Justin Pfister

[Solved] Multiple Instances of PowerPoint

2009-10-28T09:40:00.001-07:00

Lately, I've found it really important to have multiple instances of a powerpoint open. Unfortunately, powerpoint opens all the files under a single instance of the application. Ultimately, in a multiple monitor environment, this makes it impossible to enjoy the benefit of having one .ppt in on one monitor and another .pptx open in another monitor.

Alas, I've found a solution!

Thanks to this site. Essentially, you need to setup an extra user on your machine (hint: Control Panel > Users > Add Users) and then open one instance of powerpoint by simply clicking on it. And then opening up the other takes a couple seconds. Here's the steps:

Find the POWERPNT.EXE file. (NOTE: this is not the same as the short cut). Mine is located in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12"
Finally, hold down your Shift button and right click. Magically, you'll see the option -- "Run as Different User". I've attached a picture.
Click that -- Enter your other user credentials and you'll be all set!

Happy Productivity!

Adobe - Licensing for this Product has Stopped Working

2009-09-25T07:05:00.000-07:00

Well, if you ever get this err from your Adobe Software suite, "You cannot use this product at this time. You must repair the problem by uninstalling and then reinstalling this product or contacting your IT administrator or Adobe customer support for help".

Have no worries!

Just download, unzip, and run this file: http://www.adobe.com/support/contact/licensing_download_eula.html

ReadyNAS NVX Remote Client Setup

2009-05-18T05:29:00.000-07:00

I've recently purchased a 4TB ReadyNAS NVX and I'm currently trying to setup a pretty new feature called ReadyNAS Remote, documented here. As far as I can tell, this functionality will allow me to replicate a traditinal VPN setup and I'm really excited to use it. Since I'm having a little trouble getting this setup and there's a lack of documentation on the internet about it, I'm going to highlight the problem solution path I went through to get this setup. Starting with step 1:

1) My ReadyNAS Remote Client Won't Connect

I was getting an error. This ReadyNAS cannot connect to ReadyNAS Remote.

Problem Solved!

OK - I was on the phone with netgear about 4-5 times. I got a support ticket going and got my issue raised to Level 2. Essentially - I think something was wrong with their services because all at once, the ReadyNAS started recognizing the service and my laptop logged into the client. The ReadyNAS remote experience is A+. When it's all setup, you can securly using your network attached storage off your LAN. \\ReadNAS\folder\file.txt on your LAN will still be \\ReadNAS\folder\file.txt .. This was a big deal for me because I've got Dreamweaver setup to access web documents on the NAS. If I had to edit the Site Manager everytime I took logged onto a new network, it would be real pain.

GREAT JOB NETGEAR!

CFFTP - Null Pointers are another name for undefined values

2009-05-10T07:01:00.000-07:00

I recently upgraded my Coldfusion 8 development server to 8,0,1,195765 and a pretty basic FTP task I had sceduled started erroring. It was giving me the following error :

The system has attempted to use an undefined value, which usually indicates a programming error, either in your code or some system code. Null Pointers are another name for undefined values.

Ultimately, what fixed the error was changing 'cfftp name="xxx"...' to 'cfftp connection="xxx"...'. [I found this solution here]

How to create a self-signed SSL Certificate for a Development Server

2009-05-04T06:31:00.000-07:00

Recently, I've taken steps to create a web development environment for building newer versions of some of my websites. I plan on covering some of the finer details later on but some of the upgrades include things like:

Netgear ProSwitches for lightning fast gigabit connectivity
ReadyNAS NVX for 2.6TB of RAID-X centralized storage. I enjoy every aspect of this device.
Webserver/PC running Windows Server 2003 - Enterprise Edition for serving up multiple websites.

Granted, this setup isn't super unique but if you take the time to do something like this, 2 questions may follow:

When I type EXAMPLE.COM into my browser, how do I make it load from my web server and not from the internet?

The simple answer is to look into editing your HOSTS file. FYI - you will need to edit the HOSTS file on your workstation computer and your server. I recommend using your own top-level domain for your development box. For example, having EXAMPLE.COM go to the internet and EXAMPLE.DEV going to your development server.

How can I test SSL's on pages I view on my development server?

If you try doing this yourself, you might not figure it out so easily but this is a pretty straight forward process. All you'll need for that is to read this article : How to create a self-signed SSL Certificate .

Happy Developing!!!

Resolving "Setup did not find any hard disk drives" during Windows XP Installation

2009-04-24T08:45:00.001-07:00

I didn't quite realize this would be an issue when I tried - but essentially I went about making a XP Professional web development box with an older Pre-Installed Vista machine. What happened shortly after starting the installation process was I recieved an error, "Setup did not find any hard disks". It seems the newer computers don't come loaded with a XP compatible storage controller.

To make a long story short, everything is working great now thanks to this link. I created a Custom XP installation using NLite. The directions on that link were really good and everything worked well. In my case, the hardest part was getting the actual Dell Storage Drivers because they give you an .exe file that only wants to write the drivers to an old Floppy Disk drive and I couldn't seem to fool it. I did end up searching for my drivers and got a zip file.

If this is happening to you, Goodluck! Just go to that website I highlighted, follow the directions and know it's not the end of the world.

Portable Humidifier With Water Line Connection

2009-02-20T11:57:00.000-08:00

I'm fairly tired of filling up my humidifier every night and I'm still concerned about the heath issues of mold, viruses and mildew flying around our duct work. I'm looking for a humidifier which I can connect to a water line and does not need to be connected to the duct work. The idea is simple but I can't find anything quite like it. Any suggestions? If I have to, I might just have to invent it!

I've found a company called AprilAire and they seem to have some innovative humidifying technology but it doesn't seem like they have what I'm looking for.

Calculating Windchill for My Snowmobile Trip

2009-01-14T11:11:00.000-08:00

I'm heading up to St. Raymond, Quebec soon for a 4 day snowmobile trip. The temperatures have been so cold lately so I wanted to know how the already cold weather would get magnified by the speed of our sleds.

So this is the windchill equation

As of 2009, Windchill Temperature = 35.74 + 0.6215*T - 35.75(V^.16)+.4275*T*V^(.16)

Outlook Won't Add Appointments or Contacts - Exchange Server Setup

2009-01-09T06:05:00.001-08:00

Are you here because you can't add a contact or address to your Outlook? In my particular situation, I have an Exchange Server connected to my Outlook and my Mobile Email Device. Suddenly out of the blue, I could no longer add appointments or contacts via Outlook but I could do it on my Phone.

How Did I Fix this issue?

I discovered that this issue was being caused by the constant 'connection' to the Exchange Server (which doesn't seem right). I proved this by going to bottom right of my Outlook program and right clicking on the Online/Offline button and selecting 'Work Offline'. At that point, was able to add contacts and appointment.

From ContentImages

So that's the quick fix!

How About a More Permanent Fix

After investigating, I learned that this issue is caused by a corrupt email profile so the more long-term solution is to re-create your profile. The beauty of exchange server is that this won't set you back one bit as your email, contacts and appointments will be instantly recreated once your recreate the email profile.

Who is Binky Sears?

2009-01-05T03:55:00.000-08:00

It seems like for a few months now, I've been watching New Hampshire's WMUR in the morning and frequently a commercial comes on for an opportunity to get a Fritz Weatherbee ring tone. It's really hard to describe who Fritz is if you don't live in New Hampshire but anyway, one of the ring tone's say "If you pick up your phone, it might be Binky Sears!". Binky Sears - Who is Binky Sears? It's taken me a while but I've finally tried figuring out who this 'Binky Sears' character is and I've determined that nobody else seems to know either. I've only found one lonely message board thread about it and it doesn't conclude anything. So....

Who is Binky Sears?

And why should we get excited if he calls? If I ever find out, I will post the answer hear and if you have any leads to where we might be able to find an answer, please comment or contact me.

Possible Ideas

#1 - BINKY SEARS may be an Anagram

Anagrams are a type of word play where the results of rearranging the letters of a phrase make a new phrase. It's doesn't seem likely that Fritz is using anagrams or other hidden language to communicate with his audience but it's not completely crazy as it is something people who pass on knowledge sometimes do. Before we try 'BINKY SEARS', I'll illustrate an example of an anagram's from the popular book 'Da Vinci Code'.

O, Draconian Devil -> Leonardo da Vinci
Oh, Lame Saint -> The Mona Lisa

Below is a list of anagram solutions I found for 'BINKY SEARS'. There's probably 1000's of solutions so I'm just going to list some interesting ones. If you're trying this yourself and the anagram really exsists, it's probably a 'New Hampshire Phrase' or specifically related to something in 'New Hampshire'.

So here we go! By rearranging the letters 'BINKY SEARS', you can spell:

IS BARN KEYS
IN BRASS KEY
SKIS NEARBY
SKI BARNEYS

So far, I'm not convinced 'BINKY SEARS' is an anagram.

#2 - Fritz's Mom is 'Binkie' and 'Sears' is a Clue to where his Uncle came up with the name

This idea came from a comment on this post which was written in a way that leads us to believe Fritz left it himself. This means we need to do some research in New Hampshire about his mother spelled 'Binkie' and the term 'Sears'. My first thoughts are that it could be 'Sears', the department store OR 'Sears' a last name like Richard Dudley Sears. It could even be a homonym like 'seer', which is a visionary.

I've found a couple references to a 'Richard Dudley Sears' who was a graduate of Harvard and resident of Massachusetts. It's hard to tell but this this 'person' may have been a great tennis player or even a architect in Concord,NH. If he is the architect in Concord,NH then we may be on to something.

#3 - Contact Fritz & Ask Him

Well, aside from being the most obvious solution I'm a bit perplexed as to why Fritz would be making and marketing ringtones about something the nobody knows about and ultimately has to be ask him in order to find out who 'Binky Sears' is. Is this Fritz's way of reaching out to the community? Maybe I will inquire about 'Binky Sears' from Fritz himself and finally get a more solid conclusion.

Excel Adds Quotes When I Copy Cells

2008-12-31T07:07:00.000-08:00

Excel is a great program for manipulating data and then using it to concatenate a SQL string. Recently, I've found that when I copy concatenated string which looks perfect in excel, it adds quotes around the text when I try and paste them into a text editor or SQL manager. These quotes are unnecessary and I don't want them there.

Why does this happen?

I've found that if there are line breaks in your concatenated text, then excel will try and preserve the string by adding surrounding quotes.

How do I fix it?

I've found that by removing the line breaks - Excel will paste un-quoted text. If this doesn't help you and excel is still randomly quoting your text, let me know and maybe we can figure it out together.

Setting an Auto-Reply to New Twitter Followers

2008-12-30T07:53:00.000-08:00

When first mentioned, I didn't know how to set an Auto-Reply to new followers on Twitter. I wasn't sure if it was a Twitter App setting or a setting within Twitter.

I have found out from RavenSEO's John Henshaw that you have to use a 3rd party application like TweetLater. That was just the first one I found. I'm sure there's a lot more out there and being developed. It seems like you can use this sort of technology to have a Tweet go out whenever you update your blog. That's a nice thing to keep in mind.

Picasa 3 After Removing or Adding Tags the Search Doesn't Register Changes

2008-12-23T05:11:00.000-08:00

I've been using Picasa, Google's acquired digital photo management software for a few years now and I've always thought it was the cat's meow when it came to 'easily importing photos', 'doing very-small touch-ups', sharing, sending photos to print shops, TAGGING and so much more. But on my recent upgrade to version 3, I'm almost driven to the point where I can't use the software anymore. Something is seriously off with the Tagging and I can't figure it out. All I can find is this post ( Discussions > Something Broken in Picasa 3? > Removing tags and searching ).

Initially to me, it seems it could be...

Issues with Picasa's search cache. Since the search is so quick, the information must be caching somewhere. That kind of explains why photos with deleted tags are still coming up for old tags.
Issues with folder and file privileges. Picasa might be registering the tag was deleted but in the back end, it's never able to alter the file and create the changes. This doesn't seem to likely since I've looked into this.
Installation issues.. Maybe I should uninstall and reinstall. If I do this, I'll keep you posted on the outcome.
Any other suggestions?

I look forward adding a solution to this problem when, and if, I finally figure out the answer.

Dreamweaver CS3 Crashes While Working with a File

2008-12-15T09:08:00.000-08:00

I don't get it but sometimes programs that you use day in and day out just bug out. For me, Dreamweaver CS3 started crashing when I opened particular Coldfusion (.CFM) files. I could almost predict which ones would make it crash (files calling functions from other files). In some cases, I could get the file open but when I went to change some code, Dreamweaver would crash again. This made no sense to me and a lot of online sources said this had to do with the installation but I didn't believe it.

The solution for me, thanks to Martin Perry, was to delete the winfilecache.+\.dat file which can be found by going here:

From contentimgs

On Windows Xp, the file is at:-

[drive]:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Adobe\Dreamweaver
9\Configuration

On Windows Vista, you can find it in:-

[drive]:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Dreamweaver 9\Configuration
or accessible via windows explorer in
Desktop\[username]\Roaming\Adobe\Dreamweaver 9\Configuration

I recommend just deleting it if you have it. It's a small file and you can put it back if you need too. I actually tried putting the file back to see if I could recreate my problem for documentation purposes but it I couldn't get it to came back. I figure that's a good thing.

Mobile 5 Treo 700w / Smartphone Wildcard Cert SSL Fix

2008-12-05T04:24:00.001-08:00

Recently, my Exchange Server company upgraded their SSL to a Wildcard Certificate. As you probably know if this article has peaked your interests, Mobile 5 devices don't like this. In order to get your device to accept this configuration, you'll need to make 1 modification to your phones registry. This process is Really Easy and quick (10 minutes) so don't be shy.

Here's the Steps

Download the Smartphone Registry Editor

Here's the link: PHM Smartphone Regedit. The file I downloaded is called "Smartphone 2002, 2003 (ARM/PXA)". This file will have an extension '.CAB'. Save it to a local folder on your computer. There is nothing you need to do to this file on your computer
Connect Your Treo to Your PC

Use Windows Explorer or whatever you'd like to copy that .cab file onto your phone.
Open the .CAB File on your Smartphone

Just click it or open it. It installs quite easy. After the installation, you'll see a link to "PHM Registry Editor" in your programs.
Run PHM Registry Editor

Navigate to 'Hkey_Current_User' > 'Software' > 'Microsoft' > 'ActiveSync' > 'Partners'. Once you click on partners, you'll see registry entries.
Add the 'Secure' DWORD Key

When you select a row and hit values, you get a list of attributes for that registry entry. *Special Note* I repeated this step for both the registry entries you see in the above step.

You'll notice if you scroll down the list, you won't see an attribute called 'Secure'. We need to add this and set it's value to '0'. So lets start by adding the DWORD Key!

Behold, you'll see 'Secure' and it's got a value of '0'!

At this point, you can just continue your Exchange Syncing with your Treo 700w or other smartphone and everything should work. Enjoy!

If this doesn't work for you, you might want to restore or format your device and start from scratch. On a palm, you need to take of the battery case and push the reset button and hold the power button. If you are hooked up to an exchange server, this isn't a big deal because all your contacts and email will populate once you get it connected.

How Do I Use a Permalink?

2008-11-21T04:25:00.000-08:00

Permalinks are like ID's and are important because they uniquely identify content online. If you reference my unique url on your website then you create a connection to a particular article within my website. This better than linking to the basic url (justinpfister.com) because it's easy to use a search engine to look for web sites linking to a particular permalink on external websites and giving authors the chance to reply and continue the conversation!

In the picture below, I've used orange to highlight the possible places you might find permalinks. Generally, you can look in the url box of the browser and in most cases the author of the content will provide you a permalink, like I do.

Once you've found the permalink, reference it using an A HREF in your content. Once your content is published and you have your article being crawler by blog search engines or something similar, in a short amount of time ( 1 minute - 1 day) most content creators will be able to find out that you've referenced their content and then they can reply back to you.

Justin Pfister

[Solved] Multiple Instances of PowerPoint

Alas, I've found a solution!

Adobe - Licensing for this Product has Stopped Working

ReadyNAS NVX Remote Client Setup

1) My ReadyNAS Remote Client Won't Connect

Problem Solved!

GREAT JOB NETGEAR!

CFFTP - Null Pointers are another name for undefined values

How to create a self-signed SSL Certificate for a Development Server

When I type EXAMPLE.COM into my browser, how do I make it load from my web server and not from the internet?

How can I test SSL's on pages I view on my development server?

Resolving "Setup did not find any hard disk drives" during Windows XP Installation

Portable Humidifier With Water Line Connection

Calculating Windchill for My Snowmobile Trip

So this is the windchill equation

Outlook Won't Add Appointments or Contacts - Exchange Server Setup

How Did I Fix this issue?

So that's the quick fix!

How About a More Permanent Fix

Who is Binky Sears?

Who is Binky Sears?

Possible Ideas

#1 - BINKY SEARS may be an Anagram

#2 - Fritz's Mom is 'Binkie' and 'Sears' is a Clue to where his Uncle came up with the name

#3 - Contact Fritz & Ask Him

Excel Adds Quotes When I Copy Cells

Why does this happen?

How do I fix it?

Setting an Auto-Reply to New Twitter Followers

Picasa 3 After Removing or Adding Tags the Search Doesn't Register Changes

Dreamweaver CS3 Crashes While Working with a File

Mobile 5 Treo 700w / Smartphone Wildcard Cert SSL Fix

Here's the Steps

Download the Smartphone Registry Editor

Connect Your Treo to Your PC

Open the .CAB File on your Smartphone

Run PHM Registry Editor

Add the 'Secure' DWORD Key

How Do I Use a Permalink?