Sven Slootweg's Blog

I have been neglecting my blog lately. I’ve been very busy with projects like YuNicc, as well as some other freelance and personal projects I can’t release any information about yet. I’ll try to write more articles when I have time. I will also write about some other subjects occasionally, that aren’t directly IT-related… just to make it a little bit more interesting.

Keep an eye on my blog.

Ok, basically I’ve been deleting over 30 spam messages, and banning over 20 IPs in the past few minutes. *Someone* thinks it’s fun to spam my blog to pieces. Anyway, I just implemented reCAPTCHA, which means you will have to solve a so-called captcha code every time you post a comment. This shouldn’t be a problem for most users. If you have any issues with it, you can always contact me at info@sven-slootweg.nl.

Now let’s hope the spam bots stay away. And no, I don’t want Viagra.

I’ve had the problem myself. Many people have had the problem. After uninstalling the great but oh so laggy Aston Shell, you suddenly can’t get your taskbar back after explorer.exe crashes. Or worse, you don’t get any taskbar at all. But there is a fix.

Using some information gathered from various forums, I compiled a tiny little registry patch that cures the problem. It simply resets the default shell to explorer.exe (something the Aston Shell Uninstall usually forgets). Apply the patch, reboot, and everything should be working again!

You can get the patch here: http://sven-slootweg.nl/downloads/download.php?id=9

If you have any problems, feel free to post a comment.

A pretty surprising sight I’ve seen on my statistics today. I’m using StatCounter, a free statistics service, that hasn’t let me down for the past few years even a sigle time. However, today I found a few very weird and interesting entries in my pageview history.

The above screenshot is slightly edited, to hide the non-interesting entries (it monitors my entire site) and to black out the IP addresses of my visitors. Privacy is important.

It shows, however, a LOT of visitors that do not have a referer. That would mean they either got the link to my article over MSN, IRC, or a similar communication method, or that they simply typed the address entirely by hand (which is unlikely). I’ve collected 40 of those no-referer visitors over the day (the normal amount of blog visitors is maybe 3 or 4 a day) and I have no clue where they are coming from. The most notable thing, though, is that the first option (links over IM applications) is pretty much impossible, since the first visitor to my article doesn’t have a referer either. I know there is someone in that list with Twitter as referer, another very weird thing. I doubt I’m on their front page, so it should show at least some search page or profile page in the URL. Maybe they’re my followers on Twitter?

Very, very weird.

I’ve been thinking about a blog for a while, but I’m finally taking the plunge. I will use this blog to update you on new software I release, handy computer tricks, and a lot of other similar stuff, of which half probably won’t even interest you

Anyway, to start off with, I released the first public beta of TORNT, my new torrent metasearch tool. It’s version 0.2, since version 0.1 didn’t really do anything besides returning errors and crashing PC’s. Head over to my download page now to get it! It’s here: http://sven-slootweg.nl/downloads/download.php?id=7
While you’re at it, tell your friends about it as well… They’ll be happy to have a small and fast tool to search for torrents.

On a side note, I did not make the theme for this blog myself. I just found it somewhere, and it fits in with my website design perfectly. Maybe I’ll customize it later, but that’s not important for now.