The style file posted below allows you to embed a .MOV file in a PDF file. This is useful if presentations are composed in LaTeX. Paired with the hyperref package which accepts the syntax \href{run:external-command}, one can create very powerful, multimedia rich presentations that can automatically trigger events at the presenter’s command.
After a recent Windows Update a number of my VB/WMI scripts stopped working. They would launch and immediately report the error “Library not Found”. Unfortunately they failed to report precisely what library was failing to load, so after some general Google searching with regsrv32 in the query I discovered wbemdisp.dll was necessary. Reloading the library via “regsrv32 wbemdisp.dll”restored them to their working order, although I’m still a little unclear about which update caused the library failure in the first place.
As of IE7, you can no longer use the runas command to launch the browser as an administrator and then redirect it to the C: drive to have a temporary Windows Explorer session with elevated privileges.
The alternative is to run the following from the Run Dialog, which in the long run would have been easier to use anyway. Incidentally, this doesn’t work in Vista, but hopefully UAC will take care of the need.
runas /user:administrator “explorer /e”
I’m a few weeks into my Vista testing and beginning to compile lists of
show-stoppers, annoyances and incompatibilities.
The most significant issue to date seems to be a lock-down on user profiles implemented with Vista. In Windows XP one was able to simply create a local profile, customize it and copy its contents to the Default User folder for use as a default profile. That method no longer appears to work. Neither does deletion of a user profile in order to spur its regeneration. Finally, this problem extends to user profile migration. While Microsoft has offered up tools for that purpose (namely, the User State Migration Tool 3.0) I’m unclear as to whether or not that can be trusted to grab each and every third party software setting.
[addendum]
It appears as if I spoke too soon. For some reason the default ownership of files in a user’s profile is now SYSTEM. When changing the ownership to SYSTEM for a manually copied user profile it works as expected. I’ll have to dig a bit deeper to find out why exactly this has changed.
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.
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