Untangible

Gmail hangs on loading, then displays error in Chrome

EricPell — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 23:03:02 +0000

I’ve been having issues with my Gmail while using the newest developer builds of Chrome. When clicking on an email message the loading display at the top of the screen would come on and it would just sit there for approximately 30 seconds before displaying an error message and then allowing normal use of email. I thought it may have been due to the dev build but it works fine running dev on my home machine.

Thankfully this one had a very simple solution. Click the wrench (settings) button. Go to Options. Personal Stuff, Clear Browsing Data… I only checked Clear Cache and set the Period to be ‘Everything’ and Gmail started working normal again.

Picasa Desktop adds Facial Recognition and Tagging with 3.5

EricPell — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:28:13 +0000

Google has finally brought the facial recognition feature that is enjoyed by the Picasa Web Album users to the desktop. Version 3.5 released today also includes geotagging of images so you can now quickly find those pictures of your best man passed out in Vegas on demand.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/picasa-35-now-with-name-tags-and-more.html

Picasa Will Not Export Videos

EricPell — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 01:04:46 +0000

I’ve been putting up with an annoying problem in Picasa on my main system for too long and finally decided to try and fix it. The system would play fine but when trying to export videos Picasa would just hang at 0.0% on the encoding/saving process. I was quite certain this was tied to the TVersity Codec Pack yet uninstalling TVersity and it’s pack didn’t solve the problem.

Time to turn to the trusty CCCP. I installed The Combined Community Codec Pack using all the defaults for the install and the configuration afterwards. Fired up Picasa, tried an export and it immediately started working.

Kennedy Love by National News Outlet

EricPell — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:44:45 +0000

ABC loved him the most with 56 front page references.

Then CBS at 26

Followed by CNN with 23

NPR with 17

MSNBC comes in at 12

Bottom of the pack is Fox News with 9

Thank you national media for sullying the man’s memory with your typical over exposure. Hat’s off to all you vultures.

Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 2 is out

EricPell — Tue, 26 May 2009 15:21:45 +0000

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

32 bit

64 bit

Long delay in Windows Explorer when opening files

EricPell — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 19:41:46 +0000

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.

“File name or path doesn’t exist” Error While Saving in Excel

EricPell — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:24:29 +0000

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.

Warning – Google May Harm Your Computer

EricPell — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 14:44:27 +0000

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

Covert UNIX Epoch dates in Microsoft Excel – Including Timezone Examples

EricPell — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:09:37 +0000

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.

Don’t set your WordPress address URL to something other than the folder WordPress is installed

EricPell — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:49:32 +0000

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.