Stephen’s Scribble Pad

Let me get this straight - the iTunes Store for South Africa doesn’t sell tunes? Duh! Wasn’t that the whole point of iTunes? What a rotten apple this is!

A visit to this “so-called” music store revceals that all we miserable bastards in South Africa can download is useless utilities and other crap that won’t even work on a “normal” iPod. This App Store has so far only offered me shit for an iPod Touch or iPhone - neither of which I own or will ever own anytime soon. Not even a single game is available for my iPod.

Someone said the lack of music was due to local laws - so yet another fine thing to be grateful for from those arseholes in Pretoria! I love you guys so, so much!

Does anyone know of an alternative to iTunes for purchasing cheap music online?

Blood, sweat and VICTORY!

Have just recently finished putting together a bulk mailing application inside Excel to email preformatted html newsletters with embedded images. I learned a lot in the process and was able to solve a problem that has irritated me for years.

Previous research led me to the Micro$oft’s support website to this solution but it only attaches one of however many files you may have selected. I am now using a visual basic script file to replace the default MAPIMail link. It can send attachments via the explorer context menu in html format, with my default signature AND multiple attachments. It works for me with XP and Outlook 2007 so I hope it will for other versions of Outlook.

Create a new text document in Notepad, paste the code from below and save the file somewhere safe. Rename the file to “Mail Recipient.vbs”. Next create a shortcut and rename that to “Mail Recipient”. Customize the shortcut’s icon to the one found in C:/Windows/System32/Sendmail.dll and move your new shortcut to your “Send to” folder e.g. “C:\Documents and Settings\Stephen\SendTo\Mail Recipient.lnk”. Rather don’t delete the original MAPIMail link, just change it’s attributes to hidden (you may want it back again later).

Option Explicit
Dim objArgs, OutApp, oNameSpace, oInbox, oEmailItem, olMailItem
Dim a, oAttachments, subjectStr, olFormatHTML
olMailItem = 0
olFormatHTML = 2
Set objArgs = WScript.Arguments ‘gets paths of selected files
Set OutApp = CreateObject(”Outlook.Application”) ‘opens Outlook
Set oEmailItem = OutApp.CreateItem(olMailItem) ‘ opens new email
For a = 0 to objArgs.Count - 1
Set oAttachments = oEmailItem.Attachments.Add(objArgs(a))
subjectStr = subjectStr & Right(objArgs(a),Len(objArgs(a))-(InStrRev(objArgs(a),”\”))) & “, ” ‘recreates the default Subject e.g. Emailing: file1.doc, file2.xls
Next
If subjectStr = “” then subjectStr = “No Subject ”
oEmailItem.Subject = “Emailing: ” & Left(subjectStr, (Len(subjectStr)-2))
oEmailItem.BodyFormat = olFormatHTML
oEmailItem.Display

The consultants I work for are always needing process flow diagrams and so I use Visio a lot. However my efforts to boost productivity by customizing the interface have always been frustrated because, try as I might, I couldn’t get Visio to retain any of my changes to the toolbar from one drawing to the next. It appeared at the time that these changes (as well as any macros I might have recorded) could only be saved in the actual drawing file currently open and would thus vanish as soon as I started a new drawing. Unlike Word and Excel which have the Normal document and Personal workbook templates respectively, Visio has no such thing. Visio also cannot create custom buttons so you can only assign shortcut keys to run your macro.

By chance I made an amazing discovery (second best this week). Open Visio without a drawing page, change your toolbar buttons as desired and close Visio. Then when you open it again all your tool changes are still there, and they stay there no matter how many different drawings you work on. Super!

One trick I’ve always wanted to automate was resizing the printed page to fit the drawing contents so that drawings embedded as objects in Word documents would be correctly framed within the boundary of the object and not zoomed to a portion of the drawing only. This usually requires navigating in Visio through File/Page Setup/Page Size tab and checking the Size to fit drawing contents option. The best thing I’ve learned this week was that macros can be stored in Stencil files too. I nearly always use the Basic Flowchart (Metric) stencil (a.k.a. BASFLO_M.VSS) so I created my “fix my page” macro in this stencil so it will be available for 99% of my work. Of course the stencils are opened as Read Only so you need to save it under another name and then, after closing Visio, rename the original stencil as a .bkp file and rename your new stencil to replace the original one i.e. BASFLO_M.VSS.

B.t.w. the stencils are found in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Visio**\1033

I’ve only caught rare glimpses of Vista in action but thanks to my employer dropping his laptop and getting a new one with Vista Ultimute pre-installed I’ve had the dubious pleasure of making it’s acquaintance. Wow! It really is breathtakingly beautiful, an absolute visual feast of ultra-cool flavours.

I was secretly glad to spend some quality time with it transferring all his old data, but then of course Micro$oft threw “shit” at the this “would-be” fan.

1. Vista doesn’t open NTBackup files
2. Vista doesn’t play nice with XP computers on your simple home network
3. Five days later and sharing our previously shared printer still isn’t happening

Who would have expected that trying to get a Micro$oft product to actually work with a previous version of itself could prove so problematic. I needed to spend almost a day combing through numerous forums to learn that:

1. I need to find, download, and install a small application to open NTBackup files in Vista called the “Windows NT Backup - Restore” utility. I found this out here. Isn’t this such an obvious need that it should have been part of the Vista package to begin with?
2. I need to find, download an obscure gizmo / protocol called the Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD), previously unheard of by the common people, on all the XP machines otherwise I can’t see them in the network map. Again, wasn’t this obviously something that could have been accommodated in Vitsa itself instead of having me fix the problem myself?
3. No one seems to have a solution to my shared printer dilemma.

The upshot of all this is that my employer now want’s XP back on his machine but, joy of joys, he no longer has his CD Key.

There once was a Virus Killer named AVG who lived quietly in his little corner of the screen. In another place there lived Billy*, a spotty faced teenager with a personality disorder. Billy* wrote a virus to kill virus killers called killav. This was Billy’s* great gift to the world. AVG wrote all about Billy* in their database now we all have a virus killer killer killer in the corner of our screens.

Now in their enthusiasm to Kill Billy*, AVG have attacked my bat file used to configure my desktop for the “Ultimate Gaming Experience”. I run this bat file to kill all my “supporting apps” who don’t feature in my offline games, thus saving a few nanoseconds of valuable processor power. Included for temporary termination of course was AVG since the games are offline and no protection was needed. Obviously the virus scanner found the characters “kill” and “avg” in close proximity as in taskkill /f /im avg*xyz*.exe. No “killav” virus / trojan was truly present as there is no killav.exe process running - thank goodness.

Now to get the Virus Vault fixed in AVG Free 8 so I can recover my bat.

*This [deleted]’s real name and gender (if any) is unknown.

A funny thing happened today, but wait let me start at the beginning. Yesterday I was playing around with visual styles for Micro$oft Windoze XP and was toying with changing font sizes, trying to get bigger taskbar icons etc, i.e. generally trying to squeeze water out of a bloody stone. Lo and behold, without installing anything “foreign”, just using the plain old Display control panel to select new fonts, font sizes, icon sizes, DPI settings etc, “something” managed to break so that CSS styles wouldn’t render properly. This affected both my browsers FireFox 2 and internet exploiter 6. It was also noticeable in Windoze Help and Support Centre and various html based help files. Dreamweaver also couldn’t render it’s “syntax coloring” at all. Since I needed to spend my time productively working on a website built with CSS this was a bit of a problem as the code was hard to read and I couldn’t preview my work. What could have happened? I don’t know.

The problem sorted itself out with system restore, however that brilliant piece of Micro$oft technology managed to delete documents from two folders I created in root to store all my documents. The folders and sub-folders are still all there but they are vacant. Nobody is home. “Surely this is an optical illusion”, I thought, “maybe I just need to refresh my file browser”. Yeah right!

Micro$oft says that System Restore “enables administrators to restore their PCs, in the event of a problem, to a previous state without losing personal data files (such as Word documents, drawings, or e-mail) “. Perhaps they had fine print there about “oh it has to be in the original My Documents or else, blah blah blah…” , however since I am allowed to move the My Documents special folder to point to a folder of my choice that should have meant my files were safe, shouldn’t it?

I only moved the files there because we are all limited to file names of 256 characters and unfortunately that includes the full path which Micro$oft so cleverly reduced to 208 by wasting 48 characters (in my case) just to get to the root of the My Documents storage location, i.e. “C:/Documents and Settings/*******/My Documents/”. The fun starts when your sub-folders and the eventual file name take up the remaining 208 characters and THEN for example, Micro$oft Word creates a backup and slaps “Backup of ” to the front of the file name. Suddenly your file name becomes longer than 256 and the message “path could not be found” pops up when you try to open it. [mmm, shouldn't we just tell the users "we can't make a backup because the file name would be too long".... naaah, let them suffer]

I was only trying to defer the inevitable by moving everything into a folder named “C:/Documents/” (a mere 13 characters) and pointing to that as the My Documents folder, thereby saving 34 chars to allow for more descriptive folder / file names in my directory structure. Now, apparently I have sinned in doing so and the built-in retribution daemon has zapped my files.

DISCLAIMER: NO TRADEMARKS WERE SERIOUSLY HARMED DURING THE TYPING OF THIS POST

I had difficulty resizing an embedded Excel sheet in MS Word. I’d edited the embedded object by opening it in Excel, but could not get the extra columns I added to show in Word. I tried to use Word’s crop feature but wasn’t satisfied with the level of control there because it wasn’t precise enough to fit to the column / row edges exactly resulting in messy display of the border lines.

I later discovered that you can do this if you choose the ‘Edit’ context menu item instead of ‘Open’. Then it opens in a sort-of frame in word instead of in a new window. Resizing the frame using the edge handles automatically snaps to the column / row boundaries in the spreadsheet and allows precise control so that border lines are displayed correctly.

For some unknown reason (probably a badly written third party software) some of my applications were suddenly using a bold font in their dialog boxes. This sometimes resulted in options being hidden off the edge of the dialog window or description text being truncated. This was evident in the following places:

• the Download Accelerator Plus options window
• the clock in the task bar
• various applications’ About windows
• the list box label “class” in the Dreamweaver 8 properties inspector panel for tables (bad coding on the part of the Macromedia / Adobe programmers since the font specification is obviously wrong in the actual application)

Apart from a recommendation requiring an in-place upgrade of windows from the CD there appeared to be no other fixes that would work. I tried reinstalling the default XP fonts but this didn’t help. I then noticed after checking against the list of default windows fonts that I found here, that MS Sans Serif wasn’t listed in my Fonts folder. Then more googling revealed that MS Sans Serif is actually called sserife.fon and actually was in my Fonts folder so that couldn’t be the problem could it? Further research lead me to open Regedit from the run box to look at my registry and I saw that

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes

substitutes Helv with MS Sans Serif, but when I look at the list of fonts in

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts

there was no path reference to the MS Sans Serif font file. So does this mean that windows doesn’t know that it exists even if it’s in the Fonts folder? Ready to try anything, I created the string:

Name: MS Sans Serif

Type: REG_SZ

Data: sserife.fon (no path required if it’s in the Fonts folder)

I then closed Regedit and restarted Windows and voilà it was FIXED!!!

In 2005 I had a nasty fender bender with a BMW on the way to Pretoria. Through insurers Outsurance, North City Panelbeaters were given the job of doing the repairs. Not only was their communication with me atrocious, but their service itself was shameful. I was ill in hospital shortly after the accident and they took advantage by shelving my repair job until I insisted after a month that they get on with it. I flew back to cape town and they delivered the car via road freight. It arrived:

• without my radio-cd player
• without the right-hand front headlight globe
• with a non-functional air conditioner
• with a non-functional interior light
• with complimentary finger marks on the interior roof lining

However, what I only discovered now after my gear-box conked in was that they replaced the right-hand CV shaft with a non-standard part that was too long. This caused irregular strain on the CV Joint which eventually has cracked so now that and the shaft had to be replaced as well. If this CV had come apart while doing 120 km / hour on the N1 freeway I might have been killed.
Because I was ill at the time and lacked mobility what with a broken hip and collar bone, I did not have the luxury of inspecting their work. It seems that unscrupulous people like North City Panelbeaters  will take advantage of this and do sub-standard work, probably hoping to maximise profit from the insurance payout.

Note to self:

• always inspect your vehicle for obvious visual signs of poor workmanship
• get a written service report with a detailed breakdown
• AND COMPLAIN IF YOU’RE NOT HAPPY
• AND KEEP ON COMPLAINING UNTIL YOU ARE HAPPY