Recently, I wanted to use Google Talk plugin(comes along with installation of Google Talk) for Windows Media Player that sets the currently playing song as your status message(Wow! Why Yahoo! couldn’t think of something like that????). Now as long as I used to use MS Windows XP, it wasn’t an issue et all. But the problem started when I tried to used in WMP 11 on Windows Vista Home Premium that came bundled with my Dell Studio 15 laptop. As soon as I tried to enable the plugin, WMP would crash and I couldn’t understand why!!!

After a wee bit of Googling, I came accross this thread which actually explained the cause behind it. While you can obviously visit the thread for info, I’m including the steps, here, for your ease.

Basically, the problem is caused as Google Talk fails to properly register gtalkwmp1.dll. So what we need to do is register it manually.

• Goto Start > Run.
• type cmd and press Enter.
• type cd\ and press Enter in the newly opened Command Console Window.

cd "Program Files"
cd Google
cd "Google Talk"
regsvr32 gtalkwmp1.dll

• As soon as you hit enter on line 4, a window will show that the file has been registered successfully.
• Now re-enable the plugin from Windows Media Player and it should work smoothly (atleast it worked for me :) )

Links

http://groups.google.com/group/Finding-Solutions/browse_thread/thread/b07627597f49979e
http://www.google.com/support/talk/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46532

Before, you start wondering what is Google Friend Connect, I suggest you to visit this site. Once, you are through with the knowledge of what is Google Friend Connect, you should be knowing about what Social Bar is. Yes, it’s a widget that can be installed onto your site and then lets you create your own site community without the headache of programming, registering and managing user and all that.

So what you up to this time, eh?

Well, I have created an extension that further eases the installation of this Social Bar. All you have to do is register your site with Google Friend Connect and get yourself a Site ID. After that, once the extension is installed, it will show the Social Bar whenever a full post is served. Combined with the Google’s Commenting feature, your blog will become a breathing community.

The Social Bar

 Comment Widget

Community List

Join/Login

So what does this extension exactly do?

As this extension was created for my personal needs, it may not be totally useful to you and you may not agree with me on how I use Google Friend Connect’s Social Bar. Now that we have an understanding let me tell you what this extension does. This extension inserts the Social Bar code into each post(single post only) served i.e. when you are viewing the full version of the post. Currently, the Social Bar is shown at the bottom of the page because that’s how I like it. As, the Social Bar implements the commenting feature (isolated to the page currently being visited), it eliminates the need of internal commenting system.

How to insall this extension?

• Download the extension from the bottom of this post.
• Extract the GFCSB.cs and upload it to your BlogEngine.Net’s ~/App_Code/Extensions folder. If your blog isn’t hosted on root, please change the path as needed.
• Also, you can install the rpc_relay.html and canvas.html to the root(~/) of your site or you can download and install them when you setup your site with Google Friend Connect.
• Goto Settings and select Extensions tab.
• Look for Google_Friend_Connect_Social_Bar under the Name column and click on Edit link on the same row. 
• In the next page, change the Site UD to your own Google Friend Connect’s Site ID. Please note that if your code is not valid, an empty bar will appear but I cannot guarantee what will happen on your site.

• You can also change the Div Tag ID. Since, IMO, it’s used just to differentiate one div tag from other  div tags, when multiple Google Friend Connet’s widgets are used, if you are only using this extension i.e. no other widgets installed, you won’t need to change it(at least worked for me:)).
• Allow Anonymous Post. as it’s name suggests that you can decide if you want to allow only people who join your community to comment or any one who visits your site(they don’t have to join your site to post comment).

Possible Updates

• Allow you to change the position of the Social Bar(Top or Bottom).
• Change the text of the default text ( “- Let me know about your thoughts –“)
• Possibly allow the poster to post YouTube links

All this features are actually supported by Google Friend Connect and if you are good at playing with C# files, it shouldn’t be too hard to modify the code to suit your needs. I’ll just provide this facilities who don’t know anything about programming yet want to use it.

Download here

GFCSB.zip

Hint for next post: Have you ever thought of a program that makes creation of BlogEngine.Net’s extension, a piece of cake?

Update: I'm currently working on a program that would ease the process of scheduling tasks for you. The details of the program is available here. If you want any new features, now is the time to ask for it. Just leave your feature request as a comment or send me a message with “Feature Request: Broadband Scheduler” as subject via Contact and I'll let you know if it would be possible for me to do it or not.

This post in actually extension to my previous post and therefore I’ve included only steps you need to follow.

Previously, I didn’t have Windows Vista^TM so I didn’t knew how to work with it. But my Dell Studio 1555 came preloaded with Vista Home Premium and so I had a go wit it.

Windows Vista uses Task Scheduler 2.0 which is far more better than the older 1.0 which came with Windows XP. While, there are lots of blogs and websites that enlist the features of Task Scheduler 2.0, the best I liked is the ability to change your Windows Account password without affecting your scheduled tasks.The reason I like this is because last month, when I was using Windows XP, I’d scheduled my tasks to run at different times. As you very well know, in Windows XP Task Scheduler(even if you don’t know just accept it), you need to provide your account password while setting up a task. If you change your Windows Account password, the password saved by Task Scheduler will eventually cause Bad Authentication and thus the tasks won’t start. This is not the case in Task Scheduler 2.0. Here, it Credentials Manager to store passwords and so there is no need to change password for each task. Secondly, it uses XML based Job Files that helps sharing of tasks across computers, that’s what I’ve done.

Now, as we have some preliminary information of Task Manager 2.0, we are going to use it’s Import Task feature. Please follow the steps as below

• Download the zip file and extract it to a safe location.
• Go to the directory where you extracted files using Windows Explorer
• Open Connect 2 Internet.xml in any text-editor(I prefer Notepad++)

• Go to Line 47 and you will find three space-separated values enclosed between <Arguments></Arguments> tag.
• Replace the connectionname with your Dial Up connection name(mine is BSNL), username with your BSNL username and password with your BSNL password.
• Save the file and close the editor.
• Open Task Scheduler from Start / Control Panel / System and Maintenance / Administrative Tools

• Select Task Scheduler Library from the left pane and click on New Folder on the right pane.

• Enter “BSNL Broadband” (you can choose different name or even skip this and previous step) and press OK.
• Now select the newly created folder from left pane and click on Import Task from the right pane.

• Navigate to the folder where you extracted the task files, select one of the task files and then press Open.

• A Create Task will be created, pre-loaded with task details from the Job File. Unless you want to play around with it, just press OK.

• Your task is created successfully.
• Repeat the above 3 steps for all the downloaded files.

• Please note that I’ve only provided tasks for Connecting, Disconnecting and Shutdown as the software needs will be different for each user.
• But if you wish to learn, there is abundant information available on Internet on how to Create Task in Task Scheduler 2.0. All you have to do is Google :p

BSNL Broadband Automation in Vista

Update: I'm currently working on a program that would ease the process of scheduling tasks for you. The details of the program is available here. If you want any new features, now is the time to ask for it. Just leave your feature request as a comment or send me a message with “Feature Request: Broadband Scheduler” as subject via Contact and I'll let you know if it would be possible for me to do it or not.

It seems that my last post was inadequate to make you understand how to use this batch files. So let me explain you how to do it in a step by step process.

Prerequisites: You should have basic knowledge of DOS prompt and how to use DOS commands.

1. This batch files use an executable called “rasdial.exe” that is available in Windows OS(XP or higher).
2. This executable lets you run your connections from the command-line. So, i n order to schedule our automation scripts, we are going to use batch files.
3. Now lets see, what the download consists of…
4. connect.bat – This file contains the command that will use your existing dial up connection to connect to internet.
5. disconnect.bat – This file contains the command that will disconnect your dial up connection.
6. Power-Off.bat – This file contains the command that will shut-down your computer. After all, we should save power too ;-)
7. The only file you need to modify is connect.bat. It calls rasdial.exe and passes three parameters namely dial up connection name, user id and password. So, open connect.bat in notepad
8. change “bsnl” to your connection name
9. change “uid” to your BSNL username
10. change “pass” to your BSNL password (Your password is stored as plain text so its not that safe to use this method)
11. No go to Start Menu > Control Panel > Scheduled Tasks and create new tasks as follows

    Time	Filename
    02:05 AM	connect.bat
    07:55 AM	disconnect.bat
    07:57 AM	power-off.bat

12. Set this tasks to daily so that they are executed daily.

Note: 

I’ll post steps for Windows Vista later this weekend. I have posted the steps for BSNL Broadband Automation for Vista. Please review them too.

Have a sound sleep.

BSNL Automation.rar

I created this little theme in the spirit of [IYA] – 2009 when I was using [MWPSK]. Now, that I don’t use it any more, I thought, I’ld let this theme remain available for download. The theme was created using MWPSK Theme Generator

Astro.zip

This extension is based Danny Douglas’s  SocialBookmarks Extension. I suggest that you also have a look at it.

What is AddThis?

AddThis is one of the popular(actually #1 per their site) social bookmarking button on Internet. This button eases your burden of maintaining links to each and every social bookmarking site on internet. Instead, the site provides us with a code that, once embedded into your post, opens a small popup with number of ways for sharing your content. Also, it tracks all the bookmarks through which you can analyze.

What AddThis extension does?

Instead of manually embedding the code, provided by AddThis, to each and every post, this extension inserts the code, on the fly, as and when the posts are requested.

How to insall this extension?

• Download the extension from the bottom of this post.
• Extract the AddThis.cs and upload it to your BlogEngine.Net’s ~/App_Code/Extensions folder. If your blog isn’t hosted on root, please change the path as needed.
• Goto Settings and select Extensions tab.
• Look for AddThis under the Name column and click on Edit link on the same row.

• In the next page, change the Username to your own AddThis Username so that you can track your traffic.

• Check Only Full Post  if you want to show the AddThis button when a full post is requested. If you want to show the AddThis button on all post on the default page(as request by Chad), just uncheck it.
• Now, you should be able to see the AddThis button at the bottom of your posts. 

New features in v1.3

• If you don’t wish to monitor your bookmark traffic, just check the Keep Anonymous option and your traffic will not be monitored.
• Now you can choose from multiple buttons supported by AddThis. The details on how to use different button is given in the inside help, on settings page. If you are struck anywhere, just leave a comment. You can see the list of possible buttons here

• I’ve also added a simple option to change between small and large buttons. Check Large Button option to show large buttons. This will not apply to plus button.

Your comments, compliments and bug reports are always welcomed…

Download here --