As I value screen space more than gold, I hate it when status messages show up and bloat my list size to twice its original size. Most people think that this is the aftermath of Google’s new Buzz. Well, no actually, this happens because the setting to hide the statuses isn’t an inbuilt feature in Google Chat, but is a Google Labs feature. Its called Muzzle and Google have silently removed it from the Labs database, along with it some other features listed here [Gmail Labs graduation and retirement]. I can understand when they say they want to clean up, but keeping the Back to Beta feature which just adds a beta label to GMail and eliminating Muzzle seems utterly stupid.

The only solution that I have found so far is to use a greasemonkey script which will hide the statuses and make it behave normally. You can find it here [GMail Muzzle Lab Reviving]. If you are not familiar with scripts read this [Installing Scripts]. I will update this post when there is a better alternative to this.

WordPress

The Upgrade :

1. Backup the following files and folders :
   • wp-content (backup the whole directory)
   • wp-config.php (file)
   • Database (using phpmyadmin, backup the whole database, safe.)
2. Downloaded the latest WordPress here.
3. Delete all the old WordPress files .
4. Extract and upload (or upload and extract) the new WordPress files.
5. Copy the wp-config.php to the WordPress root directory.
6. Run wp-admin/update.php (http://yourwordpresssite/wp-admin/update.php). It will ask for a database upgrade, continue. If all goes well it will redirect to a blank page.
7. Delete the new wp-content directory and upload your old wp-content directory in place of it.
8. Visit your site!  All your posts and plugins will be active and it will look the same! (All incompatible plugins will be disabled automatially, but most of the plugins that work with 2.6.* also work with 2.7
9. Admin URL is the same: http://yourwordpresssite/wp-admin/

Known Issues :

1. If you by chance cannot see the left navigation menu, disable any menu optimizing plugin that you have installed before like Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu plugin or Lighter Menus. Do that by deleting the corresponding plugin directory in the wp-plugins directory.

Successfully upgraded my site by exactly following the above steps :). The new admin interface is brilliant! Its good to look at and the interface is just amazing. Moreover, once you upgrade to 2.7 you don’t need to follow this painful upgrade process every time a new version is released. You can directly upgrade from the admin interface. Cheers ;)

1. Navigate to the folder :
   • XP users :C:Documents and Settings\USER_NAME\Local Settings\Application Data\Activision\CoDWaW\players\profiles\
   • Vista users : C:Users\USER_NAME\AppData\Local\Activision\CoDWaW\players\profiles\
2. Delete all the folders in there.
3. Create a new folder with the name of the Profile ex: tHeSiD (folder remains empty)
4. Create text file: active.txt (must NOT be readonly)
5. Open active.txt and type in your profile folder name (tHeSiD)

Thanks to ju7er117 at mininova for this fix :)

I eventually disabled the plugin and the titles were reverted back to WordPress default. Blog name – Post title. I didnt want that either. I want Post title | Blog name. I checked the template header file and rearranged the wp_title() function and the bloginfo(‘name’) variable. There was still a problem with that, the separator was still on the left side. The title looked like this ” » Post title | Blog name “.

I went on to codex and researched a bit, unlike the older versions wp_title() does take parameters. Setting the right parameters can help customize the way the title of the post is displayed. Here is an example, one I used for this blog.

Originally

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<?php bloginfo('name'); ?><?php wp_title(); ?>

This resulted in a Title of this format. “Blogname » Post title”

You can change that to this

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<?php wp_title('|',true,'right'); ?><?php bloginfo('name'); ?>

This results in a title of this format “Post title | Blogname”

A small tweak but really helpful when you want your search listings proper.

For more information and customizations of your own read the wp_title() documentation here. Template Tags/wp title

1. Replace vmmouse driver with mouse driver in xorg.conf
Open the xorg.conf file

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sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

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Section "InputDevice"
Identifier  "VMware Mouse"
Driver      "vmmouse"

Scroll down to the Driver entry in that section and change vmmouse to mouse
Save and reboot.
This is just a minor fix, in some cases there might still be problems in full screen mode and you cant shift from the virtual machine to the host easily.

2. To fix all the above issues and enable proper vmmouse implementation in the guest,
Open the xorg.conf file

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sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

and add this to the xorg.conf file

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Section "ServerFlags"
        Option      "AutoAddDevices" "false"
EndSection

Save the file and reboot.
This will enable true vmmouse and the mouse will track perfectly.

PS: I used sudo here, if you haven’t configured sudo on your system, enable it or just use the root shell.

Tested on (FF3.0 Vista/XP)

To get it to work,

1. Enter about:config in the address bar and hit enter
2. Look for a value named middlemouse.paste, you can use the filter for searching it.
3. Double click on the value to change it to true.
4. Thats it, you can now paste with the Middle Click!

about:config showing the default setting for the option

about:config page showing the option changed to true

First of all, go here » Rating Services and familiarise yourself with the type of requests and the variables.

Now, to add the ratings to the sidebar, there are two ways. One, You can directly edit the template and add the code in the sidebar.php. This is the simplest way. There is a problem with this though, you cannot place the widget at any place you like, you can only add it either at the top or the bottom of the dynamic sidebar which is controlled by wordpress.

The other and a better way is to add the a widget with your code via wordpress so that you have full control over its position. WordPress has a Text/Html widget but it doens’t parse PHP on the fly, so download and install this plugin » PHP Code Widget. This plugin allows us to insert and execute php code in a widget. After installing the plugin, in the widgets page, a “PHP Code” widget will appear, add it to your sidebar, click on edit and enter the php code. Save and refresh. The code will now be executed.

Coming to the code to display the ratings, its similar to the example on the Rating Services page. Its simpler if you are displaying the ratings of just one user. First, we have to prepare the request URL. If your user name is tHeSiD and you want the ratings from the AoC Random Map ladder, the URL will be

http://www.igzones.com/ratingservices?ladder=AoCRM&player=tHeSiD

The format would be

http://www.igzones.com/ratingservices?ladder=<ladder>&player=<username without clan tag>

The response to this will be a Comma Separated Values string

example : 114752,tHeSiD,1622,56,53,0,1,AoCRM,1233541,2008-08-27 19:14:43

The values are in the following order

User ID, User name, Rating, Wins, Losses, Incomplete, Streak, Ladder, Last Match, Last Match Date & Time

Rest is just to explode this string into an array and get the values from it. The code will explain this better.

This code is for single user only. Prepare your Request URL and replace the URL in the code with yours.

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<?php
	$igz_site = fopen("http://www.igzones.com/ratingservices?ladder=AoCRM&player=tHeSiD", "r");
	$ratingservices_page = fread($igz_site, filesize($igz_site));
	fclose($igz_site);
	$igz = explode(",", $ratingservices_page);
		$userid = $igz[0];
		$name = $igz[1];
		$rating = $igz[2];
		$wins = $igz[3];
		$losses = $igz[4];
		$inc = $igz[5];
		$streak = $igz[6];
		$ladder = $igz[7];
		$lastmatch = $igz[8];
		$date = $igz[9];
 
	$data = '<ul>
		<li>Tag : <a href="http://www.igzones.com/user/'.$userid.'">'.$name.'</a></li>
		<li>Ladder : '.$ladder.'</li>
		<li>Rating : '.$rating.'</li>
		<li>Wins : '.$wins.'</li>
		<li>Losses : '.$losses.'</li>
		<li>Streak : '.$streak.'</li>
		<li>Last match : <a href="http://www.igzones.com/matches/'.$lastmatch.'" target="_blank">'.$date.'</a></li></ul>';
	echo '<a align="center" href="http://www.igzones.com" target="_blank"><img class="igzimg" src="http://www.igzones.com/images/microbanner.png"  border="0" alt="Age of Empires IGZones"></a><br/>';
	echo $data;
?>

If in any case you have a problem with the filesize() function, just replace filesize($igz_site) with a numerical value. I recommend 75. so line 3 should be

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$ratingservices_page = fread($igz_site,75);

Save the widget and refresh your site. Your ratings will now be visible in the sidebar.

In the explorer, above the folders bar, there is a Favorites link section which has links to <User Folder> My Docs etc. To that list you can add as many links as you want. All you have to do to add a link is drag the folder into that section and it automatically creates a link.

Add your most frequently visited folders in it. After adding the folder you can directly go to it with just a click! No more C:>Folder1>Folder2 navigation. However deep the folder maybe, you can go there in an instant. Its really helpful when you handle a lot of files with explorer. You can also switch between folders in an instant making copying and moving very very easy and less confusing.

After adding the link, if you are unable to see the link in the section, find the separator between the links and the folders bar sections and drag it till all your links are visible.

Here is a screenshot.

Favorite Links section in action

Windows

Linux

Ofcourse all this was before the screen broke to bits and pieces. Why I am posting this now? Coz I thought of posting this long back and found it now when backing up stuff on monster. Why now? Coz Theres no fuking monster and I cant think of a way to spend time :D.