Browser pas

Desperate one behaves vilely. Opera installer v11.11 made that browser default without asking me (I can swear, no questions were asked). To return the IE as default browser (not that I like or use IE for browsing, but to make it start first for test purposes) I had to modify the registry.
As it turned out, the HKCR hive is not a link but a cascade union of the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes and then HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes. So, modifying one branch, make sure there is no the same in the second place which will override the values.

A certification pit

Each time we need renew or issue a new certificate for test web servers it becomes a quest. The certification server is installed on a windows 2003 server and each time it behaves different. I wonder, if somebody noticed that too?
It works differently in different browsers, and does not let you in even with IE until the browser's advanced security property "Enable Integrated Windows Authentication" is off.

USB drive instead of Floppy.

Some things beyound my understanding. Here is a story. After a windows update on our DELL server, windows 2003 refused to boot, even in the safe mode. We decided to run the recovery from the installation DVD. But the problem instantly occured - the installer did not recognize the DELL's PERC/5i RAID controller. The machine did not have a floppy drive (even though the motherboard actually has a floppy connector on it). We contacted the DELL tech support and were told to put the PERC driver to a USB flash drive using special utility available also to download (the content of the drive was gone, so saddly to say). Then, standard F6 key worked and the installer saw the driver on the USB drive as it was a floppy disk.
How it did that? No clue.

COM to .NET

How to make a .NET class library be accessible as a COM object?

1. Create a new .net class library project for the wrapper
2. Declare the class as "ComVisible":
   using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
   [ComVisible( true )] public class ClassName
3. Generate the Keyfile:
   C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\bin\sn.exe -k "keyfile.snk"
4. Set the project property to sign the library using the generated keyfile
5. Generate the Registry entry with the path to the library .dll as the "codebase":
   regasm.exe %TRGDIR%\LibName.dll /codebase
   Specify also the /tlb option if the library is to be imported by the C++ #import directive
6. Check the registry has the ProgId: LibName.ClassName and refers to the CLSID which has the "codebase" path to the LibName.dll

min-height in IE

All the standard browsers have the min-height CSS property, but IE has it only in the strict !DOCTYPE mode (which is a nightmare) and it does not work properly anyway.
As a workaround, we can do the following
1) Specify the min-height which is ignored by IE
2) Specify the "hight" for IE only.
How to make the other browsers to ignore the "height"?
There are at least two solutions found:
1) Make a weird selector path, like:
* html .dd_h { height: 18px; }
(.dd_h is the class name for the object which need the min-height)
2) Add the style property with an underscore ahead:
.dd_h { min-height: 18px; _height: 18px; }
In some reason IE processes such property as usual, and of course it's ignored by proper browsers.

Source:
http://www.cssplay.co.uk/boxes/minheight.html
http://sandgroper14.wordpress.com/2007/05/24/css-min-height-issue-solved/

Android versions we have

Android developer console has a new statistic feature.
In that we can see the current Android's version distribution:
Android 2.2 - 57.8%
Android 2.1 - 29.0%
Android 1.6 - 6.8%
Android 1.5 - 4.9%
Android 2.3.3 - 0.6%

Gingerbread already available for 5 month (from when it was first introduced), and still has a tiny share.
Will the other makers start to install it on their devices some day or it will never happen due the enormous Gingerbread ugliness?

GMail advanced IMAP

GMail was quite annoying placing all the old emails to the "All Mail" folder.
I don't care if they want to archive them but I do care when my IMAP client downloads all the oldies each time and keeps the huge copy on the local storage.

Praise all gods, that can be fixed. As described in the following article:
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/answers/how_to_setup_gmail_imap_and_mail.app1/

In short, just go to the settings, then to the "Labs", and enable the "Advanced IMAP controls". Then go to the "Labels" and uncheck the "All Mail - Show in IMAP" checkbox.
That's it. The mail client won't see that folder anymore!