Right, someone trying to convince me why Firefox is so much better than IE brought up the issue of being able to type "google searchterm" into his Adress bar and immediately being taken to the site.

Well, here's some news: IE can do that to, along with imdb, whois, vandale, php and everything else that uses parameters as query terms.

How? Look at this registry key and see the light:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\google]
@="http://www.google.com/search?q=%s"
" "="+"
"%"="%25"
"&"="%26"
"+"="%2B"

%s is where your search term comes, and the name of the key is the prefix.

Another example to get the hang of it:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\imdb]
@="http://us.imdb.com/Find?%s"
" "="+"
"%"="%25"
"&;"="%26"
"+"="%2B"

Got it? Sweet, enjoy your new IE power! ;)

I have uploaded a .reg file which contains altavista, astalavista, cd, download, google, googlenl, imdb, php, sub, vandale, vcd, whois and lucky as search terms. Feel free to invent more :)


Update: Google feeling lucky keyword.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\lucky]
@="http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky"
" "="+"
"%"="%25"
"&"="%26"
+"="%2B"

Today something very weird happened and I doubt something this weird will ever happen again.

I was working on a site at school when I browsed to a file-server to check some paths, and to my surprise I could suddenly access ALL shares, not only the ones for students, but all of them...

When I tried creating files they got made under BUILTIN\Administrators! But I was logged on with my own student account. So, being nice and all, I reported it...

Then we spent almost entire afternoon trying to determine why I was suddenly an admin.

And this is when the weird stuff started to happen:
On PC1 I was an admin on the server, but when I logged in to PC2 I couldn't access it.
We tried different student accounts on PC1 but they also couldn't access the shares.
Then we removed all groups from my account except Domain Users, and I still could get in.
We cleared the profiles from PC1 and 2 and also deleted my roaming profile.
Nothing changed...

First conclusion: It's tied to username X and PC1, examine PC1 later.

Then we go to another room and try it on different computers. And there it starts all over again.
PC3: I'm an admin, PC4: I'm not.

In the end we checked all groups I belonged to, and their membership, deleted my profile, checked all NTFS permissions (which I could change as well..), and nowhere there was a trace of me or any groups I belonged to. Nothing had admin rights.

We forced replication to make sure I was group-less but it still worked!

Conclusion: User X has the rights of an Admin, but does NOT show up in any group, NTFS permissions or anything else...

Solution: We disabled the account and created a new account.. (Which means I have to recreate my entire profile again...)

Has anyone else every encountered this, and found out why this was happening?

Right, about 2 weeks ago Jon Lech Johansen released Justeport, a tool to stream your Apple music files to your Airport Express. <

His site went down almost as soon as the big news sites picked it up, and the source of Justeport couldn't be downloaded.

I also didn't see much blogging about this, which is strange, because his tool is written in C#!

A few days ago I got an Airport Express and now I'm streaming .mp3 to it from iTunes (on Windows) but I have to use iTunes, and that's not something I like, making me go away from Winamp...

But JustePort can not stream .mp3 files to it, but the source is available (and here is a mirror), so maybe there is someone with a better understanding of handling music files in C# who could write something to stream .mp3 to it.

Hopefully there will be a Winamp plugin someday to do this.

It's a great piece of technology, a very small WiFi AP which you can plug in to an electric outlet and to your stereo and stream music to it through the air.

I guess if someone has too much time on his hands and wants a challenge, this is one, writing an mp3 player that can stream to the Airport Express (with volume control, play, pauze, prev, next and playlist support of course ;))

If someone is up to it, and needs someone testing it with an Airport Express, contact me and I'm willing to help you.

With my new laptop I got a screen with a 1920x1200 resolution, so I went out looking for wallpapers for the resolution, because my existing ones degraded in quality with that size.

My search led to Deaddreamer from which I have my current wallpaper as well.

But nowadays he got so many good ones, so I picked up 5 1600x1200 wallpapers. And now I want a random wallpaper each time I logon.

Having some spare time (very rare) I created something small myself, I'm sure there are tools out there to do all that.

Originally I wanted to use PHP to get a random number and set the wallpaper, and then call the php script with a bat file and set it as a scheduled task. But that kept popping up a dos prompt each time it set it, and my wallpaper disappeared after boot (some bad registry settings).

So I used KiXtart to set the wallpaper and then link it with a shortcut which would run minimized.

That worked for one paper, but when I tried the RAND function in KiXtart, it didn't go well.. But I had the php script and bat still there so I let that make a random number and then kill the KiX script with that number as argument.

Result:
Shortcut to wall.bat, which calls wall.php, which makes a random number and calls wallpaper.kix with the number, after which my wallpaper is set, and saved in registry.

I have to shortcut Run as minimized and on logon and every hour, and now I got a nice random wallpaper implementation.

Overly complicated? Maybe, If you have php installed, it's a small solution, otherwise you need a 1.3Mb dll and 24k php.exe in the same dir, which isn't really something bad.

I have zipped everything and written the steps to install it out in a Readme.txt for everyone wanting it as well. I also included the php.exe and dll.

Download it here: RandomWall.zip (706Kb).

And now I have sweeeet super-detailed wallpapers auto-changing without any special timer programs running, but just the Scheduled Tasks :)

Here are my wallpapers:

• ddr_0075_vertical_theory_pure.jpg


• ddr_0075_vertical_theory_decay.jpg


• ddr_0088_v1r2a_1600x1200.jpg


• ddr_0091_bioforge_1600x1200.jpg


• ddr_0086_21st_century_kaos_1600x1200.jpg

(convert them to .bmp first, not sure if it's required, but whatever, bmp is nicer, no need for desktop to go in Web mode)

One thing I immediately do on a new pc is get it personalized. This includes changing icons and wallpapers, but also resource hacking the run box and hacking the uxtheme.dll to support custom themes.

Today I'll talk about implementing the Watercolor theme I have been using for a year now, and got a lot of mails on where and how to get it.

First you have to modify UXTheme. This used to be something "difficult" but now it's easy. Get the UXTheme Multi-Patcher and run it.

As always, and on the left side of the blog, I'm not responsible if something goes wrong, everything you do is your responsibility.

Normally, according to the page I just linked, this doesn't work on XP SP2 final, but I ran it anyway and it worked. Just make sure you wait for the Windows File Protection box to come up.

Next you get the Watercolor theme, unzip it and run WatercolorLitev211.exe, it'll install the theme and you can select it from the Desktop Configuration control panel. It packs with several colors, I either have it set to Blue or Ergonomic.

Enjoy your sweet new theme :)


A screenshot from a previous posting demonstrating the theme: