Monthly Archives: February 2012

Udacity course not loading with Firefox

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Problem

Udacity courses are stuck at the Loading stage when you try to view them with Firefox.

Solution

This problem is caused by the HTTPS Everywhere addon for Firefox. Udacity uses YouTube for their videos. And by looking at the messages in the Error Console of Firefox, you can see that there is some problem. It looks like HTTP Youtube is trying to load content from HTTPS Youtube. HTTPS Everywhere does not like this behaviour and thus blocks it.

To be able to load Udacity courses with Firefox, disable the rulesets for all the Youtube entries in the Options of HTTPS Everywhere. On my system, there were two entries: YouTube (partial) and YouTube-nocookie, and I disabled both of them. Once these changes are applied, Udacity courses should load. Restarting Firefox is not needed.

Tried with: Firefox 10.0 and HTTPS Everywhere 2.0.1

Ghostery

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As we move from one website to another, we are being constantly tracked by social networks (like Facebook or Google+) and advertising networks. This is why the advertisements displayed on webpages seem to know your sex, age, interests and location. This is also why websites now show the articles or pages that were read there by your Facebook or Google+ friends.

If you find such an invasion into your privacy creepy, try the Ghostery addon for Firefox. (It is also available for all other browsers).

Configure it by clicking on its icon in the addon bar and choosing Options. Choose to block all 3rd party elements (3pes) and cookie-based tracking. If this hampers the functionality of a website, you can selectively turn on some of them later.

Once you have blocked all tracking, visit any website and Ghostery will block all tracking from it. It will display the tracking networks it blocked in a purple overlay window (see screenshot above) and also display more details in its icon on the addon bar at the bottom.

Tried with: Ghostery 2.7.1 and Firefox 10.0.2

Visual Studio: Vertical Split of Same File

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Problem

It is easy to do vertical split in Visual Studio (see here). But, it is not obvious how to display the same file in both the vertical split sections.

Solution

1. Open the file you want to display in both vertical split sections. The file is open in a tab.
2. Choose Window → New Window to create a clone of this tab. These two will now be named Main.cpp:1 and Main.cpp:2
3. Now right-click on any of the two clone tabs and choose New Vertical Tab Group.

The file is now displayed in both vertical split sections. This solution is non-obvious and calling a new tab as a new window is confusing. Hope they can fix all of this in the next release.

Tried with: Visual C++ 2010 Express and Visual Studio 2010

TeamViewer: Using Windows login on remote computer

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Problem

By default, you need to know the password generated by TeamViewer on the remote computer to connect to it. But, the problem is that TeamViewer generates a different password everytime it is re-started. Instead, it would be convenient to just login into the remote computer using the Windows login credentials on that computer.

Solution

To be able to login using the Windows credentials of the remote computer, you first need to enable this on the remote computer.

Open TeamViewer on the remote computer and choose Extras → Options. In Security → Rules for connecting to this computer → Windows logon, choose one of either Allowed for all users or Allowed for administrators only.

Back on your own computer, when you connect to the remote computer TeamViewer presents you with a TeamViewer authentication dialog. Choose Advanced here and for Authentication dropdown choose Windows. You should be able to login now into the remote computer using your Windows login credentials on that computer.

Tried with: TeamViewer 7.0.12313

TeamViewer: Show black screen on remote computer

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Problem

You connect to a computer in another room or a remote workplace using TeamViewer. But, the folks sitting around that computer get distracted by all the desktop operations you are doing. Or maybe you do not want to attract their attention. What do you do?

Solution

TeamViewer has a neat feature called Black Screen that can used to achieve this.

The Computer and Contacts window is shown on the right of the main TeamViewer window and it lists the remote computers you have added entries for. Right-click on the remote computer name and choose Properties. In the dialog, click on Advanced and in the Remote Input dropdown choose Disable remote input and show black screen.

Now connect to this remote computer. You can check whether a black screen is being displayed on the display of the remote computer by choosing Actions → Show Black Screen in the TeamViewer toolbar. Sometimes this entry is not enabled even if you had enabled the black screen in its properties. If so, you can explicitly enable black screen for this remote session by choosing Actions → Show Black Screen option.

Tried with: TeamViewer 7.0.12313

Paint.Net: Adding text with drop shadow

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A beautiful way to add your name to the photos you share online is by adding it as text with drop shadow. Text colored in a single color might get partially hidden due to similar colors in the underlying photo. By picking a contrasting pair of text color and shadow color, the text with drop shadow can stand out on top of any photo.

Here is how to achieve this with the awesome Paint.Net tool:

1. Paint.Net does not have a drop shadow feature. Download the Drop Shadow plugin from here and install it.

2. Using Paint.Net open the photo you want to add text to.

3. Create a new layer on top of the existing layer. One way to do this is by choosing Layers → Add New Layer.

4. Choose the color you want as the text color in the palette.

5. Pick the Text Tool and click anywhere on the photo. Type your text here and choose the font and font-size you want.

6. Add a drop shadow to this text by choosing Effects → Stylize → Drop Shadow.

7. In the Drop Shadow dialog, play around with the shadow color, the X-Y offset of the shadow to the text and the amount of blur you want.

8. If you are happy with the result, combine the layers together by choosing Image → Flatten and save the image to any format you want.

Tried with: Paint.Net 3.5.10 and Drop Shadow Plugin 3.1.0.0

HTTPS Everywhere

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Once in a while you come across an addon so useful and apt that it should have been baked right into Firefox itself. The HTTPS Everywhere addon fits this bill.

We all know how insecure our wifi networks are and how vulnerable our online transactions can be. There is one easy way to ramp up the security level of all our online surfing: HTTPS. A lot of websites support HTTPS, but do not turn it on by default for your session.

The HTTPS Everywhere addon hopes to turn the tide in favour of HTTPS for all websites and all users. Just install this addon and it will try to use HTTPS on all websites that support it automatically. You do not need to do anything! For example, if you type in http://google.com, HTTPS Everywhere will automatically switch this to using https://encrypted.google.com/, the secure version of Google.

IMO this addon is a must-have for everyone who uses Firefox. In fact, Firefox should either bake this feature into their browser or ship Firefox with this addon included and turned on by default.

Tried with: HTTPS Everywhere 1.2.2 and Firefox 10.0.1

eXtra Buttons

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I discovered eXtra Buttons recently and I am pretty sure that if you use Windows, you will find this utility very useful in a myriad number of ways. eXtra Buttons adds all sorts of functionality to the behaviour of application windows.

For example, you can make any window stay always on top, minimize to the system tray, roll up like a shade, become translucent or transparent and many more of such cool tricks. To facilitate this, it adds extra buttons to the left of the standard buttons at the top right corner of all windows. If you find the sight of buttons distracting (like I do) you can instead choose to have these functions appear in a right-click menu on the window title bar. If you are still not satisfied, you can even assign keyboard shortcuts of any of these actions! :-D

The two functions of eXtra Buttons that I actually use is Always on Top and Send to Tray Menu. I use Always on Top to keep a small Firefox or VLC window active in the bottom-right corner of my widescreen display. Send to Tray Menu is useful to hide download windows that need to be active, but can stay invisible. This function differs from Send to Tray, which just minimizes the window to the system tray as an icon. Since my system tray is already crowded with icons, I prefer to use Send to Tray Menu instead. This minimizes the window to an entry in the right-click menu of the eXtra Buttons system tray icon. That is, to restore this window I right-click the eXtra Buttons system tray icon and there it is!

Tried with: eXtra Buttons 2.2.3 Beta

Doxygen for CUDA

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Doxygen does not generate documentation for CUDA source files by default. The screenshot above shows how to enable Doxywizard to generate for .cu files. In the Expert tab, Input topic, find the FILE_PATTERNS section. Type *.cu and press the + button to add.

(To learn how to use Doxywizard to generate documentation for your code see here.)

Tried with: Doxygen 1.7.6.1