Clement Nedelcu's Development Journal

BEFORE FOLLOWING THIS GUIDE, make sure your users don't actually need this feature. High-contrast mode is very useful for some people. If you disable it for them, they will be pissed (I noticed several visitors got mad at me for writing this tutorial). Working as a system administrator (among other roles) in an international school, we've got a lot of computers to manage here and kids never miss a chance to mess up with them. The latest trend is to enable high-contrast mode, basically making the computer turn black and white along with a bunch of other fluorescent colors. I don't need to remind you how annoying this is and why a more permanent solution needs to be found for this problem. Tip: you can quickly enable or disable high contrast mode by pressing  Left Alt+Left Shift+Print Screen . In this article, I am providing three different ways to permanently disable high-contrast mode . All have their pros and their cons, feel free to try each of them and let me kn...

UPDATE October 2014: this application has been discontinued. [Old article:] This article presents you with the top 3 ways to migrate or transfer applications settings across computers. This will come in handy in situations such as: when you buy a new computer and need to transfer your settings from your old computer to your new computer when you want to replicate or send application settings to a friend or someone else when you want to back up your settings in order to ensure you won't lose something if your computer were to break down somehow The solution I'm going to present you is fully automated, free, and it's even open source so it's completely devoid of all risks regarding data privacy. It's a simple tool called AppMigrate . Quick tutorial First, head over to the official website and download the latest AppMigrate installer . Install the program and open it via the newly created shortcut in your start/home menu. A window appears showing you...

A quick article today about a common error people encounter with Nginx: the infamous 413 Request Entity Too Large HTTP error. I had the problem myself just yesterday on one of my newly configured servers, so I thought I'd make a blog post about it to make sure I don't forget this next time. Error 413: what does it mean? This error shows up when a visitor sends too much data in the HTTP request. This is normally caused by: • an overy large file being uploaded by the visitor • more generally too much POST data being sent by the client The fix is as simple as setting a directive in your Nginx configuration, read on below. How to fix it? client_max_body_size To fix this, you need to increase the value of the client_max_body_size directive. This directive defines the maximum amount of data Nginx will accept in an HTTP request. By default this value is set to 1 megabyte, meaning if you attempt to upload a file larger than 1 megabyte you'll be getting an  Error ...

Recently I've started encountering a particularly annoying problem with Office 2013. Every time I'd open Excel 2013 under Windows 8, it would crash instantly, leaving me a message: " Excel 2013 has stopped working ". I looked around and found a few solutions, but nothing worked for me. Eventually, I managed to fix the problem all by myself. I'm going to describe the steps that I've tried here. Note that this post is also valid for messages such as: Word 2013 has stopped working Powerpoint 2013 has stopped working Excel 2013 has stopped working Outlook 2013 has stopped working Office 2013 has stopped working (insert any other Office tool here). Most of these solutions are also valid for Office 2007 and Office 2010 applications . Solution 1: change the default printer This solution fixed all my problems, so I'm going to describe it first. Also it's the simplest! Try this first before anything else, because the next solutions are a bit more...

Recently I've been needing to access a DBISAM database created by third-party application, in order to export some of its data. Initially, I didn't even know what format the database was; I'd just found a bunch of files with the following extensions: .dat , .idx , .blb , .ibk , .bbk , and more. After a quick Google search, I stumbled upon a few pages that led me to DBISAM from Elevate Software . It's a proprietary database format that doesn't require a server application, somewhat similar to SQLite. Accessing the database from PHP was quite complex because I didn't have a proper reference or blog article to detail the process. That's exactly why I'm writing this: to give people directions on a subject that's hardly documented at all. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to access the database via PHP, execute a simple SQL query, and display the result. ODBC driver and connection I almost forgot: there's a catch-- even two, and here...

I am writing this article in the hope that this will help someone else. I have a white 2009 Macbook (version 6,1 -- if you want to know what's yours, refer to this list http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1635 ) So here's the thing. I just installed Windows 8 on my macbook, via Boot camp. Unfortunately, even after installing the most recent available drivers (from Bootcamp 4, since Bootcamp 5 doesn't support my Macbook version), my computer freezes at random times. After reading about a lot of similar problems on the web, this blog post seemed to best describe the issue I was personally encountering. Indeed: if I disable the Broadcom wifi adapter, the freezes no longer occur.  So yes, it seems the problem comes from the Broadcom wifi driver . It seems that I was able to solve the problem after looking at numerous solutions on the web. I followed all the instructions on this blog article but it did not solve the freezing problem. So I took additional steps. Before read...

Have you ever needed to write PHP code so fast that you didn't have time to properly comment it? These situations tend to happen a lot when you are being pressured by your boss (I know what I'm talking about) to deliver projects under strict deadlines.  Once the project is delivered, it is always a pain if you ever have to come back to the code and comment it.  To make it easier and more enjoyable to comment your PHP code (afterwards I suppose), I've developed a simple tool called PHPDocFill that does the following: - scans the current folder and subfolder to find all php files in your project - analyzes your PHP files to find PHPDoc documentable elements - easily insert or edit documentation blocks - it even generates a simple HTML manual based on the documentation found in all the files Full documentation, information, downloads and screenshots are available on its official site. Official site:  http://cnedelcu.net/phpdocfill/

If you are reading this article because you stumbled upon my blog looking for information on a completely unrelated subject, you'll probably wonder what this is about. On the other hand, if you were specifically looking for information on how to query Dell's AssetService via PHP, this post will tell you exactly what to do! Sept. 2015 update: this tutorial no longer works since Dell have updated their systems. If you manage to make it work please let us know what you did! Dell is one of the top IT hardware supplier for professionals. The organization I currently work for has been working with Dell for over a decade: we have hundreds of Dell laptops, desktop PCs, screens, videoprojectors and whatnot. As it turns out, Dell makes use of a particular serial code that is assigned to each of the products they manufacture: it's called the "service tag". The service tag can be found in at least three locations: - on a label physically stuck on the item (see...

I have been an iOS user for a while now and making use of iMessage since the day it was launched. It's quite convenient and most of my contacts use it too. Ever since the "Moutain Lion" version of Mac OS X, users are also able to send iMessages using their laptop or desktop computers, in addition to tablets, phones and iPods. Now, if you're like me and own both an iPhone and a Windows-based PC, you probably wondered at some point: how do I send iMessages from my Windows computer ? where do I find an Apple iMessage client for Windows ? At the time of writing this article (March 15th, 2013) there is no proper iMessage client for Windows. However, there seems to be some kind of workaround application that enables people to do so. But before you read any further you should know the limitations: 1) it works together with your iOS device, which means you need to have it with you -- kind of defeating the purpose 2) it requires your iOS device to be jailbroken -- wh...

Lately I've been in a situation where I had an image embedded into a .docx Word document, and I absolutely needed to get the original image file  in order to be able to retrieve the original best-quality picture. See the screenshot below? My document contains a picture, it shows up as a small thumbnail, but I need the original high-resolution picture. This tutorial shows the way, it works with  Microsoft Word 2007 and above . There are several ways to retrieve or extract images from a Word document. I am going to be listing the top 3 ways to do so in this article. Feel free to use whichever way you want, but expect different results. Here is the article index here: Renaming the .docx to .zip , opening the zip file and extracting the images (Best way!) Copying and pasting the image into a picture processing application (Alright) Saving the document as a web page and retreiving the generated images (Nice!) Alternatively you could just use the Snipping Tool from ...