Help The helpers ...

Hi again.
as you may have asserted i have new found respect for Microsoft with the new Windows 8. i have some "Air Time" with it too, i installed a machine for every preview version available (developer, consumer and release previews). in anticipation for the official release, and been an MSDN subscriber, i went ahead and assumed this will profit me in the long run.
I assumed that i will be able to upgrade my edition, and keep the hours of work put in to customize my machine.

guess what ..... i was WRONG !!!

after trying everything except for installing a fresh install (on a formatted partition), i was referred to this post and followed it. At first it looked promising (may i quote from the post: "Keep in mind that this is not supported, and could end up with a catastrophic failure if some bits are not properly upgraded,")

an of course after the third re-start, i was forced to to what i didn't want to do in the first place

Re-install (at least restoring from the web is fast).

why oh why do i like to help out ?

see you soon.

G.

מדריך לבניית אתרי אינטרנט או המוסד לביטוח לאומי - שרות ונגישות מעל הכל

בעוונותיי אני נאלץ לשלם לביטוח לאומי, עד כאן הכל בסדר. יש אפילו אתר אינטרנט אשר בו אזרחי המדינה (הריעו לריבון) יכולים בנוחות ובצורה מאובטחת לשלם את מסיהם

אצתי, רצתי למחשב הקרוב למקום מגורי (פשוט שלפתי את הלפטופ מהתיק) ופתחתי את הדפדפן החביב עלי (בלי לנקוב בשמות) והפלא ופלא ... כלום, פשוט כלום

מוטב מראה עיניים

  כפי שוודאי אתם שמים לב... כך קשה במידה מסוימת לשלם מיסים, אך, לא לי

הנחתי שמדובר בבעית תאימות ולכן ניסיתי (ללא הצלחה) עוד מספר דפדפנים (שהציגו תמונה דומה) ומספר אמולטורים (מדמי תצורה) לפני שניגשתי ל"דבר האמיתי" הדפדפן האימתני של מיקרוסופט ... אינטרנט אקספלורר 10

הוא בטח יציל אותי ... הכל בנוי להתאים לו, ובטח אתרי האינטרנט של הרשויות אשר בחרו במיקרוסופט (בצדק) כספק התשתיות מס 1 שלהם ... את ההפתעה שציפתה לי ניתן להראות רק בתמונות

עכשיו ... אתם מתבוננים בתמונה ואומרים לעצמכם ... "על מה הוא מדבר?" הכל עובד ... אני אמרתי אותו דבר, ואז גיליתי שאין באתר כפי שהוא נראה שאף לא אפשרות פעולה אחת

לכן הפעלתי מחדש דפדפן אחר (פיירפוקס 14.0) וניסיתי דבר שלא היה עולה על דעתי לנסות אלמלא הוא עבד

הפעלתי תוסף*  שמפעיל את אקספלורר דרך פיירפוקס, לא לא, זה לא עוד מדמה או אמולטור זה ממש להריץ דפדפן אחד דרך ממשק משתמש של דפדפן אחר. וכפי שציינתי התוצאות היו מעבר לכל דמיון

כעת אני (וכל בני ישראל אשר מבינים "מעט" כמוני במחשבים) לשלם את חובותיי (אשר הלכו ותפחו מול עייני בזמן הנסיונות לשלמן) בנוחות וביעילות

אה... ועוד משהו קטן ... בעת הכניסה לאתר, משיקולי אבטחה, מוצגת שאלה אשר מבקשת מהאזרח להקליד את האותיות שבתמונה, לא תאמינו באיזה צירוף מקרים נתקלתי, כשראיתי את זה חשבתי שפשוט יש מישהו בביטוח הלאומי שפשוט צוחק עלי

לזה אני קורא צדק חברתי

עד הפעם הבאה

 (IETab לתוסף קוראים)*

Painstaking tasks (recursive archives)

Hi all ... this is another example of how to apply the "longer path" approach

isn't it annoying to unzip an archive only to find out that it contains another archive ?

here is a sipmle shell script that will help you unzip archives recursively...

I called it "rezip", it carries the same functionallity of originall "zip" command

ToDo: make it indifferent to type of archives (people tend to get clever and switch archiving methods)

'till nex time 

G.

Taking the longer path

As I am the "computer guy" in the family, I was appointed to be incharge of the presentation for my father-in-law 70th birthday.
Well, at least ,in charge of getting 200 picture images into a powerpoint presentation file (in deed a job worthy of my experties).

As i was starting this tedious task i looked online for an automatic solution for my problem that will save me some time, and found this nice post in msdn.

The task, of course, was a small battle of it's own (the code and my machines configuration needed some modifications due to it beeing a sample and not intended to work out of the box).
but, 3 houers (and 5 seconds of runtime) later, after showing the outcome to the "client", she said: "I would had done it faster manually".

well. I think I still like the longer path ... and I'll see what happens on his 80th (assuming I can find the code)

'till next time.

G.

Are you ready ???

make Windows 8 CP look native in Virtualbox

Hi all.

I recently encountered another hassle in attempting to perfect my Window 8 machine. setting the virtual machine's screen resolution to fit my laptop screen (16:9) dimensions and resolution (1600X900X32bit) proved to be challenging.

I'm not the guy to run away from such a challenge.

Due to the Beta nature of the OS it was not surprising that Virtualbox's guest addition (Ver. 4.1.8), dose not yet support display dimensions that differ from 4:3

although there is the option of using the "scale mode" <host key+> it doesn't quite cut it.

 Disregarding the annoying host top window bar, the font looks stretched and it's just not it :( no worries, there is a solution:

Shut down all of your Virtual machines and VirtualBox too (not mandatory for linux or Mac hosts).

for windows hosts:
open the command line interface type the following line:

in c:\Program Files\Oracle\virtualBox>

...>VBoxManage.exe setextradata "MachinName" CustomVideoMode1 1600x900x32

for Linux hosts:
open terminal and type

:~$VBoxManage setextradata "MachineName" CustomVideoMode1 1600x900x32

 * replace MachineName with the name of your Virtual machine
Lo and behold ... it works (you can obviously use your favorite screen settings [Hight]x[Width]x[Depth]).

  

so now i can actually use the full extent of my screen.

 ... Oh Joy

G. 

A winning Combination

I have been working with Vim "text editor" for some time now. I found a few helpful entries I'd like to share. These helpful tips and tricks helps me be more efficient, code faster and makes the very powerful Vim even stronger.

First of all - install Vim and learn how to work with it (took me a while, but totally worth it).
 
The first cool add-on: snipMate (super easy to install) check it out

a short feature that show just the tip of the iceberg

Than i found some cool new features that actually transforms Vim editor in to an IDE altogether.

basically you need to run these commands:

$ git clone https://github.com/sontek/dotfiles.git
$ cd dotfiles
$ ./install.sh vim 

unfortunately the both (snipMate and Pathogen) don't work well together, this is just a challenge for me, there is no way I'll give up and just choose one. 
So I looked for a way to combine the two.
The trick was, installing them in the right order, snipMate then Pathogen (although you can mess around with it to find your way).
and then follow this little patch, to fix this small twitch, regarding mapping a different key <Ctrl+j> to activate snippet instead of <tab> to allow the both to co-exist.

Any way, the real cool thing about these features is that you can easily modify and adapt them to your needs. writing new code snippets, changing text highlighting, customizing auto-completions and syntax checking can be super helpful and is super easy to do.
 you can create your very own customized, "free of Charge",flexible and "free spirited" IDE.

For example:
writing a new code snippet for "*.xml" filetype:
simply write a new file named "xml.snippets" and place it in "~/.vim/snippets/"
(or equivalent, e.g. $HOME\vimfiles on Windows), edit the file and add (for the example sake) this code:

snippet version
            <?xml version="${1:*.*}"?>

snippet <>
            <${1:TagName}>
            </${2:TagName}>

this is what it does (I'll let you do the simple revers engineering):
but the guidelines are "${1:text}" - the first variable the marker will enter when snippet key  (in my case <Ctrl+j>) is hit.

* the video is a bit fuzzy but ... you'll get the picture :)
In future entries I'll try summarizing all of my insights in customizing Vim.
let me know what you think ... i feel this work was life changing (seeing that i suck in getting syntax correct the first time).

- Cool fact: "*.snippets" filetype has snippets (recursive ?) -

G.