Thursday, May 28, 2009

Useful jQuery Plugins

These are a few useful jQuery plugins that I have found while working with a few websites. I think they are great and easy to use. I'm sure I'll have to add more down the line, but jQuery is a great javascript library in and of itself that lends well to writing simple custom scripts.

Pngfix: fixes problems with transparent png images in Internet Explorer 5 and 6
Corner: creates rounded corners (as well as other corner effects) with only javascript.
GATracker: allows you to load the google analytics tracker very simply at the beginning of the page. Also allows for tracking of internal links such as pdfs.
AddThis: adds social bookmarking links to your website.
BeautyTips: Nice looking and flexible tooltips

ed. 6/1/2009 - added AddThis
ed. 6/12/2009 - added BeautyTips

Easy audio recording on your computer

I was looking for a simple way to record audio running in to a computer. The simplicity factor was a major deciding factor as it was going to be used by someone without that much computer experience. So, as I was looking for an inexpensive option, I took to looking through SourceForge to try and find something open source. I went through a ton of programs searching for just the right one and finally happened upon the Alis Recording Tool way down towards the bottom. The downloadable files hadn't been updated since 2006 but it does look like there is some activity in the SVN. Anyway, I made some changes to better fit it to our usage and decided to share the source which you can download here.

P.S. The build file uses Launch4j and Nullsoft Scriptable Installer System

Friday, May 22, 2009

How to Enable Automatic Complete for the Command Prompt (Cmd.exe)

While using the command prompt today, I started to wonder why the tab key didn't auto-complete the file paths I was trying to get to. Well, a simple search landed me on the Microsoft TechNet knowledge base article on how to fix it.
It turns out that the fix is a simple registry change:
To enable automatic complete for Cmd.exe, use Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe) to view the following registry key:


HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Command Processor


Edit the CompletionChar value, and set the value of REG_DWORD to 9. Note that you do not need to restart your computer.