DJ Katy

Learn To Program 1: What It Takes

A comment I hear from my friends and colleagues at least once a month goes something like “Programming sounds interesting, I wouldn’t mind learning some basic programming. What does it involve?” An excellent question, and one with many possible answers. As the discussion evolves, the same set of issues tend to come up, so I…

How to enable right-clicking with a buttonless touchpad in Ubuntu 12.04

The buttonless touchpad, also known as the ClickPad – designed to allow greater flexibility in touchpads by treating the entire surface as one button with programmable click regions – is possibly one of the worst touchpad designs ever conceived. Unfortunately, it would seem that it’s here to stay. The last few versions of Ubuntu haven’t…

Printing numbers in binary format in C++

The problem You want to display or output a number in binary format. Iostream only has output manipulators for decimal, hexadecimal and octal. The bad solution People usually write a loop to do this that iterates over each bit in the integer: int v = 0x12345678; for (int i = 31; i >= 0; i–)…

Tutorial: How to make WSUS 3.0 Selfupdate work with Apache

The problem: You want to run Apache or another web server besides IIS on port 80 on a machine which is also running Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). When you disable IIS’s Default Web Site running on port 80, WSUS stops working normally and the following error is reported in the Event Log: Event ID:…

Book Review: The Trouble With Physics – Lee Smolin

“The Trouble With Physics – The rise of string theory, the fall of a science and what comes next” is a very interesting and multi-faceted book, in equal doses about particle physics and the beaurocracy and inertia present in modern physics research.

IE7 Conditional Comments and XSL

About conditional comments Conditional comments in Internet Explorer 7 are a way to ensure only IE or non-IE browsers parse certain parts of a page. This is mostly used to include CSS compatibility hacks by way of a <link> element in the page header, but they can in fact wrap any amount of HTML anywhere…

How to tidy up badly formatted XML with an XSL stylesheet

How do you turn this: <broadcastScheduler><!– ================================================================ –><!– CURRENT SHOWS –><!– ================================================================ –><recurr ingBroadcast href=”show-varee-season-2″ indexStart=”26″ recurFrequency=”14″><firstAirDate channel =”d2″ date=”2007-09-21T22:00:00-06:00″ dstRules=”us” automaticStartup=”false”/><firstAirDate chan nel=”d1″ date=”2007-10-05T22:00:00+00:00″ dstRules=”eu” automaticStartup=”true”/></recurringBroad cast><recurringBroadcast href=”show-dan-ascherl-season-1″ indexStart=”6″ recurFrequency=”1md”><fi rstAirDate channel=”d1″ date=”2007-05-04T22:00:00+01:00″ dstRules=”eu” automaticStartup=”true”/>< firstAirDate channel=”d2″ date=”2007-05-04T22:00:00-05:00″ dstRules=”us” automaticStartup=”true”/ ><firstAirDate channel=”d1″ date=”2007-05-18T22:00:00+01:00″ dstRules=”eu” automaticStartup=”true “/><firstAirDate channel=”d2″ date=”2007-05-18T22:00:00-05:00″ dstRules=”us” automaticStartup=”tr ue”/></recurringBroadcast><recurringBroadcast href=”show-bent-killer-season-1″ indexStart=”21″ re…

Slow network file copying / moving / deleting in Windows Vista when playing audio (MMCSS)

File copying in Vista is, well, slow. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who has been sitting there wondering what exactly Vista is doing while it spends 5 minutes “calculating the time remaining” to copy half a dozen files.

How to fix being unable to login to Windows XP after you image it

You just copied your Windows XP partition from one drive to another. When you reboot into the new partition, you reach the login screen, but when you try to login, it logs you straight out again with no error.

PartitionMagic Error 4444, NTFS and Windows Vista

If you’ve tried to use PartitionMagic 7 or 8 from Windows 2000/XP to image or alter a Vista partition, or to write something onto a drive that had a Vista partition on it, you might’ve been in for a shock. Accessing the properties of the Vista partition from PartitionMagic will give you “Error #4444”. If…