Blog posts dated 2013 – Posts 6..10 of 13 posts found:

MIDI Selector tool created

Windows Vista and later no longer include the MIDI mapper that was used in earlier Windows versions to route MIDI output to the preferred device. Vista did away with this, supporting only the rather underwhelming "Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth". While this is adequate for most users, it simply won't do if you have a proper MIDI synth for retro gaming or for playing MIDI files through Media Player. There exist several tools on the net that can change the default MIDI output device, but it appears there are differences in registry keys used between Windows Vista and Windows 7. The tool for one simply won't work on the other, so unless you knew which one to use, you'd still be stuck with Microsoft's softsynth.
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Update to RunExit tool

This is an update to the RunExit tool I created a few years ago for Windows 3. The original tool just plain ran the program and waited for it to complete. It didn't set the working directory for the program it ran (which messed up some programs, such as the games from Microsoft's Best of Entertainment pack) and didn't pass parameters, which may limit the usefulness in some other cases.
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Tip: Getting rid of the warning "The column name 'start' is a MySQL reserved keyword."

Version 4 and later of popular database management tool phpMyAdmin "helpfully" displays warnings when a column name in a database conflicts with a reserved word in MySQL. This may or may not be an actual problem. If you are in the habit of enclosing table names in your SQL queries in `backticks`, it shouldn't be a problem at all. For others, it may depend on the actual column name. In the example provided below, "start" and "end" can safely be SELECTed unquoted, whereas "group" needs the backticks. At any rate, having the warnings show up the whole time rather than just at table creation time is annoying. Here's how to disable them.
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Book review: Magento Performance Optimization How-to

Open source e-commerce platform Magento is widely used and flexible, but at the default settings, it can be dog slow. Packt Publishing recently released "Magento Performance Optimization How-to" by Nayrolles Mathieu in print and ebook format. It aims to be a short, fast and focussed guide to improving the perfomance of Magento stores using practical, hands-on recipes. So is it any good?
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Magento & Memcached - Fix "Unknown number format type 'boolean'."

Recently, I posted a guide to speed up Magento using Memcached. If you've followed another guide that has incomplete information, Magento may fail to work, greeting you with a rather unhelpful error message "Unknown number format type 'boolean'. Format '' must be a valid number format string.". The fix for this is simple.
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