scadblog

For some reason, the Surplus Submission Form now does a browser check after you authenticate. If you’re not visiting the site with Internet Explorer 5.5 or above, you’re told to go launch it.

I need to submit things to surplus often, and I do not always have access to a machine running the ‘right’ OS, with the ‘right’ browser.

You can try to get around this inconvenience by (until the site designers respond to my mailings) using this link to visit the surplus submission form. It is the direct link to the form.You will be asked to authenticate. Once you do, you’ll get a page that doesn’t quite look right. Hit the reload button in your browser and you’ll have the submission form.

You’ll get tripped up when you try to click the button labeled Submit Items to Surplus. The form will report that you haven’t authenticated, but you have. This is because it is using a method to get around authentication timeouts documented here. But that method must have some bad JavaScript or something, because when the form tries to communicate with the bottom frame to check your authentication status, its getting a bad result.

I’ve emailed the author, but if you have any ideas on how to fix that example page, it would translate to a fix for the Surplus page. I’ll keep you posted as to this developing story.

Remotely convert Linux boxes to FreeBSD. How awesome is that?

Software Sales has this thing about CD media; they don’t like to loan it out or share it over the network. If they do loan it, they typically want it back the same day.

If you have a distance to travel to get to Frist, all this back and forth can be annoying. So, for the lazy ones amoung you, here’s a shortcut solution. Borrow the disk for 5 minutes and take it upstairs to the 200 level where there are cluster machines towards the back of Frist. Roxio is installed and you can use it to create your ISO and dump it to whatever remote filespace you have available.

I had a feeling that Endnote would be a troublemaker but didn’t have any evidence to back that up. Now I’ve stumbled upon some undocumented trouble that can arise, so I thought it would make me feel better if I were to share.

It seems Endnote has the potential of choking on its own corrupt registry key when accessing the spell check preferences. If you click on Edit > Preferences > Spell Check the program will say it has had a fatal error and crash without writing a useful error log. In order to fix this you need to delete the keys SpellingLexiconPrefs as well as SpellingPrefs from HKEY_CURRENT_USER>Software>ISI ResearchSoft>Endnote>Prefs in the Windows registry.

This one came over the wire from Josko the other day and it is very useful. In the past I’ve used some crude combo of cat, grep and less to do what one program will do all at once. Here is the post in response to a query about breaking a multi-meg file into smaller pieces:

split will do that for you
split -l 100000 inputfile outputfile
will split the inputfile in outputfiles with 100000 lines each, first
one will be called outputfile.aa, then outputfile.ab and so on. Check
man page for more options.

In order to set Outlook as the default Mail application, click Tools > Options > Other and under General check off Make Outlook the Default.

This is a prerequisite if you wish to move to Mozilla and you want it to be able to detect your Outlook Address Book for import, or if you wish to try out Outlook of course.

I thought I had written this up before, but a quick search of my own journal turned up empty.

To determine who is currently using what Matlab component on the university license you can run the following commands from the platforms indicated:

[Windows]

lmutil lmstat -f -c license.dat

[UNIX, Linux, Mac]

lmstat -f -c license.dat