...and master of none

So, I recently completed writing a Desk band for windows. What is a desk band, you ask? Well, your windows start bar is the home for several desk band objects. These are basically COM objects that support a bunch of interfaces and register themselves in appropriate places so that windows knows to load them. In short, you register your windows class and it gets put in the toolbar. Nearly the same code can work in multiple places in IE, Explorer, and in the Start Bar. So, I learned a few lessons: It is far easier to do your initial development so the band will work in the IE toolbar than in the start bar. This lets just run the COM object (and automatically start IE) rather than manually starting up the desk band, and attaching to the Explorer process. When you get most of what you need done, you can test it in the Start bar. A conditional compilation switch in your code will make sure that you don't accidentally register the release version of your desk band object to run in IE (if

I got my Shuttle SN25P XPC on Monday from NewEgg and immediately put it together. The components that I had delivered with it are: AMD Athlon X2 64 3800+ processor 2 GB Crucial pc-3200 memory (2x 1GB) Samsung SATA2 250 GB drive Gigabyte Nvidia GeForce 6600GT 128 MB video card Then I spent most of the evening installing Windows XP, service packs, and all kinds of hot fixes. Not to mention the drivers needed by my machine (like everything!) Well, to make a long story short, the UN-service packed version of XP doesn't recognize drives over 130 GB or so, so it formatted the drive smaller than it should have been. So now I'm faced with resizing the drive with partition magic or something similar. I could have saved myself a lot of time using the following utilities and programs: Unattended XP CD nLite - Tool for slipstreaming and customizing windows installations RyanVM's Windows XP Post-SP2 Update Pack - latest hotfixes all together in one install or separately DriverPacks -

I guess if Brent can do it , so can I. After much coaxing and goading, I am going to keep a blog of cool stuff that I figured out. This is not so much a vanity site, I really don't believe that anyone will read what I have to say as it is my anti-altzheimers mechanism of choice. Or, to put it another way... "Cool. Why don't you put that in a blog so that when I ask you how you did it a year from now you won't just give me a blank expression" - Brent Oh, yea, and Scott has said almost the same thing from time to time. Now, for those of you who don't know me... What are you doing here? You must really be bored.