Run a command and read console output in VB6 / VBA

Needed to run a command line program from code and read the input. Found this useful code to do it:

Official Skype Install for Acer Aspire 1 (aa1)

Just got Skype running on my aa1 running Linpus Linux. There are a few blog posts out there with instructions, but I found an official download from Acer which is a lot more straight forward and worked for me where other methods didn't.

Just follow the instructions at: http://www.acer.com/aspireone/support/files/connect.html#002

There are also instructions too on how to install support for 3G USB sticks (Huawei 3G dongles) which I haven't tried out , buy let me know if it works for you: http://www.acer.com/aspireone/support/files/connect.html#003

Half of LCD Monitor is Yellow

I have a 19" LCD Monitor from LG . A little while ago the right half of the screen had a yellow tint to it. I played around with the cables for ages but it was no use.

I considered buying a new monitor cable or even returning the monitor for repair until I tried out one thing. I went into the Monitor menu, went into settings and selected Factory Reset.... once I selected this, after a few seconds the screen was back to normal... yipeee ... hope this helps somebody else out.

Visual Studio Tricks

I am going to keep this as an ongoing post with whatever tips and tricks I come across when using Visual Studio.

Show Active File In Solution Explorer

When working with big solutions and projects this is so useful. By default visual studio doesn't highlight the file that is active (i.e the one you are viewing) in Solution Explorer.

To activate this do the following:

Tools – Options – Projects and Solutions – Track Active Item in Solution Explorer

Credit for this tip goes to Ronald Widha's blog .

Use the Command Window to Search for Files

In Visual Studio I really miss the equivalent of Eclipse's CTRL - T shortcut to search for classes.

The next best thing I have found is to open the command window ( View > Other Windows > Command Window ) and type:

>open file you're searching for

and a little drop down will pop up of files that start with whatever you have typed in.

More Tricks

Also check out any of my blog entries tagged with visual studio

Installing flash for firefox in xubuntu

This weekend I was trying to get the flash player installed on XUbuntu and working on firefox. Following the instructions on Adobe's site didn't work , but after a bit of googling this is what I did and it worked.

1. Download Adobe Flash Player from http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/. Choose the tar.gz option.

2. Extract the contents of the extracted file to your desktop . The file libflashplayer.so should now be on your desktop

3. Open up a terminal window

4. Enter the following , and replace username with your username.

sudu su

cd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/

cp /home/username/desktop/libflashplayer.so .

cd /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/

cp /home/username/desktop/libflashplayer.so .

5. Restart firefox (maybe a couple of times)

6. Test out youtube.com

Show delicious saves and tags on blog

This is a useful feature from delicious where you can show how many people have saved your page as a bookmark on delicious and the tags people have used.

You can probably see this at the bottom of this page.

Just go to http://delicious.com/help/tagometer and it has a snippet of javascript to copy and paste into your page.

To add a snippet of html/javascript to blogger have a look at the help site.

Adding ClearCase commands to Visual Studio context menu

If you are using Visual Studio and clearcase this is really useful. This puts clearcase functions like opening the version tree into the menu when you right click on a file in solution explorer.

1. The following link shows you how to add new menu items to the context menu when you select file in the solution explorer:

http://www.sharpregion.com/blog/?p=105&cpage=1

2 . Just add the following bit of code to the module ContextCommads or download the full file from here:




3. Now Repeat steps 7 to 9 from the afore mentioned link Extending the Visual-Studio Context-Menu for the following three subs :

VersionTree - this opens up the clearcase version tree for the selected file
HijackFileCommand - hjacks the selected file (makes it writeable)
ClearCaseAnnotateCommand - calls the clearcase annotate command to show who and when each change was made on the selected file

Thats it. Now right click on a file and you will have these options available