Web Talk

There is a bug affecting Windows Vista that may prevent your computer from displaying the name of folders and files in Windows Explorer. Some people call it Easter egg, but I think that it does not have anything to do with it. If you are looking for a real Easter egg in Vista, click here. This bug or feature lets you hide the name of folders and files in Windows Explorer giving a more compact  and tidy look to the whole  window. To take advantage of this feature (or bug) read this trick:

1. Click Start.
2. Click Computer.
3. Select your Hard Disk.
4. Now press CTRL + SHIFT together, and click on the Views button a lot of times to quickly switch among the different views available to display  the contents of the folder. At a certain point the folders’ name will disappear all of a sudden.
5. To revert the process just continue to browse to other folders

If you computer is experiencing this issue the only solution which seems to work is to perform a disk check and turn off and on the computer. To perform a Disk Check and fix the issue, follow these steps:

1. Click Start.
2. Click Computer.
3. Right click on your Hard Disk.
4. Click Properties.
5. Click the Error tab.
6. Under Error-Checking click Check Now and tick the two options available.
7. Turn the computer off and on.

A few days ago I spoke about the new Wordpress 2.5 and its nasty bugs located in the Media Section. The all new Media Section is based on Adobe Flash technology and lets you upload multiple files at once into the gallery. The whole process can be followed thanks to the new indicator bar. Anyway the upload process is buggy and at some point, it stops working with the result that files are not uploaded at all. The symptoms are very different. A few of them include: nothing happens when you try to upload a file; after the word “Crunching” appears the uploading process stops; HTTP errors; during the upload the browser crashes or freezes; media buttons disappears etc. There are a lot of ways to fix this issue while waiting for the new Wordpress release. Some of them are listed here. Another fix can be applied by downloading a patch. More support and workarounds can be found here. If you have issues with Media Section and you are using Firefox try this trick. If you have issues with Media Section and you use Mac OS X browser try this trick. Continue reading »

So, this is the news of the day. The much awaited Wordpress 2.5 is finally out. This new version can be considered a real milestone, bringing the end-users lots of new features above all in the back-end side. If you want to know more about this new version, you can read this page. For a brief list of its features read this page. Keep in mind that Wordpress also adds new interesting features as far as Wordpress themes are concerned. If you want to know if your theme can support the new Wordpress, or if you just want to know what to add in your code theme in order to take advantage of its new features, visit this page. Anyway, for your peace of mind, the only thing you will have to do, as far as your theme is concerned, is to add this code in the comment loop:

<?php if(function_exists('get_avatar')){ echo get_avatar($comment, '50'); } ?>

This piece of code will enable your theme to show avatars next to each comment. If you want to know more about new features related to Wordpress themes, read this article. To check if your theme is conformed to the norms or standards defined by various organizations, read this article.
For a complete list of those plugins working with Wordpress 2.5 visit this page. If you want to run some preliminary checks in order to see if your blog is ready to be upgraded, you can use this plugin. As a general rule, before upgrading back up your blog and its database. As far as I am concerned, I think I will wait some more time before upgrading my blog. In fact this new version is far from being perfect (this works for all new releases of course) and I want to be sure everything is really ok. So, I will just upgrade when the 2.5 Sp1 version will come out. One of the flaw which is constantly reported by users during these hours, is a problem with the Media Section. Whenever you upload an image or look at the gallery, none of the image previews is shown. Plus, one of the plugins this blog uses namely Simple Tags, is reported to work funny sometimes. Read this page to know more about Simple tags’ bugs. Anyway the general Wordpress 2.5 feel and look is nice, smooth and more effective. I really like this new version of Wordpress. It provides the blogger with a lot of new tools and features to tune, organize and manage its blog. Once again, well done Wordpress!

This is really a bad news for all of those people (and myself too) who have got a Gmail. As a matter of fact it looks like the famous captcha, so important and necessary if you want to open a Gmail account, has been cracked allowing in this way spammers to create as many accounts as wished, in order to spam as many Gmail accounts as possible. But why Gmail? Firstly, Gmail is one of the most used email accounts in the Internet, secondly Gmail bases its filter upon a blacklist which, of course, doesn’t include all those email accounts with gmail.com extension. Now, having many Gmails means opening the gate to spammers who are sure to bomb effectively their Google targets. The program used to read the captcha is being said to be far from perfect, but anyway it manages to create an account out of five attempts. The percentage is really good, isn’t it? Let’s hope Google is going to put a patch on this dramatic problem.

The new N810 seems to have a little bug on its browser. As a matter of fact once you lunch the browser it gets stuck for about 10 seconds while consuming 100% of the CPU. After 10 seconds everything starts working fine. The trick here is to remove the /home/user/.mozilla folder and restart the browser.

Source: bugs.maemo.org

If you have a blog and you want to know if everything is all-right with it, you have to pay a visit to a couple of websites. The first one is PopURI which tests your blog popularity by checking some important ranking websites such as: Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati etc or the most important social bookmark: del.icio.us. The second website is TestEverything which performs the most common tests with important tools such as: CSS and HTML validators, SEO tool, Social Services tool, Text tool, Image tool etc. You will be amazed at the amount of errors your blog has. (I was very surprised with my site since it contains dozens of errors which I will correct…sooner or later)

According to PcWorld the first biggest Tech Disappointment of 2007 is Microsoft Vista. Well, if you ask me I would say this is not a big surprise since everywhere we listen to people complaining of such O.S. My Hp laptop sports a nice Windows Vista Home Premium which is nice and eye-candy oriented but it is full of bugs and slower (as far as the transfer of files is concerned) than Xp. When I come to think about Vista I get the feeling that it has never come out of its beta version, one of the last but nevertheless a buggy version which had to be revised many times before throwing it on the market accompanied with a big fanfare.