The Technical Exorcist

One site that I’ve found to be very useful is bugmenot.com. This site helps you get around the free registration that is required on so many sites. There a good number of reasons why you’d want to do this. Registration is a pain, and takes time. Registration unfailingly requires you to provide them with your email address, which they may sell to other companies, increasing the amount of spam messages you receive. Sometimes they even require your postal address so they can send you junk via snail-mail.

Here’s how it works. Someone registers for the website, creating a throwaway account. They then submit that login to BugMeNot.com. When you want to visit the site, you put the URL for the site into BugMeNot, and it gives you the login and password. No Spam, and no hassle.

I make it even easier for myself by adding this button to my Opera internet browser. (Link only works in Opera.)

I’ve encountered two Microsoft Office problems recently that were peculiar enough that I decided the solutions would be worth sharing. Let me know if this helps you!

The first one was in Excel 2000. The Save As menu option errored out claiming that it could not find GWXL97.xla. The Save, close, and a few other options were greyed out as well. Excel was effectively crippled. A full re-install did nothing to help. Neither did deleting the MRU lists. Thanks to google, I was able to find the solution. Apparently Novell Groupwise will sometimes corrupt the toolbars, creating this behavior. The solution was to reset all the toolbars. More information can be found here.

The second problem was in Word. Every time formatting was applied to an individual word, it was applied to the whole document. The user was dealing with the problem by applying the formatting, and then hitting the undo button so that only the text she wanted bold was bolded. Re-installation did not help. Once again, an appropriately worded Google search turned up the answer. Apparently, due to some quirk, the Normal paragraph style was set to automatically update when you changed formatting. Changing it back fixed the issue. Detailed instructions are available here.

The other day I received an e-mail along these lines:

“The reason I’m writing is thanks to me moving back home Femme and I will be
back to one computer. ShadowQ (the guy I work with) suggested a router, but
we’re not sure what kind. So how do you get two people playing Warcraft III side by side?
If you do use a router, make/model? And do you use a wireless connection at all in your set up?”

In my reply, I gave an overview of how I set up our computers for the Ethereal Land game players:

“I use a Linksys wired router. I can’t really recommend Linksys, though. I haven’t been totally happy with their routers, but then I haven’t been totally happy with any router. I’d just make sure you get a well-known brand, whether it be Linksys, D-Link, Netgear, or whatever. I have used a wireless router in the past, but Ethereal residents were both very unhappy trying to play Warcraft online with it. Missed packets are no big deal when you’re browsing the web, but if you’re playing a game, it can make you lag like crazy. I’d stay away from wireless if you can. If you have a little money to blow and really don’t want to run Cat 5 cables for a wired router, I’ve heard that the routers that transfer data over your home electrical system work pretty good now.

To get two people online playing Warcraft at the same time, I set up both PC’s with fixed IP addresses. I then went into Warcraft’s Game settings and changed the network port on the one PC to 6112, and the other to 6113. Then I went into the router settings and set up port forwarding for the first machine to use port 6112, and the second machine to use 6113. This was necessary because Port forwarding sends all packets for the specified port to the IP address you supply. This means two people can’t play on the same port. You also need two Warcraft CD keys, because two people can’t be online with the same key.”