If you’re having a hard time getting Boot Camp to correctly install Windows and you’re getting either a “disk error” or “hal.dll missing” error, here’s how to actually fix it.

First, you’ll have to restore your disk to a full Mac OS X partition. Then, you’ll reformat it to be a Mac OS X partition and a Windows partition (using Boot Camp).

This is now the important step. You must write over the partition. So load up the Terminal and enter

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk0s3 bs=1m count=100

Where rdisk0s3 is the disk where the Windows Partition is. To know the name of your Windows partition, you can go to the Disk Utility (Applications-Utilies) and look for a partition under your hard drive.

When that is done, you can restart your computer with your Windows CD and install it. Everything should be fine now.

PS. Use at your own risk. The command involve writting 0’s to your partition table, which might screw it up if done unproperly.

PPS. I cannot be held responsible for anything happening to you or your computer.

If you’ve been having some problems with your connection or especially with firefox, check if you have FasterFox. If you indeed do, please uninstall this crap. I was on dnsstuff.com and got blocked by one of their script telling me I had FasterFox (which in that case was true, even though I generally don’t install that thing). I was having a hard time loading pages for no reason but I had good internet download speed using FlashGet.

In the end, I removed FasterFox, restarted FireFox, everything is back fast and furious :).

If you’re having trouble with your DVD not being detected in Windows XP while being detected in the BIOS, this is THE solution you’ve been looking for.

This problem is generally caused by the Adaptec ASPI drivers needing to be updated. The best way to fix this problem is to download the latest Adaptec aspi_471a2 drivers. You can download them at Softpedia.com.

Good luck!

“richtx32.ocx” is not an executable file and no registration helper is registered for this file type.

I had this thing always appearing while using my FTP software so I had to fix it. I looked all over the internet to find any possible fix but no one gave me the answer I was looking for. After a while I decided I would try to find out the latest version of this file and almost every place I went to, I found the version 6.0.88.4 which was the one not working for me. Then I went to http://www.martin2k.co.uk/ and grabbed his Microsoft Rich Textbox Control 6.0 (SP4) (richtx32.ocx) which was version 6.0.88.77. By executing regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\RICHTX32.OCX on my winXP computer, the damn thing finally registered itself!

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^your-domain-here\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.your-domain-here.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

This code placed in your .htaccess will give you the possibility to send any visitor coming to your-domain-here.com to www.your-domain-here.com. This has a great advantage especially with search engines because all your pages will be referenced under the same “subdomain” as if you had both, you’d get www.your-domain-here.com links and your-domain-here.com links which would count as different pages.

Well, it took me some time until I realise that this cool slider bar option as something negative about it: it hides contains from search engines spiders.

Using AJAX coding, the only one who can trigger the request to the server are the users, a bot wouldn’t be able to read any content except the one that’s appearing on the front page.

Is this going to kill my chances of getting spidered? Actually yes. As the top navigation (the ­­Older and Newer links) are also programmed to trigger javascript, the spider cannot go anywhere. When it reads a # link, it just stays on the same page, no new content for the bot to read.

The thing though is that the spider can still view your list of latest post which are static. When they go to theses pages, nothing is in AJAX format, the links are all going to another post so it’s fine. The only impact the slider has is it removes a bit of power from your front page.

Have you ever been on a forum waiting for people to reply to your threads? Do you find it frustrating to have to bump your own threads so you can get the response you’re looking for? If yes, then you might want to look at this concept idea:

When you are online, varying from 5-10 of your “latest” post would be bumped to the top automatically as your are online. This would increase the chances of getting a reply to your messages. As well all know though, forums are being browsed by thousand of people so bumping all those threads all at once would be useless & cpu consuming that’s why instead of bumping all of our threads, we would be able to bump 5 chosen thread each time we are online.

Doing so will help your own forum to grow as members who are online longer have better chances of getting replies and then to reply so more posts. The problem with current forums is that threads which aren’t always done end up not being answered. Why not make sure all threads are getting the reply they should get? When a user is satisfied with the answer, he can remove the thread from his list => yes, this means we could ask for others people thread to get replied to.

Yet, this is only an idea. I’m sure that forums such as vBulletin and Invision Power Board will find this thread and will add it to their next release as people are avid of answers. By giving them a better opportunity to get their answer, community grows, people are happy, everyone’s happy :).