Handling Apple’s .dmg files in Windows

If you just want to look into (or extract) contents of .dmg file, a good, old and free 7-Zip will take care of this. This should also work for Apple .sparseimage files. But, beware that (just like in case of .iso files for Windows) these formats can contain bootable information and or whole disk images (Apple .hps files), rather useless under Windows. So, for example, if someone tell you that he has Windows XP image ready to be used in VirtualPC for Macintosh, keep in mind that you rather won’t be able to use in in Windows version of VirtualPC. Or you’ll have a lot, lot of work with extraction, conversion, tune-up etc.

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Changing keyboard shortcuts in PowerPoint… costs (40) 150 USD! [updated]

When you go to Options for changing Ribbon settings, in your Word 2007 or Word 2010, you can see a small button at the bottom of button list letting you to change keyboard shortcuts for most areas of you text editor. When you go to exactly the same place in your PowerPoint 2007 or 2010 you my (surprisingly?) notice, that there is no such thing. Googling around the web let’s you discover that this is… normal situation!

2023 Update: It is still a normal situation for Microsoft. Only this time you have to pay 150 USD per year (!) to gain the ability of changing keyboard shortcuts (that is: the most basic feature of every software)!

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Using PHP and Oracle database

I was working on bigger project using PHP (Yii) and Oracle database (through PDO and Yii). This isn’t a very common combination and many developers thinks, that writing PHP application to use Oracle database is a pure madness, mostly due to many strange behaviors and nasty bugs, that are present in PDO driver for Oracle. I can actually confirm this. Following article contains links to my Yii forum discussions on various aspects of using Oracle with Yii and PHP. You may find it useful, if you’re struggling with any problem.

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Lorem ipsum is gone

If you already don’t know, what Lorem ipsum is, then let me tell you, that it is a non-sense text, incorrectly said to be based on Latin or Greek, used by web developers to fill-up some textual parts of webpage. Mainly to show end-user a placeholder, where a real text finally appear. Instead of for example writing some real article to fill-up example article body, they eager to use this text.

If you don’t like Lorem ipsum of would like to have some replacements for it, then this article may help.

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addClass, removeClass and hasClass without jQuery

Class manipulation methods in jQuery are really handy, but when you need just them and nothing else out of jQuery, then using entire library seems like a little bit mistake. Using own versions of addClass, removeClass and hasClass sounds like a better idea and for this reason I have wrote following article, where you’ll find an example implementation of these methods.

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Incorrect music or audiobook order in MP3 player

You may notice, that many MP3 players (both Windows programs — not tested on other OSs — as good as external hardwares) are making their file lists in some strange order. This may not be a big deal, when talking about music (though, when listening to a particular album, you may get yourself pissed-off as well), but became a really pain in the ass, if we’re talking about audiobooks.

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Get rid of ID3v2 tag from many files at once using Winamp

If you’re an “old-school” MP3 user, and ID3 Tag version 1 data is all you need to get happy, you may find a shit stick to version 2 of ID3 Tag a little bit annoying. If it is so, then the big question is, how to quickly get rid of ID3v2 data for many files? Many programs are allowing to do a massive ID3 tags (both versions) change/edit, but there aren’t many of them that allows to delete particular tag version out of many files massively. And here comes my little trick.

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Disable refreshing of removable drive contents in Total Commander

When CD or DVD is ejected from drive, Total Commander “resets” contents of the pane to nearest available drive (usually C:). It is normal and obvious because contents of CD or DVD are no longer available. But, the same thing happens even if Total Commander is in background. This might be seen as an annoying feature, because each time you change CD or DVD in drive, you have to manually again select that drive in Total Commander. Fortunately, there is an easy solution for this.

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Can’t pin folders to my Windows Explorer icon on the taskbar

When you right-click Windows Explorer icon on the taskbar in Windows 7, you can see list of recent items (i.e. recently opened folders) with an option to pin some of them permanently. On some Windows 7 systems user may experience issues with recent items and pinned entries list not being displayed, missing or cleared without reason. New items cannot be added to these lists.

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Modify CGridView look

The CGridView class in Yii is a state of art solution, that gives you out-of-the-box full model browsing features including filtering, pagination and sorting. The picture would be perfect, if not for default look of grid view, which is a little bit “nasty”! :> It is understandable, as Yii author focused himself on delivering perfectly working framework, that does not necessary have to be pretty in the same time.

However, basing on famous flexibility of all components in Yii, with a help of few simple steps, you can completely change the look & feel of your grid view.

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Understanding… series of articles for Yii 1.1

Suppose, you place your self somewhere in the middle of Yii 1.1 experience ladder. You’re no longer new to Yii 1.1, but you’re not an experienced Yii developer in the same time. In this case, I strongly encourage you to spare half an hour or so on reading articles in Yii Wiki, that are grouped in this table-of-contents article. These articles contains a lot of useful information, a must-know for all experienced Yii developers, that are mostly not know to those with middle experience

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Dropdown must use both onChange and onKeyPress events

Bear in mind that when writing JavaScript / jQuery code for handling user changes made to dropdown boxes, you must program your website reaction not only to onChange but also to onKeyPress events. Why? There is a rare situation, where user selects value by clicking dropdown and then using keyboard’s cursor up or cursor down keys. onKeyPress event will be fired in this situation instead of onChange event. And desired effect won’t work, if you put it only to onChange event handler.

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Populate record

You can use CActiveRecord::populateRecord method in Yii to create new record basing on existing one. And, as this descriptions means, you must use it like that:

[code language=”php”]
$data = $this->getUser($id);
$model = new Users;
$model = $model->populateRecord($data, FALSE);
[/code]

instead of (last line):

[code language=”php”]
$model->populateRecord($data, FALSE);
[/code]

because populateRecord creates new model instead of modifying existing one!

Forcing default encoding on all files in Netbeans

A default file encoding for every file in Netbeans is defined at project level — see Project Properties dialog, Sources category. But there’s nothing similar (possible) for particular files without a project. If you’re using Netbeans just as an editor then all files opened from outside any project will be scrambled, because Netbeans is not using UTF-8 encoding by default on all files.

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