Fixing a Corrupted Iuident.cab File

Fixing a Corrupted Money File

Tips for Fixing XP File and Printer
sharing

D-Day CD ROM's are Corrupted

Will STV Voting be Corrupted by
Computers?

Corrupted Files and Related Errors

How a Corrupted USB Drive Was Saved by
GNU/Linux

Recovering from a corrupted netinfo
database

mcafee dat corrupted? (was: Virus scan
attack)

Exporting and Importing to Fix Missing
or Corrupted Certificates

HotFix Watch: Mail alerts are corrupted
after you upgrade to Microsoft
Operations Manager 2000 Service Pack 1

Fixing Comdex

Top Tip: A tool for fixing the MBR?

Fixing Duplicates

XP SP2 über patch already needs
fixing

fixing a hole

I had a wonderful time at my signing in Huntington Beach last night. There were about forty people seated when I started, and by the time I was finished, another fifteen or so had joined us.

Over the years, I've developed a pretty good sense of how the audience is relating to me, and I felt like I connected with this audience immediately, and maintained the connection all the way through. It was awesome. The last few readings I've done have been a hardcore geek conferences, you see, and there's been a very palpable "Okay, prove to us that you deserve to be here, jerk." feeling from at least part of the audience, but last night, I didn't feel any challenge or hostility from the people there, so I was able to relax and just do my thing.

Usually, I just thank people for coming, and get right into reading, but last night I tried something now: I gave a little bit of a "talk" about the internets, and the power of blogs. I talked about how blogs are a powerful communication tool, and how blogs can be used for very positive things, like helping our friend Kris when she had cancer. I also talked about this awesome auction I'm a part of to raise money and awareness for the Alzheimer's Association of Los Angeles (that is going to be so cool, it gets its own entry in the near future.)

I've been thinking a lot about how my life has changed, and I know that none of this would be happening without the examination of my life that happened because of my blog and my books. I talked a little bit about that examination, and how I discovered this thing called "the quarter life crisis," where we hit our mid-to-late twenties and freak out because we don't know what we're doing (or going to do with) our lives as we near thirty. At that time in my life, I recalled, I was struggling not only to be a successful actor, husband, and stepfather, but also to figure out who I was. My mom always told me "just be yourself, and you'll be happy." That's great advice, but it's tough to heed when you don't know who "yourself" is.

Anyway, I talked about all those things as a lead-in to the writing of Just A Geek, and to set up where I was in my life when I experienced the events I wrote about in Chapter Nine of Just A Geek (pdf file), which is what I read last night.

The actual "reading" portion of the . . . uhm . . . reading . . . was great. I felt comfortable with the material, and it is always entertaining (to me, anyway) to edit out the naughty words on the fly when I read. It was extra fun last night because people were following along in their own books, and they'd giggle when I replace "shit" with "crap," or something similar.

When my reading was done, I took a few questions, which gave me another opportunity to talk about how empowering the internet is, and how I used the internet to reassert control over my creative life. Then, I sat down and signed books for everyone there. The people who came out were all friendly and enthusiastic, and the whole experience was just wonderful. I was done about 8:45, and through the power of quantum physics, I made it up to ACME by 9:30 without ever exceeding the posted speed limit.

Shut up. I did.

Fixing the Add-Remove Component

Fixing Public Transportation

Fixing the Microsoft Fixes

Fixing Public Key Problems

Fixing MSDN with Greasemonkey

Site specific browser customisations have been a a recurring theme on this site over the past six months. Thanks to the ever inventive Aaron Boodman that problem is pretty much solved. Greasemonkey is a plugin for Firefox that lets you create user site customisation scripts (.script.js), easily install them in Firefox and then set which sites they should be run on. Michael Moncur has a handy tutorial on getting started.

I've already found reason to write my first script. For all of its faults, one thing that can be said for Internet Explorer is that its technical documentation runs rings around its competitors. Safari and Opera have virtually no technical documentation at all, while Mozilla's is piecemeal to say the least (let's hope they listen to Jon Udell and Tim Bray). Unfortunately, IE's documentation is hidden away on the always frustrating MSDN. The good stuff is in the HTML and DHTML reference, but information on which versions (and platforms) of IE can cope with which objects is no where to be found.

Or at least that's what I thought, until someone on IRC told me to hover over the event box at the bottom of this page. Nothing happened (in Safari), so I tried Firefox and IE5/Mac. Still nothing, so I viewed source and discovered that the platform information is hidden away in a made-up platinfo attribute on the link and revealed using IE/Windows specific JavaScript. Doh!

A few minutes with Greasemonkey and I had a solution: this user script restricted to URLs matching http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/*. It's not pretty, but it works - and I'm sure it could be made to look quite decent given a little extra effort.

ERROR:  Cannot insert a duplicate key into unique index
auth_permissions_pkey

SELECT setval('auth_permissions_id_seq', 
  (SELECT max(id) FROM auth_permissions));