If you’ve ever tried to get a Bluetooth headset to work in Windows Vista, you know you’re in for a world of hurt if you want to try and make it work with the existing Microsoft Bluetooth stack. You have to steal drivers from other manufacturers or basically just give up and switch to using the Broadcom WIDCOMM Bluetooth drivers.
For the longest time I refused to use the WIDCOMM drivers because their look and feel was stuck in the Windows XP days – it wasn’t horrible, but it didn’t integrate nicely in with Vista and it completely took over the Bluetooth stack which I didn’t want to do because I was afraid it would prevent my Microsoft Wireless Entertainment Desktop 7000 (Bluetooth keyboard & mouse combo) from working.
Well, the other day I decided to replace my old Plantronics Explorer 320 headset (Bluetooth 1.2) with a new Sony Playstation 3 Bluetooth headset (cheap, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR). I went and paired up the new headset with Vista, however the sound was just as choppy as before and it really didn’t seem to be any better; those old Bluetooth Audio drivers I hacked in to Vista needed updating…
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If you do any sort of Web Development at all and you don’t know about either of these sites, you’re severely missing out on one of the Internets most useful resources ever created for Web Development. Sure, there are other sites, even Microsoft’s MSDN Library which has pretty good documentation on a lot of the same stuff, but none are as easy to navigate and have as many tips and information about cross-browser application.
I’m talking of course about Brian Wilson’s Index DOT Html and Index DOT Css sites. I have been using these sites over the past 8+ or so years as one of my primary resources when it comes to Web Development. They document the majority of the HTML and CSS elements and properties, how they work and what browsers support them (and to what degree) – complete with browser specific tips and notes.
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How would you like to join the Microsoft Web Solution Partner community and get your company name out there to clients you never thought of before? What if I told you you could get a free copy of Microsoft Expression Web 2, three 1hr training sessions on Microsoft Web Development tools (including Silverlight, Visual Studio, .NET and more!) and specially tailored hosting packages from the Microsoft Hosting Partner community? Not too shabby eh!
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Unfortunately, the WordPress online documentation is a mess of old, outdated API information and when I tried to make a little plugin today and have it put a little meta box in the sidebar of the edit/new post admin pages, I had one hell of a hard time getting things to work the way it was documented.
Everywhere I looked, it told me to hook on to the “admin_menu” event when I wanted to queue up my meta box using add_meta_box(). After a bit of messing around, it seemed as though I had it working for the edit post page, but then it wasn’t showing up on the add new post page. I did a bit of debugging and ensured that it was the fact that the add_meta_box() call wasn’t being queued properly – I assume it had something to do with when it was being added to the meta box queue… ultimately meaning that the “admin_menu” event was too early of an event for me to hook on to.
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If you have the Java Runtime Environment installed on your Windows (Vista) system – and chances are you do – you may have tried disabling that Java system tray icon without much luck. The problem lies in registry permissions, and the solution lies right here!
As the Administrator user in Windows, you can easily go in to the Java control panel and disable the “Place Java icon in system tray” setting and it will stick (meaning the setting actually gets saved in the registry). Problem is though, the setting seems to be per-user, so you’ve only disabled it for your Administrator account – not much use for your normal user account(s) in Windows now is it.
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