Next up was Zencart. Zencart seems to be the premier open source shopping cart system on the web. I’ve always wanted to play around with it so I installed the latest stable version and started modifying it and adding my comic book collection. Zencart installed easily and without problems but stripping it down of the various unneeded buttons and links was a bit time consuming. Many of the options are hidden in many menus and the process doesn’t seem very intuitive. That being said Zencart seemed very feature rich and had everything an online store would need to conduct business on the web. Setting up the various modules was very easy and soon I had the store accepting paypal via my account and handling shipping accordingly.

I didn’t get to mess around with templates and zencart as much as I wanted. Code wise the template seems all over the place and I’ve already jumped to a half dozen places commenting out portions I didn’t want. I probably should have just picked another default template and installed it.

Both programs are free open source, so overall no complaints whatsoever. If I really had any problems I could just fix them. Isn’t open source fun?

Smarty is a template system for the web. I’ve been thinking of incorporating it into some of my projects but I know nothing about it. Anyone used it before?

I filed Issue 362 for SumatraPDF to show my commitment to updating their installer a bit. There is already one done at Issue 192 but it really seems hectic.

Editing the Windows XP Boot Menu seems pretty easy. Just edit the boot.ini.

I’ve got a router with DD-WRT setup with DNS-O-Matic so I can filter out certain sites at OpenDNS. I’m trying to set up a home.llynix.com address with all that jazz.

You see I don’t have a spare mouse and keyboard. When I’m working on another computer I simply use the mouse and keys I have tethered to my laptop. But after I set up the new computer now snug across the room out of the family’s way I found myself very much wanting a normal mouse and keys for my laptop.

After some searching I came across Synergy an open source, multi-platform, network keyboard and mouse sharing program. Unfortunately it has been out of active development for a couple of years now. That didn’t stop it from working like a charm once I had RTFM’d.

To save you some trouble I’ll let you in on the gotcha’s. Basically what you do is download the Synergy program to each of the computers your going to share. In my case this new desktop had the keys and mouse connected to it so it was the host computer. On the host computer you need to configure screens and links. It’s a little confusing but once you know the trick it’s easy. Synergy identifies computers by their computer names. So in my case I’ve got a computer named desktop and one named laptop. If your not sure of your computers name just right click on My Computer and choose properties. You’ll need to add a screen for each computer. Now once your screens are in place you need to add links. For my purposes I have a link set up that looks like ‘desktop is to the left of laptop’ and another set up that says ‘laptop is to the right of desktop’.

Now if all goes well hit start on the host computer and it should fire up. Next on the client computer, in this case my laptop load up Synergy and just connect to the host. You can apparently use the computers name to connect but if that doesn’t work you can use the local ip address of the host computer. To easily get this information on the host computer go to a command prompt and type ipconfig.

Hopefully if all went well you should now be able to zonk the mouse all the way to the right and presto. Your keys and mouse should now work fine on the client computer. If you have any problems check out this longer tutorial at LifeHacker.

So now I have two computers side by side, sharing internet, mouse and keys. Pure geek.

Each disk has two holes already as long as you click the write protect correctly. If you look at the bottom of the disk there are two holes that don’t go completely through the plastic. Using these as a guide drill them out for four disks. These make up your sides. For the bottom use another disk as a template. The two holes that come naturally on every disk can serve as a guide to drill identically spaced holes at the bottom of a disk. This should line up perfectly your four sides and then it’s just a matter of cable tying it together leaving the knot of the cable tie on the inside of the box.

In it he included this snippet of code:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">

</SCRIPT>


I haven’t decrypted it to display it’s contents but I know it’s just a simple javascript redirect to a rather nasty windows “anti-virus” site. I put that in quotes because it is anything but. This webpage even caught Firefox in Ubuntu for a loop and took a bit to shut down.

As soon as I found out all of this I reset the password and then upgraded Wordpress to the very latest version. One thing went wrong with the upgrade. The categories for some reason didn’t copy over correctly. Since I only have a handful of categories I manually updated them but it did take me a few to figure out why my website didn’t print any articles.

It’s kind of embarrassing, but I thought I’d share. Moral of the story: even on your dead sites, upgrade or go static.

I like to make pencil holders out of them.
You could try making a Starship Enterprise.
Or a Floppy Disk Bag.
This site shows how to make a notebook out of floppies, but I’d use cable ties instead of paper clips.
But if your really good and have a floppy drive lying around.

I started with album covers. Using a program called Album Art Aggregator I downloaded almost every album cover I needed. The program is fairly simple to use but does require the .NET libraries to run.

I then upgraded to the latest version of foobar2000 which was 0.9.5.4.

I had the chore of tagging my entire collection. But foobar has a few features to help out. Highlight an entire album, right click, then choose Tagging -> Get Tags from freedb. Hopefully you’ll be presented with multiple tag sets to choose from. If one isn’t found, right click, choose properties and in the Tools menu try out Auto-Fill tags. Foobar will generate tags for you based of the filename.

If you want to look good Columns UI is the way to go. It’s a little clunky to figure out at first but this might help, everything to tweak the design seems to be modifiable from File->Preferences then Display->Columns UI choose the second tab Layout. Play around with your right-click menus in there.

Another big boost is the Lyrics Panel. This handy plugin automatically downloads lyrics for your songs if it doesn’t find any.

My Foobar2000 Setup.

I had the opportunity to play around with it recently and I must say I’m impressed by its simplicity. Just download and install. Then the only hurdle is mounting your old files like this:

MOUNT C D:\My Old Dos Games

Now just zip over to them using DOS commands and run like normal. If you want full screen hit ALT+Enter.

I’ve got The Bard’s Tale and its sequel sitting on my desk. Can’t wait to hook up the old computer with a disk drive.

Customers are able to password protect their accounts in order to prevent social engineering attempts and such. Usually this process goes as well as normal passwords go. However in this case if the customer doesn’t happen to have their password they need to go out of their way to a store and verify their ID to get it changed.

Many times representatives for the company are forced to send a customer to the store even though clearly the mistake was the companies.

You see the password field the representative had to type in had no confirmation field. Sometimes a speedy rep would race through the form and be off in filing it out. As a result the date or an odd account number would end up as the password instead of what the customer requested.

This error has been fixed recently. But the lesson is clear: ALWAYS double verify new passwords. Even more so if your expecting your customers to jump through several hoops to reset it.