Microsoft saw this coming and this built this great tool called “Program Compatibility” which helps you run applications that were meant to be run on different Windows versions – so this works nicely for all software including drivers.

A huge plus in my opinion was the fact that before I was on my desktop I already had the wireless drivers installed and pretty soon the video ones too. I have a 6720s laptop with pretty much basic stuff as far as chipsets and all that – nothing too complicated.

I will stop here because I will soon write a post about my Windows 7 experience – so let’s continue with how I managed to get a great sound out of my Creative USB Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit sound card on Windows 7.

So when I tried installing the Vista drivers from the CD that came with the sound card it told me that this drivers weren’t compatible with my version of Windows.

So I started the Program Compatibility wizard and pointed it to the setup.exe file from the CD. This also didn’t work because the initial installer launched a separate installer depending on what I wanted to install or leave out from the software package.

So I headed back over to Program Compatibility and pointed the application to setup.exe – this time from \audio\setup folder on the CD. Installed the driver without any problems, restarted the computer. All seemed fine but when I tried to play a song in Winamp I realized the woofer was dead – more than that the system was running in 2 channel mode even though it said 5.1 in the Creative Audio Console.

Next, I launched the Creative Software AutoUpdate application from the Start menu. I downloaded and installed the new drivers with Program Compatibility as indicated above – the path for the downloaded software is c:\Users\All Users\Creative\Software Update\cache\ as the application states.

Same stuff, 2 channel mode but the difference was that this time the Audio Console said 2 channel instead of 5.1. Headed to Creative.com (won’t link to them) and after searching by the classical means you try to find a driver to download from a hardware producer I lost my hope.

In the end I ended up on SoundBlaster.com and there I saw a logo that said “Get the latest beta patch for Windows 7″. Clicked on it, got me to a page where only the header of the site was displayed and under it some VBScript runtime error. Thank god I am a guy that knows how to pull information from sites with such poor navigation and maintenance work.

I ended up clicking on a link which should have pointed me to the download page for that particular file. It pointed me to a page saying “Sorry, your search did not return any results.”. So I copied the file name and Googled it – what every decent minded person would do nowadays.  Found the file ready to be downloaded on a weird site written in Chinese – wouldn’t be surprised to be a warez site.

Downloaded the file, this time I didn’t use the Program Compatibility program because theoretically the software was meant to run on Windows 7. So it did as I am writing this post while listing to Crowded House – Don’t Dream It’s Over on my SB Live! powered audio system :)

Here is the troubled driver to download at your convenience.

The WordPress Codex directory is way cool and it is maybe one of the best wordpress resources out there. Here’s the link that interests us in particular: Creating an Error 404 Page. You just need to create a 404.php file in your theme directory (in case you don’t already have one). Put the following code in it and customize aiding yourself with the comments:

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<?php get_header(); ?>
   <div id="post-entry">
     <h1>Whoops !</h1>
	     <div class="post-content">
	     	<p>You 
				<?php
				#some variables for the script to use
				#if you have some reason to change these, do.  but wordpress can handle it
				$adminemail = get_bloginfo('admin_email'); #the administrator email address, according to wordpress
				$website = get_bloginfo('url'); #gets your blog's url from wordpress
				$websitename = get_bloginfo('name'); #sets the blog's name, according to wordpress
				
				  if (!isset($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'])) {
				    #politely blames the user for all the problems they caused
				        echo "tried going to "; #starts assembling an output paragraph
					$casemessage = "All is not lost!";
				  } elseif (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'])) {
				    #this will help the user find what they want, and email me of a bad link
					echo "clicked a link to"; #now the message says You clicked a link to...
				        #setup a message to be sent to me
					$failuremess = "A user tried to go to $website"
				        .$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']." and received a 404 (page not found) error. ";
					$failuremess .= "It wasn't their fault, so try fixing it.  
				        They came from ".$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
					mail($adminemail, "Bad Link To ".$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],
				        $failuremess, "From: $websitename <noreply@$website>"); #email you about problem
					$casemessage = "An administrator has been emailed 
				        about this problem, too.";#set a friendly message
				  }
				  echo " ".$website.$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; ?> 
				and it doesn't exist. <?php echo $casemessage; ?>  You can click back 
				and try again or try using the search box in the sidebar.
			</p>
	     </div>
	</div>
 
 
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Easy enough ? I think it is an awesome method. At least for testing if not for permanent use. Hope this helps. Oh, and by the way, if you have a large blog be ready to be bombarded with emails generated from this 404 page.

After the installation process of Ubuntu itself (all went ok) when the login box appeard for the first time I noticed that the resolution was 640×480. That was very weird because all the distros I’ve ever tried on this PC were setting up by default a 1204×768 resolution.

Normally, the first thing I went to do was to change the resolution as it was very annoying. I was very surprised to see that only 640×480 mode was available. I said to myself that after I will install the nVIDIA driver everything would be ok. I installed the driver through the native hardware driver window (something like Device Manager from Windows). Rebooted the system and all was the same. Checked the available resolutions nothing was there to choose from. I was clearly seeing that the nVIDIA driver was succesfully installed because even Compiz was using it at full throthle but only on 640×480.

I tried to solve things with EnvyNG, by editing xorg.conf, installing the nVIDIA drivers the hard way, typing in a lot of commands that were related to video settings but nothing seemed to work. I did a little bit of research but nothing relevant came up. People had the same problems but their solutions were not working for me.

I was on the point of installing Ubuntu 7.10 again but the following command saved me:

gksudo displayconfig-gtk

All you have to do is to type that command in a terminal (root access is required) and from there just choose your display model and the corresponding resolution and frequency. The settings will be applied after you log in again.

This is a very easy and effective way of correcting this problem.

If you want to integrate ads into your posts here’s what you need to do. First of all let’s begin with defining the CSS class we’ll be using.
The following code is for right-orientated ads (like the ones i use on my blog).

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.ad-right {
display:block;
float:right;
margin: 0px 0px 5px 10px;
}

The next code is for left-orientated ads.

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.ad-left {
display:block;
float:left;
margin: 5px 10px 0px 0px;
}

As you can see, the differences between the two classes are not so big. Feel free to play with them until you get the desired effect or if you don’t have any CSS knowledge at all you can use them as given. After you decide which class you will use, copy the code into your style.css. Thats it for the CSS part.

Let’s move along and edit our theme files. Whether you want to show your ads on the index page or the page containing just the article you will need to look for the following code:

<?php the_content(...

By default any wordpress theme will have that code in it’s template file and it doesn’t matter what’s after it because many themes use custom and different code. After you located the code be sure to add the following lines exactly before it:

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<div class="ad-right">
////Replace me with your ad code////
</div>

Replace the line that says so with your ad code. Notice the class that is used. You might want to change that with ad-left as i told you before.
Ok, so now you have in-content ads.

Now lets move forward and add some ads between your posts on the index page.
In your index page template find the following code:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Again bare in mind that you may not find the exact code. If you don’t have that exact code just make sure you find the have_posts() function. Add the following code exactly before it:

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<?php
$post = 1;
$ad1 = 1;
$ad2 = 3;
$ad3 = 5;
?>

The above code uses the $ad1, $ad2, $ad3 variables to define after which posts the ads will be shown. The variable $post stores the post number and will be incremented later.
Now before the closing of the div that marks the ending of the post content (something like this < / div > < ! -- End of Post -- >) add the following lines:

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<?php if ($post == $ad1 || $post == $ad2 || $post == $ad3) { ?>
<p><center>
////Replace me with your ad code////
</center></p>
<?php }
$post++; ?>

As you can see at the end of the code we incremented the post variable.

If you want to know how to display ads from multiple advertising companies using the same code just drop me a comment and i will explain how to achieve that.

I’ve tested this method with ads from AdSense, BidVertiser, WidgetBucks, BlgAds, Chitika and AdBrite. The reason i’m not writing a tutorial for each of them is because all you need to do is to paste your ad code in the upper mentioned spot.

SimplePie can be integrated within the following platforms:

• BitWeaver

• CakePHP

• CodeIgniter

• DokuWiki

• Drupal

• Facebook

• Joomla!

• MODx

• Mediawiki

• Nucleus

• PHP-Nuke

• Plume CMS

• PunBB

• SilverStripe

• Textpattern

• WordPress

That’s an evidence of the fact that SimplePie really gets the job done as it can be integrated with a lot of CMSs. I am particularly interested in the possibility of integrating SimplePie into WordPress. Of course there’s a plugin that does all the hard work for us. Unfortunately the download link seems to be outdated but there’s no need to worry as there is another official download location for SimplePie.

I’m sure that you agree with me when i say that there’s no better explanation than a demo which demonstrates the potential of SimplePie. All you have to do is to enter your feeds address (if you don’t have any just choose one from the list) and feast your eyes on a simple, fast, easy to use feed.

A nice feature of SimplePie is that it supports templates so now you can create your own custom made layouts using the available template tags.

If you ran into problems or just want to find an answer to a simple question you can consult the online documentation or FAQ. If you don’t find what you need be sure to check the community forums (which are a proof of the great support that SimplePie has) though bare in mind that they are moving their support over at Yahoo! Groups.

Also you can integrate SimplePie into Firefox browser and use it as a feed handler.

A good-to-know tip is that SimplePie works perfectly with FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin.

Check out SimplePies Wordpress plugin options:

Don’t forget to backup your files before you proceed and to refresh your template files from ACP after you are done.

“Evil Quick Reply“ is the name of the MOD which adds a button next to “Post Reply” that says “Quick Reply” and when pressed toggles a textbox (without refreshing the page) in which you can type a fast reply and submit it right away without going through the “advanced reply form”. This MOD is extremly easy to install, it doesn’t require any database adjusting and you can get it up and running in like 2 minutes. It has been successfully tested on the latest phpbb3 version (3.0.0). Also it supports prosilver and subsilver2 styles engines. Optionally you can choose to add the BBcodes and the smilies to the quick reply form.

Unfortunately not even to this day there isn’t an official MOD designed to quick edit posts on both prosilver and subsilver2 styles. However if you use a subsilver2 based style you can consider yourself lucky because in spite of the fact that it’s just in its DEV state there is a MOD that provides the quick edit function. “Ajax Quick Edit“ is also a great MOD that’s easy to install, supports phpbb 3.0.0 and it doesn’t require any database adjusting. The single disadvantage for the moment is that it currently supports only subsilver2 style engine but as the developer promised, support for prosilver will soon be available (i might post a quick notice article when prosilver will be supported just to give the ones that are interested a heads up).

These being written all that remains now is to inform you on the alternatives you have in case of you’re not the admin on the forum but still want to use this great functions as the forum administrator didn’t implemented the above MODs. As some of you already know, GreaseMonkey is an awesome Firefox addon that supports user scripts. I bet most of you already know what i’m about to write because of the terms association firefox-greasemonkey-userscript-phpbb. You got that right ! There are two user scripts available that will enhance your experience with phpbb3 based forums.

“phpBBv3 Quick Edit“ for GreaseMonkey is just another breathtaking, must have script (with a little AJAX) that’s more than useful because it offers you the chance of editing an article without refreshing the entire page EVEN when no such MOD has been implemented to that forum !

“phpBBv3 Quick Reply” script offers the much needed quick reply function to phpbb3 forums users. Remember that this is possible even if the forums don’t have MODs implemented !

The above two user scripts for GreaseMonkey represent a kind of consolation yet a very viable alternative !
*to download/install the MODs or scripts mentioned in the above article please refer to the links given.

All you need to do is to edit the target path of the original shortcut created by the install wizzard and to add the following launch parameter at the end of the line: /nomutex

There you have it ! Now you can have more than one instance of Google’s native instant messaging program, Gtalk.

Here is a picture for the ones that didn’t really understood the lines above: