Changing Chrome Policies for Testing

I recently ran into a situation where I was pretty sure that a group policy was breaking functionality on my intranet app, but I needed a way to test that theory. After some research, I finally figured out a way to do this.

I am working on an Oracle Virtual Box VM of Windows 7. Because it's a VM on my laptop, I have complete control over the operating system. To set the policy, I used the Windows Registry Editor regedit.

Within Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies, I created a new key called Google. Then within Google, I created a new key called Chrome.

From there, I just needed to add policies one by one until I figured out which one was breaking my app. The link at https://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3 provides a full list of policies. After saving a policy, I would restart Chrome and the new policy would be enabled. Sure enough, I found the culprit. By toggling this policy and restarting Chrome I could verify that the application worked and then broke with each change of the policy.

SMB/UNC Path Translator Bookmarklet

I needed a quick way to translate a UNIX-style SMB path to a Windows-style UNC path and vice versa.

For example:

From: smb://my-server/path/to/file
To: \\my-server\path\to\file

OR

From: \\my-server\path\to\file
To: smb://my-server/path/to/file

So I created the bookmarklet below. To use it, drag the link below to your bookmark bar. Then click it, enter a path, and click OK. It will return a translated path that you can then copy and paste.

Path Translator

Exporting the Windows Task Manager Process List

I'm trying to make a case for a new computer at work. One of the things I want to show (besides the incredibly slow boot time) is that I am maxing out my RAM. To do that, I wanted to get a list of tasks running that I could import into a spreadsheet to figure out how how much memory my day-to-day applications consume (Outlook, Eclipse, SQL Developer, Firefox, etc.) versus all of those background processes that I don't even know what they do. Here's how I did it:

Start -> Run -> cmd
tasklist > tasklist.txt

Then open tasklist.txt in Excel as a fixed-width file and go to work.

Fast Application Access on Windows XP

It used to be that anytime somebody saw my laptop screen at work, they would joke about the number of icons in my Quick Launch toolbar. I had 2 rows of icons followed by a row of shortcuts. Although it was organized (Office products, developer tools, Internet apps, graphics, etc.), it did seem a bit overwhelming. So after purchasing my first Mac recently, I decided to look for an equivalent app to the Finder feature of OS X.

I discovered this gem:

It sits just about my system tray and using various "Magic Words", I can start up any of those apps that I had bookmarked before. And with auto-complete goodness, it's rather fast. I have now eliminated my Quick Launch toolbar altogether.

Now supposedly having a lot of icons doesn't slow down your computer, but I have noticed an increase in performance since I got rid of the Quick Launch bar. I think having shortcuts to a bunch of networked drives was causing a performance hit.

Best of all it's a free app. They just ask you to shop Amazon using the provided link.