Solving technology problems, one at a time
Sometimes for whatever reason, Time Machine doesn’t auto-delete backups to make space for new ones. If you have this problem you might try getting it going again by manually deleting one or two of the oldest ones. Here’s how to safely do this, using the Time Machine interface.
Enter Time Machine and select the backup you want to delete.
Continue readingA few months ago, I needed to revise an HTML file that is used many times across a large website. Most of the key code associated with this file is contained in centrally-located includes, but as luck would have it, this time the entire file needed to be revised – even the user-customized bits. That meant that almost a thousand files would have to be replaced. Worse, they were not entirely the same, since they were customized by the users to some extent.
After checking a few of them, I found there were enough commonalities to serve as the basis of a regular expression search. They always started with a comment, like this:
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<!--/ *v
Symptom: hyperlinks that worked in a Powerpoint file no longer work in the published Presenter or Powerpoint presentation based on that Powerpoint.
This is because Flash Security treats local content differently than the content on the internet.
The solution is to put the published files onto a web server and access it using the URL (like: http://yoursite.com/yourpresentation.htm).
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There have been a few interface updates to Amazon’s Kindle page since I last wrote about it, but there remains a strange lack of comprehension on the part of Amazon, that people might actually want to use their highlights. There is still no obvious way to export the data.
For those with Macs, I’ve come up with a workaround, and perhaps there is something similar on the PC side.
Continue readingAfter doing a series of updates to a Drupal installation, the following error appeared on all admin pages and edit pages:
“call_user_func_array() expects parameter 1 to be a valid callback, function ‘clients_access_callback “
Other symptoms included that the database could not be updated to complete some of the following updates, and search no longer worked.
Continue readingLately it seems that apps tend to crash a lot on my first-generation iPad. Safari is one of the biggest offenders, and it appears the problem is at least partly from lack of free memory. If Safari starts crashing everytime you open it, it sometimes helps to close all apps in the multitasking bar.
Continue readingiCloud looks great on paper, but the effects of choices you must make to enable it are not obvious, so, as a busy person with more than enough troubleshooting to do, I am shutting it off for now.
No replacement for iDisk yet.
I’m probably one of the few people that use iDisk, but I do use it. I store my Papers library on it, and a variety of assets I use at work and at home. It was a great little server, without any hassle. According to this technote, I have to save my files and get ready for it to disappear.
I never used the iWeb or MobileMe Gallery features, but it looks like all of that is disappearing also. iCloud is neither a hosting service, nor an unstructured file-server. Documents can be stored by apps, but probably not dragged there by you, as far as I can tell.
Continue readingIn a .NET application used to deliver quizzes, attempting to import a large quiz from another server resulted in this error:
“The request filtering module is configured to deny a request that exceeds the request content length.” A second message stated:
“Request filtering is configured on the Web server to deny the request because the content length exceeds the configured value.”
There have been several times when I’ve discovered that settings changes I make in Captivate Preferences or Properties are not being honored – my changes can be seen in the Preferences or Properties panels after closing and reopening the Preferences or properties, but they are not being used.
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Captivate allows you to import a Powerpoint file to use as the starting point for your learning activity. It’s often easier for people to “think” in Powerpoint, so many users prefer to rough out a project in Powerpoint, then import it and continue working in Captivate.
When a Powerpoint file is imported this way, its images become part of the Background element of the slide in Captivate. Backgrounds are not easily repositionable, or croppable, but it’s not hard to bring the background image up onto the slide as a regular image element that can be moved around, edited, and included in actions.
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