CoNetrix

Blog: General

As I was building a new laptop and begin to work with Office 2007 apps, I missed the little customizable toolbar. When I started looking for it I didn’t even know what it was called. I found out it is the “Quick Access Toolbar.” Also, the toolbar settings are stored in a file for each application, “Word.qat, Excel.qat, PowerPoint.qat (These are the apps I tested, maybe other Office 2007 apps too. OneNote does not have the Quick Access Toolbar.).”

If you save or can recover the *.qat files from your previous work environment you can save them to your new system and be good to go. Here are the file locations.

  • For XP: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Setting\Application Data\Microsoft\Office
  • For Vista: C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office
General, Office, Toolbar,
 

A friend of mine called me concerning an issue with Outlook Express 6.  He told me he was trying to spell check an e-mail but the built in spell checker was showing words in another language.  He had a new Dell computer with Office 2007 installed.  Doing some Google searching, I found out that OE 6’s spell checker only has the French language installed with no additional language support.  I also found a free program on the web called “Spell Checker for OE”.  I had my friend install it and viola! English spell checking was available.

Another option I found was to install the proofing tools for Office 2003.  This also is supposed to fix it.

 It would appear that a missing dll file, csapi3t1.dll is the root cause of this option.

General, Spell Check, Outlook Express 6,
 

Google offers a service called "Google Alerts" alowing you to monitor what is being posted on the Internet about your company or even yourselft.  [more]

Simply go to http://www.google.com/alerts, to Create a Google Alert (see options below):

  • Search terms - enter your choice of query or topic
  • Type - options include, News, Blogs, Web, Comprehensive, Video, and Groups - in most cases you will want to choose Comprehensive
  • How often - options include once a day, as-it-happens, and once a week
  • Your email - you will be sent a verification e-mail before you begin receiving alerts

You can also sign up for a Google account and manage your alerts within your account - to sign up for a Google account go to https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount

For more information about Google alerts, visit their FAQs at http://www.google.com/support/alerts/bin/static.py?page=faq.html&hl=en

General, Security and Compliance, monitoring, Google, Google Alerts,
 

I went to visit family this past weekend and as the family’s ambassador for technology, I was set to work on their list of electronic aches and pains. My aunt who recently upgraded her abacus-era computer for a new PC was complaining that whenever she would plug her computer into the phone line, all incoming phone calls would chirp once on the house phones, then nothing. She had already talked to the techno-wizards at Radio-Shack who said that she probably had “older 3-wire phone wiring that might not work with her new computer”. I had to bite my tongue. [more]

After some fact finding investigation, it appeared that the house was wired in a loop (not star) configuration. Also, it didn’t matter what phone jack the computer was connected to, the results were still the same single “chirp”. At first I thought the PC might be using some telephony software to try and answer the call, but the behavior remained the same with the system powered off and unplugged from power (but w/ the phone line still connected to it). With her phone line connected to my laptop, incoming calls rang fine.

Adding up all of these factors pointed to a bad PCI modem installed in the computer. My hypothesis is that somewhere in the manufacturing process a path to a capacitor or resistor got messed up so that when the phone rang, the current charged the capacitor thus completing the circuit and dropping the incoming call. The moral of the story… just because something is new and has a manufacturing defect rate of 10,000:1 doesn’t mean you can’t be that one person. Now if I could only get that lucky in the lottery…(oh wait, that would mean I have to actually play it).

General, Dial-up,
 

With 3 sons at home, the dangers posed by the dark side of the Internet are a real concern. During a recent visit to Kim Komando’s website, I discovered a totally FREE Internet filtering and control solution for the home called K9 Web Protection. After testing it on two of our three systems at home for about 10 days, it appears to be as effective and custom configurable as other commercial products I have used in the past.[more]

K9 Web Protection (http://www1.k9webprotection.com/) is protecting almost half a million homes, according to their website, and has been awarded the Seal of Approval from The National Parenting Center (http://www.tnpc.com/search/tnpcarticle2.asp?rec=5275), the iParenting Media Award (http://iparentingmediaawards.com/winners/11/5572-4-174.php) and the IIA Family Friendly Filter (http://www.iia.net.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=416&Itemid=73). Additionally, CNET’s Editor Rating is 4 stars (of 5) and the average rating from CNET users is 4½ stars (see http://www.download.com/K9-Web-Protection/3000-2162_4-10487710.html?tag=lst-6-4).

I was also impressed with the philosophy that led Blue Coat Systems to offer this product free for home use:“Blue Coat Systems has been very successful selling a version of this software to Fortune 500 companies and other large corporations. When we became successful, and were looking for ways to give back to our communities, we realized that one valuable thing we could offer was a free version of our Web filtering service for home users.” (see “Why are you giving away this software?”)

General, Internet filtering,
 
 

SurfControl doubles the number of licenses for the SurfControl Web Filter so that computer IP and Username entries may be recorded.  Once all of the licenses are used up, it will place any new entries (users, IP Addresses) into an unmonitored list.  What I have noticed is that there were three types of entries: usernames, IP addresses, and computer DNS names.  I found that unmonitoring the IP Addresses would cause the username to stop recording if they were using the computer with that IP Address, and computer DNS entries did not appear to be required to log user activity. Some tips to help keep licenses under control are to set ex-employees and computer DNS entries to be "Unmonitored".  This will immediately free up another license while retaining the history of the unmanaged items.

General, SurfControl,
 

A client of ours frequently uses a web application to manage customer data and print various documents in PDF format. Users started to complain that they would try and produce a PDF document that was populated with unique costomer data, but there were 'strange words' (they were actually variable names) where the customer data should have been. Normally when our client clicked the "Print" function from within the web application, the webapp would open a new browser window, then opened a PDF  document with the cutomer info merged into a PDF form. This problem was happening only when users accessed this webapp from a Terminal Server session. A similar behavior was happening with a webapp on a different website as well (also only happening on the Terminal Server). [more]

To use this particular web app, the user has to have a unique certificate installed on their machine. Initially I thought that the XML data was not being retrieved properly due to a problem with the certificate, thus the PDF was being merged with an empty data set. After confirming that the certificate was in order, I spending a significant amount of time investigating the Permissions and Trust Manager settings within Acrobat Reader 7 on the Terminal Server. Editing these settings did not alter the behavior of these webapps.

About the time I was considering a re-installation of Acroat Reader on this Terminal Server, I noticed within Acrobat 7's "Internet" preferences a check box labeled "Display PDF in Browser". This option was checked (as it should have been) but I decided to toggle this setting off, apply, then toggle it back on, and apply. This restored the web apps XML-PDF form merging functionality. It appears that the PDF form was unable to access the XML data from the IE pop-up window that initially launched the PDF document. It is still unknown why this particular Adobe setting stopped being enforced (when previously it WAS being enforced). The broken functionality did not coincide with any system event. The web app techinal support team was unable to explain WHY this happened, but they did confirm that they had seen this happen before. The moral of the story... even if everything looks correct on the surface, that doesn't mean it really is.

General, XML, PDF, Acrobat Reader,
 

During an information security audit I was working with a file from a regulating entity containing audit procedures.  The file had several  tables with form fields and was protected.

The "form fill" restriction was too limiting as I worked to record audit information in the document.  The longer I worked the more frustrated I became.  It would have been much more useful if I could “unprotect” the file.  I had heard others talking about scripts that could be used to discover the password, but I didn’t have access to any password discovery applications. [more] 

I did remember that Word 2007 was using xml as the source code to format it’s documents.  It made me wonder if there would be anything in the xml code that could be used to unprotect the file.  I made a copy of the file, saved it as xml, and then opened it with WordPad to view the xml code.  I searched until I found something about document protection.  Here is what I found within the documentProtection command.
 
<w:documentProtection w:edit="forms" w:enforcement="1" w:cryptProviderType="rsaFull" w:cryptAlgorithmClass="hash" w:cryptAlgorithmType="typeAny" w:cryptAlgorithmSid="4" w:cryptSpinCount="50000" w:hash="D+Y7lSKVquz/6NisDVadZtFS31g=" w:salt="J6dnbwcKHV7Gn4bMQjXoUA=="/>
 
In the w:enforcement field I changed the "1" to "0".  I saved the document.  Then I opened my altered copy in Word and the document was intact, with proper formatting, but now it was unlocked.

General, Word 2007, Office,
 

Printing from an AS400 causes a prompt on the printer display to select an available tray.  This is a known problem on the following models HP LJ 4250, HP LJ 9050, and HP M3035 printers.  This is caused by the limited driver selection on AS400. Printing directed through this server directs print to Tray 1. Since Tray 1 is not loaded, the printer prompts for user intervention to redirect print to loaded tray.  To fix this, you can modify printer settings to automatically try another tray, preventing prompt and user intervention during print. [more]

Steps for modification:

  1. From web interface, select settings Tab
  2. Browse to the following Menu: Configure Device>System Setup> Tray Behavior
  3. Set Use Requested Tray to First (default is Exclusively). This will allow print coming to tray one to be redirected to the next available tray without user interaction.

NOTE: The actual menu options may be different for different models. The menu names above were taken from the 9050 model.

General, AS400, printing,