Category Archives: Technical

There used to be a Windows PowerToy that gave you an option in your right-click menu in Windows Explorer to “Open Command Prompt Here.”  Basically, you navigate Explorer to a folder deep in your hierarchy somewhere and you could instantly open a command prompt to that folder.

In Vista, they’ve made it both easier and harder.  They put the option in there without the need to install a PowerToy.  The problem is, you only see it if you hold shift when you right-click the folder.  Not acceptable to me.  I dug around with Google for a couple minutes and found this article with a few different ways to attack the problem.  #5 (hack the registry) was the one I found to work very well and the way I wanted.  It even works in Vista64!

1. Navigate in your Registry to

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Classes/Folder/Shell

   and create a key called “Command Prompt” without the quotes.

2. Set the default string to whatever text you want to appear in the right-click menu.

3. Create a new key within your newly created command prompt named “command,” and set the default string to

   cmd.exe /k pushd %1

   You may need to add %SystemRoot%\system32\ before the cmd.exe if the executable can’t be found. (I didn’t need to and, in fact, it didn’t work when I put that in.)

4. The changes should take place immediately. Right click a folder and your new menu item should appear.

Of course, the usual warnings go along with this–you can really bork your machine when you’re screwing around in the registry.  Be careful and I’m not responsible if you mess your computer up!

Because of my job, I occasionally get to do some interesting things. Things I wouldn’t normally do. Like test Safe Eyes on Vista from time to time. Now, thanks to the wonder of virtualization and especially Parallels Desktop for Mac, I don’t actually have to have a computer with Vista installed. I have a VM set up and ready to go if the need arises.

The other day, the need arose. The bat-signal was lit up because someone had some problems getting Safe Eyes to run after installing Vista’s newly released Service Pack 1 (SP1 for all you OS gurus out there). So, I got out my trusty Vista VM and said, “no problem, I’ll just install SP1 myself to make sure we don’t have a major incompatibility on our hands.”

My first clue this wasn’t going to be an enjoyable experience was when I tried to download it. I went to IE7 (because what better product is there to download a Microsoft product than IE) and went searching. Of course, it wasn’t right there, but with a little help from Google, I found the download page. That’s when I saw it was 434MB. No problem–we’ve got a pretty fast connection at the office. I started it up, it got to around 100MB and just hung there. No progress, no nothin’. Finally, after about 10 minutes, I canceled the download and re-started it. This time, it got further, but after about 15 minutes, I got a “The connection was interrupted” box and my download had died again. IE can’t pick up where it left off, so I said, “forget this,” and proceeded to download it in Safari 3.1 on the Mac side. It downloaded perfectly and I copied it right into my Vista “hard drive.”

Now, to get the install started:

What?! Over an hour? For a service pack? Seriously? I’m not even sure it took an hour to install Vista in the first place (this is a mid-2007, 20″ aluminum iMac that runs a 2.0 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor). To top it off, it would restart my “computer” several times. Well, nothing for it, but to do it.

Sure enough, the install took well over an hour (more like an hour and 15 minutes), restarted my computer three times (three?!), and several times just hung there at “Step 1 of 3, 0%” for a while. Why bother putting in a percent if it’s not going to, you know, calculate?

Fun stuff. The long and short of it is, I had no problems once it was installed. Vista even seems a bit snappier and more responsive than it was (which others are reporting too). Safe Eyes functioned normally under Vista SP1 and other than a half of my day gone, it turned out pretty well. Don’t worry, Microsoft is not going to “push” this via the Windows Automatic Updates until mid-April sometime, so you have a little time to prepare, set aside a half day, and pray all your drivers (apparently, some subset of the Intel GMA950 video drivers can really hose you up) and peripherals work when you’re done!

Oh, and I apologize for the LOLcat-speak in the subject line. I was in sort of a LOLcat mood.

I am not sure where the ultimate problem lay, but if you read my blog using Firefox and happened to check it over the past couple days, you probably noticed it was all screwed up.  I decided to try embedding a couple YouTube videos and, while Safari handled the embed code in stride and theme, Firefox really got lost in there somewhere and just messed everything up.  IE put little red X’s where the YouTube video should have been but even it didn’t screw up the CSS–come on, Firefox!

Fortunately, there was a solution readily available.  Jens Törnell has a great WordPress plugin for embedding YouTube with a simple, customizable tag without screwing up your chosen theme’s CSS.

Check it out if you need something similar and I apologize for the horror that was my blog’s front page over the past couple days!  Special thanks to XBL buddy Shadrick for pointing it out.