Help make blogs more visible

There are by some estimates more
than a million weblogs. But most of them get no visibility in search engines. Only a few "A-List" blogs get into the top search engine results for a given topic, while the majority of blogs just don't get noticed. The reason is that the smaller blogs don't have enough links pointing to them. But this posting could solve that. Let's help the smaller blogs get more visibility!


This posting is GoMeme 4.0. It is part of an experiment to see if we can create a blog posting that helps 1000's of blogs get higher rankings in Google. So far we have tried 3 earlier variations. Our first test, GoMeme 1.0, spread to nearly 740 blogs in 2.5 days. This new version 4.0 is shorter, simpler, and fits more easily into your blog.

Why are we doing this? We want to help thousands of blogs get more visibility in Google and other search engines. How does it work? Just follow the instructions below to re-post this meme in your blog and add your URL to the end of the Path List below. As the meme spreads onwards from your blog, so will your URL. Later, when your blog is indexed by search engines, they will see the links pointing to your blog from all
the downstream blogs that got this via you, which will cause them to rank your blog higher in search results. Everyone in the Path List below benefits in a similar way as this meme spreads. Try it!

Instructions: Just copy this entire post and paste it into your blog. Then add your URL to the end of the path list below, and pass it on! (Make sure you add your URLs as live links or HTML code to the Path List below.)

Path List
1. Luke Hutteman's public virtual MemoryStream
2. The Occasional Tech
3. (your URL goes here! But first, please copy this line and move it down to the next line for the next person).

(NOTE: Be sure you paste live links for the Path List or use HTML code.)

Broken MSDN

See attached link!

Presentations: Powerpoint Templates for FREE

omg!!!!!!!1 totally sweet ppt tmplts

LaTeX: conflict between hyperref and bibentry (natbib) packages?

well? anyone know anything??

generates an error along the lines of:

! Use of \pdfmark@ doesn't match its definition.
\@ifnextchar ... \reserved@d =#1\def \reserved@a {
#2}\def \reserved@b {#3}\f...
l.25 ... \textbf{\bibentry{purvis02seng}}

at the point it hits the bibentry line.

Leave me a comment! nobody seems to know..

LaTeX: More new formatting tips

General help: here
This page is also great.

• Line spacing, line height:

• \linespread{1.0}

• \linespread{1.5}

• etc.
• Custom formatting commands:
• \newcommand*{\CommandName}{\textsf{Hello this is the New Command}}
• \newcommand*{\CommandName}[1]{\textsf{#1}}
• etc..
• Adding bibliography to your Table of Contents:
• \addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Bibliography}
• put this line _after_ the line:
  
• \bibliography{bibfilename}
  

LaTeX: error - missing $ inserted

Single $'s are used to indicate the start and end of math mode (i.e. typesetting of mathematical forumlae).
This error could, of course, occur legitimately if you left off a $ from your math mode section, however it ALSO occurs if you use an underscore _ or a ^ character outside of a math mode section.

THE FIX: enclose these characters in $'s or use something else.

LaTeX: inserting jpg files

First problem:

Command: \includegraphics[width=60mm]{input.jpg}

! LaTeX Error: Cannot determine size of graphic in input.jpg (no BoundingBox).

FIX:
\includegraphics[width=Xmm,bb=A B C D]{input.jpg}
where {A-D} are integers which describe the dimensions of the image's bounding box,
and X is a value with describes the width of the image.

Second problem:

Image sizing placement! i.e. the image is either massive and you can only see a corner, or it's the right size but is overlapping text.

FIX(es):
- enclose in a figure and add the environment variables (correct term?) [htp]
- scale the image back to a nice size for your doc
- set the width (or height, or both) of your image area
- set the bounding box because jpg's don't contain these (unlike EPS) - i am guessing the bb params are bottom left, top right x-y pairs, and are specified in millimetres by default. Trial and error is how you figure out the size of the bb.
- clip stops the image from overlapping text, but if your bb is too small, then.. image gets clipped!

Non-placement related stuff:
- caption text inside [] is what is displayed in the table of figures
- actual caption text is within {}
- label text is used for intra-doc cross-ref'ing


e.g.

\begin{figure}[htp]
\centering
\includegraphics[scale=0.2,width=80mm,bb=0 0 800 1100,clip]{Images/img1.jpg}
\caption[My Image] {My Image}\label{fig:img1}
\end{figure}

SQL Server import - Data Overflow. Invalid character value for cast specification

Error occurs when using SQL Server's Data Transformation Import Wizard to import data from Access and you have dates outside the following range: 1/1/1900 and 6/6/2079

Just run the query below on the offending table, and change the resulting dates to something like #1/1/2004 01:01:00 AM" (this depends on your column's date format)

Query:

SELECT TABLE_NAME.DATE_COLUMN_NAME
FROM TABLE_NAME
WHERE (TABLE_NAME.DATE_COLUMN_NAME) Not Between #1/1/1900# And #6/6/2079#;

thanks to attached page..

Battling procrastination

This should work for almost everyone:

• Go outside and do some exercise
• Think of someone you want to do better than

Things that might work:

• Visualise yourself completing the task

Things applicable to essay/report writers:

• Create a document skeleton
• If this doesn't get you going, revise it - as you go write in whatever content comes to mind. I call this the iterative approach.
  
• Get your template/general look all sorted out - you'll appreciate it later when the fruits of your procrastination come to bear

Preventative methods:

• Start early because:
• a small addition to your knowledge at time X1 becomes magnified at time X1 + a, where a is a couple of weeks. I think this is due to the human subconscious mind processing new information over time.
• This is the key: find a way to leverage/motivate the change in yourself. Main attributes to consider: pain or pleasure in the extreme. This is very hard to do later on, so again: START EARLY.
  

Things to remember:

• Stick to your beliefs and standards
  
• The beliefs must match the standards. If you have high standards but believe you are lazy and will do things at the last minute, then you may as well lower your standards right now.
• The pain of not doing what you feel you must, SHOULD be more than the pain you go through while procrastinating. Often this is not true because it is easy to cop out by doing things at the last minute and then forgetting the whole sordid episode occurred once the deadline has passed. This is common, but is a terrible state of affairs.
• You only have a finite time to complete the task. Do not overestimate your effort/time ratio. By now you should know what you're capable of. The first change to make is your motivation, NOT your work rate, because how could you possibly do this without first increasing your motivation.
  

Bad things (to avoid):

• Self-sabotaging thoughts

Repairing flashing question ? mark on os x startup disk

Some useful pages:

general
apple
Mike's open firmware page
igm

an interesting product

can't open: error
macosxhints

My particular symptoms:
Flashing question mark in a floppy disk icon when you try to boot.
If you try to boot into Single user mode (by holding down 's' while booting), you get the error "Can't open: " repeated many times. Following this, you get the flashing question mark again.

Things i tried:
Resetting the PRAM (hold down command-option-p-r until you hear two chimes (after the first one you hear on the first boot)) - didn't work
Booting into the OS X CD and trying to repair the disk. The startup disk couldn't have anything done to it - all greyed out. Size reported as zero bytes.
Booting into OS 9.2 CD. Disk First Aid utility couldn't recognise the disk.
Booting into Open Firmware (hold down cmd-opt-o-f until the OF shell shows up:
set-defaults
reset-all (mac will reboot)
-- didn't work!

I think the disk is dead. RIP.

Installing LaTeX packages (sty, cls) - TexLive

See the URL.

A problem you may encounter:

[LaTeX output]
! LaTeX Error: Two \LoadClass commands.
[Type 'h']
You may only use one \LoadClass in a class file

You may be trying to do a \usepackage{class} when you should be using the package on the documentclass level e.g.

\documentclass[a4paper,11pt,titlepage,draft]{thesis}

C# Global Variables

Everything must be defined in a class. Gone are the days of including header files.

Abstract Class vs Interface

If you know your classes will need to interact with other classes whose design may change, an interface is the way to go.

If you need to include some "base-level" or default behaviour (e.g. communications handling) in your class template then an abstract class allows you to do so.

Additionally, in C#, implementation of multiple interfaces is allowed, while multiple inheritance of base classes is not.

sshd server key refused authentication error

Key refused errors generally refer to permissions being incorrectly set on the public key files stored in the user's home directory (generally residing on the server running sshd.)

e.g. the sshd daemon may require the authorized_keys or authorized_keys2 file to be set to 600 or 700 permissions..

When your soulseek downloads are all failing..

..and you don't know why..

it's probably because your disk has 0KB free.. otherwise it's due to your net connection dropping out, but this should be more obvious..

Building NAnt 0.8.4 from src w/ Visual Studio .NET 2003

First of all, set up your PATH env var to point to \bin. If you're on Windows 2000, log out and log back in, so that the environment variable is registered in the dos box. If you don't want to do this, copy the PATH string and paste it into the dos box like this:

c:\> set path=THE_PATH_TEXT_YOU_JUST_COPIED

Then to build go to your nant directory and type: nant

I had two problems:

(1) A test fails in Tests.NAnt.Console.Test_ShowHelp().

To fix:

The copyright message (set in \src\CommonAssemblyInfo.cs, on line 37) was set to 2001-2003 for the AssemblyCopyright assembly attribute.

Just change this to be 2001-2004 or whatever year you are reading this.

(2) Other tests fail when it is trying to execute the HelloWorld test project. This occurred because i hadn't set the visual studio environment vars.

To do this, make sure your path includes your Visual Studio Tools directory, which will be something like this path: X:\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\Common7\ToolsIn win2k, log out and in, as above. Then type vsvars32.bat in a dos box. Then build nant again, by typing nant.

Everything should build now, and you will have the build result in: YOUR_NANT_DIR\build\net-1.0.win32\nant-0.84-debug\bin

LaCie firewire CD-RW w/ OS 9.2 + Toast

to get it working i needed to:

- disable Apple Firewire and USB Authoring extensions (duplicate your extension set and rename it to something like Toast FW CD-RW support
- Install LaCie silverlining pro 6.4.9 (download from http://lacie.com)
- User silverlining pro to set the Toast support drivers to load for the drive
- restart

MSIInstaller

Windows Installer Clean-Up Util

98/ME
http://download.microsoft.com/download/office2000pro/util22/1/W9X/EN-US/msicu.exe

NT/2000
http://download.microsoft.com/download/office2000pro/util20/1/NT4/EN-US/msicuu.exe

RegClean

free software

check it...

Cubase SX 2.0 setup with external MIDI hardware

Assuming you've sorted out MIDI communication and a decently low latency, these notes assume you plugged your keyboard into the computer's in and out MIDI ports. Then connected the rest of the MIDI hardware from the Thru port of the keyboard.

Open a new 16 channel MIDI project. Say you have a sampler in multi mode, so that each instrument is triggered on a separate MIDI channel. e.g. channel 1 = kick, channel 2 = snare, channel 3 = bass, etc..
In the project window, each channel has a record ("red dot") symbol and a monitor ("speaker") symbol. The record symbol turns on/off the channel's response to the keyboard. So, using the example above, if the first midi channel in the project has its red dot on then the keyboard should trigger whatever is bound to the output.
The speaker does the same thing more or less except it has a different purpose. It just lets you hear what's coming out of that channel, without accepting MIDI input for the channel. So say you're recording on one channel, but you want to hear another channel but not record any MIDI data into it (e.g. recording a lead and you want to hear the kick channel), you would hit the monitor button on the channel you want to hear.

If you're having problems with loading DLL's at runtime..

.. just copy them all into your executable dir.

MSVC Linker error LNK2020

basically this error means there is an unimplemented declaration.

No idea how to fix this except i did and did so by removing a static variable and making it non-static.

WinCVS - adding a directory to an existing module in the repository

Create the directory on your cvs server (ssh in or whatever)
From WinCVS, do an update on the whole module containing that directory
When that's done, the directory should be considered as a CVS dir.
Add the files that are in there and you're done.

LNK2019 errors

"unresolved external symbol"

First of all it can help to turn off Use Precompiled Headers.. project properties: C/C++->Precompiled headers.

I have read that it is caused by functions being declared but not defined. The errors show up when you try to use these functions.

Now here's the really moronic reason for the error:

REMEMBER TO ADD THE CLASS SCOPE TO YOUR FUNCTION DEFINITIONS

e.g.

Class1.h
class A {
dosomething();
}

Class1.cpp
A::dosomething() {}

NOT:

dosomething() {}


HOWEVER, there are still more reasons for the occurrence of this error.. hopefully they will appear here in the future..

VC++.NET How to convert System::String to char pointer

lookie here

This article also covers a bit about passing these char pointers to unmanaged functions. Very useful.

General Managed C++ comments and links

#using is for MSIL output files only, e.g. . You have to compile projects with /clr to make them MSIL.

System.IO.FileNotFound Exception. Additional information: File or assembly name BLAH, or one of its dependencies, was not found.

This error is weird. It seems related to mixing unmanaged code with managed.

OK, i seem to have the beginnings of a solution.. You MUST use pointers when declaring unmanaged types. I am thinking i will need to do a proper managed C++ wrapper class. See: Part I: Introduction to Wrapping C++ Classes.

Clean/Rebuild is your friend.

MSVC Linker error LNK1136

F R U S T R A T i O N

can't tell if this is because you can't link to a dll or because the dll is stuffed! more to come (hopefully)

-- Fixed this by putting the Test harness program (the one that was trying to use the dll) into its own solution and referencing the dll as a dll reference, not a project reference.

MSVC Compiler error C2129

This can be fixed by declaring the function as extern in your header file.

LNK2005 errors

These can happen while using VC++

One way to fix them is make all the offending "multiply declared" variables/functions static, so they are only declared once.

Another way is to check that you have no functions defined in your header files.

Compiling bzip2 on OS X 10.1.5

You must have the Developer Tools CD installed

1. Download: ftp://sources.redhat.com/pub/bzip2/v102/bzip2-1.0.2.tar.gz
2. cd to download location
3. tar -xvf bzip2-1.0.2.tar.gz
4. vi Makefile
5. Change line:
CC=gcc

to

CC=cc

6. exit vi
7. make install (to place binaries in /usr/bin, /usr/man, etc.. )

Macronix MX98715 NIC slow and dropping out

Background:
- Windows 2000 Pro computers only
- 100Mbps link
- computers connected via 100 Mbps switch
- driver loaded came with card (Skymaster OEM brand)

Symptoms:
- File transfer across LAN slow (< 1MB/sec)
- after 40MB of sustained solid transfer (e.g. large MPG or 100MB of MP3s) Windows reported the "lanman" error and transfer was halted.

Solution:
- downloaded generic chipset driver from: here (must log in)
- updated driver - no reboot

Outcome:
- network file transfers occur at 7-9MB/s
- no drop outs