Chris: Geek Guy

My employer’s SharePoint-powered external website – which I look after – uses ISAPI Rewrite to provide “friendly” URLs for certain pages, and also to redirect old URLs to their new locations. Coming from a LAMP background, this is great for me as it basically works the same as Apache’s mod_rewrite.

Previously the website responded to requests for both domain.com and www.domain.com, which is not ideal. SEO best practice is to either redirect the non-WWW version to the WWW version, or vice-versa. In my case, www.domain.com is the preferred format, so I’m using the following rule:

### Redirect domain.com to www.domain.com
RewriteCond Host: ^domain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http\://www\.domain\.com$1 [I,RP]

If you want to do the opposite, you’ll need this one:

### Redirect www.domain.com to domain.com
RewriteCond Host: ^www\.domain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http\://domain\.com$1 [I,RP]

The Include Gadget allows you to embed any HTML page within your iGoogle start page without having to go to the trouble of writing a true iGoogle widget. I’ve created a “Work” tab on my iGoogle page and I’m using the Include Gadget to display the latest news from my company intranet alongside some other useful gadgets, as illustrated below.

Like me, Darren Wright is fed up of seeing notifications in his news feed from applications such as FarmVille. Fortunately there’s an easy way to solve this, which doesn’t involve unfriending anybody!

Just click the Hide button next to one of the offending notifications, and you will be given the option to hide notifications from that application. Even better, this also stops the notifications from appearing on the Facebook mobile site, iPhone application and third-party readers such as TweetDeck.

Thanks to Darren for bringing this to my attention.

There’s also the option of switching to Facebook Lite, a back-to-basics version of Facebook which does away with applications altogether.

I just tried to install Google Chrome on my Windows 7 machine and was faced with this obscure error message.

I found the answer on the Chrome support site – it’s caused by the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Setup\State\ImageState

Mine was set to IMAGE_STATE_UNDEPLOYABLE. Removing this value enabled the Google Chrome installer to proceed as normal.

I’m currently testing out Google Chrome to see if it can replace Firefox as my main day-to-day browser, and have so far been quite impressed. However I hit a stumbling block when I tried to watch some tutorial videos on Microsoft’s site and was prompted to install Silverlight 3, which is unfortunately not supported on Chrome.

The easy thing to do at this point would have been to drop into Firefox or IE and install Silverlight from there, but where’s the fun in that?

Luckily the Silverlight 4 Beta seems to work fine in Chrome – all you need is the Windows Runtime component.

Buried in my AA (Automobile Association, that is…) renewal documentation, I spotted that they’ve provided land line telephone numbers as an alternative to the usual non-geographical 0800/0870 numbers, which cost extra from most mobile phones:

• For breakdowns, the number is 0121 275 3746.
• For membership enquiries, the number is 0161 332 1789.

Sites such as Say No To 0870 regularly publish user-submitted geographic numbers for many companies, but kudos to the AA for providing official numbers without having to jump through such hoops. Less kudos to them for taking 2 hours to tow my broken-down car, instead of the promised 45 minutes, but that’s another story.

By default, iTunes on Windows only supports multimedia keys when in focus. MmKeys.dll is a tiny (44K) addon which just needs to be dropped into your iTunes plugins folder to add support for most multimedia keyboards even when iTunes is running in the background.

I’ve been using it for the past couple of weeks and have found it really handy!

Google Reader allows you to star articles to read later, which is handy. However, I’ve been happily starring away items since I’ve started using Reader, and have built up quite a backlog. On the advice of a friend who was horrified by this, I decided to unstar all items before a certain date. Surprisingly, Google Reader doesn’t currently give you a way to do this, besides unstarring each item individually, which isn’t much fun when you have over 500, even using the ’s’ (star/unstar) and ‘j’ (jump to next item) keyboard shortcuts.

To automate this process, I whipped up this quick and dirty AutoHotkey script:

^!r::
Loop 600 {
Send s
Sleep 10
Send j
Sleep 10
}

As you may have worked out, this simply simulates a press of the ’s’ key, waits ten milliseconds, simulates the ‘j’ key, waits again, then repeats the process 600 times.

The first line of the file means “do the below when the user presses Ctrl+Alt+R”.

So all I had to do was save the script, double-click the .AHK file to activate it, then click on “Starred items” with Reader, click to open the first one and press Ctrl+Alt+R to instruct the script to start rifling through your items, unstarring them one by one. Because I had slightly less than 600 starred items, I found that the script “sticks” on the last item, starring and unstarring it repeatedly until I killed the script by right-clicking the “H” icon in the taskbar and clicking Exit.

Feel free to use my script to clear down your own starred items. If you find that the script seems to miss the odd item, you may need to increase the 10 ms delay.

Here’s a useful tutorial for WordPress users wanting to move to a different domain. I’ve had to carry out this process a couple of times and although it’s not rocket science, it’s handy to have a step-by-step list to ensure the process goes smoothly.

This is one of a series of WordPress guides that cover a whole host of topics.

Access 97, for some unknown reason, seems to chew up all available CPU when it’s idle. Microsoft acknowledges this but has never provided a fix or workaround. It turns out this isn’t much of a problem – if you have other applications running which need CPU time, Access will gladly relinquish it. But PCs and laptops have evolved in the past 10 years, and often have variable-speed fans, which invariably sound like a cross between a vacuum cleaner and a jet engine when running at full pelt. Fortunately, there’s an unofficial patch available to bring Access’ CPU usage down to a more respectable level. Being unofficial, it’s of course not supported by Microsoft (or even the author of the patch), but it does seem to work fine on my system. The patch needs the latest Office 97 Service Release (SR2b), a 24MB free download from this MS page.