2007-11-24

Windows Time Sync

Sometimes you need to know if your computer has the correct time, what do you do to ensure that?

On Windows XP you double click on the clock in the right corner of your screen select "Internet Time" and click "Update Now". All the times I did this I got an error. Windows has only two entries in that combobox, and both return errors, why?!

Today I have gone a step further I googled for more Internet Time Servers, on this page I've found plenty. For example Germany has 214 servers in a time server pool (de.pool.ntp.org).

It was about time ;-)

2007-11-10

New Updates to MFC in Visual Studio 2008

Here is an half an hour interview with Pat Brenner on the topic "New Updates to MFC in Visual Studio 2008".

A very informative movie, my favorite quote is "we kinda moved out from the '90s"!

And a quick summary:

What's new for MFC developers:
  • Ribbon

  • Customisable Menubar / Toolbar

  • Visual Studio 2005 like Docking

  • Tabbed MDI

  • New status bar

  • and many more



  • You can get a full visual tour on what's new on the Visual C blog entry.

    Here is a screenshot of MFC demo made by the Wizard:




    All this functionality is available now from 3rd party vendors, but this will be backed by Microsoft. Impressive!

    Edit MFC Update powered by BCGSoft as you can read here.

    Y!M 9.0 Without Ads

    One way to disable the ads from the main window of Yahoo Messenger 9.0 is to cut access to one specific file. With this version it doesn't work any more the trick of clearing the file and making it read only.

    If you have installed Y!M on a NTFS file system you are lucky, you can remove the Read security attribute and the ads are gone (at least until they fix this too).

    Here is the code to remove the access to the file from the command line, or batch file:
    cacls "%PROGRAMFILES%\Yahoo!\Messenger\Cache\urls.xml"  /E /P %USERNAME%:N


    If you want to bring the ads back because they were adding color to your contact list here is the command line to do just that:
    cacls "%PROGRAMFILES%\Yahoo!\Messenger\Cache\urls.xml"  /E /P %USERNAME%:F


    I hope they won't read this blog and fix the hole until the final version 9.0 gets out next year ;-)

    Edit: by upgrading to version 9.0.0.907 I found out that removing reading rights from the file was not enough, you need to fiddle with the Windows Registry e bit. Here is a batch file that does it for you:

    @ECHO OFF
    TITLE Remove ads from Yahoo Messenger 9

    > %TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO REGEDIT4
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO.
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Yahoo\Pager\YUrl]
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "First Login Beacon"="noads.html"
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Change Room Banner"="noads.html"
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Finance Disclaimer"="noads.html"
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Messenger Ad"="noads.html"
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Chat Adurl"="noads.html"
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Calendar Alert Ad URL"="noads.html"
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Conf Adurl"="noads.html"
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Mail Alert Ad URL"="noads.html"
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "News Alert Ad URL"="noads.html"
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Personals Alert Ad URL"="noads.html"
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Stock Alert Ad URL"="noads.html"
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Webcam Viewer Ad Medium"="noads.html"
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Webcam Viewer Ad Big"="noads.html"
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Webcam Viewer Ad"="noads.html"
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Webcam Upload Ad"="noads.html"
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Chat Transition Ad"="noads.html"
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "N2Phone Adurl"="noads.html"
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Webcam Viewer Ad Bid"="noads.html"
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "IMVironment Ad URL"="noads.html"
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Auction Alert Ad URL"="noads.html"
    >>%TEMP%.\noYMads.reg ECHO "Login Mobile Ad"="noads.html"
    REGEDIT /S %TEMP%.\noYMads.reg
    DEL %TEMP%.\noYMads.reg

    cacls "%PROGRAMFILES%\Yahoo!\Messenger\Cache\urls.xml" /E /P %USERNAME%:N

    2007-11-09

    Yahoo Keyboard Patch!

    Yahoo! Messenger had a very annoying problem, text selection with Ctrl-A was done when it shouldn't be done.

    For example Windows maps AltGr key to Ctrl-Alt keys combination, which is default behaviour. Yahoo! Messenger treats AltGr-A as Ctrl-Alt-A but then it gets the Ctrl-A part, whole text selection, and afterwards it goes to normal keyboard handling, which with a certain Romanian keyboard layout generates the character "ă", but because the text was selected before, "ă" was the only character left in the sentence you wrote.

    This was very annoying, but then by using the wonderful Microsoft technology called Detours I was able to intercept certain WIN32 API Messages and prevent the text selection from happening. Yahoo! keyboard patch was created.

    Cristian Secară was very nice to host this patch on his webserver, also he made some very good suggestions which improved whole the quality of the software.

    The patch is available at this location (Romanian language only).

    Note: this patch also works with other keyboard layouts, for example the Hungarian default keyboard layout can be used to generate the character "ä" now.