Matt Refghi

I’ve always preferred cats over dogs for one simple reason: independence. Still, I find myself wanting to enforce certain behaviors that are, well, dog-like. Whenever I grabbed the bag of food to feed my cat, he would get really excited, sometimes even blocking my ability to pour the food by sticking his head in the bowl. This eventually started to bother me, so I decided to train him how to behave when I’m giving him food. I decided he shouldn’t be sticking his head in the bowl – he should be patiently waiting until I pour the food, and also wait for my command before he begins eating. I felt this would help cover cases where I wanted to add … Read more

Due to my choice of profession, I tend to spend a lot of time using computers. Consequently, I work with a lot of applications – that means I see lots of different user interfaces. Some are good, some are bad – but every now and then, I find something in between. Sometimes, it perfectly showcases the developer’s sense of humor. For example, here’s what the “Go To” dialog looks like in Notepad++. You can access it by pressing CTRL+G. Not sure that’s the best design for the dialog – but I appreciated the humor.  🙂

Computers have a means of communicating without external speakers – they do so via hardware beeps. These are the main scenarios I’ve seen where a computer beeps: There is a problem when the system tries to boot, so it attempts to communicate what went wrong – via a sequence of beeps. Too many keys were pressed at once on the keyboard. The system is configured to beep whenever an alert dialog appears. The last one I found particularly annoying when I was developing Visual Basic 6 applications at my day job. For some reason, Visual Studio 6 likes to communicate with you via alert dialogs. Visual Studio .NET corrected this – instead of a typical alert box, they list the … Read more

Since it was first introduced, Google Chrome has been my browser of choice. So, when version 4 was released, I was particularly pleased to see the new extensions feature. When I went to view the extensions gallery, a particular entry stood out from the rest: Right there among the top rated extensions, I found one that did nothing(Update 2022-11-22: link removed.): When I viewed the details about the extension, it became obvious that many people were fueling the joke by adding supportive comments. Still, you see glimmers of confusion every now and then. The last comment is my favorite.

Ah, yes… Print Screen. I’ve been using the Prt Scr key for many years now – for a long time, it was my primary method of taking screenshots. However, when I started working as a developer, I quickly discovered the benefits of using specialized screenshot utilities. Presently, I use Snipping Tool and Jing much more than Print Screen. The problem was always that Print Screen would copy the whole desktop, which is particularly frustrating when you have multiple monitors. Soon after starting as a developer, I was told that pressing Alt + Prt Scr would copy only the active window to the clipboard. This proved convenient in the cases where I wanted exactly that – just one window. See the screenshots … Read more

UPDATE: I made a video explaining this in December 2016. The article can still be read after the video, if you prefer. If you use Windows, chances are, you know about the Task Manager. Windows Task Manager is a task manager application included with Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems that provides detailed information about computer performance and running applications, processes and CPU usage, commit charge and memory information, network activity and statistics, logged-in users, and system services. The Task Manager can also be used to set process priorities, processor affinity, forcibly terminate processes, and shut down, restart, hibernate or log off from Windows. Typically accessed via CTRL+ALT+DEL, this handy tool was never intended to be widely used. Watch … Read more

When I tried to run my new Ubuntu virtual machine using the free VMware Player, I was hit with this error message: The first thing I did was check to see if such a service was running, and, sure enough, it was. Solution After seeing this… it occurred to me: did I even launch VMware Player with administrative rights? Probably not. Sure enough, when I enabled administrative rights, the error message didn’t appear. UPDATE January 8, 2023 – Old comments posted to my previous site can be seen here.

At home, I use multiple external hard drives; however, I don’t always leave them on. I usually have just one of them running at a time. Today, when my turned on my main external hard drive, it was assigned the drive letter I by Windows, whereas it usually used F. This caused some problems – some of my shortcuts expect it to be the F drive. When I look at my drives in Windows, here is what I see: Looking at the drives, I don’t quite understand why Windows thought I would be a good idea. I’m guessing it remembers another drive that had F, and wants to reserve it. Why it didn’t do that before, is beyond me. To correct … Read more

As a developer, I very often see error messages – some of those originate from the products I develop, and I have to report them as bugs. Whenever I get an error message in a dialog, I typically take a screenshot, and add that to the bug base issue. That’s fine, but it means people can’t search for that error message in the bug base – in order to enable that, I’d usually just manually type out the error message, rather than take a screenshot. That was before. Today, I’d just press CTRL+C to copy the error dialog contents. That’s right, whenever you see a dialog in Windows, like this: You can press CTRL+C to copy, and then open up … Read more

I was pretty happy when I managed to snag Far Cry 2 for a low price on Steam, a month or so ago. Unfortunately, when I went to run the game, it never launched successfully. The splash screen appeared, and the game did momentarily appear in the task bar – but after that, the screen turns black for about 2 seconds, and then everything disappears. Kind of a disappointing experience for a newly purchased game, but it wasn’t the first time I encountered a game that refused to start. Solution To solve this, I had to carefully trigger a keyboard shortcut at the right moment. 1) Launch Far Cry 2. In my case, the splash screen appeared, and then it … Read more