The Technical Exorcist

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.”

Most of the work on been doing on EtherealLand.com has been related to getting advertisements in place with Google Adsense. Google Adsense provides us with content sensitive advertising in an unobtrusive manner. It is my goal to eventually have the site pay for it’s own hosting. As easy as Google makes it to put ad’s up, it has still taken a fair amount of work on my part, in part because I am working with people whose goals are artistic in nature rather than economic. Another problem I ran into was Google limitations on ad placement. Google doesn’t want people to create Ad-Farm sites with their product, so they limit you to three text ad’s per page. I wanted to put a text ad at the bottom of each post on the Troll Cave, but I wanted to have more than three posts on the main page. In the end, I decided to have one Google ad per day, rather than per post. To my disappointment, WordPress doesn’t have any built-in function to make this easy, and I had to write one of my own.

If you’d like to try out targeted advertising, you should

Other than that, I helped Chickenman get set up, put up the Good Doggy’s latest version of the site map, and made more optimization changes.

Most of you have probably already read the letter about DRM Steve Jobs put on the Apple site, but if you haven’t, you should check it out. He doesn’t say anything that isn’t old news to most of us, but it’s nice to have him finally admit that DRM doesn’t do anyone any good. There are a few things I’d like to point out though.

Rather than trying to make it solely the job of consumers to convince the music publishers to sell DRM-free music, pressure still needs to come from ITunes and the other pay-for-download companies. As should be evident from Mr. Job’s own essay, it’s not just our problem. Music download services are wasting a lot of valuable resources on DRM, and still they are left with the threat of having all the music pulled out from under them if they can’t make their flimsy, purposeless, DRM systems stand up to a couple of hackers with a weekend to blow.

Secondly, I’d like to point out that Mr. Job’s is incorrect when he says that “No DRM system was ever developed for the CD”. Sony, in their typical incompetence, did make a DRM system for CD’s. The end result was basically a root-kit—a security vulnerability that tended to result in damage to the system if you tried to remove it. Sony got burned for that one, but still not as badly as consumers were.

I came across an article about “random” numbers recently that I found quite interesting. It found that when people are asked to pick a random number between 1 and 20, they favor prime numbers, particularly the number 17. Read the article here, and the follow-up article here/

Tatterdemalion asked me for help with her site the other day. The titles on some of her posts were so long the didn’t fit on the sidebar, and it was messing everything up. Since she didn’t want to change the width of her sidebar, we needed a way to truncate really long post titles when they were listed on the sidebar. I didn’t feel like going through the headache of figuring out the PHP myself, so I searched the web for a WordPress plugin that would do the job. I managed to find one that works well called ODEN latest posts. Simple installation, and works well.

I thought it was pretty funny that the President of Romania had the gall to tell Bill Gates he was glad his country steals Windows. Long live free software! Or whatever. . .

Bill had nothing to say. Maybe he’ll buy Romania as a punishment.

This letter was not specifically addressed to me, but to a newsgroup that Brer Licky reads.

I’ve just become aware of the Net Neutrality debate going on. I’m
wondering what you all know about and think about this issue as users
of the internet. I can’t explain the issue as well the people who are
behind the movement to preserve Net Neutrality. There is information
about it at www.savetheinternet.com (at least regarding USA) and
www.movielol.org/ (regarding Europe).

I’m really curious to find out if you have heard about this and what
you think about it.

~Ed Provencher

First off, I should point out that the links Ed provided are simple propaganda sites, and don’t even make an effort to be unbiased. A far better starting point for someone who is new to the Net Neutrality debate would be this article on the Washington Post. Jeffrey Birnbaum doesn’t take a stance on what the government should rule on this matter, but he does a pretty decent job explaining the issues, and why neither side is in the right.

But as Mr. Birnbaum also pointed out, the government must take a stance one way or the other—either allowing the cable companies to carry out their plans, or stepping in to preserve Net Neutrality. So what should be done?

My take is that as long as they aren’t violating any consumer rights, the thing to do is let capitalism take it’s course. If they provide inferior service, people will switch to a better one. If they do create a monopoly and start to abuse people, the courts can break it up.

If people want the Internet to remain free and open to new ideas, they need to let companies experiment with ideas like this. All the laws that are necessary to protect competition are already in place. Allowing the government to make laws how it’s citizens charge for and carry out their data transfer services will only result in more trouble later as the technology changes and the laws become outdated.

It looks like logitech may have just come out with a universal remote that might be worth buying. Check out this review from the Inquirer. It seems to deal nicely with the common flaws of universal remotes, such as unrecognised devices, complex programming procedures, and bulk. Now if only I had the toys to justify buying one. . .

You’ve probably heard a million rants against DRM (Digtial Rights Management) protected music, software, and hardware. You may have wondered if people were making a big deal out of nothing. Well, they aren’t. This letter I received a few weeks ago is a good example of what could very possibly happen to you if you continue to buy DRM infected files.

M–wants to download music from Wal-Mart. In fact she has downloaded an installer and paid for some songs, and downloaded some songs. When she tries to play the songs, WMP 9 says “Windows Media Player has encountered an unknown error.”

Upgrading Windows Media Player did not help. In fact, following all the suggestions listed here
http://forums.peerimpact.com/pi-forums/showthread.php?t=4161
did not help.

The posts give a good description of what I’ve encountered.

One note: it appears that not all of the Windows updates that I’ve downloaded have been installed, and I can’t try that now because M— has stuff running. By tomorrow morning you can probably assume I have installed all the updates without better success.

To clarify: currently when I go to the web page to upgrade DRM support for pre-11 WMP, the button is grayed out (using the latest greatest IE).

-A

And here’s my reply.

Unfortunately, M has got her first taste of why DRM is unacceptable. Even after you buy songs, and have used them for months, your music files are still under their control, and they can and will accidentally (when they aren’t doing it on purpose) screw you over. Since you have all the components they require of you, (Windows is updated, WMP is updated, etc.) the fault lies squarely with them, and there isn’t much you can do besides continue to harass them for swindling you, and make sure they realize how unacceptable this is. You can try to contact their customer support like they suggested (support@peerimpact.com)—maybe they can manually validate your licences. Unfortunately, even after they get them working for you, you are still entirely vulnerable. All they have to do is make a mistake in their databases and your music won’t play anymore. Also, the latest version of WMP (I can’t remember if they’ve released it yet,) won’t allow you to back up your licences, so if you have to do a re-format, or otherwise lose your files, you’ve lost all the money you paid.

The only practical solution I’ve managed to come up with is to demand your money back, and buy elsewhere.

Here are some respectable non-DRM stores. They’re selections are somewhat limited, but at least they should work.

Emusic.com
AudioLunchBox.com
Mp3Tunes.com
MiniDawn.com

You can get a very small amount of free non-DRM music from Amazon as well.

Rumors are flying like mad that Amazon is looking to provide a DRM-free music store with a variable pricing scheme, but Amazon has thought about getting into the music download selling business for a while, and hasn’t done it yet, so I guess I’m not holding my breath.

Good luck

The Technical Exorcist

Do you see the problem? Companies who implement DRM give themselves the right and power to renege on a sale. Instead of a contract between peers, your rights are considered subordinate to theirs. This is reprehensible both ethically and practically. Take this story as a warning. Examine the the service agreements on ITunes, Napster, MSN Music, or any other store, and see if you dare buy from them again.