Solving technology problems, one at a time
The error “The document “filename.pdf” could not be exported as filename.pdf” started appearing in Safari on attempting to save PDFs from the browser.
The problem appears to be update-related: apparently a recent Acrobat update left an old file in the plugins directory that needs to be deleted.
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I usually troubleshoot XML files by simply dragging them into a Firefox browser window. Unlike other text files, Firefox displays XML in a handy tree format, as show below.
If you are having trouble inserting a page or section break at the end of a Word document with Endnotes, you have two choices. You could either insert the new section BEFORE the Endnotes area, or change the Endnotes settings to display Endnotes at the end of each section .
Word considers the end of the document to be the one and only end, so nothing can come after it. It is easy to mistake the white space after the last Endnote for normal document space, but it is an “endnote-only” area.
Continue readingWhile trying to install a .NET application on a Windows Server 2003 box, I ran into a problem where the .aspx extension was not being recognized. Browsing .NET pages resulted in 404 (“page not found”) errors. Since the same set of application files had been installed on several other servers without incident, it seemed likely that there was something different about this server. The same version of .NET had been installed on all the servers, but never used.
I had assigned .NET 2.0.50727 to the application using the drop-down menu in the Application properties window in IIS Manager. But apparently, sometimes the .NET installer doesn’t register .NET to IIS, and it has to be done manually.
You can tell that this is the problem, if you have assigned .NET to the application, but when looking in IIS Manager > Web Service Extensions, it does not show up in the list.
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If you get .NET errors that reference
<system.web> <httpRuntime requestValidationMode="2.0" /> <!-- everything else --> </system.web>
It means that the application you are trying to run has set the property requestValidationMode to function the way it acted under .NET 2.0, but this directive only makes any sense under .NET 4.0 or greater, and your website is not set up to use .NET 4.
You need to run the application in a separate application pool and set it to run under .NET 4.0 (which, of course, needs to be installed before it can be used).
Continue readingSometimes 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).
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.
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