McFang – Exercising Futility

Posting drivel that is not of interest to anyone.

Posts Tagged Annoyance

Disable WordPress Autosave

Oct 20

Posted by mcfang in Internet | No Comments

WordPress’ Autosave feature was getting on my nerves. Often I make several revisions of a page before I save and WordPress was saving intermediate drafts that I didn’t want to keep.

I was surprised to find that there is no option in WordPress core to disable Autosave. Thankfully though it is incredibly easy to disable through editing the source or creating a custom plugin.

The following code (take from the reference link below) will function as a WordPress plugin and will disable autosave (works in WordPress 2.8)

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Disable Autosave
*/
function disable_autosave() {
wp_deregister_script('autosave');
}
add_action( 'wp_print_scripts', 'disable_autosave' );
?>

References

Adjust WordPress Autosave or Disable It Completely

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Firefox save-as for unknown mime-type

Feb 18

Posted by mcfang in Internet | No Comments

If Firefox 2.0 does not recognise a mime-type it forces you to jump through hoops every time you wish to save a file of that type – never giving you the option to make a default action (eg. save-as) for the type.

Getting tired of this I eventually did some research to find a solution, case in point is the RAR file type (application/x-rar; application/x-rar-compressed).

Option 1: An Addon

Add the Mime-Edit extension that allows you edit any mime-type’s properties and actions, even those not recognised by Firefox.

Option 2: Hack

If you are confident in XML manually edit mimeTypes.rdf in your profile folder and add these blocks:

<RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:mimetype:application/x-rar-compressed"
NC:fileExtensions="rar"
NC:description=""
NC:value="application/x-rar-compressed"
NC:editable="true">
<NC:handlerProp RDF:resource="urn:mimetype:handler:application/x-rar-compressed"/>
</RDF:Description>

<RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:mimetype:handler:application/x-rar-compressed"
NC:alwaysAsk="false"
NC:useSystemDefault="false"
NC:saveToDisk="true">
<NC:externalApplication RDF:resource="urn:mimetype:externalApplication:application/x-rar-compressed"/>
</RDF:Description>

And in the section <RDF:Seq RDF:about=”urn:mimetypes:root”> add in this new row:

<RDF:li RDF:resource="urn:mimetype:application/x-rar-compressed"/>

Update: If the problem persists then there are some additional types you can override. Add these blocks:

<RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:mimetype:unknown/unknown"
 NC:value="unknown/unknown"
 NC:editable="true"
 NC:fileExtensions="rar"
 NC:description="RAR archive">
 <NC:handlerProp RDF:resource="urn:mimetype:handler:unknown/unknown"/>
 </RDF:Description>

 <RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:mimetype:handler:unknown/unknown"
 NC:alwaysAsk="false"
 NC:saveToDisk="true">
 <NC:externalApplication RDF:resource="urn:mimetype:externalApplication:unknown/unknown"/>
 </RDF:Description>

And again in the section <RDF:Seq RDF:about=”urn:mimetypes:root”> add in these new rows:

 <RDF:li RDF:resource="urn:mimetype:unknown/unknown"/>
 <RDF:li RDF:resource="urn:mimetype:application/unknown"/>

If this still doesn’t solve the problem there is still one last type you can try overriding. Search for the following text and change the saveToDisk to TRUE and alwaysAsk to FALSE.

<RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:mimetype:handler:application/octet-string"
 NC:saveToDisk="true"
 NC:alwaysAsk="false" />

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SP2 cripples Windows XP

Feb 18

Posted by mcfang in Operating Systems | No Comments

SP2 brought with it a rather annoying tweak to the TCP/IP stack: a 10-connection-per-second limit.

I can’t remember exactly what alerted me to this problem, it may have been when a link-checker application stalled, or could have been the multi-threaded ftp client I was using.

Either way, the effect of “hitting the wall” was damned annoying and I need to find a way around it. Thankfully I found an article that offered a few solutions.

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