with Mozilla products is Extensions and how they break between versions of the products and how developers are not on top of releasing updates to those extensions. I'm not necessarily an early adopter of stuff, but I do have a tendency to be cutting-edge on certain applications. I don't run bleeding-edge stuff except for my own product line where I'm constantly adding a new feature here and there. Mozilla Thunderbird is the latest of major annoyances. Thunderbird 2 just came out a couple days ago and several of my extensions broke. For the most part, extensions break because a single string that says "I work with versions of Thunderbird from x to y" where y is less than the current version exists. Let's take a look at how Outlook would handle the scenario. You've got millions of happy Outlook users with their extensions implemented as COM objects (DLLs). The latest version of Outlook will attempt to load the extension and, i...

I just discovered that dbghelp.dll has an undocumented export function called 'itoldyouso'. Those funny guys at Microsoft. Feel free to confirm it for yourself using Dependency Walker. I saw it and chuckled to myself. (I'd love to know who had the guts to name an export function 'itoldyouso'?)