The mouse pad worked just fine for days and "all of a sudden" my Acer, an Aquire R 14 (Acer Touch R3-471T), but it looks like many if not most Acers have the same issue.

The fact is that I use the Fn + F8 key to mute the speaker all the time, whenever there is an ad in a video, I really have to do that!

The Fn + F7, which is right next to the Fn + F8, is actually a key one can use to turn the Mouse Pad ON and OFF. Do it once again, Fn + F7, and the Mouse Pad will work again.

Hopefully you had a USB mouse or like me, you installed Synergy and thus could use your Linux mouse anyway. ...

I installed a website on a brand install installation of Ubuntu 14.04 (opposed to an upgrade from earlier versions) and the same website would not start...

Apache2 would give me the following error:

client denied by server configuration

which did not seem to tell me anything... I search for the error and the first page that popped up was a page by Apache2 and they said to add the deny/allow trick. I tried that and it did not help.

    <Directory /my/special/directory>
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>

Search further, I found an answer on ...

When I installed Flash, it automatically installed McAfee, the anti-virus, and really, I have not seen an option to NOT install that wonderful free tool which annoys me (and probably many others) a lot...

Not knowing, I then searched for a little while, why is it that my Wifi connection says "Limited" instead of "Connected". This is because McAfee replaces the MS-Windows firewall with their own stuff. That stuff limits the connections and everything will not go through, hence the Limited information on my Wifi connection.

Since I removed McAfee, my connection remains and ...

When I downloaded FileZilla, somehow I also got Chromium and some TV something downloaded and installed under Win10. I removed the TV crap, really no need, but I was thinking to keep Chromium since I need to test my websites with it once in a while. Cool, but that stupid software installed itself to auto-start!!!

I don't think I had the option to NOT have such a feature turned on.

So... I had to search for it because apparently no one knows how to handle Auto-Start features under newer versions of MS-Windows. It is actually... take a deep breath... in the Task Manager. (At least in ...

Click image to enlarge. Source: Synergy Project on Github.com

Multiple Computers One Mouse & Keyboard

As I like to have Synergy working on my Windows boxes (i.e. laptops), I am saving a copy of the installer 64 bit version which works fine with WinXP and Win7. I'm about to test it with Win10 which is likely to accept it as is too. Just in case you did not know, Synergy is a driver that takes one mouse device and makes it work on multiple computers. In other words, you can use any number of computers with one mouse and one keyboard. Move the mouse to the right computer and you ...

Today I was confronted with an error in a process that would run in the background and slowly fill up the Windows message queue when it should have been dormant.

I looked at the messages that were being processed once the process woke up and the message number was 0xC10C or so. Nothing in the software has such a number. So I looked around and found out that the message was one of those created using the RegisterWindowMessage() function. (This is wrong in that application since the messages are never used from external applications, but oh well... that does not change the basic problem.)

So, ...

I always have to looks for the command line option to turn sites and modules on and off (really it is said to be enabled or disabled.)

The commands are as follow:

• a2ensite -- enable one site
• a2dissite -- disable one site
• a2enmod -- enable one module
• a2dismod -- disable one module

When you use one of the commands in the command line terminal without specifying which site or module to enable, then you are given a list of the sites or modules you can enable or disable. Note that the configuration files have to end with .conf for this mechanism to work as expected.

Solaris 11.2 (Open SunOS really) has virtual console a la Linux. This works great. You can use the Alt-F1 to Alt-F6 keys to instantly switch between 6 different consoles. I use that to have one console with an editor and another with my make and runtime tests.

Unfortunately, Solaris includes a lock which manes that each time you switch between a console, it hides the content and ask you for your password to unlock the console (that way you could have multiple users on the same computer, each using a different console and the system remains safe since people cannot just go to someone's ...

A little while ago I noticed that I couldn't find documentation on how to get the modification time of a file in micro-seconds. The notorious stat() call returns st_mtime defined as a time_t in the documentation.

Well... The fact is that the structure is really composed of a timeval structure and not a time_t (that applies to all 3 time values: modification, last access, and last status change.) So in fact you can use the name of the field without the last letter and a sub-timeval field as in:

struct stat s;
seconds = s.st_mtim.tv_sec; // == s.st_mtime
microseconds = ...

Now a day I like to install Solaris to check that my code compiles and generally runs under that OS.

I think that's a good way to prove that the code is multi-OS ready even if it is only for Unices.

OpenSolaris is free and can be downloaded from Oracle. The last URL I use was:

https://www.oracle.com/solaris/solaris11/downloads/solaris-downloads.html

The system, by default, comes with a directory named /usr/sfw which includes a really old version of gcc. It is possible, though, to move forward with a newer version of the compiler by installing a package. Under Solaris 11.2, this ...