Unblock multiple files using SysInternals Streams

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Sometimes you may find that you need to unblock a file in wondows if you have downloaded it from the internet from moved it from a network drive – in this case you may encounter a message like this:

 

“This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer”

 

To do this you right click on the file in explorer, choose ‘properties’ and on the general tab click the ‘Unblock’ button.

 

This is all very well but what if you need to unblock a folder of 27 files, the above method would take an age?!

 

Well SysInternals have a utility called Streams which helps with this. Download Streams and extract streams.exe into a directory that’s on your path. Now, to unblock a folder full of files, open a command window and run something like this:

 


streams -s -d {directory}

 

This should unblock all the files in the specified directory!

 

Drupal 7 – Views Slideshow only displaying one image #drupal7

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If you are having a strange problem whereby Views Slideshow only displays an image for the first of your slides in Drupal 7 (perhaps to non-authenticated visitors) try disabling the devel module (if it’s enabled of course!).

 

This fixed this strange and annoying problem for us…

 

corkoperahouse.ie wins ‘Best Arts Website’ in Irish Web Awards 2012 #webawards12

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Congratulations to our buddies at PrideDesign who have just won another award for their work – the website which they designed and built for the Cork Opera House won in the ‘Best Arts Website’ category at last night’s Irish Web Awards 2012!

 

Well done to all involved!

 

Drupal 7 – Backslashes being added to quotes on Blacknight Hosting

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This is a very strange and annoying problem, when editing content on a Drupal 7 installation backslashes were being automatically put before quotes – a real pain especially when editing HTML!

 

This is a well known issue caused by a silly PHP5 module called ‘magic quotes’. Anyway on Blacknight I found that the only way to get rid of the problem was to make sure that magic quotes functionality was turned on in .htaccess – this would force Drupal to successfully work around the issue. The way to do this is to make sure the the following is included the .htaccess file:

 
  php_flag magic_quotes_gpc          on
  php_flag magic_quotes_sybase       on
...

This seems counter intuitive – surely we want to turn magic quotes off? however, including these lines in the file lets Drupal 7 know that the magic quotes functionality is turned on and then it successfully fixes the problem itself..

 

Task queue problems on localhost with Google App Engine SDK 1.7.2 (Mac)

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If you are having problems creating task-queue tasks after upgrading the Google App Engine SDK to 1.7.2 on a Mac, then I am reliably informed that running the following should help the situation:

 
sudo echo "127.0.0.1 b1.localhost" >> /etc/hosts
 

Thanks Lukasz!

 

RaspberryPi & Lego ‘super-computing’ cluster!

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Fantastic! The University of Southampton have created a ‘supercomputer’ cluster from a load of RaspberrryPis and some Lego, The Register writes about it here:

 

I think it’s the Lego that makes it!

 

HTML / Javascript – Setting hash without browser scrolling.

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Q: I set a document’s hash using:

 
document.location.hash = '#my-hash';
 

But this always causes the browser to automatically scroll to the top of the region identified by the hash. How can I set the url’s hash without the page scrolling?

 

A: On newer browsers you can use the new HTML5 History API to silently set the hash by using history.replaceState(), for example:

 
history.replaceState(null, null, 'my-hash');
 

When you set the hash in this way, the page won’t scroll. To see which browsers currently support the history API, check here.

 

Enterprise Architect – Show parameter names in class diagram

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I don’t know what it is about UML editors but it always seem you have to spend more time fighting with them than actually successfully doing and UML modelling for the software that you’re supposed to be developing..

 

Anyway I was trying to figure out how to get Enterprise Architect to display operation parameter names in class diagrams, and it turns out that this isn’t enabled by default and to switch it on you have to go to the following menu:

 

Diagram / Properties… / Features

 

and then select ‘Full Details’ in the ‘Show Parameter Detail’ drop-down, now parameter names should be displayed in your class diagrams…

 

#Drupal 7 on #RaspberryPi

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Class, just found this post that makes mention of Drupal 7 successfully hosted on a Raspberry PI!

 

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5199

 

Brilliant, it’s like chocolate and mint, my two favourite things brought together, I have have just found myself a new hobby!

 

Drupal 6 – strtotime() [function.strtotime]: It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone settings

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Recently we came across this red/pink error message on an old(ish) Drupal 6 site that is running on shared hosting:

strtotime() [function.strtotime]: It is not safe to rely on
the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use
the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set()
... blah blah blah ...

It seems that this PHP warning is new to PHP 5.3 so we reckoned that the shared hosting must have upgraded their PHP to 5.3, anyway it turned out that adding the following line to the site’s php.ini file got rid of the red error message:

date.timezone = 'Europe/Dublin'

This explicitly sets the time zone to ‘Europe/Dublin’