Trouble buffering and reloading Youtube videos on Google Chrome browser
Mar 11th
I have been having this problem of buffering Youtube videos on Google Chrome with the latest updates. I am not entirely sure when this problem started but my guess is very recently. It could perhaps have started due to one or more of the following reasons: Chrome update, Youtube update or Adobe Flash Player update.
What I discovered was a simple fix in the end. I started by deleting the Google Chrome browser cache by going into Options->Under the Hood->Clear browsing data. You will come to the following window.
First tick both Empty the cache and Delete cookies and other site data options and then click on Clear browsing data button. Next click on Adobe Flash Player storage settings link.
You will then come across a browser window with the following settings window.
What I did was to click Delete all sites initially, closed all browser sessions and then loaded Youtube website on a new browser window. Once Youtube website was loaded I reopened this Flash Player settings screen and found the site s.ytimg.com under websites. I then highlighted the website and then dragged the slider to the far right until Unlimited was displayed. This ensured that Youtube has enough storage space to load videos. This fix helped to buffer videos as far as I can tell. Let me know if this improves your Youtube viewing experience too !
- Update 1: Windows vs Linux vs Mac OS … must say I have only seen this buffering issue on Windows. Quite weird.
- Update 2: Just wanted to say that it has been a week since I have had buffering problems. So seems like the issues have resolved. I do have the odd crash on google chrome. and thats due to me running windows 7 on a laptop that does not handle it very well ..
Forcing MATLAB to detect virtual serial ports
Mar 9th
I recently started working with MATLAB’s Instrument Control Toolbox. I normally work with USB-to-serial adapters and discovered that MATLAB does not detect them when plugged in. I use the command instrhwinfo(‘serial’); in order to check the available serial ports. So the problem is MATLAB is not detecting the ports when plugged in like most terminals out there. Then I found out that in order to refresh the underlying ports you need to restart MATLAB. I’m just putting it out there in case if anyone had to spend hours like me to figure out whats going. Unfortunately I did not come across any documentation that mentioned this.
Have been busy !
Jan 29th
Hi everyone,
Sorry for the lack of updates recently. I have been really busy with completing my ME. I will be back with more stuff so stay tuned. In the mean time please continue to support my efforts by commenting.
Pass by Reference vs Pass by Value in C#
Aug 24th
Check this article by Jon Skeet to get a clear understanding of when to use pass by reference and when to use pass by value
Align “read more” link on wordpress posts
Aug 20th
Recently, I had this conundrum trying to align the “read more” link (in my case its “continue reading” link) on the homepage that gets generated via whats called an excerpt or via the more tag (<!–more–>). I am not going in to the details of these two so check out the wordpress links for more information.
So what is an excerpt or the more tag you ask ?
Well simply an excerpt allows you to display a summary of your posts by truncating the posts by a number of lines you specify. Default is 50. Having an excerpt on your blog generates “read more” links just below the summaries. This feature is quite useful for visual clarity.
The more tag allows you to set where you want to truncate the post to a summary. So unlike an excerpt this is a manual feature for the user to set and wordpress creates a “read more” link in place of the more tag. In fact this very post has a more tag.
There is more to it than this so once again read these links for more information.
Excerpt – http://codex.wordpress.org/Excerpt
More tags – http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/the_content
So what was my problem ?
In summary my problem was aligning this “read more” link easily to the right. If you have read those links above you may have found that wordpress automatically wraps the posts including the “read more” links with <p> tags. With css, doing a floating right of this link will cause some annoying white spaces top and bottom of the link. Even making the padding 0 will do no good. This is more apparent if you have a background color like I do. I had even posted a question on the wordpress forum to see if anyone could help but to no avail I had to find my own solution by doing some trial and error.
Delete a word left/right of the cursor on iTerm2
Aug 18th
A user has requested for a tutorial on how to setup deletion of a word on the left and right of the cursor on iTerm2. I believe these steps should work on iTerm as well but the actually settings window on iTerm is quite different and I am not going to go into details about setting up on iTerm.
Unfortunately, macs come with a single “delete” key and this has to be bound in such away to use as a muti-function key for the purpose of “backspace” and “delete”. Therefore, the setup does get a little bit tricky. Hopefully, I don’t confuse you so bare with me !
How to access Character Viewer on Mac OS X
Aug 18th
On this post I want to show you how to access the Character Viewer on Mac OS X. At times it may be useful to have access to this to add special characters. Trust me you do need it 
You can easily use the shortcuts: Command key (⌘) + Option key (⌥) + T
If you want to find it the hard way you can go to Settings -> Keyboard window. Under the Keyboard tab as shown below you should have an option “Show Keyboard & Character Viewer in menu bar”. Tick it to enable the icon in the menu bar.
Restore Visual Studio with default settings
Aug 17th
How many of you run Visual Studio on Microsoft Vista like me ?
How many of you had problems with Visual Studio crashing and acting all weird ?
How many times did Windows crash for you with memory dumps blah blah and running Visual Studio at the same time will sure to cause the settings to go wonky !
Well I definitely have experienced all this problems. And it was very annoying. I had problems with Font and Color and no matter how much I tried to reset the fonts to the default settings via Options menu I wasnt able fix it.
I then found this nifty way of whacking all your settings to restore it completely. Its like a hard reset. Note that this will erase your custom settings. So make sure you back up your settings as given in this post.
Steps to follow,
- Open the VS command prompt by going to Start -> Programs -> Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 -> Visual Studio Tools -> Visual Studio Command Prompt (2010). If your version of VS is different don’t panic. If you follow the same path you should find the command prompt.
- In the prompt type, devenv /ResetSettings
- If you already have VS open restart the sessions and it will act like a fresh installation.
The fix given above can be applied not only to problems appearing on Vista but also on other flavors of Windows and Visual Studio.
As given in the post (load settings section) if you already have saved your custom settings prior to restore the second step can be changed to,
- In the prompt type, devenv /ResetSettings “c:\folder path\YourCustomSettings.vssettings”
Save and load custom settings on Visual Studio
Aug 17th
To save your custom settings on Visual Studio
Follow these steps,
- Go to Tools -> Options
- In the left pane of your Options window you will find Environment. Expand it to find Import and Export Settings as shown in the picture
- Then browse to the location where you would like to save the settings as a .vssettings file
Alternatively, there is a much easier way to do this on the more recent versions of Visual Studio.
- Under Tools -> Import and Export Settings as shown in the picture
- Select Export selected environment settings option and proceed by clicking Next
- This allows you to select any options you desire or you can ignore and click Next to select everything by default
- Finally browse to the location where you would like to save the settings as a .vssettings file
Always keep your saved settings unique. I choose to add a unique time stamp to file name so I know when the settings have been backed up.
Running ClickOnce applications on Chrome
Aug 12th
I have always wondered certain sites that require .NET framework don’t work very well on Google Chrome. You need to install ClickOnce extension on Chrome from Chrome webstore
