Google Chrome and pdfs
This my story of struggle to get Google Chrome working nicely with pdf-files. First I will talk the symptoms and finally I will walk through the suggestions and fixes I found from the web.
So I first installed Chrome version 4.0.223.16 (newest at the time of writing). I already had Acrobat Reader installed.
OK, so basically everything worked just fine, pdfs opened inside Chrome using the adobe reader plugins. Unfortunately, there Acrobat Reader seems to have some problems on my computer so sometimes it just hangs indefinitely. The problem is that then the Chrome hangs…The whole program!…I know, I know it shouldn’t happen because Chrome should run each tab in its own process but it seems that some compromises has been made when it comes to plugins (like the Acrobat Reader plugin).
OK, I must admit that after you wait something like 10 seconds, Chrome asks if you want to shut down the non-responding plugins. After pressing OK, pdf-tabs come back alive by refreshing them.
This was unsatifactory for me, since the Adobe plugin hanged quite often.
I wanted to know whether the problem was the Acrobat reader or the plugin itself. I tested opening pdf files manually from explorer and found out that sometimes the whole acrobat reader just hanged and I had to force kill it. It’s quite safe to assume that this was the reason why the Chrome sometimes stopped responding too.
Solution Suggestion #1: Disable pdf viewing in Adobe Reader (Open pdfs outside the browser)
- Open Acrobat Reader, select Settings/Internet and uncheck the “Display PDF in browser” checkbox.
- Restart chrome and open pdf file
When the option is unchecked, Chrome opens every pdf file outside the browser, therefore opening Acrobat Reader. OK, this might be good for some, but it didn’t resolve my problem since the Acrobat Reader itself hanged quite often.
Note: Chrome doesn’t handle this setting very nicely. When you press pdf hyperlink in page, let’s say “http://www.site.com/report.pdf” it opens it outside the acrobat reader, but unlike you might expect the URL bar in Chrome still displays “http://www.site.com/report.pdf” EVEN THOUGH the website is still displayed. None of the stuff in the website is clickable since the real URL is “http://www.site.com/report.pdf”, not “http://www.site.com/”. So ther must understand to press Back-button to get to the web page the link is on. Not very ideal, when compared to IE or FF, for example. At this point I can tell you that I haven’t found a way to Chrome work properly in this situation. So currently there’s no way (as far I can tell) to tell Chrome to open pdfs outside the browser, and not changing the url of the browser to the pdf. Chrome seems to be designed to use the pdf plugin and nothing else.
Solution Suggestion #2: Install alternative pdf viewer, Foxit Reader (Best I’ve found so far)
There exists alternative pdf readers, one of them is Foxit Reader. It’s free but has some ads displayed on the top corner. I thought that this might fix the problems I was having with Acrobat Reader.
I installed Foxit Reader normally and associated all pdf files to it. It worked very fast and didn’t show no problems. PDFs opened automatically using Foxit, as expected.
The problem was that Chrome still opened the files using the acrobat reader!!! This is against all expectations, definately Chrome should respect system’s defaults.
After digging deeper (Note:you can see the used plugins by writing about:plugins to the URL bar) it seems that that Chrome still uses Acrobat Reader pdf plugin and ofcourse the Acrobat plugin opens Acrobat Reader.
I’ve googled way to make Chrome use the Foxit Reader plugin but all suggestions didn’t seem to work (One of them suggested creating Plugins folder inside Chrome directories and moving the foxit plugin dll there, didn’t work for me.)
It seems that Chrome uses Acrobat Reader plugin nppdf32.dll located in
C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\Browser
If you just delete the file, pdfs don’t open at all in the browser so that doesn’t work. EDIT: Deletion is enough, and after that Foxit browser works.
What if we replace the file with the Foxit plugin (btw, it’s located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Foxit Software\Foxit Reader\plugins\npFoxitReaderPlugin.dll)
Well, it turns out that after this the Chrome opens pdfs inside the browser, using the Foxit Reader. I’m satisfied with the result, although it’s not perfect. Ideally I would prefer the pdfs opening outside the browser but please note the problems mentioned before.
By the way, the solutions might be easier if you just delete the Acrobat Reader alltogether and install Foxit Reader, probably then Chrome would understand to use Foxit. I’m not ready for this yet (until I’ve verified that Foxit displays the pdfs correctly).
Chrome seems to have some sort of weakness here, I think the user should be able to set which file is opened in what application.
Hopefully this helps someone. Please ask and comment!
For Reference: http://www.geekrant.org/2009/07/08/use-foxit-reader-in-chrome/comment-page-1/
How to Replace a System Program without Modifying System Files or Permissions
See this post. This can be used to replace notepad with other program, for example.
Basically,
Under the registry key
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options
create a subkey with the name of the exe you want replaced.
Add a string value called Debugger.
Modify Debugger with the command you want run.
When any user tries to run any executable with the name of the subkey, Windows executes the Debugger command with path\name of the original exe and all command line parameters appended. (Did that make sense?)
Solution: Vuze (azureus) seeds getting ‘queued’ status
Wonder why your seed get queued even if you want them to be seeded?
The problem is vuze’s quite poor default values. To understand the problem let me explain a bit more how vuze determines whether to queue an item.
Vuze determines the queue status on few things (in this order):
- First Priority rules (Options/Queue/Seeding/First Priority). Items matching the first priority rules go to the top of the queue. Please note that first priority have ignore rules which override the “matching rules”
- Ignore rules (Options/Queue/Seeding/Ignore rules). Items matching the ignore rules go to the bottom of the seeding queue and probably they will never seed.
Most forum posts mention “correct” rules for ignore rules but fail to mention that First priority rules have their own ignore rules too.
I have attached my working settings but feel free to tune them for your connection and needs.
Powershell script, executing commands to lots of files
Following powershell script goes recursively the folder “J:\pictures” and converts all avi file to mp4 files. It uses ffmpeg (remember to download newest binary)
I couldn’t get invoke-expression to work (it gave some error about “-” operator), so I just sticked all the commands to a text file d:\commands.txt and run it as a normal batch script.
I used this script to convert lots of videos shot with my camera to more compatible format.
"" > d:\commands.txt
foreach ($file in get-childitem "j:\pictures" -recurse -include "*.avi"){
$ffmpegprog = "`"C:\Program Files (x86)\WinFF\ffmpeg.exe`"";
$ffmpegparams = " -threads 2 -f mp4 -vcodec libx264 -b 1500k -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -deblockalpha 0 -deblockbeta 0 -b 1500k -maxrate 2000k -bufsize 4M -bt 256k -refs 1 -bf 3 -coder 1 -me_method umh -me_range 16 -subq 7 -partitions +parti4x4+parti8x8+partp8x8+partb8x8 -g 250 -keyint_min 25 -level 30 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -qcomp 0.6 -trellis 2 -sc_threshold 40 -i_qfactor 0.71 -acodec aac -ab 256k -ac 2 -ar 44100";
$command = ($ffmpegprog + " -i `"" + $file.FullName + "`"" + $ffmpegparams + " `"" + [System.IO.Path]::ChangeExtension($file.FullName, ".mp4") + "`"");
$("$command") >> D:\commands.txt
}
You can just copy-paste the file to a powershell window.
For some reason direct execution of the commands.txt batch file didn’t work so you can just run it throught type
type d:\commands.txt > d:\commands.bat
Banshee Shoutcast extension
Is going forward by Akseli Mantila (COSS project)
http://aksussummerofcode.blogspot.com/
Ubuntu: Trash can support on NTFS volumes
As Wyatt Smith said on https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/52985 :
To enable a trash can on a NTFS partition you will have to make an entry in your /etc/fstab file. You must specify the drive by UUID and assign a userid.
To discovery the UUID of the external drive. Please plug the drive in and then type
sudo blkidTo edit your fstab file with root permission
gksu gedit /etc/fstabHere is an example of how the entry should look. Please replace the UUID and mountpoint with the appropriate values from your system
# NTFS Partitions
UUID=19031A6158945892 /media/DATA ntfs-3g defaults,uid=1000,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0Save and exit.
To remount (unmount then mount) all drives listed in /etc/fstab
sudo umount -a
sudo mount -aYou should then see a hidden trash folder on your ntfs drive.
After this deletes are not permanent and they should be visible in the trash.
Annoying nonbreakable space character by accident
Have you noticed that when you press alt gr + space in terminal window, a non-breakable space character is outputted? It looks just like normal space but it prevents commands from working.
From example ‘[alt gr + space] ls’ cannot be interpreted but ‘[space] ls’.
Solution is to change keyboard behaviour:
From here
This feature can be configured in:
System
->Preferences
->Keyboard
->Layouts
->Layout options…
->Using space key to input non-breakable…
Change the setting to ‘usual space at any level’ setting.
Please note that this problem may not occur in some keyboard layouts.
