As it was announced on 29 February 2012, The Pirates Bay has stopped serving .torrent files, switching entirely to magnet-links. Reasons for that are unclear and arguments, that it will not cause much troubles, are weak as per me.
So I’m pretty happy that someone has discovered a very easy work-around for this problem.
Read More “Downloading .torrent files from The Pirates Bay”I’m so sucking and low player that actually for past fifteen (!) years I’ve been playing in actually four games: Diablo I, Diablo II, Civilisation and Transport Tycoon. The first two caught my heart so deeply that I even try to run them (Diablo I!) on Windows 7. And… I actually managed to do this.
Since, this involved a lot of googling and asking, here is a summary of my findings.
Read More “Fixing graphic problems in Diablo I and Diablo II”
Delphi’s TListView supports checkboxes out-of-the-box. You just have to set Checkboxes to True and iterate through TListView.Items to find, if particular item have Checked property set to True. You can even enable your own OnCheckboxClick event (not available by default) — I wrote about it here. But very similar to TListView‘s TTreeView does not support checkboxes by default at all.
So, you have to craft entire solution yourself.
Unfortunately, the TListView object does not have a specific event fired, when the Checked state changes for a TListItem (an item in the ListView). If you need to react in such situation, you have to mimic this behaviour yourself. Here are some tips on this.
Every Delphi’s Guru will probably think about subclassing and catching windows messages here. If you’re one of them — at delphi.about.com you’ll find an example. But, there’s an easier way to achieve the same.
There’s an (probably very) old About.com Delphi’s article on how to build simply MP3 Player using only TMediaPlayer component available in every Delphi edition. Since powerful XAudio is no longer offcially available to Windows developers and other MP3 players or components are quite expensive, when it comes to pay for the license, then this could be a good alternative. But, this article catched my attention for a completely different reason — reading and writing ID3Tag v1 in MP3 files, without using external libraries, just the pure Delphi code.
Read More “Read and write ID3Tag in Delphi without any extra components [updated]”
Here is a quick solution, how to synchronize scrolling of two TListViews. All you have to do is to write a code for OnAdvancedCustomDraw event for both lists.
XAudio SDK probably is (or at least was) the most powerful, yet freeware Software Developer Kit for playing MP3 files in Delphi. It offered outstanding possibilities. Let’s say that fifty (!) events, you could use to write any MP3-related software in Delphi is enough good mark. And there’s more. That is why, it was really pity to me to discover, that this library is no longer available neither to Windows nor free. And finding replacement is really hard, if not impossible.
To make a screenshot of your current screen state you don’t need any extra software under Android 4.0 or newer. Simply press and hold both Power button and Volume Down button in the same time. On some devices it may be necessary to press Power and Volume Up button instead.
In this post we have an example of some Yii extension available only in module and not available in main application. I’ve put that example there, because I haven’t got any other solution ready, when writing that article.
But the fact is, that the very same solution can be achieved in much easier way.
Read More “Force extension to be available only in a module”
I was looking for a function or solution, that would convert a string into associative array, i.e. respecting both keys and values. To be successfull, such function would have to operate on two delimiters. One for separating each key-value pair from surronding one. And second — for spliting keys from values. Which is, where PHP’s build-in explode function fails. Lucky I am, my two favorite uncles — Uncle Google and Uncle Stack Overflow — helped me in this case as well.
To automate compare phase (first step) in folder sync tool you should:
c:\totalcmd\totalcmd.exe /S=S:=backup command.The := instead of just /S=S:backup causes an automatic start of the comparison.
Of course you must adjust path to reflect your location of Total Commander.
Currently you can automate the compare step, not the copy step. It is considered to risky to be automated.
Here you have three different pages, each holding links to 25+ beautiful icons sets:
There are 109 total icons sets presented on these three webpages. Most of them are free. Some of them are devastating beautiful, some have medium quality. But, put together, makes a strong icon sets compilation, in which nearly anyone should find something interesting for his or her current project.
For most of your this task is as obvious as it can be and writing separate blog post about such simple thing is… simply useless. For me, a total Linux newbie, it isn’t that obvious and I found myself spending way too much time on finding this simple thing. Thus, I decided to write it down for my own future reference.
Read More “Change file’s date or time using console in Linux”
Testing your website, written in PHP, for GET request is a very easy task. All you have to do, is to manipulate your browser’s URL bar. And what about testing POST requests? Impossible?
Well… This Stack Overflow answer shows, that it is not only possible, but also fairly easy.
Read More “Use file_get_contents to simulate form submissions or POST requests”
If you use Multi-Rename Tool in Total Commander to batch-rename only folders and if all folders are numbered with dot after number (example attached and below) then multi-rename tool will treat all folders as filenames — i.e. it will “see” everything before dot (two characters in above example) as actual filename and all the rest, after dot, as file’s extension. Here is a quick fix for this situation (it actually may not be considered as bug).
Read More “Fix for multi-rename tool bug in Total Commander”
They say that SPAM bots are really good these days and can figure out your e-mail out of many “traps”.
I wonder, if they can catch it out of something like this:
<a
href="mailto:me.nononono@domain.nononono.com"
onmousedown="this.href=this.href.replace('.nononono','')"
onkeydown="this.onmousedown()">
contact me</a>
I prefer to think, they don’t and that they’ll crush their ugly spammy teeth on this! :]
Sometimes any attempt to install Google Earth standalone program or a plugin for your favorite browser ends up with error message: Error during execution of GoogleEarth.exe. Cannot find specified file. If you’re installing a plugin, directly from your browser, you can see an additional message saying that installation failed with error number 9. I don’t know, what exactly causes this to happen, but found an easy workaround for this.
Read More “Problems installing Google Earth client or plugin”
When your external USB disk or drive fails to be formatted by Windows system tools, next step is to hire vendor-specific tools, that usually ships to you along with that drive. If this also won’t help, then low-level format seems to be the only option. Here you’ll find some tips on how to do this under Windows.
If you ever run into situation, that your application works fine on localhost (or one of webhosting) but fails completely on webhost (or another server) then first thing, you should look for, is to check, if you don’t have an extra XHTML line in on of your files that you’re loading using include or require.
Meaning, that your loading and PHP-parsing these files. Because problem doesn’t exist, if you’re loading this files as simple text files, using file_get_contents for example.
Situation, I’m talking about most times causes a PHP syntax error saying, that there is an unexpected T_STRING in first line of one of the files used in an application.
Read More “Application works fine on localhost but fails on web server”I have created a simple CPage class, which I use in my non-Yii projects for easily rendering views, templates and whole pages using object-oriented approach. This class can render given contents into given view and embeded it in a selected layout file. These are very limited versions of Yii framework’s view and layout rendering mechanisms. I have also added a simple alerting system, this time taken from Twitter Bootstrap.
Here you’ll find an example (and some tips) of an extremely easy PHP code for recreating SQLite database. It can also be used to execute any SQLite query (or serie of queries) stored in a external file.
If you’re still lurking in the darkness of writing code with pure PHP and not using any framework then in this post you can find some nifty function, useful for drawing a HTML list boxes.
Basically it tries to render (draw) a <select> element basing on input data provided in $source variable. It can be either a list (key=>value) or string, where values and items’ texts are separated with delimiter. Such string can be provided directly or read from file. In this case you only provide path to a file (source of data).
Read More “Simple function for drawing HTML dropdown list from various sources”
Basic Yii application’s route consists of controller and action. Sometimes you have to add an extra separation layer, to group controllers and actions belonging to separate groups. Not everyone know, that you don’t have to use modules for this purpose. Controllers subdirectory can also be a considerable option. For me, this was a nifty discovery, so I decided to write this down as a personal memo.
Adding a omnibox shortcut to quickly search some site or language reference isn’t a hard task and it is discussed in thousand of blogs. However, by an accident I have found something better — an ultimate solution to PHP shit-littering and cretinism.
Read More “Searching PHP.net using Chrome omnibox”I’ve set myself quite big goal. To setup:
To achieve my goal, I needed a bit tweaked version of WordPress (network) plus a bunch of plugins.
Read More “Multi-site multi-language Markdown-styled WordPress network”