Tuesday, December 18, 2012

SysExporter - Nice utility

I found a nice utility to extract the data from common windows controls. It was useful for me to copy around 100 rows of list view data which otherwise would have taken me hours to copy to a document by hand.

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/sysexp.html
Thanks to Nir Sofer for an excellent application.

Wednesday, June 06, 2012

Run time error 5992

The other day I stumbled on this error in Word 2007
Run time error 5992 'Cannot access individual columns in this collection because the table has mixed cell widths.'
I was working on BeyondCompare to generate HTML file difference reports and paste this to Word. BeyondCompare report uses tables and it had a few rows that spanned across multiple columns. This was causing problems for Word VBA. I looked for solutions on the web, but unfortunately could not find any. It seemed silly because the individual columns can be moved manually using the margins on the ruler, but the script cannot access it. It became clear that this is limitation of Word VBA interface and I need to look for work arounds.

I edited the HTML to remove offending spans and pasted the tables to Word and this error is gone.

Another solution is to probably to use script to remove the spans in Word itself or work on the individual cells adjusting its width.

Sunday, May 13, 2012

Upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04


Took the plunge yesterday and upgraded my 10.04 LTS to 12.04. This Unity thing was holding me from upgrade last year with all those negative comments. At the moment, I am lost actually - where are the menus and stuff! May be I'll get used to it after a while.
Some Observations:
1. Laptop is running cooler - they seemed to patch a power management issue was hogging for long time.
2. Upgrade was smooth and all programs seem to be intact. Usually I had to spend atleast a day to fix all the issues after an upgrade - searching the net for issues and finding solutions.
3. Not all applications are Unity compatible, leaving a mixed bag. Therefore the windowing experience is confusing and inconsistent. e.g. Firefox and chrome.
4. I expected to get new versions of applications with 12.04, but did not. e.g. Gimp is still 2.6.
5. Meanwhile, while typing this post, I closed the browser at least three times, while trying to open the menu from top left corner. Thanks to Chrome, I got the windows back, along with the unsaved blogger post!


Laptop running hot? Fans might be clogged!


Just yesterday, my sister left her old laptop with me to have it re-formatted. It was terribly slow and I didn't see any improvement even after restoring to factory state. Now, I had hated this restore thingy, which copies the image from a hidden partition to C drive. But this time, it was god send, and the restore took hardly 15 mins. When I checked the CPU temperature (using an utility called SpeedFan), it was hovering around 75degC. I knew it was high and could feel the fan running at high speed all the time.

Now, this is an 8 year old laptop and I thought the fans and heat sink could be clogged, though I could not see any dust when looking through the sides. Searched for disassembly videos on youtube and luckily got one. Finally reached the fan assembly and saw this:


Took apart the fan assembly, removed the fan from the housing, cleaned up the fan/fins using a small brush. It was not easy. Wish I had compressed air can.

Assembled the whole thing back, booted up and after running a while with all browsers with flash pages, ran the Speedfan again. This time the CPU temp showed 65deg C. That's a lot of improvement. The PC seems to run better, though not to my expectations. But the fan speed seem to be normal.

Saturday, March 03, 2012

Micca MPLAY media player

I bought this Media player, primarily for the dual-use in Car as well as Home. It is value for money, can play from SD card and from USB stick/hdd.

It can play the following specs.


File TypeVideo CodecAudio CodecNotes
Video*.AVIMPEG4, DivX, XvidMP3, AAC, PCM720 x 576 Max
*.MP4, *.MOVMPEG4AAC, OGG
*.VOB (DVD)MPEG2MPEG, PCM
*.MPG, *.DATMPEG1/2MPEG MP3
*.RMVB, *.RMRealVideoRealVideo, AAC, MP31024 x 576 Max
*.3GPMPEG4AAC640 x 480 Max
Audio*.MP3MPEG Layer-332kbps-320kbps
*.WMAWindows Media Audio32kbps-192kbps
Photo*.JPG, *.GIF
*.BMP, *.PNG
JPG 7800 x 5280 Max


Here are some quirks.
1. The format selection is based on the extension, so one needs to save the file as correct extension to read the file properly.
2. The player seems to slow down due to some reason, especially with Xvid codecs.

I use a Handbrake to transcode the video files to the right codec the player can play.