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Blank PDF tabs in Firefox

If you ever have issues with PDF’s not displaying correctly in your browser then this Adobe support link appears quite helpful.

I installed Foxit Reader then uninstalled it on my Windows 7 box and now my Firefox wont open PDF’s.  Just a blank page. 🙁

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A look to the past to see where you are going

I read a great article just now by Bruce Eckel ‘The Positive Legacy of C++ and Java’.  Bruce talks about Java as a language gettings stuck (complicated Generics, etc) but paving the way via the efficient JVM to develop and host new higher languages very quickly (Groovy, Scala).

It finishes with this great line

All future languages should learn from this: either create a culture where you can be refactored (as Python and Ruby have done) or allow competitive species to thrive.

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Easily Unhide an NTFS partition with included Windows Tools

Warnings:

Make sure the hidden partition is NTFS!!!! 

No responsibility taken if you follow these instructions and you fubar your disk.  If in doubt, use a graphical tool like Partition Magic to help you out.

Open a cmd window

Type diskpart and enter

A seperate diskpart window kicks off with a DISKPART> prompt.

Find the partition you want to unhide using LIST and SELECT commands

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
————-  —————-  ——-  ——-
Partition 1    Primary             55 MB    32 KB
Partition 2    Primary             89 GB    55 MB
Partition 3    Primary             60 GB    89 GB

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
——–  ————-  ——-  ——-  —  —
Disk 0    Online          149 GB      0 B
Disk 1    Online         5831 MB      0 B

DISKPART> select disk 0

Disk 0 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
————-  —————-  ——-  ——-
Partition 1    Primary             55 MB    32 KB
Partition 2    Primary             89 GB    55 MB
Partition 3    Primary             60 GB    89 GB

DISKPART> select partition 2

Partition 2 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> detail partition

 

Partition 2
Type  : 17
Hidden: Yes
Active: No
Offset in Bytes: 57576960

There is no volume associated with this partition.

DISKPART> SET ID=07

DISKPART> detail partition

Partition 2
Type  : 07
Hidden: No
Active: No
Offset in Bytes: 57576960

Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info
———-  —  ———–  —–  ———-  ——-  ———  ——–
* Volume 3     F                NTFS   Partition     89 GB  Healthy

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Its all Greek to me

Ok, so I’m learning Greek right now.  When venturing onto a colleagues PC, I noticed he was running Firefox in French.  So I thought what a great opportunity to expose myself to the Greek language by running my apps in a foreign language also.

Although when we design apps, we generally include locale’s for different regions, switching an already installed app to a different language doesn’t seem to be as easy as changing a setting in Preferences.

For Firefox and the windows live apps, special language versions exist.  I downloaded the Greek Firefox from here to get started.  Interestingly, the installer looked all gyberish characters (yes more gyberish than greek!), but once installed all the menu’s, dialogs, status bars, etc came up in the Greek as expected.  I decided to keep my installs separate as well rather than over the top of the existing one, but it does share the same profile folder without any strange issues so far.

Once your browser is in Greek, when you go to browse websites such as Windows Live, Google, etc, you’re results are all in Greek also (where applicable).  Its one thing to read about (and even implement support for) internalisation and another to actually see it in practice.  Nice touch.

The next thing you need to do is setup the Greek keyboard so you can type in Greek.  There are a couple of keyboard layouts.  Basically a modifier so you can type the accent characters.  Greek Polytonic seems to be working for me.  This Microsoft site has keymaps for each of the layouts showing you what key types what and how to get access to the modifiers.

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SQL Joins

This great article on codeproject talks about the different sorts of joins there are in SQL.  Sounds pretty easy right, but then there are ones I dont remember learning in school, Left and Right EXCLUDING join, and Full Excluding Join.  Before that, I’d be doing SELECT … MINUS SELECT.

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Chuffed

I just deployed my first Grails app running with PostgreSQL on MorphExchange.

Following their Java Dev Cookbook was quite easy though I found I had to do the following:

  • Under log4j configuration add a property logs.home = ”./logs” (here)
  • Don’t need to change the Grails DEFAULT_DEPS in War.Groovy to exclude jdbc2_0-stdext.jar per their doc.  Perhaps the exception they warn about will be a problem if trying to use JNDI?

The real wide internets beta lookout, I now have a place to host some unsuspecting Java onto the world, <cold evil laugh>

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HTC Touch Pro

Ok, so I got my new phone toy and I must say I’m pretty happy with it.  Much smaller and better screen resolution than the 838 pro.  There are a ton of neat features all through the sexy touch flo interface which makes getting things done a breeze.

The first annoyance I had though was as it turns out, the HTC task manager.  It would automatically exit programs once a certain memory threshold had been reached.  Coming from a previous WM phone where the apps stayed open (most notebly, switching from email -> opera and back again), I found this very annoying – had to restart app instead of task switch.

To fix, there is a registry key HKCUSoftwareHTCTask ManagerEnableAutoKill which setting to the value of 0 will stop the auto-close behaviour.

That tip plus many more I found through the PPCSG forums here.

Opera browser is really neat on this phone. However if you’ve been using Opera for a while, you’ll notice its usually packed with options. This version has a big take on simplicity so the options screen is considerably lacking. Thankfully if you enter opera:config in the address bar, then you’ll be taken to a far more detailed config screen. Other special opera pages include opera:plugins, opera:history & opera:cache.  With regard to the config page, there are many sections, but the User Prefs section at the end is probably the most detailed.  Here you can up the number of open tabs from 3 to whatever you’re choosing.