Route planning for dummies

At this site even grandmas can get driving directions. Just point and click.

Provided there is a route between the cities. :)

Change desktop background color

It's pretty easy actually: right click on the desktop, select Properties from the menu, select the Appearance tab of the dialog and there push the Advanced button.

In the Advanced settings dialog you can change the color of any part of your desktop. Enjoy.

Be a happier clipboard user!

I wasted lots of time during the years with the clipboard, because I often lost text on it when I copied a new block of text which overwrote the old one on the clipboard.

I heard about clipboard manager programs before, but I never tried any. Until now. Do yourself a favour and try ClipX or any other free clipboard manager.

On less thing to worry about. I'm a happier man since then. :P

Quick Window/Application Switcher for Windows

You have to try it, it so efficient. You can have dozens of applications open and still you can get to any of them in seconds:

iswitchw is great

Sorting text correctly according to language rules

Sorting text in different languages into a proper order is a tricky thing. Collation rules can be quite complicated. If you have a static body of text then the simplest way to sort it is by using the relevant Word feature if you are on Windows or Openoffice on other platforms.

So copy the lines to be sorted into world. Select the whole text and choose Sort from the Table menu.

That's it. You can even choose the sort order there.

Finding interesting deleted pictures and videos

Heard about some juicy thing in the news? Like a scandal or a sex video of a celebrity? You see links in the articles, but they are all dead, because the censors were faster?

Twitter to the rescue! Twitter is real time, so it's hard to censor it. Go to Twitter search, input the desired name or thing and there is a good chance you'll find instantly what you're looking for.

Nifty, eh? The dawn of real time search is a nail in the coffin of internet censorship.

Incresase the annoyingly tiny font in Skype chat

Do you also find the small default font in Skype is killing your eyes? Luckily, there is a solution well hidden in the options panel: Tools Menu/Options/IM&SMS/IM Appearance/Change Font.

Much better, eh? Your eyes will be thankful for it.

Python ternary operator syntax

var = stuff if cond else otherstuff;

Why Twitter is vulnerable when reporting from oppressive countries

We hear many stories recently about Twitter used by people in Iran and China to report about issues which the government doesn't want its subjects and the world to know about. Twitter is used very successfully in this fight, but the main problem is the service is centralized, so the government can shut it down and that's it for tweeting.

Google Wave will be released this year and I expect it will replace Twitter for such uses. Why? Because people can run their own Wave servers and those servers can communicate with each other, so there is no central point of vulnerability.

So people run their own servers and they use it for normal communication, but if there is an important event they can use the mesh of Wave servers to distribute information about the event. The government has no central server to shut down, they have to go after each individual Wave server which is much more laborious.

Therefore the future of citizen media is Google Wave, not Twitter. We only use Twitter temporarily until the real thing comes out. Work faster, Google! :)

The reason why PHP Can't connect to MySQL server on 'localhost'

If you can access the server from the command line with a mysql command issued without parameters then there is a good chance the server is configured to use a local socket or pipe on windows, so you need to specify this socket when connecting.

On Windows it's as simple as this: mysql_connect(".")

Configuring local virtual hosts with Apache/XAMPP

Add these to c:/xampp/apache/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
    DocumentRoot C:/xampp/htdocs
    ServerName localhost
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
    DocumentRoot path/to/your/project
    ServerName yourvirtualhostname

    ErrorLog path/to/your/project/error_log
    CustomLog path/to/your/project/access_log common

    <Directory "path/to/your/project">
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory> 
</VirtualHost>

The second one is your new virtual hosts and the first one guarantees access to non-virtual hosts still work.

You also need to add your new host name to c:/WINDOWS/system32/drivers/etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1 yourvirtualhostname     

Opera Unite turns everyone into a pirate

Interesting announcement from Opera today. Opera Unite turns your browser into an easy to use web server which can be used to shared stuff with your friends and family.

Neat idea, though I don't have my computer switched on all the time, so it's usefulness is limited to the periods when the computer is actually on.

The distributed approach is vaguely similar to Google Wave,  but the details differ, of course.

The main problem I see with the approach is the limited upload bandwidth. I'm on ADSL, uploading stuff is slow, so having my meager upload bandwidth eaten by others is not what I want. Could be useful to people with fatter pipes, though.

Nice work, Opera. You showed them once again. :)