Geek and a Half

October 22nd, 2006 by Jake

This was posted on Digg today, and I figured I’d post it here, as well, because a) I’ve found that the method works and b) nobody should ever have to bear using IE6 longer than they have to. Original article as follows:

Internet Explorer 7.0 is the long awaited tabbed web browser by Microsoft. Nearly four years after the release of Internet Explorer 6.0, in the face of growing competition from Mozilla’s Firefox, Microsoft has finally given the old IE platform a facelift. Optimized design along with new cool interface, favorites centre, search box, RSS feeds and most importantly easy to use tabbed browsing are the exclusive features of this new internet explorer.

You must have Windows XP Service Pack-2 (SP2) in order to install Internet Explorer 7.0. But still you will face a problem while installing this new Internet Explorer if your copy of Windows XP is not a genuine (non-pirated) one, since IE 7.0 installation requires genuine windows validation!!! So what to do??? Don’t worry… There are some tricky steps through which you can install IE 7.0 even in your pirated copy of windows XP bypassing the genuine windows validation. You just have to follow the following steps one by one:

1. Download Internet Explorer 7.0 from the Microsoft site. You have to choose Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) as your operating system. Remember you can’t install IE 7.0 if service pack 2.0 is not installed in your operating system.

2. Extract the downloaded Internet Explorer setup file (IE7-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe) using WinRAR to a directory (IE7-WindowsXP-x86-enu).
3. Download the patched iecustom.dll and then copy-paste it to the update folder (IE7-WindowsXP-x86-enu\update\) and click yes when asked to overwrite.
4. Run ‘update.exe’ in the update folder (not iesetup.exe!!!). At the end, you have to choose ‘exit/finish without restart’ option to finish the running process of the exe file.
5. Download normaliz.dll and then copy-paste it to “c:\windows\system32\” directory (in order to prevent problems with the file not being found after the installation). And then reboot/restart your pc.
6. After rebooting your pc, you may face a problem with a file called normaliz.dll that can not be found by explorer.exe. If you’re having this problem, you will find your desktop blank.(If you are not facing this problem then just go to step 7) In order to fix this problem, you have to do the following things one by one:

1. Press ctrl-alt-del to go to the task manager.
2. Go to “File -> Run” in the task manager.
3. Type: ‘cmd’ and push enter. The command prompt window will appear.
4. Type:
   ‘copy c:\normaliz.dll c:\windows\system32\normaliz.dll’
   - in the command prompt window and push enter.
5. Reboot your pc and yahoo!!! now you can see your desktop contents!!!.

So folks, don’t forget to install Windows Internet Explorer 7.0 in your pc and enjoy the experience of tabbed browsing with lots of new features. And those who are using Firefox, can use a special IE Tab plugin to enjoy browsing in the Internet Explorer environment being in the firefox and switching around from Firefox to IE and IE to Firefox. And thus you can make your web browsing faster and more interesting…

Original Article can be found here.

August 2nd, 2006 by Jake

I stumbled across this little app while looking for itunes Plugins (which I later found out only works with Mac…stupid Apple…). It goes through your entire iTunes Library (or a playlist), searches either Amazon or Google and finds album art for each song. It’s supposed to be $10 shareware, but I haven’t found any restrictions yet. It utilizes track name, album name, and title. There’s even an automatic mode, so you can just let it run (it makes sure the song is in the album before assigning the art to it). I manually went through a playlist I have, and it seemed like it would have about 90% accuracy if I had let it run on its own (Certain art I changed because of preference, i.e. from a “Greatest Hits” album to the original). I’m going to let it loose on my library tonight and see what it comes up with (After it’s done it shows you % success), I’ll edit this post and let you know the outcome.

Download iArt Now! (And pay the guy $10 if you like his app!)

Edit: So there is a limit. I think you can do about 50 album arts before it stops working, which is reasonable. So I forked out the money and let it run last night, and my lirary was full of art this morning. It wasn’t always successful, and if I didn’t have an album there it would choose one for me and add the art (and fix the tags). I might delete all my album data and let it run again, just so that it can do everything all at once and have all the right data from Amazon. It is a really nice tool, especially if you do it manually.