Automation Adventures

ArsGeek has an excellent article on how to make the Vista Shutdown button actually shut down your computer.

In the Plan Settings for your Power Options, choose the Advanced Power Settings, and change the Power buttons and lid, Start menu power button option to Shut Down.

See the Arsgeek article for a more detailed description with pictures.

It looks like all went well with the upgrade to Wordpress 2.2.

I may change the design a little over the next week or so, to take advantage of the new plugins option in 2.2. This makes maintaining the site much easier (i.e. no need to hack into PHP code to add a small functionality to a sidebar).

Lifehacker has updated a cool little utility Adam Pash has developed, called Swept Away.

Swept Away monitors your open windows, and whenever a window hasn’t been used for a user-defined number of seconds (default 300 = 5 minutes), it automatically minimizes the window. This not only helps you keep an uncluttered view of your desktop, but in some cases the minimized program actually uses less memory (think Firefox with the trim on minimize tweak).

The new version adds a user-defined monitoring interval (default 300 milliseconds), and some bug fixes.

Well, I just spent close to two days figuring out how to make the Progress Debugger to run in Windows Vista 64-bit.

When we first installed OpenEdge 10.0B on Vista, an error message popped up that the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Secure couldn’t be accessed. Since everything seemed to work OK, we didn’t pay much attention to it.

Until we tried to debug a program, and Progress informed us that we had to enable debugging. prodebugenable seems to do little more than change the value of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Secure\ProDbgCK\”C:\DLC100B” from “Debugging disabled” to “Debugging enabled”. A co-worker of mine, running Windows Vista 32-bit, simply pulled up the registry editor, and created the necessary keys.

When I did that in the 64-bit version, prodebugenable still complained it couldn’t access the registry key HKLM\Software\Secure. Suspecting a rights issue, I installed a utility called subinacl, that allows to read and change the rights on registry keys. However, this utility also couldn’t find the registry key… and it’s a 32-bit program. Hmm.

It turns out that Vista employs a virtualization of the registry for 32-bit programs. There is a node called HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node, under which 32-bit programs can create keys… it’s still a little black magic for me, but here are the steps I took to create the necessary keys and get the Progress Debugger to work:

1. Open a command shell, running as Administrator: find the cmd command, right-click on it, and select “Run as administrator”
2. Type the command
   reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node /v Secure
3. Type the command
   reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Secure /v ProDbgCK
4. Type the command
   reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Secure\ProDbgCK /v "C:\DLC100B.state" /d "Debugging disabled"
5. Verify the correctness of the keys by typing the command
   reg query HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Secure\ProDbgCK
   It should show you the state key with the value “Debugging disabled”.
6. Now open the Proenv environment, also running as Administrator.
7. Type the command
   prodebugenable -enable-all
   You should get the confirmation that debugging is now enabled.

After these steps, you can start using the debugger. If these steps don’t work, I’d be interested in hearing from you.

One drawback: if you’re running Aero in Vista, activating the debugger switches the theme to Windows Classic. It doesn’t switch back automatically…

Today Wordpress 2.2 was released on the unsuspecting masses. It includes a couple of neat improvements (speed, Widgets included in the core, better comment moderation), and it looks like we’ll be moving to WP 2.2 this weekend.

So this Saturday, from about 9AM to 12PM, there will be intermittent outage on this website…