Blog: General

From time to time, one of my desk monitors would take on a yellow cast.  It happened recently and was persistent in lasting about three days.  I was thinking the monitor would have to be replaced when a co-worker came by my desk, glanced at the monitor and said “you’ve got a bad connection.”

At that time we checked the monitor cable and found it was secure, but the “bad connection”  idea made me wonder if perhaps my laptop wasn’t properly seated in the dock.  I undocked and then docked again, taking care the laptop was firmly locked into place.   When the monitor came up this time, it was back to the normal color.

Thanks my to my co-worker for recognizing the problem right away.  And when checking connections, it is important to think through every link along the way.

I had to recreate a terminal server user’s profile recently and they asked me if I could put the “show desktop” shortcut next to their start button.  Usually the icon is there by default as long as the quick launch toolbar is showing.  It was turned on, but the icon wasn’t there. 

I searched for a way to put it back in the quick launch, but I couldn’t come up with anything quick.  I found that you can recreate the icon yourself using notepad.

Open notepad and type the following: [more]

[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]
Command=ToggleDesktop

Save the file as Show Desktop.scf to a location such as their documents folder.  Drag the file down to the quick launch toolbar, and it works.

To re-execute a recently typed command, retype the first few letters of the command and press F8. The command will expand to the latest command in the history that matches those letters. Press F8 again to keep going back in time. Note that the matching is case sensitive.

If you want to see a list of commands previously typed, just press F7 in the command window to get a menu of selectable commands. [more]

There are some four and five finger gestures on the iPad (iOS 4.3) that can be enabled by downloading Apple’s development kit, Xcode. The gestures can be enabled on the iPhone, too, but they seem much less useful on the smaller screen. Xcode costs $5 to download and you have to install it on a Mac, but you do not have to purchase the developer license. This website explains how to download Xcode and enable the gestures. The gestures include:

• Pinching the screen with all five fingers to close an app and return to the home screen
• Quickly switching between apps by swiping four fingers across the screen
• Opening the multitasking bar by swiping four fingers up the screen

Oldversion.com and oldapps.com host old versions of many Windows and Mac programs. A recent example where this came in handy is this. Roboform's latest release no longer exports the full site URL. Roboform even changed the previous version so that it no longer has this feature either.  If you want to migrate to LastPass, you need those URLs. So the old version of Roboform is what you need. Another example is PRTG - It used to be very simple to install and set up. The most recent version is much more powerful, but you have so much setup to do just to do some simple monitoring. Of course, be careful running older versions because there may be security concerns.

A local IT support customer who does CPA work, was getting errors submitting tax returns electronically. They were instructed to install an update to install the new forms needed. During the installation by one of the employees, it stopped responding and only half installed. They had been instructed to reinstall the old version over the current  install then run the update again. I was asked to perform the procedure. Every time I attempted to re-install the older version it would hang and then give me an error that it was the wrong operating system.  I attempted the install from a Windows 2003 and Windows XP system which is how it is normally installed.

After consulting with ProSystems support found that the problem was that the Microsoft installer was trying to run with the installation. The tech said “right after starting the install, open the task manager and kill any instances of MSIEXEC.exe that is running”. I did this and the install ran without any problem. I then apply the updates and it installed the needed updates, using the built in update agent, without any issues.

The nice thing is that when I asked the tech if this was documented anywhere, his response was “nope”.

My iPhone was having many different problems, the main one of which was my GPS not functioning as it should. After doing some research I found that when you restore from an older model iPhone to a new one, it carries over some residual data that can cause issues.  I had moved from a 3G to a 3Gs to 4 and each time just restored my old settings. I decided to rebuild my iPhone, I backed it up and made sure all my purchases had been transferred. I then wiped my iPhone 4 and set it up as a new phone. I did not restore from backup. I proceeded to reinstall all my apps, data and email account info. I have yet to have a problem with my GPS and my phone actually hangs up at the end of a call, without me having to push the end call button 10x. [more]
 
During this process I also found that having multiple backups of iPhones can chew up a lot of drive space. Just by removing old backups I cleared over 12GB.
Just make sure you don’t delete one you may need.
 
In Mac OS X your iPhone files are backed up at the following location:

~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/

Windows XP stores all of your iPhone backup files in this location:

C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup

Windows Vista and Windows 7 backs up the iPhone files to here:

C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup

Obviously if your main drive is not C: then you’ll have to change that, same goes for ‘user’

Note to Windows users: the Application Data and AppData directories and their contents (iPhone backups included) are considered ‘hidden’ so you will need to enable ‘Show hidden files’ within Windows Explorer before you will be able to see the files.

I experienced some odd behavior in Word last week while working on an audit report (I was docked in my office).  Periodically, the blinking cursor in Word would disappear and my document would appear to freeze up.  Neither Word nor my laptop was not locked up because I was able to scroll in the document but when doing so, the document would turn black and my text would either disappear or become garbled, with lines appearing to repeat over and over.  This would last for 20-30 seconds or more.  I tried rebooting to no avail.
 
At one point, I noticed the proofing cursor was animated, as it does when it is writing to disk. [more]

This made me think the problem might be network latency.
 
I mentioned my problem to another information security auditor. He suggested it might be related to offline files.  I thought I had reversed the “Always available offline” option for this folder.  However, upon further investigation I found out that I had not.  Once I did so, the problem did not recur.

Microsoft has introduced a technology that competes with the QR codes. One of the main differences in the Microsoft Tag is that there is a tracking mechanism that will tell the tag owner how many people have accessed the tag… and also allows the tag owner to change the contents of the tag over time.  QR tags are static.

All the tagging technology (readers, creators and the web site to control the content) are free at this time from Microsoft. [more]

Here are a couple articles of interest:

http://tag.microsoft.com/overview.aspx

http://www.signsoveramerica.com/sign-blog/index.php/2010/11/15/qr-codes-vs-microsoft-tag-reader-predicting-the-winner/