http://www.mzzt.net/tf2/

One of these days I’ll style it.

Mine is here.  The biggest change is I’ve gone for the look of the new Windows 7 Content view for files and folders … I like it very much.

In addition I have removed most of the excess whitespace, added hover effects, and added tooltip info to images.  In addition there are custom icons for some different filetypes, and it’s easy to change those.

There are also a couple interesting statistics at the bottom.

Download the source here (requires 7zip or a tool that can extract .7z files to use).

Shockingly IE8RC1 renders it correctly without requiring any hacks.  I did not test it with IE7 (I’m scared to, given the semi-hackish way I got the folder/file lists working without tables).  The latest versions of Gecko, Webkit, and Opera all handle it fine… and of course Gecko and Webkit get fancy rounded borders too.

For the future I might add some javascript in to allow for custom sorting and maybe different views for files/folders… who knows.  But that would require coding a lot of the template over in JavaScript.

Windows 7 introduces a new feature which allows you to add search engines right to Windows Explorer.  It’s not as convenient as in a web browser (the search engine is represented by a file somewhere on your computer that you download) but it works.

It uses the standard OpenSearch spec (with their own Microsoft twist, of course!) to query search engines which already conform to this standard.  Basically you can pass a script your search terms and get them back in an RSS or Atom feed which Explorer or any OpenSearch compatible client can parse and display how they like.

Google doesn’t offer any such feed.  So I made a PHP script to parse the HTML output Google feeds web browsers (using this library) and spit out an OpenSearch RSS feed.  Works pretty good.

Had a few annoying problems along the way… a big one was I couldn’t always get Explorer to parse it and it doesn’t tell you why.  For some reason I didn’t think to try to view the feed in Internet Explorer to get a more detailed error report.  Turns out Google pages use a different encoding than what I was marking the XML file with, and that was causing feeds with smart quotes to annoy Explorer.

Anyways it’s working now.  You can try it out with this.  Download and double click to have Explorer open a search window.  This DOES proxy the results through my server so don’t use that if you plan on using it regularly… here’s the source code.  Go put it on your own server.  Just remember to change the urls in all the files to point to your server instead of mine.

There’s an extra file, opendescription.xml.  AFAIK it’s not NEEDED for Explorer but it’s part of the OpenSearch spec so there it is.  This should be compliant with the spec, so not just Explorer can use it.

Hopefully I’ll get some more content on here soon, the latest beta of Windows Live Writer looks nice and works with my blog, not to mention this “QuickPress” thing in the new WordPress. Also I have made a bunch of new little programs I need to post and add to my resume portfolio which I will hopefully do soon.

It’s available at the top under Projects.

I need to blog more often, but here’s a quick catch-up summary: I like the Windows 7 new taskbar, though it rips off Apple’s Dock a bit much in functionality, who cares.  Been playing the Left 4 Dead demo, I love it, can’t wait for the full thing Tuesday, missed out on exploiting the “be a zombie” glitch before Valve patched it.  Still playing lots of TF2.

Still don’t have a job, grr.

Sooo… hi everyone visitiing.  You all have probably used more bandwidth in a week than my site has ever seen before… so thanks.  If you’re here that probably means you navigated one level up from my kill notification generator out of curiosity, so let me be your tour guide.

Check out my links on the right side and on the top of this page.  My “Projects” page has downloadable apps I’ve written, including a minimalist automated screenshot tool and a portable app compacting tool.  I also have a image index script which I overhauled based on garry’s.

I’m also looking for employment at the moment.  If you or someone you know is looking for entry-level desktop application programmers or web programmers in the area of Central New Jersey, I’d appreciate it if you’d check out my résumé, see if my skills are something you/they might need, and send yourself/them a link.  I’d appreciate it.

I am unsure if they are e-mails specifically targeting me or some sort of mass-e-mail to all blogs… I’m leaning toward the latter, since I never got anything like this before I moved my blog from its sub-domain to the main site.

I have not and will not ever put advertisements on my site.  My web host is happy when I put a small text link to his site in my site footer (actually I should put that back in now) but otherwise here are some conveniently numbered things I believe strongly in and will not change.

1. If a site or individual asks me to link to them, especially when I have never heard of them before, I likely never will, based on principle.
2. Any sites I do link will, 99% of the time, be because I like the site and the services it provides and want to share it with others.  It will be my own choice to share the site, without outside prompting.
3. I am not interested in monetary kickbacks for advertisements.  I don’t like ads.  I use AdBlock Plus in Firefox and I highly recommend them to everyone.  You can block ads individually or by domain, or you can go through a little extra work and setup a subscription to automatically keep your blacklist of ads updated.
4. Using Google Chrome, I started to get hit with ads again in the first time in years.  Since there’s no ad blocking for Google Chrome yet, I turned to a lower-level form of ad blocking at the OS level.  It’s not perfect (I still see a few ads, and it can’t block ads on the same domain as a legitimate website) and it doesn’t automatically update, but it’ll do for now.
5. I understand some users need ads to pay for their hosting, but blocking can’t hurt them since I have never clicked on ads anyway.  In fact it might help, since if I were to accidentally click on one and then back out of the ad site, it would register as a fake click and the website would lose money.  OK, not as good a point, but even if you disqualify it I still click just as many ads if I don’t block them.

So that’s my feeling about links on my website and about advertisments in general.  If these e-mails are specifically targeted at me, you now know it’s a waste of your time and mine.

That is all.

The guy has the right motivation and mindset for making this sort of plugin (he hates spam and wanted to avoid false positives while quashing spam) and it has plenty of options and vectors through which it can try and figure out if a message is spam or not. And it was very simple to drop in with zero configuration, except the “N spam messages quashed” footer doesn’t seem to be working, I’ll fix it later. I should probably get a simpler and faster theme while I’m at it. What was I thinking.

In other news I seem to be running into some annoying bugs in Scribefire and Wordrpess.  When Scribefire “publishes” anything I try to post, it schedules it for 5 hours in the future… instead of publishing it.  When I try to publish it with WordPress, it doesn’t work and it still shows up as scheduled.  I have to first change the scheduled time to some time in the past before it will let me change it to Published status.  Weird.

Update: It seems to be entirely WordPress bugs from a little more research.

AppCompactor compresses programs by using UPX to compress binary files and 7-zip to recompress archives. Interestingly shortly before I released it or even announced it John Haller came out of the blue and released a similar tool. And after I announced and released mine he renamed his to match… I know he saw my comment about my tool, he replied to it… but I’ll let him use the name too since he’s a nice guy. Check out his stuff.

Oh yeah, both of my programs require .NET Framework 2.0 or greater. Windows Update should recommend it to you if you don’t have it already. Vista ships with it.

Speaking of Vista, I always knew it ran slow on my machine but it was really crawling like I never remembered. I installed SP1 and that seemed to improve it a little, but I’m not going to use it regularly just for pretty borders and annoying pop up dialogs. Between XP and Ubuntu I believe I’m covered. Windows 7 sounds like it could be more promising, but so did Vista before half the feature set was dropped, etc.

I’ve been playing far too much Team Fortress 2 lately. There should be an update in a week or so with new content including a new map/gamemode, upgrades and achievements for the Medic class, and a new “Meet the…” video.

For April Fools I stuck a copy of a domain squatter’s index on my front page and asked various people in IM chat and on IRC if they could access my site, claiming I couldn’t. I got a few people with that. Good fun. The search box even points to Google. I thought that was a good easter egg myself.

I upgraded to WordPress 2.5. I also approved and disapproved some comments. I probably will forget about comments and never check them ever again. Oh well. There are actually still a number of “borderline” spam comments but I stopped caring once I got rid of the obvious ones. Maybe I can tweak my WordPress install so it’ll break bots. It would only take a change of one POST variable, really…

Now to complete this blog post by having every category tag I’ve made apply to this single post, I’m gonna talk about Wii stuff. OK. So Wii homebrew has become possible thanks to a buffer overflow vulnerability in the Twilight Princess save game loader and there are more and more homebrew apps becoming available every week. Right now it’s just ports of GameCube homebrew since I guess the Wii uses a superset of the old GameCube API. But I have faith that soon we’ll see ScummVM with Wiimote support, etc.

And I just realized WordPress has both categories and tags, which makes no sense to me because categories act like tags. Weird.

Well I had a few more minor things, but I’ve covered enough topics for one post I think. Enjoy my programs.