Rolling Resource

I recently upgraded my Adobe Reader to version 10.1 )Adobe Reader X) and all the buttons disappeared, meaning that you could no longer zoom in or navigate your way around the document; it appeared that the only way to scroll through a document was using thumbnails if the document opened in a browser window or to download the document and open it in a standalone copy of Adobe Reader. Even the annoying buttons which used to appear in Adobe Reader 9 (if you had the mouse in the right place) no longer appeared. These changes rendered Adobe Reader useless for my purposes.

I also tried using right click on an open PDF file to edit the ‘Page Display Preferences’ and clearing ‘Allow documents to hide the menu bar, toolbars and window controls’ under Documents, but with intermittent results.

The solution is to press F8 every time you open a PDF in your browser.

If you are running any version of Firefox, you may be getting frustrated that the Search Box (next to the ‘Awesome Bar’) only features Google, Yahoo, Bing, Amazon.com, ebay and Wikipedia by default.

I tried searching about:config for google and changed all references from google.com to google.co.uk, but without success. It turns out that the definitions are saved in XML files. You can either edit these directly, or install the necessary add-ons. I tried Get more search engines… from Manage Search Engine…, but was presented with a befuddling confusion of options. The two I ended up adding were Google UK- the web, which although marked as experimental is fault free, and always ‘.com’ which is the converse and forces use of google.com.

In Windows, the XML files for the default search engine are saved in %ProgramFiles(x86)%Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins while the custom definitions are saved under %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\???\searchplugins (where ??? is your profile)

The two add-ons are very similar in structure as can be seen from the XML code below:

<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
                       xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>Google UK - the web</ShortName>
<Description>Search Google UK with "the web" selected - includes Google suggest</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
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<Url type="application/x-suggestions+json" method="GET" template="http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?output=firefox&amp;client=firefox&amp;hl={moz:locale}&amp;q={searchTerms}"/>
<Url type="text/html" method="get" template="http://www.google.co.uk/search?q={searchTerms}&amp;hl=en&amp;btnG=Google+Search&amp;sourceid=Mozilla-search&amp;start=0" />
<moz:SearchForm>http://www.google.co.uk/</moz:SearchForm>
</OpenSearchDescription>

and

<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/" xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
	<ShortName>Google.com (in English)</ShortName>
	<Description>Google.com that doesn't default to local Google site when outside US, without restricting search to the English language</Description>
	<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
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	<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">
		<Param name="hl" value="en" />
		<Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}" />
	</Url>
	<moz:SearchForm>http://www.google.com/</moz:SearchForm>
</OpenSearchDescription>

so it should be fairly simple to create a suitable XML file for any search engine.

By default, Firefox comes with a US English dictionary. To change this to British, install the addon from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/british-english-dictionary/.

The simplest way to activate the dictionary is to misspell something in a search box, right click it and select “Check Spelling”. Right click again, then select “Languages/United Kingdom”

I needed to create a BartPE Boot disc, but got the error “Source files wrong version. File version of d:\i386\intdll.dll is 5.1.2600.0 should be 5.1.2600.1045 or higher. You must use Windows XP Service Pack 1 or Server 2003 version of windows”

In order to update the files on a Windows installation CD, you need to go through a process called ‘Slipstreaming’. This is the process of including the Service Pack files into the original disk. I tried following the instructions at WinSuperSite, but ran into a problem as my XP disk is an OEM version from Dell, which already includes their updates. When trying to update the original, I received the error “This ServicePack cannot be integrated into a destination that also has integrated SoftwareUpdates.”. I therefore needed to use the nlite utility instead which miraculously removes the hotfixes and painlessly slipstreams the Service Pack into the original. Oh Happy Days

nlite will also do all the hard work to create a bootable image for you.

I use Twitterfeed to spread another blog around the internet via Twitter and Facebook

This normally works very well, but sometimes Twitterfeed seems to miss a series of posts. To understand why, we must look at the raw RSS feed. Each item in Blogger’s RSS feed has the following parameters:

• <item>
  • <guid> (unique identifier)
  • <pubDate> (timestamp)
  • <atom:updated> (timestamp)
  • <category> (one per tag)
  • <title>(of article)
  • <description> (text of article)
  • <link> (to article)
  • <author>
  • <thr:total> (number of comments)
• </item>

The problem is that Blogger feeds its posts sorted by Update time (<atom:updated>), while Twitterfeed expects the feed to be sorted by pubDate.

In order for your posts to appear, you need to change some of the Advanced settings. Change the ‘Post Sorting’ parameters so that new items are posted based on GUID and clear the checkbox ‘Feed is sorted’