If you have a text field or textarea that is case-sensitive or needs to avoid spelling autocorrect in mobile Safari, you can use these attributes on your field:
autocorrect=”off” autocapitalize=”off”
Note the use of the keyword “off”. It seems to ignore you if you try to use “false” instead.
If you want to replace your Mac OS X main hard drive with a larger one, I find this process to work well for me.
1) Connect the new drive to your Mac using an external USB dock.
2) Insert your OS X DVD (Snow Leopard) and use “startup disk” to have your system reboot from the DVD. Or, you can just reboot and hold down the ‘C’ key on your keyboard to make it boot from the DVD.
3) From the installer program, go to utilities and launch disk utility.
4) Erase the new drive and create a partition (Mac OS Extended Journaled). I’ve had problems using the entire disk in the past. I recommend you size the partition to be slightly smaller than the entire disk. A few hundred MB is probably enough. You can drag-and-resize the partition right in disk utility.
5) Using the restore function, drag the original hard drive to the source box and drag your new disk partition to the destination box. I unchecked the option to erase the drive again and let it just copy over all the files from the original drive. Once you start, it will probably take a few hours.
6) Quit disk utility, shut down and physically swap out the hard drives and boot up from the new one.
Slight variations from this process in the past have resulted in problems such as startup disk not being able to bless the new disk and make it bootable which is very frustrating of course.
Recently while upgrading the hardware on a very old Windows XP Pro box, I immediately got a blue screen of death when booting up for the first time. The system would boot fine in safe mode. The message provided was “An attempt was made to execute to non-executable memory.”. The error code was 0X000000FC. The fix for this was to edit the boot.ini file and make the following change. Start->settings->control panel->system->advanced->startup and recovery settings->edit. Change the “/NoExecute=OptIn” to “/NoExecute=alwaysoff”
I recently brought a 10 year old XP Pro machine back from the dead with a new motherboard/cpu/memory. Everything was working except in both Firefox and Internet Explorer the act of scrolling caused massive screen redraw problems and black horizontal lines to appear in the browser window. Also, the scroll bars would be out of position and sometimes 2 scroll bars would draw although only 1 would work. I thought this was a video driver problem, but it wasn’t!
This problem was fixed by disabling the dual core cpu so it would only use a single core. In the system bios this was turned off by choosing Advanced->cpu configuration->unleashing mode->disabled. This system uses an Asus M4A77TD with an AMD Sempron 140 2.7GHz and DDR3 1066 PC3 8500 RAM.
I recently had to reactivate a Windows 7 box due to hardware changes. I was prompted to use the automated phone system and provide my installation ID. However, the system asks for 9 groups of numbers and only 8 were displayed. All the content on the right side of the activation window is cut off. Words are cut off and the 9th group of numbers was completely hidden.
Here is a quick tip to get your installation ID if you can’t view it in the activation window. Run cmd.exe as administrator and type ‘slmgr -dti‘. This will display your entire installation ID in a popup window. When the system gives you numbers to type in to reactivate, the same problem may occur where the input boxes are cut off and out of view. Type the numbers even if you can’t see them and as long as you don’t make a typo, it will accept them and activate.
If you think your mail server may be configured improperly, here is a simple way to test it. Use command line telnet like this.
1) Telnet to port 25 of your mail server.
telnet your.mailserver.com 25
2) Issue some SMTP commands starting with this.
HELO random.victim.com
The server will respond with something like this:
250 your.mailserver.com Hello so.and.so [XX.XXX.XXX.XX], pleased to meet you
3) Now you type this.
MAIL FROM: yourself@random.victim.com
The server will respond with something like this:
250 2.1.0 you@random.victim.com… Sender ok
4) Now you type this.
RCPT TO: asdfasdf@your.mailserver.com
The server SHOULD respond with a 550 like this:
550 5.1.1 asdfasdf@your.mailserver.com… User unknown
If instead it responds with something like this, then your server configuration probably needs fixed to prevent backscatter:
250 2.1.5 asdfasdf@your.mailserver.com
I recently switched to ViaTalk for my home phone. ViaTalk has somewhat of a reputation for not being user friendly, but if you’re a typical do-it-yourselfer, it’s a pretty good deal. I’m paying less than half of what I paid with Vonage and the ability to blacklist phone numbers over the web is absolutely great. ViaTalk does not supply you with a softphone, but it does provide you with the settings to use with 3rd party softphone software. CounterPath (http://www.counterpath.com/x-lite-download.html) offers both free and not-free softphone products. X-Lite 4.0 beta is the free softphone that will work with OSX Snow Leopard. The default settings did not work for me. I could place and receive calls, but I could not hear the other party while they could hear me. I’m fairy sure this problem was caused by routing confusion dealing with NAT. I finally figured out the settings that make everything work (see screen shot below). This setup makes me pretty happy. I’m saving money, I can blacklist phone spammers, I have callerid on my desktop softphone and it works well using my built-in speaker and microphone as well as my Logitech USB headset.
While trying to install the latest update to Parallels Desktop 5, I ran into an installation road block because the installer claimed 10 different Parallels applications were running and needed to be closed. Clearly, this was not the case. My first thought was to blame Parallels, but then an Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader update failed for the same reason–the installer claimed certain applications were running when they were not. While using the OS X Terminal, I realized certain commands were not working. I could not “less” a file. “grep” returned nothing even when I searched for strings that were clearly there. It turns out my entire /usr/bin directory had multiple executable files showing 0 bytes! “less” showed 0 bytes and also showed thousands of links to it–the same was true for many standard command line utilities. Installers like Parallels and Adobe depend on command line utilities found in /usr/bin. For example, to determine if certain programs are running, the installer will run a shell script that uses the “ps” command. If you’re curious what that would look like, here is the exact script that Parallels Desktop 5 uses:
#!/bin/sh
if ps -w -w -A -ocommand | grep -nq ‘^/Library/Parallels/Parallels Server.app/Contents/MacOS/prl_vm_app’; then
exit 1
fi
if ps -w -w -A -ocommand | grep -nq ‘^/Library/Parallels/Parallels Service.app/Contents/MacOS/prl_vm_app’; then
exit 1
fi
exit 0
I set up a single box to dual boot Windows 7 32 bit and Windows 7 64 bit. When booting up, the boot manager asks me which OS I want to start. The problem is that both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions have “Windows 7″ as the description. So… I get the choice of booting “Windows 7″ or “Windows 7″. This is even less useful than it sounds. To fix this, I boot up in to one of them and then open a command window running as administrator: start->all programs->accessories->right click “command prompt” and run as administrator. Next, I use a command called bcdedit. Run bcdedit with no arguments and it will list your bootable partitions. Each one will have an identifier inside curly brackets–something like {current} or {aa572c50-fa57-11de-9aae-9f4b2a2101ad}. To set the names you see in the boot menu, use bcdedit like this:
bcdedit /set {aa572c50-fa57-11de-9aae-9f4b2a2101ad} description “Windows 7 32 bit”
Just repeat the command and adjust for the other partition and you’re good to go.
My plans to install Windows 7 on an empty partition hit a snag when I got this error. I have a Promise RAID card and had just finished installing the drivers for it in order to proceed with the Windows 7 installation. This 0×80300001 error wouldn’t let me select ANY partition though. It turns out this is the Windows 7 way of saying “take the drivers CD-ROM out of the drive and put the Windows 7 installation DVD back in”.