The House of Ding » Web

Disable SSLv2 in IIS 6

Chris — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 18:56:08 +0000

Does working with third-party vendors require you to have the unfortunate pleasure of working with IIS 6? Do you need to disable SSLv2 and frustrated by the uselessness of Microsoft’s support documentation?

Four simple steps

Open regedit.exe (Start Menu > Run > regedit)
Navigate to HKey_Local_Machine > System > CurrentControlSet > Control > SecurityProviders > SCHANNEL > Protocols > SSL 2.0 > Server
Right-click on the Server key and choose New > DWORD Value
Name the key Enabled with the default value of 0

There is of course a fifth ubiquitous step when making Windows changes: reboot!

Hide Gmail image ads

Chris — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 03:13:29 +0000

It looks like Google may be rolling out image ads in Gmail?! This is potentially very disappointing. I’ve always loved Gmail because of it’s lack of flashy, distracting graphic advertisements. Here’s what I encountered when I checked my email this evening:

Gross. Luckily, Chrome (my primary web browser), Firefox, and most other modern browsers, support user stylesheets. Here’s how I gave Gmail an ad-ectomy in Chrome.

Custom.css

Locate the default user stylesheet in /Users/YOUR_USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/User StyleSheets/Custom.css

Add this line and save:

div.u5, div.nH.mq, div.nH.u8 {display:none;}

Restart Chrome and enjoy.

flashie.org – Ridiculously simple online flash cards

Chris — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 19:27:53 +0000

Motivation

I recently took a semester of Mandarin at the University of Minnesota. For an English speaker, learning Mandarin is challenging. Not only are you learning new words and grammar, but you’re also learning new characters. I’ve used flash cards in the past to learn foreign language vocabulary, but they didn’t seem to fit in this case. Ideally, I’d have a flash card with three sides: a Chinese character, the Pinyin pronunciation, and the English translation.

With the two-sided limit of a physical flash card, I began exploring some of the free flash card web sites out there (there are TONS). I found none that would let me define more than two sides and most of them were clunky, confusing, and riddled with obnoxious ads. Ick.

Discouraged by what was available, I fired up the ol’ laptop and created a simple Rails app that gave me what I needed. After a couple of hours I had my three-sided flash cards and easily aced all of my vocabulary tests (my wife still got a better grade than me though—grr).

Flashie.org

Since then, I’ve been playing with this Rails app and adding things here and there. I’ve added some animations, keyboard shortcuts and other fun features. In the hope that others will find this useful, I’ve wrapped some authentication around it and made it available at http://flashie.org.

So if you’re a student (or an educator) and find a use for Flashie, please give it a try. You only need to create an account to make card sets. Your friends and classmates, or your students, can view your public sets without registering or signing in.

Kamus Kecil

Chris — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:54:39 +0000

I created www.kamuskecil.com today during lunch as I ate last night’s leftovers in my cube. It’s a stupid-simple, no-frills Indonesian-English dictionary. I’ve been sitting on this data for years now and once had a grand vision for it, but let’s face it; it’s just a dictionary. And, I really only expect one user—myself. So if you ever need to know the definition of kamus, give it a try.