Category: Gadgets & Tools

Back in December, I bought myself a little present in the form of a GPS receiver.
I wanted to get it as it could work well with my then spanking new Nokia E65 phone.

After scouring the GPS websites, of which there hundreds, I eventfully decided on getting the Holux M-1000. This little gem was an absolute killer: more accurate, longer battery life and a smaller form factor than anything else available in regular Dutch high street shops.

So I got me one those little monsters from my local MediaMarkt and tried to get it to work. Sadly, the results were abysmal and most of the time I couldn’t even get a signal. Or so my phone said.

Well today I took the time do a thorough scanning of the internet. It turns out that both apps I used (Nokia Maps, Google Maps for Mobile) rely on the underlying Symbian 6 3rd Edition to connect with GPS devices. For some reason, Nokia’s version of Symbian seems to screw around with the Bluetooth connection and fails to maintain it.

To my relief there seems to be a reliable work-around for this. The work-around involves removing the Holux M-1000 registration in the paired devices list within the phone. You need to do this every time before you start a GPS-enabled application. It’s irritating to have to do, but so rewarding when you see the thing connect with 12(!) satellites within 2 seconds flat.

Now my GPS receiver works like a charm and I’m going to have a great time playing around with it. Yahoo!

Thanks to the great comments from dayoka on the Nokia forum.

Spelling checkers used to be somewhat of a chore on the net.

For a long time, I used to prepare my texts in a real word processor before pasting them in a browser. Then came the add-ons and extensions that added the functionality to the browser. Sadly, many of these efforts failed because the dictionaries were so limited that the effect of these tools was minimal.

Thanks to the massive open-source team now involved in developing Firefox and the Mozilla family, there are now good dependable dictionaries that are directly usable in any web form you want!

As a fan of Firefox I’ve been giving the spelling a go and I can positively say that it really works well. It’s really helped me reduce the amount of typo’s I make. And that is a great thing. But how does it work?

Let Jaspio show you:

When you install Firefox, the corresponding dictionary is embedded into your browser. As I installed the En-US version of Firefox, I have this dictionary as well.

Although American English is fine for most people, I was educated in real English and so I wanted to be able to use the En-GB dictionary. You can do this by downloading the En-GB dictionary from the Firefox Add-on library. (You’ll have to restart Firefox to be able to use the new dictionary).

Next, when you are using a web form with a multi line input you can tell Firefox that you would like to use the built-in spelling checker by right-clicking on the field and checking "Spell check this field".

The next time you right-click on the field you will see the languages you have installed and from which you can choose.

After enabling the language of your choice, the spell checker kicks in and uses a thin red underline to show you which words are incorrectly spelled. When you right-click on such a word, you will be presented with a few alternatives.

I hope this has been helpful to you!

Your feedback is always appreciated.

Ever wanted to know which application pool was behind that one w3p.exe process that always clogs up your Windows 2003 server?

Now you can by running a simple IIS script.
On the console, enter the following command:

cscript %systemroot%system32iisapp.vbs

This script wil then print out a list of all the running application pools and their corresponding process ID.

I made a batch file for on my desktop that paused the script so that the popupped window doesn’t disappear straight away.

IIS is easy to use for MS development.
Sadly, the most annoying thing about IIS 5.1 is that you are only allowed to run one website.

But wouldn’t it be nice to have multiple setups for different types of websites?

Thanks to the admin scripts in the Inetpub-folder folder of IIS you can!

To be able to add multiple sites we use the adsutil.vbs file.
(the file is located in the folder C:/Inetpub/AdminScripts).

Here’s an overview of its usage:

Show a list of current setups
adsutil.vbs enum w3svc /p

Create a clean setup in a new website (make sure the sitenumber is free!):
adsutil.vbs create_vserv W3SVC/2

Copy an existing setup to a new site (including Virtual Directories!):
adsutil.vbs copy W3SVC/1 W3SVC/2

Delete a setup:
adsutil.vbs delete W3SVC/2

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You could also use the the free IIsAdmin.NET tool, but this only creates empty sites and can’t copy settings from one site to another.