Finding the Wireless Network Setup Wizard in Windows Vista

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Windows XP (SP2 and above) has an easy way to add computers or devices (like a wireless printer) to a wireless network. Once you have 1 computer connecting successfully to the wireless network, go to the Control Panel and click the Wireless Network Setup Wizard.

The wizard will guide you through a series of steps which will save all necessary settings on a USB-stick. You can then simply insert the stick into another computer or device that you want to connect to the same network, and the wireless settings will be transferred automatically.

When I switched to Windows Vista, I could not find back that wizard. The Windows Help nor Google brought any relief. I finally gave up and entered the security settings manually.

Today, I had to connect a new Vista machine to the network and I really wanted to find an easy way to get that working. After all, the wizard was working great in XP, so I could not believe it was ditched in Vista. After long searching, I finally discovered where the Wizard sits:

  • Click the Start button, select Network.
  • Click Add a wireless device. The button may be “hidden” if your window is small (that’s the main reason why I didn’t find it in the first place).
  • In the dialog box that appears, click I want to add a wireless device or computer that is not on the list, using a USB flash drive
  • Click the first option: Add the device or computer using a USB flash drive
  • This will start the wizard. First it will ask which wireless network to use:
  • Then it will ask to plug a USB stick into the computer and select it:
  • This will save the settings on the stick. You can now use it to connect other computers or devices to the wireless network.

Putting my own wiki on my server

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The internet contains a wealth of information and can be very useful when you’re searching for something, while programming, or debugging, or fixing a problem.

But some things I seem to be looking up regularly, like the numbers of characters you can store in a TEXT field in MySQL – I can never remember whether I need a TEXT or MEDIUMTEXT data type. On other occasions, the information is hard to find and if you finally get to it, you can bookmark the page, only to find out a few months later that the page no longer exists. I wanted to know which buttons to press on a HP Deskjet 6980 to do a cartridge realignment. It took a while to find that information, so I wanted to store that somewhere.

Basically, I needed my own wiki, to be able to quickly note down things that I probably would need in the future. A bit to my surprise, setting one up was extremely simple. At http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki, you can find all you need to set up MediaWiki, the free software wiki package originally written for Wikipedia.

Just following the installation instructions, I was able to set it up in minutes. You can check it out at http://www.krisgielen.be/wiki. 

I pretty much used the standard configuration. These are the custom settings that I added to LocalSettings.php:

// no anonymous editing, creating of pages or creating of talks
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createpage'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createtalk'] = false;  
// users that want to edit, need to confirm their email address first
$wgEmailConfirmToEdit = true;
// replaced the logo with a logo of my own
$wgLogo = '/mediawiki/wikilogo.png';

I also wanted to get some usage statistics, so I added the Google Analytics extension.

Experimenting with Adobe AIR and jQuery – Part 7

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In Step 7 of my Top100-application, I wanted to be able to enter a number and press ENTER, to immediately go to that specific number in the list. This is very similar to the ability in PowerPoint to move to a specific slide by just typing the slide number and pressing ENTER in Slide Show mode.

That piece was pretty easy with jQuery:

var newnumber = ''; // string to store numbers typed on keyboard
$(document).keyup(function(e) {
  if ( (e.keyCode>=48) && (e.keyCode<=57) )
    {
    // numbers (0..9)
    newnumber = newnumber+(e.keyCode-48);
    }
switch ( e.keyCode ) {
 case 13: // ENTER
  // switch to newnumber (if newnumber is number <= 100)
  var n = parseInt(newnumber);
  if ( (n>0) && (n<=100) )
    {
    currentnumber = n;
    // same effect as down-key
    $("#mainp").hide("slide", { direction: "left" }, 1500, function(){
      colornumber = currentnumber % bgcolors.length;
      $("#mainp").css("background-color",bgcolors[colornumber]);
      $("#mainp").css("color",textcolors[colornumber]);
      $("#number").text(currentnumber);
      $("#artist").text(lijst.record[numbers[currentnumber]]['artist'].toUpperCase());
      $("#title").text(lijst.record[numbers[currentnumber]]['title'].toUpperCase());
      $("#mainp").show("slide", { direction: "right" }, 1500, function(){
        $("#number").effect("pulsate", { times:5 }, 1500);
        });
      });
    }
  newnumber = '';
  break;

This worked, but only when using the numbers at the top of the keyboard. From the Keyboard Events page on Javascript Madness I learned that the keyCodes for the numbers on the numeric keypad are different (well, in IE, FireFox, Safari and Chrome, not in Opera): pressing the 1 key at the top results in keyCode 49, pressing 1 on the numeric keypad results in 97. So I had to add another series of keyCodes (96..105).
Also, I noted that when I started with a 0, I did not get the result I expected. Typing 055 ENTER resulted in number 45 being shown. After looking at Converting Javascript strings to numbers at the Javascript FAQ website, I realized the 0 at the start makes Javascript interpret it as an octal. So I included some code for that as well:

if ( (e.keyCode>=48) && (e.keyCode<=57) )
    {
    // numbers (0..9)
    if ( !((e.keyCode==48) && (newnumber == '')) )
      // don't start with 0 --> will be interpreted as octal
      {
      newnumber = newnumber+(e.keyCode-48);
      }
    }
  else if ( (e.keyCode>=96) && (e.keyCode<=105) )
    {
    // numbers (0..9) on numeric keypad
    if ( !((e.keyCode==96) && (newnumber == '')) )
      // don't start with 0 --> will be interpreted as octal
      {
      newnumber = newnumber+(e.keyCode-96);
      }
    }

The final addition I made was support for the BACKSPACE key. If you accidentally typed the wrong number, pressing BACKSPACE would erase all input:

switch ( e.keyCode ) {
...
  case 8: // backspace
    // reset newnumber
    newnumber = '';
    break;

♦ Related files: step7.html