Siddharth Abbineni

If you are wondering why your friends list in GMail chat is suddenly showing friends’ status messages, wonder no longer! You are not alone. With Google concentrating on useless new stuff like buzz, wave etc, they seem to have forgotten what the users really want.

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.

When you start a new solo game in COD-World at War, it refuses to start, especially with the RELOADED version. It doesn’t start even if you go via the missions menu, it just stays idle. If you are facing this issue, there is a simple fix thankfully. Follow these simple steps.
EDIT : FIXED VISTA PATH

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 had the All-in-one SEO package installed and I thought it took care of the titles but it didn’t. The only thing in the title tag was the blogs name/title. Even though the settings in the SEO plugin were set properly, it just refused to show the post title in the main title. I even tried setting the custom title for a post individually and that didnt work either. Sucks really coz all the pages in google had only one title, the title of the blog.

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

I recently upgraded from VMware 6.0.3 to VMware 6.5, after installing the latest VMwareTools, the mouse went haywire. I click at one place and X thinks its somewhere else. Basically the co-ordinate system seems messed up. There are two ways to fix this.

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.

I was just exploring the about:config page in Firefox and I managed to stumble upon a nice little tweak. In firefox you can paste text from the clipboard into any text field or the address bar with a middle click, just like in Linux. If you are used to middle click paste in Linux, this will save you a lot of time, even otherwise, a simple middle click is better than Ctrl+V.

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

Here is a small tip for all you Vista users out there. The new explorer has a nifty feature of displaying favourites links along wih the folders explorer bar. In XP, we could either use the folders bar or the favorites bar at any given time. Also, the favorites bar would be the same as the Internet explorer favorites, which made it even more confusing and unusable. But this new feature in Vista is a real helper when it comes to using explorer efficiently.

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