Author Archives: Clay

About Clay

I'm a Data Center Operations Engineer in beautiful Charleston, SC. I'm happily married to my wonderful wife Nan and we have an teenage daughter Lela. I'm a total geek. I got into electronics when I was around 9 or 10 and got hooked on computers shortly thereafter. I also love Sci-Fi, (not fantasy) particularly Star Trek. My favorite outdoor activities include rollerblading, biking and hiking. I'm also a bit of a car guy and amateur racing driver.

The Lazy Blogger..

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It seems I always start off a new post with how long it’s been since my last. No more! From this point onward, I acknowledge the fact that I am indeed, a lazy weblogger. 🙂

What’s New?
In my last post, I detailed the further evolution of my HTPC project. Well, It’s still working, but not as well as I’d hoped. In the months past, I’ve replaced the Hauppauge WinTV-D card with an ATI HDTV Wonder. The result was exactly what I had hoped for. The ATI tuner does everything I wanted and more. The only problem with the system has been stability. I’m planning on upgrading the CPU and video card soon (a Radeon 9500+ is required for better performance). That should help.

If you’ve been watching the ads in the Sunday paper, you may have noticed some great deals over at Best Buy. For the last few weeks they’ve had great deals on hard drives, monitors and more. I picked up a 19″ Mag LCD monitor for only $329 (after MIR). Not bad considering it’s got a 16ms response time. If you’re in the market for new hardware, ’tis the season for good deals.

The Adventure Continues…

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It’s been a while since my last post, but I’ve got a whole new article to show for it.

HTPC Project
A few posts back I mentioned a new project I was working on. Well, after a lot of work over many weekends and nights, and after waiting for parts to come back and forth, I’m finally at a point where I can talk about it. My new HTPC is finally together and working. More…

HTPC HTPC - Back HTPC - Installed

Bug stompin’

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Every once in a while most of us come across some sort of odd behavior in our software that bothers us because we can’t figure it out. If you’re like me, these problems nag at you until you are finally compelled to fix them.

Firefox 0.9x bug
While there are a number of improvements in Firefox 0.9x series of browsers, I’ve also found there are several new bugs as well. The one that’s been annoying me the most is tied to the Firefox installation and how it integrates itself into windows. Windows tries to open a new instance every time you click on a link, and because something’s messed up, you get 2 windows and an error message. The problem lies in the fact that Firefox doesn’t clear out Internet Explorer’s DDE information when it’s set as the default browser. I put the error messages it was generating into Google and found a reference on Jon Galloway’s blog. This and another link on his page sparked my memory of messing around with DDE settings back in Windows 3.1 and I remembered all you generally need is the “%1” in the ‘DDE Message’ field for the particular file type you are trying to correct the behavior for. For Firefox, this means going to an explorer window, clicking “tools,” “folder options,” “file types” and then editing the properties for “(NONE) URL:HyperText Transfer Protocol” and the following entry “…with Privacy”. Delete everything but the “%1” (keep the quotation marks) in the ‘DDE Message’ field and everything should work normally. Phew.. glad to have that fixed. 🙂