Aaron's blog

We had an issue at work where on any computer with Acrobat Professional installed Word 2007 would run really slow.  Opening, closing, saving, and creating new documents all took 3-4 seconds during which the entire computer would lock-up and the processor would be at 100% utilization.  Even switching between programs would seem to do this.

 A quick Google for Word 2007 lockups didn't turn up much other than a few references to the Add-ins menu, so I checked that out and found one for Acrobat PDFMaker Office COM Addin which didn't really seem necessary.  Turning it off instantly gave Word the excellent performance that I expected.  Here's how:

• Click the Office button in the top left, and go to "Word Options" (bottom edge of the menu).
• Select "Add-ins" on the left, and notice the "Acrobat PDFMaker Office COM Addin" under "Active Application Add-ins."
• Towards the bottom of the dialogue you will see "Manage:" followed by a drop down menu. "COM Add-ins" should already be selected.
• Click "Go" and on the next screen uncheck the box next to the "Acrobat PDFMaker Office COM Addin."
• OK your way out of the all the menus, and you should have improved performance without even restarting Word.

I got this error when trying to install the Field Scoring component of the BEST scoring software.  After much angst and reading things on Google about how it's related to an incorrect directory inside the (InstallShield created) setup file, I finally stumbled upon a solution:

Earlier in the day I had renamed the Administrator account of the computer, and also changed its password (while logged in as Administrator).  I had not logged off between then and installing the software.  Logging off and then logging back on fixed the problem.

Here's two ideas for IE7 tabs:

• Let me drag a tab to the taskbar to move the tab into its own window.  I would use this if I wanted to move a website on my second monitor and look at another on the first one.  Way easier than copying the URL, opening another window, and pasting the URL.
• Add "Move to new window" items to each tab's right-click menu.

It would be great if I could have another button on IE's download box (or this could be a Firefox extension I guess).  Right now there are Open, Run, and Cancel.  My pick for a 4th one is Unzip.  It would download the .zip file, do a standard unzip like when you right-click on a file and Extract All, and then delete the original .zip file.

Every once in a while you find a tool that is just great at doing what it does.  It takes very little system resources, might not even require an install, and works as fast as you can reasonable expect the task to be done.  I found one such tool for removing duplicate photos.

Duplicate File Finder is the latest find of mine to go in this category.  It doesn't require and install, is free, and quickly scanned several thousand photos, and then showed me the path names of each set of duplicate photos, allowing me to choose which ones to delete.  It was a bit tedious to do the selecting, but I think manually doing that is the only acceptable way given the dire consequences of accidentally deleting the wrong photo.

Here at NDSU we use the content portal known as Blackboard.  A few years back I was on my slow internet connection at home and noticed a URL full of POSTDATA in the address bar that would appear momentarily each time I logged in.  The connection was slow enough that I was able to copy and paste it into a bookmark.  Seeing as it contains fields like "&encoded_pw=XXXXXXXXX" and "&user_id=XXXXXXX" it was only natural I would try it as something to keep me from having to login manually every time.  And it works still, 2 years later.

Here's how you can hack your own Blackboard login so that you never have to type in your username and password:

1. Download Paessler URL Recorder.
2. It will start automatically after installation, so just put your school's Blackboard address in the address box of the program.
3. You will see the webpage that you normally get in your browser, and just login normally.  Several links will appear in the bottom pane of URL Recorder.
4. One of them will contain a query string that stores your login information (you have to scroll to see the entire thing).  Don't let this fall into the wrong hands because anyone who has this text can login to Blackboard as you.
5. Right-click anywhere in that lower pane and do the "Copy All to Clipboard" option.  Open Notepad and paste it in there.  One of the lines will be something like this: https://bb.ndsu.nodak.edu/webapps/login/ action=login&remote-user=&new_loc=&auth_type=&one_time_token=&encoded_pw=XXXXXX&encoded_pw_unicode=XXXXXXXXX&user_id=XXXXXXXXX&password=&Login.x=37&Login.y=9
6. Your link will have random letters and numbers instead of the XXXXXXX that I replaced mine with.  Also notice how there is some space between "webapps/login/" and "action=login".  Replace that space with a question mark so that it is more like this (attention to the bolded area): https://bb.ndsu.nodak.edu/webapps/login/?action=login&remote-user=&new_loc=&auth_type=&one_time_token=&encoded_pw=XXXXXX&encoded_pw_unicode=XXXXXXXXXX&user_id=XXXXXXXXX&password=&Login.x=37&Login.y=9
7. Copy and paste that into your favorite browser and see if it logs you in automatically.  If it does, make a new bookmark and copy the long link we just made into the destination of it.

8. Now clicking that bookmark will log you in to Blackboard from any computer.  Once again, be very careful with it, because you don't want other people logging in as you.

This is very handy for a tablet PC where you would have to key in the username and password using an onscreen keyboard.  I'm sure you can find other sites out there that this would work for too.

As I dragged some photos out of Windows Photo Gallery into a folder so that I could upload them all to Facebook, where I then manually tagged them and added captions, I wondered why there isn't a program that could do this.  It should be possible now given Facebook's Application Platform.

Features:

• Can upload any grouping of photos from WPG as an album to Facebook.  If more than 60 pictures are there, due to Facebook's 60/album limit, automatically break them into separate albums (Example 1, Example 2, etc.).  Also prompt for a name name of the album(s).
• Carry tags, names, and captions over to Facebook.  For example, if I have a tag for Aaron Axvig in WPG, it should automatically tag me as in the picture on the Facebook side.  Ideally WPG would support placement of tags like Facebook does, but that might be tricky, so I'd settle for some sloppiness on the Facebook side.
• Keep track of what's been uploaded to Facebook already, so I could potentially have it automatically keep all my photos on there.
• Is a plugin for WPG (assuming WPG supports plugins or extensions of some form, otherwise a standalone app could work but would have to re-implement a lot of stuff that's already in WPG).

 

Also, how about something that adds in support for creating albums in WPG?  (Again, assuming some sort of plugin model exists.)

So I was annoyed by the blinking light that my desktop has when it's sleeping, and decided to put it into hibernation.  I was then further annoyed by the lack of a hibernation option in the Vista shutdown menu, and even more annoyed when I couldn't find a way to re-enable hibernation.  Via Google I then found several sites confirming that there is no way to enable or disable hibernation in Vista using the GUI (I think I disabled it by removing the hibernation file in Disk Cleanup).  However, it is possible to enable or disable it via the command line, and you can read about it at those sites I linked to above.

Instead of doing this though, I have found it just as convenient to use the command shutdown -h.  Just type that in the search box in the start menu and hit enter, and the computer will drop into hibernation, whether the menu option is there or not.

I had been using https://example.com/exchange to login to Outlook Web Access, but starting with Exchange 2007 this added numerous steps.  I had to accept an unsigned security certificate, fill out a pop-up login box, accept another certificate (because it transferred me to https://servername.example.com/owa), and then login to the actual application.  If you're like me and looking for a shortcut, just use https://example.com/owa.  Only one sign-in.

I just finished running a benchmark on the new server's RAID 5 array.  Nothing really surprising but decent performance I think.  There are 4 500GB Seagate ST3500630AS drives in a RAID 5 using the built-in NVRAID on a Asus M2N-E motherboard.  The OS is on a separate drive.