If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I just started on the planning needed to upgrade my site to the latest version of Wordpress (2.3.1) and wanted to be sure that the Semiologic theme that I use will be supported.  Strangely, there’s nothing on the Wordpress site one way or the other (which is surprising for such a popular theme) so I went to check out the Semiologic site.

Yet again, it’s down!  What’s more interesting though, is that the owner’s sales page promoting the Pro version of the theme (at $295!) is still up, suggesting that it’s not a server problem.

Come on Denis - sort your site out!!!

We all love to hate Microsoft but I think it does us good sometimes to find new reasons why!

I wanted to build a fairly simple ActiveX control recently and decided to brush up my VC++ skills (since I’ve been using almost exclusively C#.Net for the past 2 years).  So I dutifully fired up Visual Studio 2005 (with all the latest Service Packs) and went through the wizard to generate an MFC ActiveX control.  Before I get too many comments - I am fully aware of how optimistic that was…!

Now, whenever I create a new project in this way, my first step is always to compile it, since all projects built with the wizard compile, don’t they?  (There goes that optimism again!)  Well, no!  It doesn’t compile!  There are errors left, right and centre and after spending about an hour fixing some of them, I finally got tired and decided that the whole ActiveX project was to SAVE me less time than this on future projects!!!

Still, there’s always C#…!

I’ve had several emails from my subscribers asking me what my motivation is for creating this blog.  Well, I can finally reveal ( ) that I’m writing this to encourage me to to keep learning - and this is a powerful motivator!

I’ve done a lot of personal development in the past, and one of the perpetual themes that I kept coming across was that of constant learning.  Peter Thomsonsays “The day you stop learning is the day you stop earning”, and Tony Robbins has a complete system which he calls C.A.N.I. - Constant And Never-ending Improvement.

This has been instrumental in me creating this blog.  It forces me to seek out new information.  It forces me to understand things in sufficient depth to write sensibly about them.  It forces me, in short, to keep pushing myself to learn more about my chosen field - technology.

There’s another side to this too.  By writing a blog within a specific field, it brings me closer to like-minded people.  I’m sure I’m not the only person here whose friends are less technical than themselves so who crave technical discussion.  I find it thrilling when something that I write triggers a response from someone - even if they disagree with me!  Debate is healthy and I’m open enough to admit that I don’t have all the answers.

So come on, debate with me, challenge me, and keep me on the road to further learning!

Since I do a lot of development on my PC, I spend a lot of time working with the “My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects” folder.  However, I’ve been finding it inconvenient that I need to constantly browse down to it from within Windows Explorer so I set about trying to find a way to add a shortcut that appears in the main folder list on the left, as per the image below:

My first thought was to simply create a standard Windows shortcut on the desktop, since this is clearly what I needed.  However, shortcuts aren’t shown in this pane - I needed a folder.

Now, I could have just created a folder on the desktop and told Visual Studio to point to it, but I wanted to leave the original directory structure intact (and I don’t like to be defeated by a computer! ).  Clearly, I needed something along the lines of the “My Documents” functionality that allows you to point one directory to another.

I finally found what I needed in the form of NTFS Reparse Points.  It turns out that there are tools out there that will do this for you, but they are not without their challenges (such as the risk of deleting all your files!)  Unfortunately, information on how to create these manually is quite sparse, so I had to do some digging!

It turns out that there’s a registry key that allows you to specify a new target for a directory, if used correctly:

If this key is referenced in a Desktop.ini file within a system folder, we can set it up to redirect to a shortcut names 'Target' in the same folder!

How to do this

1. Create a new directory on the Desktop.
2. Create a Desktop.ini file in the new folder containing the following:
   
[.ShellClassInfo]
CLSID2={0AFACED1-E828-11D1-9187-B532F1E9575D}

3. Create a shortcut, also in the new directory, pointing to the actual directory of interest (in my case, the Visual Studio Projects folder).
4. Rename this directory to Target.
5. Now open a command prompt and navigate to the Desktop directory (ie. the parent of your new directory).
6. Execute the following DOS command to specify that your new directory is a system folder:attrib +s <New Directory Name> /s /d

   where <New Directory Name> is the name of the directory that you’ve just created.

Congratulations - you’ve just created your shortcut directory!

If you ever need to remove it, you first need to remove the reparse point.  To do this, go back out to a command prompt in the parent directory and type:

attrib -s <New Directory Name> /s /d

Now you’ll be able to delete the Desktop.ini file and the shortcut, as well as the actual directory.

Enjoy!

Everyone has an opinion regarding Microsoft - good or bad.  However, I hadn’t realised just how far some people will go to actively block any non-Microsoft web browsers.

Take a look at http://toastytech.com/good/badsitelist.html to see a worryingly long list of sites inaccessible to any browsers other than Internet Explorer.

Big Brother is watching!