CyberShadow’s blog

If you’re getting error messages such as “No sound device detected. Sounds might not play.” or “Failed to create Direct Music Performance.” when running Game Maker games, the following may help you. Here’s what I did to fix them on my system:

1. Download the DirectX redistributable
2. Unpack it
3. Unpack dxnt.cab
4. In dmusic.inf, search and replace “HKCR,” with “HKCR,Wow6432Node\”
5. Install the edited dmusic.inf (from the right-click menu)
6. Copy missing DLLs (dm*.dll) to %WINDIR%/SysWOW64.

That’s it! The same method could work for other DirectX components as well.

Looking for color grep for Windows? I was. I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for; instead, I found something better.

ack is a tool like grep, designed for programmers with large trees of heterogeneous source code.

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Once in a while you’ll stumble upon a combo box which doesn’t allow you to type past the right edge of the control. When normally typing more text would just scroll the contents, you’ll just get back an annoying beep. The amount of text you can enter is actually bound by the on-screen width of the text – thus, you may be able to enter 125 “i” characters, but only 25 “W” characters.

The cause of the problem is that the combo box was not created with the CBS_AUTOHSCROLL style:

CBS_AUTOHSCROLL

Automatically scrolls the text in the edit control to the right when the user types a character at the end of the line. If this style is not set, only text that fits within the rectangular boundary is allowed.

Visual Studio’s resource editor has a different name and description for this property:

Auto

Automatically scrolls text to the left when the user types a character at the end of the line.

I love fixed backgrounds. So, I made a version of Sam‘s Pixel theme with a fixed background (which you can see on the blog already). It even supports IE6 (well, almost) – thanks, ie7-js!

Note: I re-exported the background from the original PSD as a PNG, since it’s too beautiful to be degraded by JPEG compression artifacts. The PNG is about 350kb in size – so, if that bothers you, convert it to JPEG and edit style.css accordingly.

Download

The Eclipse IDE doesn’t use the overwhelmingly common Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab shortcuts to switch editor tabs. Not only that, it doesn’t even allow you to bind these keys to the classic Ctrl+Tab behavior (switch to the tab left/right of the current one). However, Ctrl+PageUp/Down seem to be hard-coded to switching tabs the good-old way, so it’s just a matter of remapping Ctrl+(Shift+)Tab to those keys.

Here’s my AutoHotKey solution:

#IfWinActive ahk_class SWT_Window0
^Tab::Send ^{PgDn}
#IfWinActive ahk_class SWT_Window0
^+Tab::Send ^{PgUp}

PuTTY Knife is a small program that, when launched, creates a context menu that contains all of your PuTTY sessions. KiTTY is a PuTTY fork with a bunch of new features. Since KiTTY stores its sessions in another registry key, PuTTY Knife doesn’t “see” them. (continue reading…)