Windows XP dialogs using bold fonts

By Stephen  |  2008/03/22 15:47 Posted in Windows XP  |  Comments (13)

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!!!

North City Panelbeaters Are Crap

By Stephen  |  2008/02/23 13:24 Posted in Poor Service  |  Comments (2)

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

ESKOM Rewards Staff for Performance…

By Stephen  |  2008/02/02 18:36 Posted in General  |  Comments (0)

The whopping big bonuses seen in headlines a short while ago were supposedly partly for Awards that Eskom had received. Lets look at some of these shall we.

The KPMG Survey of Sustainability Reporting in South Africa
Eskom was awarded the KPMG Gold award for the best sustainability disclosure in an annual report in the Public Entities Category (2000 Annual Report), and the Gold award for the best Corporate Environmental Report in the South African Category (2000 Environmental Report).

Doesn’t “SUSTAINABILITY” mean that you plan to continue to meet growing demand?

Does “best report” mean they had the least spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and most pretty charts and tables? ;-)

Technology Top 100
Eskom’s Research Division was declared the overall category winner in the Technology Top 100 as the “Best Research and Development Group in South Africa” by Business Day and MTN.

… doesn’t say much for the rest of the technology in this country does it? ;-)

“SHED YOUR LOAD” @ www.blackout.co.za

By Stephen  |  2008/02/02 18:19 Posted in General, Poor Service  |  Comments (0)

“Well I’ll be damned! There is “wragtie waar” a place for unhappy citizens to share their “blackout” pains with the world. Who would have thought! If you have a story to tell go to http://www.blackout.co.za. Some interesting reading there.

Eskom, why “brown” stage?

By Stephen  |  2008/02/02 17:16 Posted in General, Poor Service  |  Comments (0)

The Load Shedding schedules refer to Brown Stage 1, Brown Stage 2, etc. This is derived from their cute little dial that indicates the likelihood of load shedding, with each stage affecting a different area at a different time (sort of). The dial ranges from green to brown with brown representing load shedding taking place. Is the choice of colour symbolic of the “crap” that Eskom has dumped the whole country in or of a blasé “shit happens” kind-of-attitude to the concerns of the users?

Just last night we experienced another power-cut (4.5 hours from 20:30) which seems to have been an unanticipated technical problem. I wonder if THEY have the know-how to anticipate ANYTHING?

Load Shedding Indicator

(YES, you are correct – I didn’t have anything better to do today!)

More inspiration: “Darkest Africa”

By Stephen  |  2008/01/30 01:10 Posted in General, Poor Service  |  Comments (0)

Overheard:

Q. “What did people use in South Africa before the the days of paraffin lamps and coal stoves?’

A. “Electricity”

A Light for the Nation:

Does anyone remember the Eskom advert where cities were shown being lit up and gradually illuminating a profile of the continent of Africa? I wonder how many candles that took ;-)

And a Cartoon by Me:

Eskom’s Load Shedding Control Centre…

Electricity Supply Kommedy of Errors

By Stephen  |  2008/01/25 01:12 Posted in General, Poor Service  |  Comments (2)

Judging from their own website, Eskom seems to be a very “admin” heavy organisation with a lot of resources dedicated internally to employee well-being, BEE’ness, staff development and education, as well as externally in corporate social investment. And judging from their atrocious quality of service they seem little concerned with their actual reason for being i.e. generating and supplying electricity to South Africa. Looking at the page with the executive committee mug shots, one can’t help noticing that the two positions: “Generating” and “Primary Energy” are VACANT while all the admin posts are pretty neatly covered.

Irritated by the fact that their incompetence and gross negligence has gone un-punished (primarily because the government and primary share-holder is equally guilty of causing the current predicament and therefore rather toothless) I have corrected their name and logo…

Ad-hoc Spark Supply Commission

New Eskom Logo

Smashing News!

By Stephen  |  2008/01/18 08:03 Posted in General  |  Comments (1)

This morning I awoke to my Dad shouting and a loud bang. Two young men smashed my drivers window. In the seconds since my Dad spotted “a [deleted] man coming out of the back yard” they’d ripped out my car radio/cd and disappeared. A convenient brick from the back yard did the dirty work.
Now I’m faced with the prospect of possibly losing my “no-claim” bonus with Outsurance (probably around R 2000) and having to cough up R 500 excess on the glass. To my horror I also see that my “comprehensive” policy is not really comprehensive because it doesn’t include the radio/cd. Yet another R 1000 that I’ll have to cough up.
Oh, and they took my Depeche Mode Greatest Hits cd which was in the cd player at the time.
All this for a radio/cd that was past it’s prime with a digital face panel that was dulled and unreadable in daylight.
Amazingly enough I took events quite calmly, without a single expletive, and have so far resisted that unchristian urge to damn them to hell.

WordPress users not receiving password email

By Stephen  |  2008/01/15 23:23 Posted in Wordpress  |  Comments (2)

Having asked a friend to check out my new blog I was dismayed to discover that he couldn’t log on because the Scribble Pad didn’t send him a password. Fortunately the solution to this was easily found by browsing the bluehostforum.com (here).

All I needed to do was create an email account in my domain named wordpress@mydomain.com (which in my case is wordpress@smmeyer.com).

It worked perfectly and I received my test password after only a few seconds. It looks like:

Username: steven
Password: ******

http://smmeyer.com/scribble/wp-login.php

Now if only I could make the email message content a bit more friendly…

Windows won’t let me delete a file

By Stephen  |  2008/01/15 16:14 Posted in Cool Software  |  Comments (1)

Only the “Elder Gods” at Microsoft HQ know why the world of Microsoft was created thus, but sometimes the system doesn’t let go of a file (when it should!!) and then you can’t move it or delete it. Sometimes you know exactly which programme you last used that may have done this (probably also a Microsoft offering) but other times you don’t have a clue.

A very handy free tool (really free) called Unlocker found here, allows you to see exactly which program is causing the offence and then you can choose between killing the process or unlocking the file. You can also select a further action on your file to move, copy, rename or delete it all from within Unlocker.

Unlocker can be accessed from the context menu in Explorer or (Xplorer2 in my case).

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