Technology Tales

Desktop.ini on the desktop?

Being an experienced computer, I set Windows Explorer to display hidden files when using a Windows PC. However, on my Vista-empowered laptop, that causes two desktop.ini files to appear on the desktop, one for all users and one for my user account. And displaying hidden files does not  seem to be something that you can do on a folder by folder basis. With XP, this did not cause hidden files to appear on your desktop like this so the behaviour could be seen as a step backwards. A spot of googling exposed me to some trite suggestions regarding re-hiding files again but deleting them seems to be the only way out. In spite of the dire warnings being issued, there didn’t seem to be any untoward problems caused by my actions. I’ll see if they stay away but episodes like this do make me wonder if it is time for Microsoft to stop treating us like idiots and give us things that work the in which we want them to function. Well, I’m glad that Linux is the lynchpin of my home computing world…

A pleasant surprise…

Yesterday, when taking the screen grab for my post on Quanta Plus, I did the Alt + Print Screen shuffle as usual. However, when I did so, I was greeted with a dialogue box asking me where I wanted to store the PNG file that was to be produced and what I wanted to call it. The operation was as swish as that. In Windows, the screenshot gets stuffed into the clipboard for you to extricate it with your graphics editor of choice so this was an interesting surprise. It’s the sort of thing that can make a good impression and it is striking that Linux seems to be ahead of Windows on this one. Who said Linux was less than user friendly?

Controlling what the wpgm command calls in Windows SAS

I was setting up a key mapping in SAS 8.1 such that the log and output windows are cleared and a SAS program run in the most recently used program editor window. The idea was that debugging would be easier and command was what you see below:

log; clear; output; clear; wpgm; submit

I was having trouble getting SAS to pick up the most recently used Enhanced Editor window and it was opening up an old style Program Editor window in its place. If I had wanted to use that, I would have used pgm and not wpgm. What was conspiring against me was a pesky system option. Pottering over to Tools > Options > Preferences and navigating to the Edit tab brought me to the cause of the problem: the Use Enhanced Editor check box was in the clear and fixing that set me on my way. SAS 9 could also be afflicted by the same irritation and that is where i got the screenshot that you see below where everything is hunky dory.

Do I still need serial numbers?

My spot of bad luck with Windows in August highlighted the importance of hanging on to serial numbers for software that I had purchased over the internet and downloaded. I could at the ones that I needed but they were retained in a motley mix of text files and emails; one even was rediscovered by pottering back to the website of the purveyor. The security of the installation files themselves was another matter of some concern but I was rather more organised in that regard. Both of these are things that need checking before Windows falls to pieces on you and needs to be reinstalled. Of course, human nature being what it is means that we often end up picking up the pieces after a calamity has struck when a spot of planning would have made things that bit easier.

Linux does make life easier on this front: commercial applications are anything but the dominant force that they are in the world of Windows. That means that serial numbers are few and far between and I only need the one for VMware Workstation. The mention of VMware brings me to my retention of Windows so knowing where serial numbers are located remains a good idea. Even so, I cloned my Windows VM so that any Windows restoration following a destructive crash should be a quicker affair. Now that I am a Linux user, Windows crashes should not encroach as much on my home computing any more and Linux should be more stable anyway…

The case of a wide open restriction

The addition of IMAP capability to Gmail attracted a lot of attention in the blogosphere last week and I managed to flick the switch for the beast courtesy of the various instructions that were out there. However, when I pottered back to the settings, the IMAP settings had disappeared.

A brief look at the Official Gmail Blog confirmed why: the feature wasn’t to be available to those who hadn’t set their language as US English. My setting of UK English explained why I wasn’t seeing it again, a strange observation given that they are merely variants of the same language; I have no idea why I saw it the first time around.

My initial impression was that the language setting used was an operating system or browser one, but this is not how it is. In fact, it is the language that you set for Gmail itself in its settings; choosing US English was sufficient to make the IMAP settings reappear while choosing UK English made them disappear again.

Personally, I am not certain why the distinction was made in the first place but I have Evolution merrily working away with Gmail’s IMAP interface without a bother. To get it going, I needed that imap.gmail.com needed an SSL connection while smtp.gmail.com needed a TLS one. After that, I was away and no port numbers needed to be supplied, unlike Outlook.

Faster IE7 phishing monitoring

The standard phishing detection that comes with IE7 really does slow things down when it comes to navigating web pages. In contrast, the option offered as part of Norton 360 is much faster. So much so that you hardly notice that it’s there at all. When I restored IE7 on my PC and ran it for the first time, Norton asked me to be its default fraud detection and I was away from there. Norton 360 offers nothing for Firefox, my preferred and default option but there may be plug-ins that address that need.

Firefox spell checking: getting rid of a mispelling from your dictionary.

Mozilla Firefox includes a spell checker and like any such function, it offers a chance to add words to a custom dictionary. Of course, you can also add misspellings too and these definitely need to be removed. With Word, it’s a matter of looking for custom.dic and deleting the nefarious item. With Firefox, it’s similar, at least on Windows anyway. The file that need to edit is persdict.dat and you’ll find it in C:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[random name].default. My search for the relevant information took me over to Lifehacker.

Update 2012-12-11: For users of Linux, the location of the above file is as follows: /home/[user id]/.mozilla/firefox/[random name].default. Once you find persdict.dat in there, the required editing can be perfomed.

Missing borders in Internet Explorer

It’s quite hard to describe this observation in a title so here goes with a longer description in a post. One thing that I spotted with the Prosumer theme used on this blog is that the links on the horizontal navigation bar underneath the mast head were not appearing as they should. The links have been formatted using CSS to appear in boxes with borders that are more apparent when you hover over them. In IE, the top and bottom borders were missing. After a spot of digging, I came up with the line-height property being the cause and I was right: the extremities of the boxes surrounding the text were being cut off because they exceeded the allotted space. As if to emphasise that IE7 isn’t as major a leap forward from IE6 as we would have liked, the problem affected that browser as well.

Aside: Link text colours weren’t being honoured by IE7 like they are by IE6, Firefox and Opera so another tweak to the CSS was needed.

IE7 on the way up…

I don’t spend too much time looking at that stats in Google Analytics but I do find it useful to see what people come to see. Another thing that I keep on radar is the browser technologies that visitors are using. Screen resolution is a particular interest of mine. However, browsers and their versions are watched too and I have spotted the ascent of IE7 from where it was; there seems to be a surge in recent times. I am unsure as to the cause for this but it’s definitely happening and Vista take up seems to have noting to do with it.

Command line mapping of network drives

Mapping network drives in Windows usually involves shuffling through Explorer menus. There is another way that I consider to be neater: using the Windows command line ("DOS" to some). The basic command for creating a mapping goes like this:

net use w: \\yourserver.address

To ensure persistence of the mapping across different Windows sessions, use this:

net use w: \\yourserver.address /persistent:yes

Here’s how to set up a mapping that logs in as a different user:

net use w: \\yourserver.address password /user:you

The above can include domain information as well and in a number of different forms: domain\username is one.

To delete a mapping, try this:

net use w: /delete

List all existing mappings:

net use

This is a flavour of what is available and Microsoft does provide documentation. Issuing the following command will bring some of that on the command line:

net help use