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I had to repair a corrupt administrator account this morning on Windows XP.  The account would not accept a password change and I couldn’t inspect its properties through any administrative tools.  All attempts to inspect the Administrator account  would end with an “internal error occurred” message.

I was able to do all of this inspection from a secondary administrative account.  Since I couldn’t tell what was wrong with the account I simply opened the Registry Editor intent on clearing it out.  I looked under the following key for a ProfileImagePath SID sub-key associated with the Administrator and deleted it:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

After deleting this key I restarted Windows.  The OS automatically regenerated the Administrator account and I was able to inspect its properties and set a proper password.

When writing presentations in LaTeX, the file can be created using packages such as beamer or ppower4 to control slides, create stylized borders, etc.. Today I encountered yet another such package that I hadn’t been familiar with before, namely foiltex. There was a bit of a struggle identifying this as the appropriate package as it does not exist in the MikTeX repository as of MikTeX version 2.4.
Foiltex has the distinct advantage of being able to import EPS files directly, and integrates well with psfrag. psfrag is yet another package that allows LaTeX to identify tags within an EPS graphic. You can then specify labels to replace those tags directly in the LaTeX source.

One additional little problem in utilizing psfrag: DVIs will not display label positions properly. You have to convert the file to PS to see the proper layout. I spent an hour struggling with it until I finally came across this tidbit in the psfrag readme file.

SSH port forwarding from the SSH Communications client does not work with Windows Vista.  The application crashes without an identifiable error.

Fortunately forwarding still works through Cygwin, provided you install the openssh package of course.