David's Blog

Computer says no

Disabling the Opera Bit Torrent support

By David, on May 26th, 2009

Opera has built-in torrent support which is very handy and nice, but not quite as nice as a full-fledged client like uTorrent

To disable the Torrent support in Opera so that uTorrent or your default torrent client will be used instead:

In Opera, type in opera:config in the address bar and hit enter
Click the Bit Torrent section to expand it
Untick Enable
Hit Save
Click OK at the message box

You won’t have to restart Opera for this change to take effect

Moving your precious user profile and documents to another folder on another drive in Windows 7

By David, on May 26th, 2009

One of the things I learned long ago was to always have more than 1 drive or have my single drive partitioned.

You keep your programs and operating system on the C drive.

On your D drive goes all your data, downloads and anything that you don’t want to vanish on you suddenly.

A couple of advantages of this are:

This keeps the C drive quite lean if you want to make an image of it. It contains the operating system files and installed software and nothing else.
The D drive contains everything in one spot that you can easily set up for a backup procedure
If something catastrophic happens to your operating system, you can (mostly) be comfortable with formatting and installing over the C drive without blowing away all your precious music, photos and docs.
You can store your favourite software installers and drivers on your D drive which you can reach easily if doing a reinstall – rather than having to download them all again if starting from scratch.

If you don’t partition or have more than one hdd, an operating system failure could mean the hassle of removing your hard drive and backing data up off it on another running machine.

Things can be difficult though with the way Windows likes to store the user profile data on the C drive by default like your application data and My Documents.

Here are some instructions for changing Windows 7 so that all your user data is stored on your D drive (or wherever you like).

This is starting from a clean install of Windows 7 but you could do it from an existing install; just that trying to change the location of an existing user profile is extremely difficult and not recommended (hence the Dummy account):

When prompted to enter a user name in the Windows 7 installer, use a throw-away username rather than your desired username e.g. Dummy
Once installed you should be logged in as Dummy
Open up C:\Users and copy the Public and Default folders to the new location e.g. D:\Users
Open up regedit and go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList key
Change the Default, ProfilesDirectory and Public values to the new location (e.g. replace %SystemDrive% with D:)
You should also consider moving the ProgramData location too
Restart then log on again as Dummy (not sure if this is necessary but just being safe!)
Create a new user. This will be your preferred account. Name it what you want and add it to the Administrators group.
Log off Dummy and log on as the new user
Click the Start Menu and click on your folder name just below the profile grapic and above “Documents”. Right click on the folders and go Properties to verify they are stored in D:\Users

Now, if your Windows 7 install becomes unrecoverable, you can safely format and install on the C drive and your user profile will remain intact on D.

Swiss ball trick

By David, on May 25th, 2009

Making a bootable USB drive for installing Windows 7 RC1

By David, on May 22nd, 2009

Here’s the article I followed to create my bootable USB flash drive when installing Windows 7 – something that’s essential when you don’t have a floppy drive or an optical drive in your machine.

http://kmwoley.com/blog/?p=345

To make the process even simpler, you can use WinRAR or an ISO-mounting or reading application to get the installation files and boot sector from the Windows 7 RC1 ISO image without needing to burn a DVD.

Configuring NLog for your application when NLog is in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC)

By David, on May 22nd, 2009

If you have several applications that are using NLog, it can be a good idea to install NLog into the GAC and reference that.

A gotcha you must watch out for is caused by this piece of configuration from the NLog site:
<configuration> <configSections> <section name="nlog" type="NLog.Config.ConfigSectionHandler, NLog"/> </configSections> <nlog> </nlog> </configuration>

Because you are not using the strong name for the Assembly-qualified name of ConfigSectionHandler, it’s impossible to do a GAC lookup, therefore NLog won’t be found and you’ll get an application error (even if NLog is actually in the GAC).

This means your application will throw an exception when the configuration is loaded; there will be no NLog.dll in your application folder and it can’t check the GAC as it doesn’t have the strong name of the assembly you want.

You can fix this by including the strong name:
<section name="nlog" type="NLog.Config.ConfigSectionHandler, NLog, Version=1.0.0.505, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=5120e14c03d0593c" />

Visual Studio: Cannot add project to source control; it overlaps a project that is already bound to source control at a lower root

By David, on May 21st, 2009

I’ve been getting this error a bit lately as I trying to add new projects to the solution, and then add them to source control:

The project <ProjectName> cannot be added to source control. In folder <SolutionDir>, it overlaps a project that is already bound to source control at a lower root. To avoid this problem, add the project from a location below the binding root of the other source controlled projects in the solution.

The cause of this was that I had linked files within the new project that were pointing to existing files higher up in the solution folder (in this instance, in the solution root).

In this case I was linking to the strong name key from the solution root:

<SolutionRoot>\MyKey.snk
<SolutionRoot>\MyProject\MyProject.csproj <= Was linking to the key in the root

To add the project to source control, you have to remove these links first, add the project to source control, then you can put your links back in.

iTunes Lite

By David, on May 11th, 2009

iTunes without the bloat, and the invasive Quicktime installer + annoying Bonjour service.

Install Quicktime Alternative, then the iTunes installer from Ajua Online.

That’s currently 17.8MB for the iTunes installer, and 10.8MB for Quicktime Alt. As opposed to the 80MB of bossy Apple iTunes installer.

Movies: The Expendables, The Green Hornet, Dimension

By David, on April 17th, 2009

Some cool looking movies on the distant horizon.

Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Statham, Mickey Rourke, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, Randy Couture, Steve Austin, Eric Roberts, Terry Crews, Danny Trejo… The Expendables cast is wicked! This could be an awesome unabashed 80s-style action movie if the script is good enough and it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Then we have Michel Gondry directing Seth Rogen and Stephen Chow in The Green Hornet. Nice.

And much much further ahead, Lars von Trier is still working on this mysterious and ambitious film called Dimension. It’s starring Udo Kier, who said:

Dimension is a project which we have been shooting for 8 years and we aren’t allowed to talk about the story. We meet every year at Christmas, we have Christmas dinner and then we shoot one day, three minutes. So in the year 2024, we have 90 minutes and the actor will hopefully make it. So I hope I make it to then. And the actor, because he doesn’t wear make-up will grow older 30 years in 90 minutes. I am losing the hair and all that. I like Lars Von Trier and I think definitely Lars Von Trier is one of the most talented European director there is.

Bouncer Win

By David, on April 15th, 2009

Play him off, Keyboard Cat

By David, on April 15th, 2009

Introducing Keyboard Cat

Play them off, Keyboard Cat

This one’s pretty brutal, I’m going to hell:

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