johnjcamilleri.com

Google Buzz: Stop getting emails via POP

John — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:05:01 +0000

If you use Gmail /Google Buzz and a POP client for your email, chances are you’re receiving a bunch of emails telling you about new buzz’s – including your own updates!

This is very annoying and there’s no direct setting to turn it off. However this guy has come up with a great solution, by basically creating a Gmail filter for emails containing the words in:buzz

An interesting way to avoid publishing your email address..

John — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:11:09 +0000

Check out this page: http://blacksapphire.com/antispam/

Not only does this guy require you to answer a mini quiz to prove you are human, but he will also generate a new email address for every person who wishes to contact him (which I imagine are only valid for a limited amount of time) so that he never has to give a single, spammable, email address..

I thought it was quite inventive!

johnjcamilleri.com is now seriffed

John — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:19:04 +0000

there’s just something I like about serifs, so I thought it was about time I seriffed the fonts on my own site.

other than that, it’s still the same old boring gray theme.. tbh i’m waiting for Wordpress 3 before my next major site facelift (not that the 2 are really related, but anyway…)

How to unescape HTML entities in JavaScript

John — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:44:40 +0000

This is one of those routine web development things which you assume is inbuilt, but actually proves quite tedious to find a nice solution to.

Specifically, I am talking about converting something like ' to ‘ or & to & directly in Javscript.
This function does exactly that! Note how it adds a function to the prototype for String, so is called in the following way:

"Hello José".unescapeHtml()

Find the code here: paul schreiber » Blog Archive » JavaScript: how to unescape HTML entities.

Goals for the new semester

John — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:50:12 +0000

Finish my final year project / dissertation (obviously)
Become a vi or emacs pro
Learn more about typography and font design
Get used to using SVN
Improve my handwriting to something slightly more elegant / less horrible
Enjoy my last few months as an undergraduate

Errors saving files in Windows 7 – “You don’t have permission to modify files in this network location.”

John — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:29:25 +0000

So ever since I’ve been using Windows 7, every so often I get this annoying error message when saving files, most often when using “Save link as…” from within Firefox (but not only). I would get this error, and the file would in fact be created taking up 0 bytes. However when trying to re-save over it directly after, it would work correctly… so wasn’t too serious an issue.

The full error message is:

You don’t have permission to modify files in this network location.
Contact the administrator per permission to make these changes.

(I thought the “per permission” looked a bit funny…)

Anyway, after looking at this thread, it seems it this issue is NOD32-related. The solution I tried was disabling the “Scan on File Creation” option within NOD32, found under Setup → Antivirus and antispyware → Real-time system protection.

You could argue it’s less secure, but it seems to have worked and it’s a price I’m willing to pay.

Hope this helps anyone having a similar problem.

qTranslate and multilingual META tags

John — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 23:23:02 +0000

I use Wordpress with qTranslate, but I needed to have multilingual META tags which qTranslate doesn’t support – so I wrote a plugin to do the job myself. It’s pretty basic, but I thought I would share in case anyone else needs something similar.

Plugin can be found on Wordpress’ Plugin site here: qTranslate Meta at WP Plugin Directory.

Windows 7 Backup – Update

John — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 10:17:28 +0000

So after my last post I had pretty much given on the Windows 7 backup. But then for some reason I got the suspicion that the hard drive I was using might be faulty. So anyway, I did a full scan disk and it did in fact find some bad sectors on the disk.

So I switched to another external disk and tried the whole thing all over again.. and it worked! Well, almost. For some reason it still kept complaining about a non-existant directory, C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\Web Development

Anyway this site gave me an obvious but useful solution: just create the empty folder it’s looking for! So I did and now it works properly without complaining. It’s still not my only backup, but it’s good to know I at least have it in case I need it.

Wordpress NextGEN Gallery – Thumbnail Generation PHP Memory Limit

John — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:54:13 +0000

The name says it all, if you use NextGen Gallery and have problems with GD thumnbnail generation, you might want to consider upping the PHP memory limit. You probably already suspected it, and it can be done by simply uncommenting one line of code.

Link here: Thumbnail Generation PHP Memory Limit NextGEN Gallery » Visser Labs.

Windows 7 Backup – bloody useless

John — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:58:56 +0000

As someone whos studies and work are totally computer-based, backup is an important issue to me. Until now I’ve relied on simple directory synchronisation – I can specify exactly what I want and know what exacltly is going on. I still use Directory Sync Pro, which is just great for most purposes.

However since starting to use Windows 7, I’ve been wanting to give the inbuilt Backup & Restore feature as a second backup. So I found a nice empty hard-drive for dedicating to this purpose, and went ahead.

First I just chose all the default options, which essentially backs up all your user profile stuff, and makes a “system image” (which it’s a bit vague about, but anyway). First it says it’s copying the files, which takes absolutely ages (hours and hours). The computer is usable during that time but sometimes it really slows down. Also there’s no pause button. There’s stop, but I have yet to see it actually work :/.

Anyway, then it finally gets to the system image, which takes even longer… long story short, for some reason mine would never complete. It would always get stuck at 83%, even after a whole night of working. At this point the computer is unusable – I pretty much had to do a hard-reboot. Tried again and it did exact the same thing, practically freezing at 83% then another hard reboot.

So I cleared everything, and decided to try again choosing “custom” this time. I selected my libraries and 2 folders in C:\, with no system image since that’s what seemed to be the problem before. This time it works for about an hour, getting to 25%, then suddenly finishes saying the backup was incomplete because it skipped some files. When I look at the log to find out what it skipped, it’s some non-existent file: C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\Web Development

Last chance I thought.. I changed the backup settings and removed some insignificant stuff like the contacts folder – then start the backup again, it takes 6 whole hours to get to 100%… but then complains about the same file!

At this point I lost hope. There’s definitely something in the backup, but it never “completes”, always complaining about that file. So honestly I don’t know how much I can trust it…

My conclusion: you’re probably better off with something else. Anyway if anyone has had similar (or different) luck with it I’d love to know…