Chris: Geek Guy

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’ve spent some time today trying to figure out how to set the title of a SharePoint page from my own code. As blogger Michael Becker rightly points out, you can’t simply set Page.Title.

The correct solution, as provided by Michael, is illustrated in this example C# code:

// Get a reference to the appropriate Content Placeholder
ContentPlaceHolder contentPlaceHolder = (ContentPlaceHolder)
                       Page.Master.FindControl("PlaceHolderPageTitle");

// Clear out anything that SharePoint might have put in it already
contentPlaceHolder.Controls.Clear();

// Put your content in
LiteralControl literalControl = new LiteralControl();
literalControl.Text = "Your text goes here";
contentPlaceHolder.Controls.Add(literalControl);

Happily this even works when you “cheat” by hosting an ASP.NET user control within a SmartPart, as opposed to creating a bona fide Web Part.

The BBC Future Media & Technology team have announced that their first official iPhone application, BBC News, is currently under development and due for release next month.

I’ve had a play with the online demo and it looks pretty slick, so I’m looking forward to installing the app when it becomes available.

The BBC are also planning to follow up with a BBC Sport application, and they’re also considering an iPlayer app in order to provide a richer experience than the current iPlayer mobile site.

Cleverly-named SeeSaw is a new catch-up TV service with content from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five. While much of the content is already available on the respective broadcasters’ own on-demand services, it’s nice to have everything in one place.

The site boasts a slick user interface that’s a pleasure to use, and I found the picture quality to be very good with no buffering problems to speak of.

Clearly the site has to make money somehow, and in SeeSaw’s case it’s through video advertisements embedded into the programmes you watch, something that commercial TV viewers are used to seeing.

SeeSaw have future plans to licence programmes from a wider range of broadcasters, which will enhance the service’s appeal.

Interestingly a TV licence is not required to use on-demand services such as SeeSaw – you are only legally obliged to buy a  TV licence if you watch broadcast TV.

Google offer a standalone installer for the Windows build of Google Chrome, as opposed to the standard download which is actually just a small stub application that connects to Google’s servers to download and install the actual browser.

The offline installer is handy if you have a number of machines on which to install or update Chrome, but unfortunately Google haven’t updated it recently, so you end up with version 3.0.195.38 rather than the latest all-singing, all-dancing, extension-supporting version 4.0.249.89.

You can of course update to 4.0.249.89 from the About screen, but this defeats the purpose of using the standalone installer in the first place, and you may be unlucky enough to be on a corporate network which breaks the in-browser upgrade functionality.

By using Fiddler2 to monitor the activity of the stub installer, I was able to establish that it connects to the following google.com URL to download the latest build:

http://cache.pack.google.com/edgedl/chrome/install/249.89/chrome_installer.exe

This is your standalone/offline installer, which can be used to install new instances of Chrome or upgrade existing ones (in which case the installer will upgrade your browser silently).

Google release new builds fairly frequently, so keep an eye on the Google Chrome Releases blog and substitute 249.89 with the build number of the latest stable (or development, if you’re feeling brave) build, e.g. http://cache.pack.google.com/edgedl/chrome/install/322.2/chrome_installer.exe for version 5.0.322.2.

Ninite is a free (for personal use) service which allows you to download and install several popular pieces of Windows software in bulk from a single installer – great when building a new PC or reinstalling an OS on an existing machine.

When you visit the site, you are presented with a list of well-known free and trial applications. Just select the ones you’re interested in, click Download and you’re presented with a small (~200K) stub installer which, when launched, downloads and installs each chosen application without user intervention.

I’ve just tried it on a new machine I’m setting up, and although it takes a while to download and install everything (I had selected quite a few apps), this part of the process is completely automated so you’re free to do something else while you wait.

Today I’ve been playing with Return of SmartPart 1.3,  a shim which allows you to create SharePoint 2007 web parts using Web User Controls (ASCX files) created by Visual Studio/Visual Web Developer.

This is probably the least painful way for C#/VB.NET developers to delve into web part building without having to worry too much about the intricacies of the SharePoint platform.

Complete with setup wizard, comprehensive user guide and sample user controls, it’s a snap to get running, although you will need access to your SharePoint server both to install the SmartPart and any custom user controls. It also optionally supports AJAX controls, after installing Microsoft’s ASP.NET AJAX extensions.

There’s no need to use strong naming or even compile your controls – just drop the .ascx (and .ascx.cs/.vb, if necessary) files into your usercontrols directory and you’re good to go.

This list of Lifehacker readers’ most recommended free apps contains some real gems, including some of my favourites (Google Chrome, Dropbox, uTorrent, Gmail, Winamp etc.)

The beta version of Google Chrome has supported extensions for many months, but Google today released a stable Windows version of Chrome 4.0 which supports extensions together with a handful of other features and improvements. Both The Official Google Blog and the Google Chrome blog have full details.

To get the update, click the About Google Chrome menu option (viathe spanner icon) and click Check for Updates.

I’ll keep this post short and sweet as I’m now off to the extensions gallery to pick up some new enhancements for my favourite browser!

I noticed today that the Google logo shown at the top of all search results is actually a composite image, sliced up through clever use of CSS positioning:

At first, I thought of this as nothing more than a neat trick, but then I began to think about why Google might have decided to use this technique to their advantage.

Whenever a client browser requests a page, it will also make a request for each of the images (and other media) embedded into the page. Once an image has been displayed once, it is usually cached client-side to conserve bandwidth and improve performance for subsequent loads. For example, the RSS logo at the top of my blog will be downloaded from my server on your first visit, but as you move through the site, future references to the file will be fulfilled from your browser’s cache.

Google isn’t particularly image-heavy, but a typical results page could contain five or more ’sprites’ or graphical elements. By squeezing them into a single file, user’s Web browsers need only make two requests (one for the page itself and one for the composite image) instead of six or more.

This might sound trivial, but considering that Google serve billions of result pages to millions of different visitors every day, the cumulative saving in bandwidth and server resources is likely to add up to quite a figure.

If you operate a moderately high-traffic site, it might be worth considering using similar tactics. The only other site that I’ve noticed that has used CSS image slicing in this way is the now-defunct Cdiscount UK site, for its pricing images.