Anthony Curreri: IT Solutions

First, you have to download and install Windows Media Encoder. Then go into your Windows Firewall and check the box next to Media Encoder to allow people to connect to your computer as a media server.

Broadcasting Video using Windows Media Encoder

1. Open Windows Media Encoder on your PC: Click Start / All Programs / Media / Windows Media Encoder / Windows Media Encoder.
2. Double-click ‘Broadcast a live event’.
3. Hopefully the defaults are fine. You might need to change the audio and video drop downs to be your webcam or capture card. Click Next.
4. Make sure the ‘Pull from the encoder’ radio button is selected. Click Next.
5. Make sure ‘HTTP port’ is ‘8080’ Click Next. (you can choose another port, just substitute it in the link below)
6. Select the Bit Rate. If many parties are going to connect, or any parties have a slow connection use a lower bit rate. Click Next.
7. Set archive settings if you want to save a copy, otherwise click Next.
8. Make sure the ‘No, I want to encode…’ radio is selected. Click Next.
9. Click Next, then Finish.

Receiving the Broadcast on a client PC

1. Open Windows Media Player
2. Right click the Title Bar
3. Click File / Open URL
4. Enter: http://mediaserveripaddress:8080/ For example: http://192.168.1.20:8080/.

When trying to download a file that is auto-generated on the fly by a PHP script I wrote that sends excel headers, Internet Explorer users were getting the error:

Windows Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer cannot download [filename] from [website].
Internet Explorer was not able to open this Internet site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later.

This is caused by doing a session_start(). If you don’t actually need a the session in your php file you can remove it, and IE users will be able to download whatever your PHP script is making. The problem is session_start() by default sends a cache control header including “no-store”. Internet Explorer has a bug with sending a cache header.

If you need the session, then before session_start(), add “session_cache_limiter(’none’);”

Problem solved!

I had a Windows XP computer with an HP 1020 printer that would suddenly not print. The Printers and Faxes window was empty. If you go into the Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Services and right-click Print Spooler, you’ll see the option to start is available, because the service is stopped. When I started the service, the printers appeared again but the service would stop again before I could do anything else.

In the event viewer, you’ll see the following error message:

Event ID 7031 or 7034
The Print Spooler service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1 time(s). The following corrective action will be taken in 60000 milliseconds: Restart the service.

OR

Event ID 1004
Faulting application spoolsv.exe, version 5.1.2600.5512, faulting module ZSR.DLL, version 6.20.1625.0, fault address 0×0001f979.

First, I installed the hotfix here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953546. This didn’t seem to work, but I can’t believe that what I did next was all that was required to solve the problem.

1. Unplug the USB connection to the local printer, in this case an HP Deskjet 1020.
2. Restart the computer
3. The printers now show up, because the Print Spooler has stopped terminating unexpectedly!
4. Two printers had jobs in the queue, the unplugged local printer and a network printer. Clear all the print queues.
5. Reconnect the USB connection.
6. Restart, print stuff, everything should be working normally!

Let me know via comment or the contact tab at the top if this doesn’t solve your problem.

Update: Problem did return. I did the unplug the HP 1020’s usb connection trick to make the printers show up, deleted the old driver, and installed a new driver from HP. Seems to be working now.

So a user was complaining that her Microsoft Word 2007 install wasn’t error checking. Of course it worked into 2003, but after the upgrade Word’s spell checker would not highlight misspelled words. It does underline repeated words, which I found strange. Also strange was that when I was logged in as another user (in this case, the administrator), Spell Check worked fine.

Outlook 2007 no longer uses Word 2007 directly for edits, but they do share the same proofing tools. Which for some reason this system didn’t update a registry key properly. Here’s the steps to fix!

1. Close Word and Outlook
2. Click Start, then run, then type in ‘regedit’
3. Browse to this key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Proofing Tools\1.0
4. Delete the 1.0 key and sub keys!
5. Start Word. Spell check should now be highlighting misspelled words.

When installing some software, I got the error:

This installation is forbidden by system policy. Contact your system administrator.

Make sure that windows installer service is running. Also, there are local security policy settings and registry keys that can prevent you from running MSI files. This was not problem here. All I had to do was copy the cd to a directory on my hard drive and run the installer from there. Violla! Installation is no longer forbidden! I believe that instead of the system policy being the problem, this program needed write access to the installation directory.

Wow, so this one stumped me. If you have two Word 2007 Windows open at the same time, when you switch from one to the other, either by alt+tab or by viewing them side by side and clicking one then the other and you get the hourglass, then this might solve your problem.

My clients were having the slowdown after upgrading to Word 2007. But we have Adobe CS2, and some clients that just have Adobe Acrobat 7 installed. The problem is that there is an Adobe Pluggin in Word causing the slowdown, and not that Virusscan is scanning files for viruses on file opens or some other nonsense.

To disable The Acrobat PDFMaker addin, follow these steps:

1. Log in as Administrator.
2. Open Microsoft Office 2007.
3. Click the Office Button in the upper left.
4. Click Word Options in the lower right.
5. Click Add-Ins on the left.
6. At the bottom, make sure ‘Com Add-ins’ is selected in the Manage: drop down and click Go…
7. Un-check ‘Acrobat PDFMaker Office COM Addin’ (Or whatever you think might be making Word 2007 slow).
8. Click Ok.
9. Close Word.
10. Open Two Word Windows. Now you can switch back and forth instantly!

This will work for all users on the system!

I’ve you’re just starting to play with a Union, then you might have gotten the error message:

#1221 – Incorrect usage of UNION and ORDER BY

You might be thinking: Whoa, hang on there! Do you mean MySQL can’t order a Union?! Oh, but it can! First little issue I had was in realizing that you can put parenthesis around the queries. So phrase your query thusly:

“(SELECT …) UNION (SELECT …) ORDER BY …”

Just be sure that your Order By includes only the column name. Table.Column is going to get you another error!

In fact, Contribute is automatically generating filenames ending in _000 or _001 instead of opening a prompt to replace them when you try to make a link or publish them from your computer.

The problem is that your role isn’t being allowed access to delete files.

But Tony, does replace equal delete in this strange land of Seattle in Washington?

NO! I mean YES! It does, everywhere. Because in order to replace something you sort of have to delete it first, then upload what you really want to be there. Windows file serving permissions work in a similar way.

1. Open Adobe Contribute CS3, as the Site Administrator.
2. Click the ‘Edit’ drop down menu, then ‘Administer Websites’, then click the site you want to edit.
3. Click the role you want to fix, probably ‘Publisher’.
4. Click ‘Edit Role Settings’ on the right.
5. Click ‘Folder/File Access’ on the left.
6. Under ‘File Deletion’ Check ‘Allow users to delete files they have the permission to edit’.
7. Click ‘Ok’, then ‘Close’.

My original solution was to extend the amount of time between ‘Restart Later’ nags. Of course now only the Administrator can use ‘Restart Later’.

The solution now is two-fold. I’m setting the updates to download and install automatically in the middle of the night. If the user shuts off the computer at the end of the day, Window’s XP SP2 Automatic Updates will download and install the updates the next morning when the computer is turned on.

So we still need to disable the auto-restart message. That is done by:

To prevent Automatic Updates from restarting a computer while users are logged on, the administrator can create the NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers registry value in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU. The value is a DWORD and must be either 0 (false) or 1 (true). If this value is changed while the computer is in a restart pending state, it will not take effect until the next time an update requires a restart.

Thank you, Tim Rains’ Weblog.

Wow this had a simple answer. I feel silly. It all started when I made a custom 404 page, editing the .htaccess file and the Apache configuration. I went into Contribute to make sure I could still edit files and found:

Access Denied. The file may exist, or there could be a permission problem.

When using Contribute to edit the root page of my site. Pages in other directories were fine. The pages in the other directories had the same file permissions!

I thought it was possibly some server update I applied awhile ago that broke, or an Adobe Contribute misconfiguration. I removed my connection to the site.

When I added the connection back in, I got the browse folder dialog ok, and after I choose my sites root folder I got:

Contribute cannot verify your connection information.
/var/www/html
Please contact your administrator for assistance.

Rude! Well after some investigation I found that Contribute CS3 writes tmp files to the root directory. So I thought maybe Mod_Security was preventing writing or reading tmp files.

NOPE. The permissions for the root dir itself had been changed. Possibly during an update, or when I ran this command:

sudo /sbin/restorecon -R -v /var/www/html

At any rate, here is my solution:

sudo chown staff:webauthors /var/www/html

Note: staff should be the name of the sftp user you have in contribute, and webauthors should be their group. Make sure the owner has write permission of course.