Software Salariman

An annoying feature in Microsoft Word 2003 is that the default setting for the Reviewing toolbar is Final Showing Markup, so that all changes in your documents are highlighted when you open it, even after you accept all changes and saved the document previously. The solution is to unset your Security option Make hidden markup visible when opening or saving.. See How to turn off annoying MS Word Features, 'Change Default for "Show Markup" Box' for this and other solutions to Word annoyances.

Labels: Annoyances, Software

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 2:10 PM   0 comments
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How to create a UML composite state element using Sparx Systems' Enterprise Architect application:

1. In a state machine diagram, create a new state element.
2. Select the state element's context menu item Advanced / Composite Element.

The selected state element is converted into a composite state element (the image has a infinity symbol) with its own state machine diagram (check the Project Browser). Now you can draw a transition line to and from this composite state and include it in state transition tables.

Annoyingly, Enterprise Architect's on-line help describes a composite element but doesn't show to make one!

Labels: Annoyances, Software

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 10:47 AM   2 comments
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Microsoft Visio 2003 doesn't provide keyboard shortcut for the user to resize a shape instance. You have to use the mouse pointer or (shudder) enter the required height and width of the shape in the Size & Position window.

Labels: Annoyances, Software

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 7:00 PM   0 comments
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Vista has a Memory Diagnostic Tool which you can turn on to test your computer's memory when you restart it. Once it is enabled, this tool starts every time you restart your computer. Be warned: the Vista help system doesn't explain how to disable it!

After some Web searching, I found this tip:

- Open command prompt as Admistrator: by typing in start ''cmd'' right click the .exe file and then clicking on adminstrator. - Then typing in the console: ''bcdedit /bootsequence {memdiag} /remove'' press enter, after that you can restart your com. and it wont start

Labels: Annoyances, Windows

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 9:05 AM   0 comments
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If want to save an e-mail message in HTML format in Microsoft Outlook 2003, you may find that Outlook, unlike MSIE or Firefox browsers, only saves the text in the message but not any of the embedded images or attachments. Worse, Outlook doesn't warn you that it is not saving the entire message.

Another annoyance is that if you try to save an image in the message using the context menu item Save Picture As, then you can only save using BMP format.

Labels: Annoyances, Software

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 10:38 AM   0 comments
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This is way annoying. I installed an OpenGL game on my Asus notebook and it ran abysmally. When I tried to test the OpenGL interface with glview, that program crashed. The ATI's Catalyst Control Center (CCC) reported that OpenGL Version was Not available.

It turns out that I have to update the driver for my notebook's ATI Mobility Radeon X1700 card and enable OpenGL support. ATI does not support any Mobility Radeon cards but I found an updated driver on the Asus site. Then I used Mobility Modder tool and it enabled OpenGL. Now my system has OpenGL version 6.14.10.7275 and glview runs to completion.

Whew! Thank goodness Mobility Modder worked since I wasn't looking forward to hacking .INF files without knowing anything about configuring video adapters.

Labels: Annoyances, Game, Windows

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 5:39 PM   1 comments
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If you copy-paste an image from a CHM file to Microsoft Word, you end up with a blank rectangle in your Word document. The workaround is to paste the image to a drawing program (e.g. MSPaint), then copy-paste from the drawing program into Word. Why you need to do this two-step process?

Labels: Annoyances, Software, Windows

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 1:32 PM   2 comments
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Many web sites have forms that move the keyboard cursor into an input field. For example, view your favourite search engine page and note that the cursor is in the search field. Enter a query, press RETURN, wait for the results, move the cursor out of the search field by hitting the TAB key, click on a link (don't open a new tab or window) then return to the search page. You should find that the cursor is back in the search field. If you usually just use the keyboard instead of the mouse, you have to hit TAB to move the cursor out of that field before you can scroll the page up or down. Some web sites have a search field in every page, so it is even more annoying to hit the TAB key in every page. (Why do I even persist in using these web sites?)

Web pages that display this behaviour usually use Javascript's focus() function. If you view the source code of such pages, you should see something like this: document. … .focus().

There's several solutions to this annoyance in Firefox.

The most general method is to disable Javascript by unchecking the Tools / Options / Content / Enable Javascript option, rather like using a sledgehammer to kill an ant.

If you just want to stop web pages from using the focus() method for the text fields (the INPUT tag), you can modify Firefox's security policy by editing your user.js preferences file:

user_pref("capability.policy.default.HTMLInputElement.focus", "noAccess");

Note: The policy named default is applied for all sites.

If you only want to stop certain sites from using the focus() method, create a new policy and specify when it should be applied, for instance:

user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "noinputfocus");
user_pref("capability.policy.noinputfocus.sites", "<site list>");
user_pref("capability.policy.noinputfocus.HTMLInputElement.focus", "noAccess");

In this example, the noinputfocus policy is applied to the list of sites specified in noinputfocus.sites property.

28-Jan-2008: You have to restart Firefox before your policy is applied.

Labels: Annoyances, Firefox, Javascript, Web

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 9:48 AM   0 comments
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Outlook 2003 mail editor has some undocumented shortcut keys for formatting plain text messages (!) that I accidentally triggered.

• Ctrl+R right justifies the current paragraph and all new text. To restore your message back to left-justified formatting, select Format / HTML then select Format / Plain Text menu items. The shortcut key and menu item to left-justify a paragraph aren't available in plain text mode.
• Ctrl+Shift+' toggles the Smart Quote (or Curly Quote) feature, where a leading and trailing quotes are ‘ ’ and “ ”.

These shortcut keys and features aren't useful in plain text mode. On the other hand, the useful shortcut key, Shift+F3 to switch case of selected text, doesn't work.

Labels: Annoyances

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 10:05 AM   0 comments
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Labels: Annoyances, Windows

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 11:16 AM   0 comments
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Because I work on-site, sometimes I add a Outlook contact from the client's Exchange server. If I do that, I can only send e-mail to that person using Exchange, even though I enter what appears to be an SMTP address in that contact's e-mail field. When I try to send a message to that person using an SMTP server, Outlook produces this cryptic error:

Task 'xxx.com - Sending' reported error (0x80070057) : 'Could not complete the operation. One or more parameter values are not valid.'

When I look at the contact's e-mail fields (select the contact's All Fields tab, then choose E-mail fields in the Select from: field), I see that Email Address Type is EX instead of SMTP. I think this means that Outlook would use some Exchange-related protocol to send messages to this contact.

The hack to change Email Address Type is …

1. Select the contact's details.
2. In the General tab, replace the existing the e-mail address with a string starting with smtp:. For example, replace a.b@mail.x.com with smtp:a.b@mail.x.com. Note: you have to type in the new dummy address; if you use a suggestion from Outlook, the address type does not change.
3. Select the Properties context menu item of the dummy e-mail address. Outlook should display the E-mail Properties dialog. Note that the E-mail type: field now has a value of SMTP.
4. In this dialog, remove the smtp: prefix from the e-mail address.
5. Press the OK button and the dialog should close.
6. Initially, the Contact's e-mail address does not seem to have changed. If you click on the Display As: field, Outlook corrects the e-mail address.
7. Delete the string in the Display As: field and press Enter. Outlook should refresh the Display As: field.
8. Save the updated contact.

See also this description.

If you want to find out the address type of all your Contacts, just add the E-mail Address Type column to your list of contacts view.

Labels: Annoyances, Windows

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 1:09 PM   0 comments
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I wanted to make a recording but there were no recording devices available in Vista's Sound control panel applet. Then I found out that I had to select Show Disabled Devices menu item in the Recording tab sheet's context menu to see the microphone before I could enable it. Grrr! Prior to this problem, I'd never seen a context menu in a tab sheet. Also, it seems silly to have the option to hide audio devices; most users would only have a small number of playback and recording devices in the first place.

Labels: Annoyances, Windows

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 10:40 AM   15 comments
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Diskeeper Lite doesn't work out-of-the-box in Vista; it complains about not having access to Terminal Services. After installing and uninstalling Diskeeper Lite, Vista thinks that there's no longer a defragmenter registered! Ay caramba! Another problem to fix later.

Vista's built-in defragmenter defrag.exe is mute (no status, no progress bar) so I have no idea when I can shut down my computer after I've started a defragmenting job. I found another free disk defragmenter program Auslogics Disk Defrag.

Labels: Annoyances, Windows

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 6:17 PM   0 comments
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Started playing with Windows Vista Home Premium (that's a mouthful). First thing I noticed was the eye candy. Desktop is very pretty. Second thing I noticed was how slow network transfers were. So slow that nothing happened when I tried to transfer files from my old computer to my new one.

Applied the following tweaks from Top 10 Vista Speed Tweaks.

1. Disabled Indexing. I choose Google Desktop for indexing my computer.
2. Turned of Remote Differential Compression.
3. Turned off Windows Defender.
4. Disk Defragmentation is not scheduled.
5. Didn't try the USB boost option.
6. Didn't try the Hibernation option.
7. Left System Restore feature running. It seems like good insurance.
8. Disabled User Account Control (UAC). Those Apple Get a Mac - Security ads were spot-on. UAC is such a pain in the neck if you want to do anything remotely resembling system administration.
9. Disabled some unused services.

I also did the following:

• Turned off Remote Assistance.
• Removed Symantec Norton. This program also installed its own network adapters. Speed improved from less than 1 MB/sec to 2.3 MB/sec, which is about 50% the speed of my wireless router. Good enough for transferring my files from one computer to another.
• Turned off the Firewall. My router has a hardware firewall and I prefer Sygate software firewall.

Labels: Annoyances, Windows

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 9:29 PM   0 comments
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Labels: Annoyances, Windows

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 8:00 PM   0 comments
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When I cut a heading and its heading number from a Microsoft Word document and paste them into an Outlook 2003 HTML message or Wordpad, the heading numbers are always reset. For example, 4.1.1.1 My Heading is pasted as 1.1.1.1 My Heading. When you copy text into the clipboard, it can be copied using multiple formats (text, RTF, metafile, etc.). In this case, the plain text version has the correct heading number but the RTF version does not. Note that you can check the contents of the clipboard using clipbrd.exe.

Following on, I found that Outlook 2003 only allows the user to choose the paste format (Edit / Paste Special menu item) when the message is RTF, not HTML or plain text.

Labels: Annoyances, Software

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 10:03 AM   0 comments
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Tired of inserting a key disk whenever you want to play a game? Worried that your kids might destroy your CD drive? Or just annoyed with Windows' Autoplay spinning up your CD drive each time you insert a new CD*. One solution: install a virtual CD drive. There's plenty available; I chose MagicDisc because the instructions were straightforward.

*Of course, you can also disable Autoplay. Here's one way:

1. Run gpedit.msc.
2. In Group Policy dialog, select Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / System / Turn off Autoplay.
3. In Turn off Autoplay dialog, select Enabled radio button.

Labels: Annoyances, Software, Windows

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 5:42 PM   0 comments
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I was thinking of using SyncBack to synchronize files from an FTP site to my local drive. Problem is that you can't specify an FTP location as the source, only Network Addresses (or UNC paths, the ones that start with a double backslash). What if I create a Network Place? No go, because Explorer treats Network Places differently from Network Addresses. I think FTP Network Places is only a bookmark for MSIE, no different from having a "ftp://blah.com" URI. You can't map a drive to a Network Place without using a program such as NetDrive or WebDrive. However, NetDrive requires a Novell licence. Stone the crows!

Labels: Annoyances, Networking, Windows

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 6:39 PM   0 comments
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I wanted an Excel nested conditional worksheet statement to produce different output in a cell depending on whether another cell in the row had particular sub-string. For instance, if the source cell had "Problem in XYZ" or "Issue found in product ABC", then the dependent cell would show "XYZ" or "ABC". Then I can filter the rows in the worksheet based on the name of the product. Below is how I thought I could write the statement (formatted for readability):

=IF(FIND("XYZ",C1)>=0, "XYZ",
    IF(FIND("ABC",C1)>=0, "ABC", "Unknown")
    )

This statement worked for a source cell containing "XYZ" but would generate a "!Value" error otherwise. The find() function returns the position where it found a sub-string but would return an error if the sub-string could not be found. So I have to test the return value of the function instead of the position, resulting in a more cluttered statement:

=IF(ISNUMBER(FIND("XYZ",C1)), "XYZ",
    IF(ISNUMBER(FIND("ABC",C1)), "ABC", "Unknown")
    )

It's a rather annoying gotcha because returning an error is different from the VBA's InStr() function, which returns 0 when the sub-string can't be found.

Labels: Annoyances, Programming

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 11:03 AM   0 comments
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I had accidentally typed the wrong URL for my test system into MSIE6 one day and whenever I try to visit the same site, MSIE6's autocomplete feature would NOT let me change the URL. The wrong URL I first entered was local:7001/ when I meant localhost:7001/. Now, each time I try to enter localhost:7001/, MSIE6 would replace what I typed with local:7001/.

There's no way to delete that URL in the address (unlike Firefox, Shift-Delete doesn't work for MSIE6's address bar). So I used the Clear History feature in MSIE6 and blew away my history.

Then I found that auto-complete not longer had previously entered folder paths in Windows Explorer nor the name of programs in the Windows Run dialog. This is definitely unexpected and very annoying.

Labels: Annoyances, Internet Explorer

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 9:38 AM   0 comments
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This bites me every couple of weeks: the cd command in the Windows command shell (cmd.exe) does not treat directories and drives consistently. After all these years of working in Windows, you'd think that I should have engraved into my mind that when I want to use a directory in another drive, I should type either drivename: then cd path or cd /d drivename:\path. Then I forget and I blithely type cd drivename:\path. Even worse is that cd does not give an error message that it has not changed the current directory.

17-Jan-2008: In PowerShell 2.0, the cd command (alias of Set-Location) now consistently changes drives and directories. Hoo-ray!

Labels: Annoyances, Windows, Windows Cmd

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 10:53 AM   0 comments
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Labels: Annoyances, Software

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 10:57 AM   0 comments
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I wanted to extract a specific file out of a WAR file, so I fired up Winzip, got file path in the archive (web-inf\web.xml), then tried to extract it with jar xf file.war web-inf/web.xml.

No go; jar could not find that file. After ten minutes of head-scratching, I got a list of files from the archive with jar tf file.war and saw that the path was really WEB-INF/web.xml!

Why extract that file using jar? I'm hacking a script to customize the hostname in the web.xml file for the daily build and installation of our WAR file.

Labels: Annoyances, Software

link posted by Kam-Hung Soh @ 11:47 AM   0 comments
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