g.wygonik's flash experiments

While I use Firefox 99.7% of the time, there are those rare times that I'll open IE7 to test a site or to check to see how something runs in it compared to other browsers.

Well, if you've ever tried to access a SWF (or MOV or MPG) file directly in IE7 and expected the file to load and open, you'll know that by default it doesn't. Instead it will seem to download and then you'll get an "Object Expected" script error.

There are many many posts clogging the tubes asking about "why is IE7 broken?" when this sort of thing happens. After much searching, I finally came across a reply to a forum post that had a solution that worked perfectly.

Obviously the first "solution" people state is to wrap the object in HTML or JS. All well and good, and proper best-practice, but there are many sites that just have too many media objects to do that with (including some fun time wasters). This is the only solution that will work without making your users do something to their browser or registry.

Second solution is to add each and every media URL to the "Trusted Sites" zone. No.

Third, and the one I went with, is to add a registry key to your machine that turns off this annoyance and makes it work like IE6 does (just open the damn SWF! )

I take no blame if you edit your registry and muck something up, but here's what you do:

• Open regedit
• Drill-down to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl
• Add a new key: FEATURE_BLOCK_LMZ_SCRIPT
• Add a new DWORD to the key: iexplore.exe
• Give the DWORD a value of: 0 (zero)
• Re-open IE7 and go to the URL of the SWF (or MOV/MPG/et al) in question

I'm sure that this could, perhaps, in some obscure way make your browsing less secure (even though IE6 did it differently for years), but on the flip-side, it makes it more usable and less annoying.

Surprisingly, there is no option in IE7's preferences (even in advanced) that let's you change this setting; it has to be done via registry key.

I've had emails and blog post comments asking about where some of my old projects are. While some of them are available on my "lab" site (a component, some examples, some source code, others are sadly gone for good. Reason being is that my old server that I was running at home in NOLA is no longer. And, sadly, I didn't get to backup everything before it went away. :-( Should I ever get the time to rip the server apart and pull out the drive and see if I can recover it, I'll post with news. If I can find the time, I'll go through my old posts and remove links to things that no longer exist.

g.

While I don't have a Zune, nor do I plan on getting one, I was happy to see a nice, dark, official XP theme be released with a "Zune" feel (see bottom-right of linked page).

I prefer dark themes over the blue/silver/olive XP defaults, and while dark, Royale wasn't 100% complete. The other nice thing about this theme is that it's the first XP theme I've found that let's me set the titlebar size SMALLER than 20px; this one goes down to 18px. While that's not a huge difference, I prefer my screen to be used for apps, not titlebars .

I'm not sold on the orange in this theme, though it is the same orange as the Firefox logo .