Gama System eArchive accredited (Development | .NET | Personal | Software)

Gama System eArchive, one of the two products in our document product line, received accreditation from the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia last week. This acknowledgement by our national body means that any document stored in Gama System eArchive is automatically legally valid.

This is important for both our company and other companies looking for a long term electronic document storage solution. Our product is the first service oriented solution to receive the accreditation.

Congratulations to everyone involved in the product. Well done!

7/5/2008 9:37:14 PM (Central Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [1]

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools decimal separator problem (Personal | Software)

Today I've taken my new handeld GPS device for a test run. It did its job pretty well but the real challenge started afterwards when I tried geotagging the photos I've taken. I decided to use Microsoft Pro Photo Tools which have just been released with geotagging as its main feature. Downloading the track data from the GPS device with Garmin MapSource software was quick and simple. But the problems started soon afterwards. MapSource can only export track data in its proprietary format GDB which can't be used in Microsoft Pro Photo Tools.

GPSBabel came to the rescue. This free tool can probably convert files between any two existing GPS formats, at least judging from its list of supported formats. I used it to convert my data to the GPX XML format only to find out that Microsoft Pro Photo Tools have problems with it. Converting to NMEA or KML instead didn't help either. Fortunately the latter returned a strange error (Degrees must be between 0 and 90, found degree 46298501) which put me on the right track. Of course there was no such value in the KML file so I correctly deduced that the decimal separator was to blame.

The value in the file was 46.298501 but the Slovenian regional settings have comma as the decimal separator therefore the value was misinterpreted. Temporarily changing the decimal separator to dot solved the problem - the track was successfully imported immediately afterwards. This issue won't keep me from using this otherwise very useful tool with a really nice feature set. It could even fix the mismatching time settings between my GPS unit and the camera with a single setting. I just hope they address this bug soon so that I won't have to change my regional settings every time I use the program.

The only thing I still have to figure out is why the geotags somehow lost resolution when I uploaded the photos from Picasa to Picasa Web Albums. I just fixed them manually and decided to address the issue next time. Any tips are welcome.

6/15/2008 9:03:01 PM (Central Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

Playing DivX and XviD videos natively on Xbox 360 (Personal | Software)

The Xbox 360 Dashboard update released on 4th December 2007 added support for playing DivX and XviD videos natively, i.e. without installing Transcode 360 for Windows Media Center. Unfortunatelly this only works for media played directly from the dashboard and not within Media Center Extender. Since I didn't want to copy my videos to CDs, DVDs or other external devices, the only thing left to do was to setup Windows Media Player media sharing which I never had to use before.

This turned out to be more difficult than I expected - the reason being that the media I wanted to share wasn't stored locally but on a separate file server. By default such media is not shared and there are few steps one has to follow to make this work, as thoroughly explained here:

• Enable remote content sharing by adding the following entry into the registry:
  [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Preferences\HME]
  "EnableRemoteContentSharing"=dword:00000001
• Grant anonymous users access to the shared folders on the file server by adding the read permission on the folder and on the share to the ANONYMOUS LOGON user
• Modify the file server's group policy to allow anonymous access to the selected shares by listing them in the Network access: Shares that can be accessed anonymously policy in the Computer Configuration, Windows Settings, Security Settings, Local Policies, Security Options branch of the group policy tree (just run gpedit.msc to start the Group Policy Object Editor)

12/31/2007 12:34:14 PM (Central Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

Location of PowerPoint AutoRecover files (Personal | Software)

Not so long ago I've been called to my boss's office to prevent him losing unsaved work in a PowerPoint presentation. It turned out that when he tried to save the file to a new location the message box with the overwrite warning for some reason didn't render completely and it was impossible to close it. As it turned out at the end I could have just killed the application and restart it, since the AutoRecover feature kicked in and offered a version of the file with all changes applied.

But just to be on the save side I wanted to copy the AutoRecover files to a save location before actually killing the application. But unlike Word or Excel where the location of these files is set in the options, PowerPoint does not have such an option. After some googling I finally stumbled across a page, correctly stating that the files are stored in the %temp% folder and named ppt*.tmp. I decided to publish this info here just in case I need it again.

11/24/2007 3:11:03 PM (Central Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

Installing MSI packages from command line (Personal | Software)

Although a MSI file can bi installed by double clicking on it in Explorer or by selecting install from the context menu, you might want to start from command line to include it in a script. This can be done by using the msiexec.exe utility. Although it's parameters are well documented I had to do some searching to find a way for setting a different installation directory than the default one in case the configuration forms are skipped with the /qb option. It can be done by setting the INSTALLDIR property to the desired value.

As a future reference the following command line triggers the setup package to install into the specified directory without opening any additional configuration windows:

msiexec /i MyMSI.msi /qb INSTALLDIR="C:\Program Files\My Install Dir"

7/22/2007 11:24:14 AM (Central Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

How to enable hibernation in Windows Vista (Software)

Windows Vista unlike the previous versions doesn't have an option to enable or disable hibernation in the Power Options of the Control Panel. Strangely, if you search for hibernation in Control Panel the Turn hibernation on or off option will be found but it will only open the Edit Plan Settings dialog without hibernation available if it is already disabled. Therefore, if you end up with disabled hibernation as I did (probably due to the Hibernation File Cleaner option of the Disk Cleanup tool) the only way to turn it back on is to open a command prompt and run

powercfg -H on

This will make the hibernation reappear in all the shutdown menus and power button combos.

5/21/2007 8:45:17 PM (Central Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [1]

Antivirus applications and Media Center MPEG streaming (Personal | Software)

One of the first tasks on my to-do list after buying a new computer with Vista Home Premium edition was setting up Media Center Extender for Xbox 360 along with Transcode 360 to make my Xbox 360 a true multimedia device.

Unfortunately the problems started immediately after setting up the Media Center Extender on my PC. (At this point I’d like to mention that the required 8-digit setup key can be acquired by starting Media Center on Xbox 360. I spent more time than I should, figuring this out.) Browsing pictures worked fine, also music and WMV streaming. On the other hand MPEG streaming resulted in errors.

I quickly dismissed a few probable causes for the problem:

• After noticing that Windows Media Player couldn’t properly play MPEG2 files (but strangely DVDs worked just fine) I installed FFDShow with MPEG2 playback option turned on. It fixed the playback in WMP 11 but the problem on the Xbox 360 side remained.
• Just to be sure I temporarily disabled the firewall although the required ports have already been opened and WMV streaming worked just fine. No surprises there – MPEG streaming still didn’t work.
• The last desperate act was completely disabling my antivirus solution in case it would be causing problems. It didn’t help either.

The weekend was coming to its end so I decided to try out the alternative media server solution TVersity. It worked out of the box without problems, even transcoding of unsupported formats to WMV. But during the following week I was growingly unsatisfied with it:

• Fast forwarding and rewinding of transcoded videos didn’t work until they were played back for the first time and cached.
• To make the matters worse even pausing had its problems causing the playback to stop early for the amount of time it was paused in between. Once again the problem only appeared for directly transcoded videos not yet in the cache.
• While music list was properly organized by albums and authors the video list was completely flat making it a real pain scrolling through a few hundred alphabetically sorted files.

All of that convinced me to revisit the Media Center problem. Not wanting to reinstall my machine being otherwise already quite nicely setup by that time I decided to uninstall PC-cillin Internet Security 2007 just to be sure after reading in a few forums that both  McAfee and Norton can prevent streaming altogether even if they are disabled. It actually solved my MPEG streaming problem although I thought it highly unlikely since WMV streaming worked all the time. I still can’t explain why only MPEG streaming was affected but since then I’m using NOD32 and still waiting for the first problem it would cause. Not to mention that it also uses far less system resources than PC-cillin.

The last of my problems was that the default Transcode 360 installation had problems with UAC therefore I had to manually remove it (uninstall didn’t work) and reinstall it in the unsupported service mode.

Now that all problems are solved, my Xbox 360 really is the universal home entertainment system. Being properly connected to my HD LCD TV and surround sound system I am now using it for watching DVDs, streaming videos from my computer, listening to music and watching photos. Even the user interface is very intuitive and easy to use. Only my music collection still needs some reorganization for all the different views in the Media Center to work as intended.

3/10/2007 12:34:02 PM (Central Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

Windows Defender problem with Microsoft Update (Personal | Software)

There seems to be a problem with updating Windows Defender when using Microsoft Update instead of Windows Update in Windows Vista. The problem becomes apparent when Windows Defender puts up a warning in the system tray that its signatures are not up to date. This of course shouldn’t happen at all with Automatic Updates turned on. Manual attempts to update Windows Defender result in an error, while Microsoft Update insists that the system is up to date and no new updates are available.

According to the list of Windows Update 5 errors the above error code is 0x80240029 – WU E INVALID PRODUCT LICENCE: A product with an invalid license was found on the system. This is just plain silly (in my case it was happening on an OEM Vista Home Premium edition that came with my new computer) though a look in the WindowsUpdate.log file sheds some light on it:

2007-03-10 07:30:30:258 1144 1308 Report REPORT EVENT: {3B3B2164-091C-4856-9FBC-9D99EDAE3198} 2007-03-10 07:30:25:259+0100 1 154 101 {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000} 0 0 Windows Defender Failure Software Synchronization Client has an invalid Pid.

Looking at this record you can quickly stop wondering why the Pid is invalid. An empty value instead of an actual one is used. Fortunately the solution is quite simple (once you know what it is): disabling the Use Microsoft Update checkbox in the Turn automatic updating on or off section of the Control Panel.

Once you do that Windows Defender will successfully update itself. Windows Update will also find its updates now and maybe even some other updates that didn’t show up when Microsoft Update service was used.

3/10/2007 9:59:32 AM (Central Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [1]

Run applications with preselected user credentials (Personal | Software)

The functionality of the Run as context menu item is often an invaluable tool. The following two scenarios are probably the most common.

• If you’re using a LUA account (which you always should) you can use it to run specific applications with administrative privileges.
• If you’re a developer you can use it to test how you’re application behaves with different credentials.

The downside of this command is that unless you want to use the administrator’s account, you have to enter the desired username every single time which quickly becomes tedious.

You can work around that if use the Runas command. Its /user parameter allows you to set your desired username in advance. To avoid typing you can create a shortcut pointing to the following location:

C:\Windows\System32\runas.exe /user:MYCOMPUTER\MyUser MyApplication.exe

Apart from opening a command prompt for password instead of a nice GUI this should be a perfect solution, as long as you don’t want to run too many applications this way. Creating shortcuts for all of them can once again get tedious.

But fear not, there’s a solution for this as well; create your own context menu command by adding the following entry into the registry:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\exefile\shell\Run as MyUser...\command]
@="C:\\Windows\\system32\\runas.exe /user:MYCOMPUTER\\MyUser \"%L\""

Of course you should replace MYCOMPUTER\MyUser with your desired username in both above examples; and MyApplication.exe in the shortcut with the path to your application. Use HKEY_LOCALMACHINE instead of HKEY_CURRENT_USER to add the command for all users not only for you.

1/3/2007 9:54:16 PM (Central Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [2]

Windows Desktop Search on network shares (Personal | Software)

Microsoft Office 2007 applications (at least Outlook and OneNote in particular) require Windows Desktop Search 3.0 to be installed for their built-in search capabilities to work fully. Since out of the box this version of WDS doesn’t support the indexing of files on network shares you also have to install the WDS Add-in for Files on Microsoft Networks. You still have to map the network drives to be indexed but at least you can select them in the WDS options window afterwards.

In Windows Vista WDS 3.0 is already built-in but you still have to install the add-in for the indexing of files on network shares to work.

12/31/2006 8:45:04 AM (Central Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

More Sidebar Gadgets available (Development | Vista | Personal | Software)

I you haven't checked out our Vista site recently, now is the right time to do it. Since my last posting two new gadgets have been released:

• Slovenian Portfolio provides information from Ljubljana Stock Exchange and gives you the ability to track your personal portfolio.
• Slovenian Rates provides information on exchange rates from 4 Slovenian banks: Bank of Slovenia, NLB, SKB and NKBM.

12/11/2006 12:58:18 PM (Central Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

Our first Sidebar Gadget released (Development | Vista | Personal | Software)

We have just released our first Sidebar Gadget – Slovenian Radio.

The gadget features a centralized list of radio stations (retrieved from our server) and basic controls for selecting the station and adjusting the volume. Everything is packaged in a nice and simple GUI.

Try it out. It really is the most convenient way of listening to Slovenian radio stations online. You can download it for free here. Spread the word if you like it.

12/1/2006 8:23:14 AM (Central Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

Viewing EPS files with IrfanView (Personal | Software)

If you want to view EPS images with IrfanView you need to have AFPL Ghostscript installed. I spent quite some time investigating why it worked on one machine and not on the other before I checked the IrfanView plug-ins web page where I found this useful bit of information.

6/8/2006 6:29:12 PM (Central Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

Problems with SetForegroundWindow calls (Development | Personal | Software | Win32)

Either as a user or as a developer you have certainly noticed that sometimes the application just flashes in the taskbar instead of actually coming to the foreground when the SetForegroundWindow function is called. What you might not know is why and when this happens.

As far as the why goes the Application Compatibility Toolkit’s Compatibility Administrator puts it very nicely in the GiveupForeground compatibility fix description: In Windows XP the foreground semantics have been changed to stop foreground focus stealing by one application if another application is active.

Further investigation reveals that this is related to the ForegroundLockTimeout value. It defines how much time must pass since the last user input to allow another process to force its window into the foreground. Before that time such a window only flashes in the task bar. The default value is 200000 milliseconds. The setting is stored in the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\ForegroundLockTimeout

The value can be programmatically changed by calling the SystemParametersInfo function as follows:

SystemParametersInfo(SPI_SETFOREGROUNDLOCKTIMEOUT, 0, 0, SPIF_SENDWININICHANGE | SPIF_UPDATEINIFILE);

The downside is that the call only succeeds when the calling thread has permission to change the foreground window which usually isn’t the case.

To make the long story short: you should never depend on being able to bring your application window to the foreground and this will certainly only get more restrictive in the future. If the flashing in the taskbar is not enough, you should consider using tray balloon pop-ups as the alternative way of notifying the user.

6/3/2006 1:18:29 PM (Central Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [2]

Show or hide users from Windows XP Welcome screen (Personal | Software)

By default the Windows XP Welcome screen shows the users created through the control panel applet. Administrator is shown only if it is the only account with administrative privileges. You can change all that by setting up the correct values in the registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList

To change the default behavior for a user create a DWORD value with its name identical to the account name and set its value to 1 to show it or to 0 to hide it.

6/3/2006 10:59:42 AM (Central Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

Changing the port number for remote desktop access (Personal | Software)

I really need to write down this information here so that I won’t be googling for it every time a friend or a coworker asks me about it. The default port number 3389 for RDP (Remote Desktop and Terminal Services) can be changed through the following registry value:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\TerminalServer\WinStations\RDP-Tcp\PortNumber

6/3/2006 10:37:49 AM (Central Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

Windows 2003 anonymous access to shared folders (Personal | Software)

Due to tightened default security in Windows 2003 the file shares cannot be accessed without logon in a domainless environment even if both shares and folders are set up to allow access to Everyone.

A bit of googling returns many different suggestions for solving the problem, none of which really seems to work for sure. I’m just adding my two cents to this confusion, hoping that this posting will help me the next I’ll be solving the same problem.

It’s all about configuring the Security options in Local Security policy. The logical path of enabling the Network Access: Let Everyone permissions apply to anonymous users policy and disabling the Network access: Restrict anonymous access to Named Pipes and Shares policy didn’t help. On the other hand enabling the Accounts: Guest account status policy and setting the Network access: Sharing and security model for local accounts policy to Guest only - local users authenticate as Guest did the trick. Don't forget to call gpupdate after changing the policy to enforce it immediately.

I’m not asserting that this is THE solution but it worked for me. However, you should be aware of the implications of enabling the guest account before doing it to solve your immediate problem.

A few additional words on the last mentioned policy change: It proves useful when the file server and the client have the same usernames defined but the passwords don’t match because it forces the client to login as guest. By default the client tries to login to the server with wrong password which once again causes the login prompt to appear. It is useful to keep the default setting when the password is the same because the auto login allows for granularity in security settings if more than equal permissions for everyone are needed.

5/28/2006 2:49:50 PM (Central Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

Missing Security tab in certificate Private Key File Properties (Personal | Software)

Never forget to disable simple file sharing (Explorer menu, Tools > Folder Options..., View tab, Use simple file sharing (Recommended)) when attempting to set permissions for certificate private key file on a machine with a fresh Windows XP install, not joined to a domain. In this case the option is enabled by default which hides the Security tab in all properties dialogs and consequently disallows any explicit setting of permissions.

It is a good practice to disable the option anyway but it is easily forgotten when setting up the machine for the first time. This reminder should prevent me from losing another half an hour wondering why I can't set the desired permissions using the WSE X.509 Certificate Tool the usual way in case I am once again given a task of preparing a demo machine for an application using certificates with service accounts.

3/18/2006 11:49:06 AM (Central Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [1]

NOD32 & CVSNT compatibility problem (Personal | Software)

Yesterday I tried committing some changes to one of the websites I am maintaining into my CVS repository. To my surprise the operation failed or to be more exact, the TortoiseCVS client just kept performing the command for several minutes without failing until I cancelled it.

After some investigation I realized that it’s been almost two weeks since my last CVS usage and that in the meantime the only noticeable change on my server machine where I have the CVSNT service running was the change of the antivirus software. I started trying out NOD32. It became the primary suspect for the problem.

To make my further investigation easier I decided to try if the CVS works when used locally from the server:

cvs -d :pserver:damir@localhost:/Root login
Logging in to :pserver:damir@localhost:2401:/Root
CVS Password: ******
cvs [login aborted]: Error reading from server localhost: -1

Obviously it didn’t work even locally so it wasn’t a simple problem of firewall blocking the port (although this would be strange without having any firewall enabled at all). Some googling quickly uncovered the program responsible: NOD32 IMON service. Disabling it and restarting the server solved the problem.

But I wasn’t satisfied with that. I didn’t want to disable the internet monitor completely to make the CVSNT work. This would mean that I’d have to go on looking for another antivirus solution while I was completely satisfied with this one up till now. After some more investigation I found a hint that brought me to my final solution: re-enabling the IMON service and excluding the CVSNT executable from the monitoring. The exclusions list can be reached by opening up the NOD32 Control Center under Resident modules and filters > IMON. Setup button in the following window opens up another window with Miscellaneous tab, inside the Exclusion group there's an Edit... button which displays the list. The file that has to be added is cvsservice.exe from the C:\Program Files\CVSNT directory in the case of default installation.

3/4/2006 1:27:59 PM (Central Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [1]

Opening HTML Help files from network drives (Personal | Software)

It’s almost half a year since security update 896358 has been released which prevents viewing HTML help (CHM) files from network drives. It should be noted that the file actually can be opened only the containing HTML files don’t get displayed.

Until now it wasn’t really an issue for me as I was always opening help files from local disks. But in the last few weeks I am managing help development at work and with company policy having latest files on file server shares I keep having to copy the files to my local disk before testing and reviewing them which soon gets annoying.

To avoid the repetitive tedious task of copying files around I decided to look more closely into the issue. It turned out that you can set the maximum trusted zone in the registry to avoid the problem. Since I trust the complete local network zone at work I raised the trust level by adding the following to the registry:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\ItssRestrictions]
"MaxAllowedZone"=dword:00000001

Problem solved.

2/12/2006 10:40:34 AM (Central Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]