quinta-feira, outubro 24, 2013

Adobe PDFMaker COM supplement makes Office 2013 behave wonky in network operations

I have stumbled in this weird problem.

Some users, in some files, seemed to be unable to use 'Save As...' in word 2013 in some network files.
The Save As dialog was not appearing, no amount of keyboard bashing or button clicking would solve that.

I checked the network server permissions and they were good. Stumped, I started debugging by disabling the COM supplements one by one.

And I had this eureka moment when I disabled Adobe's extension and network file operations started working again.

Microsoft's native impementation may not make files as small as Adobe's, but it is in reasonably good shape, it has been working well since Word 2010.

quarta-feira, outubro 23, 2013

Google Drive for PC bug breaks Windows Search (and how to fix it)

Some of you folks like me, which use Google Drive for PC to sync your files with the cloud, may have noticed that Windows Search does not return results from files inside the Google Drive folder.

It's not Microsoft's fault though. The problem is that the Google Drive for PC sync service is not honoring the permission inheritance from its parent folder.

The SYSTEM permissions are not being propagated to files synced by Google Drive. This causes the Windows Search index to not have access privileges to the root Google Drive folder and all its contents.

There is no fix per se (that should come from Google), but there is a workaround.

UPDATE: It turns out you can solve the search issue in a relatively simple way, by just enabling inheritance at Google Drive's root folder.

To accomplish that you can do as follows:

  1. Open Windows Explorer.
  2. Go to your user's root folder.
  3. At the right panel, right-click on Google Drive's root folder and click on 'Properties'.
  4. Click on the 'Security' tab.
  5. Click on the 'Advanced' button.
  6. A new window will show up, it should be named similar to 'Advanced Security Settings for Google Drive'.
  7. At the bottom of this window, there is a button and a checkbox.
  8. Click on the 'Enable Inheritance' button.
  9. Check the 'Replace all child object permission entries with inheritable permission entries from this object'.
  10. Click 'Apply'.
  11. Click 'OK' to close this window.
  12. Click 'OK' again to dismiss the Properties window.
  13. Done.

Windows Search should start indexing the contents as soon as the permissions are changed.

sexta-feira, setembro 06, 2013

nano-nugget of wisdom: ping with timestamp

On your Linux/Mac terminal, just type or paste:

ping google.com | while read pong; do echo "$(date): $pong"; done
And voila.

quinta-feira, junho 27, 2013

Chega (não é só pelos 20 centavos)


A quase ausência de regulamentação sobre a mídia é uma faca de dois gumes, pois ao mesmo tempo que pode ser uma garantia da liberdade de comunicação, também já era um jogo de cartas marcadas desde a ditadura, com poucas famílias mantendo uma hegemonia de direita editorando e manipulando a informação que é impingida à grande massa.

Mas hoje temos novas formas, mais ágeis de nos comunicar, temos este fantástico veículo da informação digital denominado internet, que transforma fundamentalmente o valor da informação, dados que temos a capacidade de difundir e reproduzir a informação em nível mundial a um custo próximo de zero.

Com este meio à disposição, os menestréis, trovadores, poetas, cantores e artistas que sempre tiveram um papel importante nas transformações sociais, absorvendo, decantando, cristalizando e refletindo o espírito, os anseios que quem busca uma mudança para melhor, podem se expressar deixando de lado a velha mídia, trazendo sua mensagem e inspiração para o povo do qual fazem parte:


segunda-feira, junho 17, 2013

How to enable raw disk access for VMWare Workstation on Windows 8

If you are trying to run a virtual machine from a physical disk on VMWare Workstation, chances are you will be denied raw disk access with an error message.

The only way I managed to allow VMWare to access the raw partition was to use diskpart.

diskpart is a command-line app which requires administrator privileges.

You will be better off if you take is slow and read diskpart documentation, as it can wipe out your disk partition table. Keep your backups up-to-date. You've been warned.

The process was this:

Start a command line, then type 'diskpart' and press enter.

If you run diskpart from a command line without administrator privileges, you will be prompted for the admin password, and diskpart will run on a separate window.

type 'list disk' and press enter. You should see all disks and will be able to verify which one you want to enable raw disk access.

use the command 'select disk N' where N is the number of the disk.

use the command 'offline' to keep windows disk management's grubby hands out of it.

use the command 'attributes disk clear readonly' to allow the disk to be written to.

And voilá, that should do it. YMMV.

quinta-feira, maio 02, 2013

Changing default settings of (xerox) printers on Mac OS X

So, I have this new awesome waxjet printer in my office, a Xerox ColorCube 8570.

Problem is, in Mac there is no way to alter the 'Default Settings' of the printer... at least in an accessible way for mere mortals.

But there's always some hidden magic for geeks to wiz around and do the impossible.

Mac OS X uses CUPS behind the scenes, so we can just open a browser and type the URL:

http://127.0.0.1:631

If you get an 'access denied' or 'web interface disabled' error, open a Terminal and type the following:

cupsctl WebInterface=yes

And press enter; reload the above link.

You should then see a CUPS configuration interface where you can change the printer default settings to your heart's contents.

This interface is not restricted to xerox printers as far as I know. But since I don't have non-Xerox printers I cannot test it.