So I upgraded to IE7 today to try and work through some strangeness that has been happening with the presenter software from last week. I decided I didn’t want “Live Search” to be my default search engine for it and get sent to a list of searches I can use. Most annoyingly this spawns a completely new window to display the list of search engines instead of using tabs. Wouldn’t that be cool to demonstrate how useful tabs are straight off the bat? No? Shame.

So the regular search engines are there like AOL, ASK, Google, Live Search, Lycos and Yahoo but then there is Rediff which is “Search India as it happens”, Sify which appears to be “India News” and under Topic Search there are items like “India Times”, “Naukri” (“Top Jobs in India”) and then one Australian: News Corp Online. At first I thought that for some reason I’d chanced onto India so I selected Global Sites and reselected Australia to be regreeted by India. Virgin.com appears to be there and out of curiosity I installed it only to find it didn’t actually work. I searched for contact and it didn’t appear to actually find anything. If I type ‘contact’ into the search box in the page it does go to it finds results. Clearly Microsoft is on the ball with IE7.

But once I had IE7 installed on my system I found that this alone wasn’t causing the problem. We traversed over to desktop support and pinched their present desktop dev machine to do some extensive testing to see if it was broken as well. Surprisingly once we managed to get it all set up, it wasn’t broken. Unlike the current lecture theatre PC’s that crashed when trying to use the tool, this desktop system worked perfectly fine. Bizarrely the older software, IPLOD (not sure what it means but somehow its getting replaced) appears to have still been installed in PowerPoint’s configuration which lead to a charming error every time we loaded PowerPoint which was independent of our own error. Instead of issue once we had a non-crashing desktop was that the add-in registration only occurred for the current user with the developer’s supplied installer not within the local machine context. Whilst I haven’t quite had the chance to prove it yet, I actually believe that the registry install procedure does nothing however PowerPoint is in fact the thing creating the relevant entries when it starts and notices the DLL newly registered, as the correct entries appear to be created under PowerPoint however the developer’s registry strings refer to Word. Other issues include GPO fun with Windows causing issues with the C: not appearing, background issues and weirdness of the IPLOD system recurring. Unfortunate really, however hopefully it gets resolved by Thursday for when they want to demonstrate it. Fortunately for me however its not my problem any more. Yay. As part of rebuilding the installation instructions for the software for the desktop support team to something that works I sent them an email with the registry file, two executable files required and the DLL COM add-in. Outlook managed to let me upload and send them without warning however actually refused to send the email. Some how the email disappeared and never got to its destination even though I have a copy of it in my sent box. It appears that some how the email got eaten. Looking at it in Outlook, I noticed that the other attachments had been blocked by Outlook’s “You’re an idiot” protections that for some reason don’t appear to be easily able to be disabled. As an experiment I forwarded the email externally and something called “MIMEDefang” decided it wanted to remove the sole remaining attachment the DLL file. Eventually I got sick of it and resent the email with the instructions without any of the attachments. Microsoft Office: Productivity destroyer.

On the topic productivity destroyers, Word bullet points don’t appear to work properly in 2007. I’m used to hitting enter twice to escape from a collection of bullet points however for some reason this doesn’t appear to want to work properly. I end up hitting delete around three times to get back to where I was, which is far more annoying than hitting enter a few times in a row, at least I know it doesn’t have any side effects.

The last item on my list for Monday actually happened over the weekend. What I love is how people complain that Windows is so easy compared to Linux. After my last ATI driver experience with Linux, I’m not particularly disinclined to this case however after what I had with Windows I’m not quite sure which is worse. After having the computer hard lock (probably heat issues), I decided to try to update the drivers. I downloaded the latest drivers off the nVidia web site, installed them, restarted and ended up with 640×480 256 colour display. No problem I thought, I’ll try to revert the driver – but didn’t see any easy way of doing this with the driver option not working properly. Ok, lets try to get a slightly older version of the driver. Load up Firefox and decided to hit the nVidia site and then Firefox crashes. This is weird because the page starts loading fine and then just crashes. So I tried IE and the similar case occurred. It then occurs to me that the Flash player is available in both cases and is perhaps crashing the browsers. Boned. I grabbed the original driver install CD, reinstalled it, rebooted and magically everything is back to scratch. This actually reminded me of how I did the same thing with the ATI driver except that my Linux box was a bit easier to handle switching drivers. Why does Windows make life so hard?

So a few weeks ago I released JAuthTools 1.5.4 which features Token Login. Token Login was created to solve the need to generate a secure token that you can use for automatic login, for example with stuff like newsletters. Today I’m going to show you how you can write something simple with Token Login to handle automatic login with tokens in a unique problem case.
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Have you ever done a search for a problem you’ve had only to see tantalizingly something that looks like exactly the answer you wanted before painfully realising that it’s on Experts Exchange and the page you have just clicked on says it has the answer but you don’t have an account. Sure you could sign up for their free trial for 30 days and you might even find the answer if you are lucky but what happens next time? It’s like a drug dealer: the first hit is free, but you pay for everything from then on.

Now the original design of Experts Exchange wasn’t too bad. You could ask questions if you had enough points. You could also assign points to different questions increasing in value for importance I guess. You acquired points by either paying or by successfully answering questions. The thing that annoyed me was that if you weren’t the person that was nominated as the one who answered it you got no tangible credit for your contribution even if it helps or even if the correct answer was actually wrong or perhaps not the best response.

But obviously at this point they feel that they have enough knowledge to justify not only spamming their pages with tonnes of ads but also starting to force people to pay for even more. And be aide they’ve been around for a while and have had a good reputation they’re using this plus close keyword matches on the question to continue to drive traffic.

So now with Google’s Search Wiki, we can fight back against Experts Exchange and it’s pointless entries in Google’s index. All you need to do is be logged in and when you see an Experts Exchange result in your Google search make sure you delete it from your results. My belief is that if we get enough people to blacklist and delete those entries, Google will take note and eventually lower the rank of the entries and we’ll stop seeing their results.

I decided this morning to give Panic’s Coda software a go. Coda is billed as an all in one web development tool. It has a whole bunch of things built in such as Subversion. At USD$99, I half expected it to just work, especially given their arrogant slogan. What I found by simply adding a “site” was that it crashed. I reported it and decided to give it another go. This time I got half way through adding the site and was about to save it before not one but two error dialogs appeared advising me to quit again. I haven’t had a chance to use it and it keeps crashing, not good. I think this is one bit of software I will not bother with. I guess I’ll stick to Eclipse.

Update: I have an email Coda stating that they believe that it is an issue with a third party application is causing the issue. When I have a chance to quit everything I’ll work out which application is causing it though if I can to forgo something useful it probably isn’t worth it.

Today almost seemed to be the start of the maintainence day that was scheduled for tomorrow. The USQ website was taken offline though that wasn’t so bad because not long afterwards the net link went down. Turns out there was a series of mishaps starting with a sparky wiping out one of the the interconnects between the firewall edge devices. This on it’s own wasn’t too bad until the fiber link to Sydney went down which with the edge interconnects down meant the failover didn’t work and for a few hours there was no internet connection. You see some people determine that without internet access or email there was no point being at work, which I find interesting.

I sat down and worked through ePrints most of the day. Its some how broken on my dev system, perhaps due to me trying to resync all of the systems together and creating a new field through the filesystem not through their interface. It appears that this has broken the system which is unfortunate. However I’ve managed to get everything in sync between dev, test and prod.

Almost all of today was spent working on the Adobe Presenter based tool from yesterday. Surprisingly it isn’t working properly so I ended up working to fix it. The issue appears to be that some how on the same computer but different users, Internet Explorer behaved differently enough to cause an issue and prevent the system from working. I really at times wonder what was going on and how the same computer differs for different users. Another Windows mystery is born.

Luckily I could replicate the issue on my machine so I went to work to try to work out what was going wrong. It turned out that for some reason the Javascript in the web page wasn’t working properly. It also didn’t work in Firefox so I used it to debug the issue and get it to work properly. Once I had Firefox up and running I went back to Powerpoint to test. This time when I went through it managed to work fine and passed the point where it was blocking last time and it looked like everything worked. It said it uploaded and encoded everything fine before finishing up stating the it had successfully uploaded the file to the USQ Studydesk (our Moodle site name). It lied. At this point I fired up VB6 that I had installed in the morning and opened up the project. I put in some debugging statements to try and work out what was going wrong. At this point I tried to work out how to install it and having a look through all of the resources he copied over and noted that I couldn’t find the code used to make the installer. I wandered next door to the other guy from our department that went and asked him if he remembered anything about the installer. He didn’t so again we ventured to his office. He doesn’t have a phone connected in part due to his own lack of desire I think and allegedly doesn’t respond to email. So we went and visited and discovered that he hadn’t copied the installer code over. So we got him to copy the code over even though he protested that we didn’t have the software to use the code that he had written (it was written in PowerBasic, the truth of the statement also is in question because he wrote it as a part of our Distance Education Centre (DEC) and is now working for the Centre for Sustainable Catchments, so technically the licence for the software should be owned by DEC anyway).

With the install code I managed to work out what I needed to do to get my modified version working properly to test it. Eventually I tracked the problem down to poor URL parsing which broke when I added an extra field to track another value. I shifted this field and magically it started working again. Whilst doing this I also discovered that there is very little error checking in the VB app itself and it merely hopes that everything works and will turn out fine. Looks like another app to rewrite and likely more work for me.

It has been an incredibly long time since I used Windows and now using it full time I’ve managed to get most things the way I want them, beyond the odd occasion when Windows decides that I didn’t want to use my start menu for much – but I’m working on ways around that. I’m also using Outlook full time as an email client and getting rather annoyed with its lack of functionality.

Every so often Outlook notifies me its connecting to an Exchange server, the other day when I was having IP issues it notified me that it was going to reconnect to the server but never got around to it (I ended up working out that the “You are working offline” error message and the actual “work offline” setting don’t corelate – there is another item at the bottom that was displaying disconnected). Impossible to assign rules for mailer subsystem.

Another annoyance I find with Windows is that it is hard moving maximised windows across desktops. On Mac its simple, you just drag the window across and if it doesn’t fit in its destination for whatever reason (dock, menu bar, smaller screen), the window gets resized to fit automatically once you drop the window (release the mouse button). Linux has a similar deal however windows in transit get unmaximised and can be remaximised at their destination. Windows however forces you to double click the window, shift it to the right display and then maximise it again. Interestingly on Mac and Linux I can use keyboard combos so I don’t even need to select the window’s title bar to move it (Alt dragging on Linux and I have Zooom on the Mac to handle that).

Like the previous few days I spent majority of my day trying to get ePrints in a consistent view in my SVN repo. Mostly boring.

In the afternoon I went to the handover of some presentation recording software. It is written in part with Visual Basic 6 for the Powerpoint integration and then some PHP on a Windows server that integrates with Adobe Presenter on the Windows box to handle converting the Powerpoint file and the associated recodings with the generated Flash file. While we were there the system actually broke so we stood around and waited for it’s developer to fix the system up. He seemed really reticent to hand over all of the code but I managed to get him to copy the directory. Originally he was only selecting a few files but was excluding some of the important Visual Basic project files. Hopefully I have enough of the code to get it to work

Most of my day was spent again on ePrints again. Nothing particularly interesting. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

I’ve been noticing a bit today that Slashdot appears to be going down reporting 500 Internal Server Errors. I noticed it first last night and a few times throughout today and then again just now. Not sure what is going on but they were having issues earlier self DOS’ing themselves, so perhaps something similar is occurring. Most times it comes back after a refresh or two which is good but still worrying that its happening a few times too regularly, I hope they get it fixed 🙂