Monthly Archives: August 2008

simple tags and calais auto tagger plugins don’t work well together

Computer Aid Posted on by

I’ve been looking at improving how I add tags to my blog posts, and I found 2 good plugins, which I thought would complement each other nicely… but they don’t work well together.

http://www.dangrossman.info/wp-calais-auto-tagger/

http://www.herewithme.fr/wordpress-plugins/simple-tags

When I activate both with wordpress 2.5.1, I find some aspects of calais don’t appear, and certain other aspects of simple-tags will either no appear, or just refuse to work.

Its a little frustrating, as its difficult to pinpoint a consistent feature that always fails

But since I find Calais more useful, I’ll disable simple tags, and only activate if I need to organise my tags (which I actually don’t need to use much)

Improve Vista Performance Quickly and Easily (Yeah, right!)

Computer Aid Posted on by
Looks like MS are kicking their vista PR machine into overdrive at the moment.

I found this link, and had a good laugh: vista performance and tuning

If you can manage to read through the whole 14 page document (and maybe even follow some of the links), you will find the process is far from Quick, and far from Easy.

I skimmed through most of it, as many parts seem to follow tip that have been available for quite a while (even I have a condensed set of tips: Tuning Vista). But I don’t pretend its quick or easy.

The part that caught my eye was the brief discussion on UAC:

While we recommend that the majority of your users run with standard user (non-administrator) privileges, there are times when it is necessary to deploy a subset of users with administrative privileges. In such circumstances, the User Account Control (UAC) Consent Prompt can slow access to administrative operations and has led some organizations to look at turning UAC off entirely.

A better alternative is to change the behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators to elevate without the prompting. This option, which can be set via Group Policy, allows the administrator to perform an operation that requires elevation without consent but still provides the other benefits afforded by UAC, such as Internet Explorer Protected Mode

For more information read “Understanding and Configuring User Account Control in Windows Vista” at the Windows Vista TechCenter.

So I thought: Hey great! I’d like to know how to elevate without prompting.

UAC

Well, I really struggled to understand the damn thing… so how is an unsophisticated vista user supposed to be able to read, absorb, and that decipher what needs to be done to elevate without prompting?

If you are interested in elevating without prompting a better solution is: Tune UAC

Microsoft: I think you really need to release a vista tweakui. Believe me, Vista needs it much more than XP ever did!

Fujitsu LCD monitor with strange stripes

Computer Aid Posted on by

A past customer had recently moved their computers to a different room, and wanted me to check that everything was connected correctly, and to create a custom-length ethernet cable.

Aside from the time to crimp the two ends of the ethernet cable, I found an interesting problem with a dual-monitor PC:

The main monitor worked fine, but the second one (22″ wide screen) had its picture split into horizontal stripes (about 1cm high). It looked like each stripe was showing the correct background image, but offset by about 1 inch from the stripes above and below.

I check the connectors, and the video cable was plugged in correctly (ie not upside down).

I try a PC restart, but no joy.

I use the XP display properties to change the refresh rate and resolution, but no success with that either.

I try to look at the monitor OSD, but it just shows a thin grey vertical bar. Hmmm

Ok, I’ll try turning the monitor off and then on again… Darn these new-fangled monitors… the on/off switch can be so hard to find… an inconspicuous switch on the right edge of the monitor…

Well, look at that: the monitor now works correctly.

I guess the monitor was somehow not synchronising properly with the signal arriving from the PC…

PS: I was called back a few days later… the brightness and contrast settings were way off, and the screen was forcing a 4:3 aspect ratio… all fixed using the OSD, except the OSD would start displaying, mostly, as seemingly random pixels… I told the customer that it looks like the monitor won’t last much longer… and to replace it while its still under warranty.

Note: 2 weeks later, the customer sends it back for a warranty repair/replace.