I recently had an issue with an older Windows Server 2008 R2 server that couldn’t logout which had resulted to Remote Desktop not connecting to it anymore (not even with the “admin session” option). Luckily I had an admin go and physically cycle its power since it was a physial one without any lower level […]

I got a nice expression software charity bundle with Corel Painter 2020 (current version is 2021) and a bunch of brushes in it and then noticed that the brush packs where available for download as separate installers than the Painter software. So I launched one of the brush pack installers from the command-line (can give […]

I recently needed to extract a numeric suffix from a string value in Python. Initially I did the following: import re def extractNumSuffix(value):     return (None if (search:=re.search(‘^\D*(\d+)$’, value, re.IGNORECASE)) is None else search.group(1)) Note that return has a single-line expression. So ...

Here’s how to install Python, PIP package installer and cx_Oracle extension module on MSYS2: $ pacman -S python warning: python-3.8.3-1 is up to date — reinstalling resolving dependencies… looking for conflicting packages… Packages (1) python-3.8.3-1 Total Installed Size:  108.66 MiB Net Upgrade ...

Was just trying to make a Python 2 script work in Python 3 and at first it seemed I just needed a small change to add missing parentheses to the argument of a couple of print statements. But then another issue came up, it wasn’t understanding the command raw_input(somePrompt) that was occuring at various places […]

If you’re having issues with your Windows 7 or newer, you should consider whether its installation has become corrupted (due to malicious software or hard drive errors). After doing a disk check (say by right clicking the appropriate drive under my computer and selecting Properties, then Tools tab and Error checking) and a complete virus […]

Was recently checking out the fine tools from GTmetrix for optimizing some websites I manage and one of the issues I noticed on a client’s site was that GZIP compression was turned off. They have a GZIP compression setup article for IIS and Apache web servers that contains a sample for Apache with compression rules […]

Getting really annoyed by YouTube’s insistence to autoplay (and not even stop the previously playing video) everytime you navigate to a browser tab that shows YouTube content (say using CTRL+TAB / SHIFT+CTRL+TAB to find a tab you’re looking for when you have too many and they only manage to fit their icons so no title […]

On an ASP.net MVC webapp I’m maintaining, I had the issue that due to caching of older CSS (stylesheet) files in the browser, if the user didn’t press F5/refresh, it wasn’t showing you some message (since I had added the class .center-horiz-vert in the CSS that didn’t exist in the older cached css the browser […]

For some time now I was trying to update the BIOS of an older Dell Inspiron 3537 laptop from inside Windows (with the InsydeFlash application that the respective Dell update package employs), only to get a blue screen saying Invalid Firmware Image upon reboot and the BIOS update was skipped every time. Since that update […]

Was just trying to round-off some Google Maps coordinates for display in Javascript up to 3 decimal digits and that was a bit like a blast from the past (the end of the ‘90s to be more accurate)… So here’s my contributed answer at: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2221167/javascript-formatting-a-rounded-number-to-n-decimals This works for ...

Having recently updated an ASP.net MVC web app from MVC4 to MVC5 and from .NET 4.5 to .NET 4.7.2 I was expecting Razor views (.cshtml files) to use the latest C# compiler, especially since at Properties/Build/Advanced option for the web project one read “C# latest major version (default)”. However that was not the case and […]

Based on Sam Holder’s answer at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7388475/reading-int-values-from-sqldatareader/54296026, just contributed an extension method for fetching Int32 values via ADO.net’s SqlDataReader, without jumping through hoops (aka first fetch column ordinal [number] by name, then fetching the int value passing the column ...

If you need to customize the colors (or do more restyling) of validation messages in ASP.net MVC, the following snippet from a discussion on ASP.net forums should be useful: Add to Content/Site.css: /* styles for validation helpers */ .field-validation-error {     color: #b94a48; } .field-validation-valid {     ...

The other day I found how easy it is to use a Live CD/DVD (where packet writing occurs when adding stuff) instead of a Mastered one (where all is kept to be written when you close the disk) on Windows. It feels more like using a USB flash disk and should be more safe regarding […]

Just came across this validation error display in an MVC app I’ve recently started maintaining. The required input field validation seemed to not be localized, resulting in a mixed English and Greek (from the field’s Display name) message: Looking at the MVC model I noticed they were using [Required] attributes for the userName and password ...

Unfortunately, Microsoft seems to have gone to extra lenghts to make the Windows Live suite of software go away, without anyone thinking that there were people who were using them and without offering file/project-level compatible replacements for user-friendly tools like Windows Live Movie Maker. Only Windows Live Writer was at some point ...

On Windows 10, Microsoft (they’ve acquired Skype some years ago) provide a Windows Store app for Skype, however Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps like that one don’t support older webcams (even the ones embedded in not-that-old laptops). Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn’t bothered to provide some frame grabber driver to bridge with ...

After doing sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade on an older Raspbian installation (at a 4GB SD Card), some corruption occured (probably due to lack of space, since I see newer NOOBS asks for an 8GB SD Card), making it unbootable. Would only show the NOOBS splash screen, but couldn’t boot into Raspbian. I just […]

At MonoX Social CMS, which I use at both ClipFlair Social and Trafilm websites, I was in the need of hiding some HTML markup when the user is not signed-in. The solution for this is to add runat="server" to the HMTL element one wants to hide and then set the Visible property that the object […]

I’m in the process of setting up a temporary landing page for the trafilm project, where I need apart from showing the trafilm logo to also show some text description about the project, till I set up an instance of MonoX Social CMS for it, like the one in ClipFlair’s Community website (ClipFlair Social). Since […]

Sometimes when you catch an exception in .NET, the message it prints out isn’t very informative, since it is wrapping another exception that had been thrown a bit inner in the code. That exception is in that case accessible via InnerException of the Exception instance. That inner exception is also an Exception, so one would […]

At SpeechTurtle application, I’ve just added speech feedback (voicing of a command) when an available command is executed using a mouse click on its name. That could also help the user learn the expected pronunciation in English in case the speech recognition engine doesn’t understand some of the commands as voiced by the user. One […]

Based on others answers at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3123870/find-the-location-of-my-applications-executable-in-wpf-c-or-vb-net here’s an example that shows how to remove the executable name from the path and combine the result with some subfolder and filename: At my updated version of Hotspotizer ...

At http://www.askvg.com/fix-windows-10-insider-preview-build-10240-not-appearing-on-windows-update/ it writes: NOTE: If you previously had a new Windows 10 build installed in your computer and then reverted back to an older build, you’ll lose access to the new build and it’ll no longer be offered as an upgrade option. Deleting the ...