Gavin News

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.

Posted in Announcement, technology | No Comments »

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!

Posted in technology | No Comments »

New Laptop: The Small Things

Santa brought me a new laptop for Christmas, a Lenovo ThinkPad T400. I have traditionally been a Dell guy, having an investment in their power adapters, batteries, and docking stations. This time, though, I decided to go with a more conservative model, trading in some “style points” for better performance. I decided on the T400 because of great reviews and the excellent reputation of the ThinkPad line.

One interesting thing about dealing with Lenovo, the Chinese company who purchased the PC division of IBM in 2005, was the shipping log. The laptop actually originated from China (Shenzhen to be exact). The shipment went from China to Alaska, was held up in customs, then to Kentucky, to Illinois, and finally to my house. Luckily Lenovo shipped the laptop via expedited shipping so it didn’t take as long as it could have.

So far I love the laptop. It is very solid, and the feel of the keyboard is amazing. One “small thing” that I have noticed, however, is the placement of the left Ctrl button. On my old Dell laptop and on most desktop keyboards the Ctrl button is the leftmost buton on the keyboard, making it easy to locate when I need to use it for a shortcut (Ctrl+c for copy, Ctrl+t for new tab, etc.). On this laptop, however, the button on the bottom left is the Fn button. How entirely weird! I have to re-train my hand for my keyboard shortcuts, which is a small thing, but still annoying. Sometimes the smallest things are the most noticeable.

Update: Lenovo has finally listened to the community and began a discussion on their Design Matters Blog about this issue.

Posted in News | No Comments »

Skip “Use the Web service to find the correct program”

Recently I’ve been opening up files that don’t have a program assigned to their file extension. Each time I try to open these files, Windows prompts me with a dialog asking me is I want to “Use the Web service to find the correct program” – no thank you, Windows.

So, I did a quick search and found this nice little registry edit:

1. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

2. Create a new 32-bit DWORD value on the right-hand side with the following values:

• Name: NoInternetOpenWith
• Value: 1

This causes Windows to never open that useless prompt ever again. Thanks, HowToGeek.com.

Posted in technology | No Comments »

Simple PHP Twitter Script

Here’s a customizable little PHP script that takes a Twitter username, password, and RSS feed and prints out however many of the last twitter entries you choose.

There’s a lot of documentation out there on the Twitter API, but it was hard for me to find a small quick script to do this seemingly simple query, so I’m providing the one that I wrote.

Let me know if/how you like it. Code is here: twitter_script

Posted in technology | No Comments »