Microsoft has finally released Vista’s SP2 after closing the beta program. The final releases can be downloaded here:

32 bit

64 bit

Over the past week my Windows desktop at work started acting up. When opening or right clicking any file that has a program associated to it I would experience up to a 30 second delay before the program launched or the right click menu opened. I scoured Google for an answer and all I found were others with the same problem. One person found that when they disabled their network card it would work fine. I tried that and had the same result. Checking the network properties I noticed that Virtual Machine Network Services was active on my network card.

This must be remains from a Virtual PC or VMWare install by the previous user. After un-checking the box everything is back to normal.

Ran into a bit of a head scratcher this week in regards to network file permissions on an Excel spreadsheet. Department manager created a spreadsheet in a shared network folder that his employees had read access to. He wanted the employees to be able to update the spreadsheet so I gave their security group write level access to the file. The file would open for an employee okay but when the person tried to save the document the following error would trigger:

File name or path does not exist.
The file is being used by another program
The workbook you are trying to save has the same name as a currently open workbook.

I triple checked all the permissions to make sure I had everything correct. Checked the file server to see that the user did indeed have Read+Write access while they had the file open. Even checked the server logs to make sure there weren’t any security errors. Everything looked fine.

I then decided to look at the server log to see what it looked like when an admin opened and saved the file where I stumbled upon the answer. Excel is trying to create a .tmp file in the same folder the spreadsheet is in before it saves the spreadsheet. The user’s security group only had read access to the folder which resulted in the generic Excel save error.

I moved the spreadsheet to a subfolder and applied the same permissions to that folder and that did the trick.

Careful, according to Google, the site google.com may be harmful to your computer.

There are many sites out there that will give you a full description of what the UNIX Epoch standard date system is, why it is used, and a thorough understanding of why that’s important to you. You also probably don’t have time for a history/computer science course when all you want to do is convert that time stamp into something that looks nice for your boss in Excel. In that case, here you go:

All examples shown assume that the UNIX time stamp is in column A.

GMT - Greenwich Mean Time - This is the standard example you see across the Internet
=(A1/86400)+25569

EST - Eastern Standard Time (GMT - 5:00)
=((A1-18000)/86400)+25569

CST - Central Standard Time (GMT - 6:00)
=((A1-21600)/86400)+25569

MST - Mountain Standard Time (GMT - 7:00)
=((A1-25200)/86400)+25569

PST - Pacific Standard Time (GMT - 8:00)
=((A1-28800)/86400)+25569

Now set your column format to a Date field to your liking. I use the 3/14/01 13:30 format so I can include the easily sortable military time format.

I’ve recently redirected my home page of http://untangible.com to http://untangible.com/blog using Apache’s mod_rewrite functions. This way users coming to the main site are transparently redirected to the blog yet the old Google indexed URLs that are referencing the blog subfolder still work. I wanted my sitemap which is built by a Wordpress plugin to reference the URLs without the blog subdirectory since it’s cleaner. Instead of manually changing the xml output (which would have taken all of 10 seconds) I decided to change the WordPress address setting in the control panel. My thought was that it would then just reference untangible.com instead of untangible.com/blog while still redirecting traffic to the proper path due to the mod_rewrite rule in place.

After doing this the website could still be viewed properly and all the links worked but when trying to sign into wp-admin the system would just bring me back to the login page without any error messages. To fix the issue I had to log into my virtual host site and manually change the siteurl field in the options MySQL table back to http://untangible.com/blog.

Lesson learned. Read about what the functions do before making assumptions.

Despite the how bloated Apple’s iTunes software has become it still remains one of the best music management programs available today. The quick search functions, ability to fully read ID3 tags and sort properly against those tags, as well as decent CD ripping and burning capabilities, all of which I just haven’t been able to find another client that can do everything as well. With all the time Apple has put into developing this software one thing that still baffles me is the lack of a “watch folder”.

I acquire my music from several sources such as CD rips, directly downloaded music, iTunes Store, or the Amazon MP3 store. I have a large music library and like having everything centrally located so any new directly downloaded music gets moved into a central library. None of these direct download files are found by iTunes unless I am willing to completely remove my library and re-index all the information. It would be ideal if iTunes could notice new audio files added to the folders that I have iTunes managing.

I was using a great 3rd party application called iTunes Library Updater with the 7.x versions of the software which would do exactly that. It would scan the folders I had setup in iTunes and add any new files as well as remove deleted files from the iTunes database. Unfortunately with the newest 8.x version this software no longer works and it looks like development has been abandoned. I may attempt to revert back to a 7.x version of iTunes but have worries that I may lose access to the DRM encrypted music I’ve recently purchased through the iTunes store. Hopefully Apple will address this in future versions of the software but I don’t see it being much of a priority for them as they continue to push the iTunes Store and don’t seem to care about music acquired from other sources.