Know where you are going?

Know where you are going?

Above is a picture that I took somewhere between Whistler and Jasper. Click on it for a larger version.

vim is awesome!

My full-time job is to implement Health Level Seven (HL7) interfaces. HL7 is a character delimited text standard for interfacing data between Health care applications. So, I have to deal with text on a daily basis. This interaction with delimited text starts to take even more time when we get closer to moving interfaces to a production environment because you have to analyze thousands of messages and possibly change a few things around in each. This analysis and manipulation is what I have been doing most of the last week and looking back now I can say that vim has saved me lots and lots of time. I love the vglobal, global and normal commands. What prompted this post was that I was looking for a way to highlight the line that the cursor was on and after a google search I found out the “cursorline” option, which does exactly what I was looking for. I believe this was implemented in vim 7, so if you have vim (or gvim) 7.0 or higher then try it out: “set cursorline”

Overall, I am so glad that I had spent time in the past experimenting with perl, awk, grep and wc. These four commands and vim have been invaluable to me. I would suggest playing around with these five tools (well, perl is a language) if your job involves working with text. Also, make sure to learn regular expressions because regular expressions are what will take you to the next level! :)

Destination Folder Access Denied?

Today I was copying some foobar2000 component DLL files from my Windows XP computer to the Windows Vista tablet’s Program Files folder when I kept getting the “Destination Folder Access Denied” dialog box.

This would happen even after I allowed the process to run as administrator. I am thinking that this is a bug in Windows; either that or Microsoft needs to improve their error dialog box to be more descriptive.

Now, you are probably interested in the solution. To get around this, you can either change the permissions on the target folder (Google for vista destination folder access denied), or you can copy the files to a local folder (Desktop maybe?) and then move the files from there to the target folder.

I think this behavior is only specific to the Program Files and probably the Windows Folder, so it’s not a big deal for me.

New article posted

I just posted an article about importing a root certification authority in Windows Vista. Check it out if you need to import a root certification authority in Vista.

Interesting InfoPath Error

I was filling out an InfoPath form and got the following error. I thought it was interesting enough to share. The caption says that the form did post but the actual message says otherwise, which one would you trust? I trusted the one that said that it did go through :)

Minor Windows Vista ALT+TAB Switcher Bug

Recently I discovered a minor Windows Vista ALT, TAB application switcher bug. Basically, if you press ALT and TAB and then drag the switcher window that shows the application preview, the switcher program only moves the window previews with their container but does not move the icons. Similarly, if you move the icons, the previews and the container will stay in the same place. This is a very obscure bug with no real consequences because the next time you press ALT and TAB everything will be in the right place, but I just thought that it was funny :)

Below is a screen shot of this in action.

Getting ready for the X60 review

I have had the X60 tablet for a little time now so I am getting ready to write my review about it. Unlike previous reviews¹, I am spending some time making sure that I get good pictures. Below is a sample of one that I will probably end up using. I have tried to stay away from “Photoshoping” (Fireworks in my case :)). The only thing that I have done to this specific picture is that I have cropped out the extra whitespace around it, the rest is all original! =D

¹My previous reviews can be found at Bona fide Reviews

Windows Update Crashing?

Recently my main installation of Windows started having troubles. After a program crashed (more details below) the sound stopped working, the window effects stopped (i.e. the theme), and sometimes the network wouldn’t respond; in other words, it was getting very annoying and pretty much unusable. At first I thought that this had something to do with the Microsoft Zune theme because the first things that would disappear were the window effects. So, I changed back to the Silver Windows XP style but the problem did not go away. This made me pay more attention to the Visual Studio debugging window that popped up when the process crashed. The debugging window said that svchost.exe was crashing. From prior experience I realized that it could be any of the services that this one process was hosting. I decided to capture the output from tasklist /svc before and after the crash to see what were services stopped due to the crash (see the screenshot).

After a few more rounds of crashed svchost.exe, I narrowed it down to the Windows Update service. My first few searches on the internet made me look for rootkits and viruses but I didn’t find any of those on my computer. After another half hour I found Scott Swigart’s site and that is where I found the solution. Re-registering the DLLs also did not solve the problem so I tried removing the SoftwareDistribution folder and guess what? Everything came back to normal!

So, if you get random crashes of svchost.exe and you have Automatic Update turned on then the first thing you should try is “refreshing” the %windir%/SoftwareDistribution folder. Instructions for doing this can be found at Scott Swigart’s blog entry but in my case I also had to stop wuauclt.exe before I could rename the folder. So, if you keep getting access denied errors when you rename the folder then you need to stop the wuauclt.exe process (Press CTRL, SHIFT and ESCAPE at the same time to get the task manager window > Switch to “Processes” tab > Find the “wuauclt.exe” process, right click on it and “End Process”)

Good luck!