Tuesday, April 29, 2003

More on Dave's Quick Search Taskbar Toolbar Deskbar Google Search It I am even more impressed with Dave's Quick Search Taskbar Toolbar Deskbar.  which I discussed a few days ago.  This tool is amazing!  One regular reader (probably my only reader) mentioned that it was too bad it didn't support various locals other than the US.  In actual fact it does.  Just add a /uk, for example, and you will search the UK version of google.  In fact, I believe you can make this the default via the local preferences file. One of my favorite features is the ability to use an accelerator key (defaults to WIN+S) to jump into the text box.  I have been wanting this feature for the Address bar that can be displayed on the Task bar for years and except for Intelli-sense, this search bar blows away the Address bar.  It turns out that through Windows Shell extensions it is relatively trivial to intercept what the run dialog does.  As a result, it would be reasonable simple to add all this functionality to the Run dialog (since the Quick Search Taskbar is open source that is).  Hmmm.... Not a bad idea!  Now if only I could figure out how to provide an accelerator key to place the cursor into a Task bar docked Address bar.  Any insight on how to do this would be most appreciated. 9:41:15 PM   []    comment []

Command Prompt's Ambiguous Treatment of Long File Extensions Google Search It Now this is kinda silly but it turns out that by default the command prompt doesn't distinguish between files with extensions whose first three characters are the same, at least when using wild cards.  For example, if you have two files in the current directory: temp.tem and temp.temp then entering the command del *.tem at the command prompt will delete both files.  Yikes!!! The kb article describes the registry setting required to avoid this behavior and to make it easier to make this change (when setting up a new machine), I have created a reg file to change the setting.  (Note that a reboot is required for the setting to take effect.) 12:32:56 AM   []    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Mark Michaelis.