Category Archives: General

Just general stuff, mostly random

Breadcrumb Patent

Posted by in General

Want a breadcrumb trail on your website that behaves like the Windows 7 Explorer breadcrumb trail? If you live within the United States, or any of its territories, then you may need a patent use license.

w7breadcrumb

US Patent Application No. 20080282199 covers all breadcrumb arrangements used on the internet that resemble those in Windows 7. This patent was filed in late 2008, and seems to be pending USPTO approval. While some of its claims cover features of Breadcrumb NavXT, Breadcrumb NavXT qualifies as prior art (Breadcrumb NavXT has supported hierarchical categories since 2.0.0 Beta 1, way back in November 2007).

This was found in the midst of research for implementing custom taxonomy support in Breadcrumb NavXT. In the next release, 3.4.0, taxonomy support will be completely reworked. This will enable support any flat and hierarchical taxonomy for post organization and archives. The former was implemented and in the SVN Trunk, the latter is a work in progress at the moment. Note that the SVN Trunk should be considered volatile at this time, and may contain code that does not fully work.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Window 7 Media Center Weather Alerts

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The past few days have been quite rainy for the Twin Cities, around four inches of rain have fell in the past 48 hours. Tonight, a storm popped up north of Lake Minnetonka which produced a few tornadoes as it has made it’s way east. Before one actually knew a weather event was going on in the area, the cable internet dropped out. However, Windows Media Center was able to get a National Weather Service Tornado Warning message, and display it over playing video.WMC warning system

When in this “Warning Overlay” mode Windows Media Center will not record live TV, or allow the guide to show up with the arrow keys. Once the warning expires, Windows Media Center removes the overlay and restores normal functionality. It is not clear if this is the intended behavior or not. The apparent intent is to keep the user at the current channel. However, this does hinder the ability of the user to tune to a channel with more weather information if not already on one.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

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Moab Trip 2009 “The Plants” Photoset

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I’ve finally synchronized my camera’s memory with my laptop and began sorting through the pictures I took on my trip to Moab, Utah in June. Below are some of the better shots of plants in the area. Surprisingly, many of the plants were still green and flowering, or just finished flowering. It’s too bad I don’t have anything better than a Cannon PowerShot SD850 IS with CHDK, getting it to focus on the correct object can be a pain at times (plus there is a caveat with using 4GB SDHC cards (FAT32 format is the culprit) and CHDK where it won’t auto boot).

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

goto code_hell;

Posted by in General

code_hell: echo 'Yes, PHP 5.3 has the goto operator';

In one’s opinion, the only people that should be allowed to use the goto operator are expert assembly language programmers (and you are not one). Besides, most things written in PHP are not “low level” enough to warrant the use of goto. However, if you must use the goto operator, please do so responsibly. Use it as if it costs $10,000 per use, and properly document what’s going on.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Windows 7 PunkBuster Revisit

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Well, well, well, look what we have here. Looks like Even Balance finally got their act together. Anyone taking part in the Battlefield Heroes Beta will know that DICE now has PunkBuster enabled for it. Amazingly, Battlefield Heroes still works in Windows 7, no false-positive PunkBuster related kicks. Even better, the PunkBuster client for Battlefield 2142 now works correctly on Windows 7 64Bit now as well. One was able to play on four different Battlefield 2142 servers for more than 30 minutes each today without a single kick, therefore the PunkBuster related issues appear to be solved. No hacks, no compatibility mode, no running as administrator, it just works. Hurray for silent updates! Oh wait, they are still a major security risk.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]