Gavin News

Public Service Message: ../index.htm

One of my pet peeves is when people post links or URLs in prominent locations (posters, advertisements, etc) with the “/index.htm” or “/default.php” or “/default.aspx” or any of the derivatives of these. Please people – with very few exceptions, URLs with default.htm or index.htm or things like those do not have to have those parts of the URL!

For example, the NCHS of the CDC website can be accessed at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/Default.htm or at the much better looking URL http://www.cdc.gov/nchs.

Just some helpful advice. Please take these annoying little parts off of web addresses so that it looks cleaner. Thank you.

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Building a Backyard Screen

What is better than watching a movie in your backyard on a nice warm summer evening … on a huge screen!

We’re approaching the two year anniversary of when Doug, Nathan, Joe, Kelsey, and I built a huge backyard screen for the showing of High School Musical 2 on August 17, 2007. Check out the movie below, see the article on Lifehacker, and get ready for another showing on the huge screen sometime this summer.

Lifehacker: Build Your Own Outdoor Movie Theater

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Dual-Monitors Full Screen Flash

If you have two monitors like I do, you may like to have full-screen flash videos playing in your second monitor. There is a problem, though, that as soon as you click in a different window, the Flash goes to non-full screen. In other words, you can’t browse and have full screen flash on your second monitor.

There is a fix for this “security feature,” though. (Disclaimer: Adobe claims that this feature of auto-minimizing is integral to computer security, so proceed with caution)

1. Make sure you have Flash player version 10.0.22.87 (you can see this version information here).
2. Open NPSWF32.dll (probably located at c:\Windows\system32\Macromed\flash\npswf32.dll) in a hex editor.
3. Go to address 0×136340 and change byte 74 to EB.

I have tried this, and it works great. Original source here.

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New University of Illinois PH Interface

The University used to have an online searchable “phonebook” that was invaluable when students needed to contact each other. The information displayed by default listed name, email, major, address, phone number, web site address, and department (if the student worked for the University). This has all been disabled except for email address in the new PH system. I wrote about this situation on The Quad.

Anyway, a biproduct of the new web interface is that my Firefox extension NetID Lookup was broken for about 7 days. It is now fixed, and you can go to http://addons.mozilla.org to get the latest version (1.3). Thanks, and please provide feedback if you use and enjoy this simple extension.

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Aspell with Notepad++

Notepad++ is one of my favorite text editors for Windows, but getting the spell checker – GNU Aspell – to work can be slightly tricky.

The key is do not forget to install the dictionary. Both the Windows installer and the pre-compiled dictionaries for Windows are available on the Aspell Windows website. Don’t go to the main Aspll page – they only have the links to the UNIX dictionaries.

After you install Aspell and the English dictionary, you should be able to go to Plugins > Spell Checker, define where the DLL is located, and then you’re ready to start spell checking!

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