Windows

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How to properly zoom in Word and Excel – Ctrl+[+] and Ctrl+[-]

2017/08/15
By
Modified: 2017/06/25

    This is cool!   This is fresh!  Make your Word and Excel to respond to human zoom commands like normal applications. In most modern applications you can zoom in and zoom out current window using fast Ctrl + Plus and Ctrl + Minus keyboard shortcuts.   Not so in Word and Excel.  Even in the latest ones – from Office 2013 – you do not have this functionality.  Finally, finally here in this article you learn how to do it with macros.  Word partial idea was published before on other site (see below), but Excel technique uses new and exciting macro.   WORD To make keyboard combinations Ctrl+[+] and Ctrl+[-] to work in Word…

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PHP chokes server with TEMP files – Updated and Solved

2017/08/11
By
Modified: 2017/07/22
FastCGI Settings

I am running PHP on IIS 7.5.   This is a Windows 2012 Server.  Fresh clean install every time. The only way to access and delete these TEMP files are by using  a command prompt.  And this deletion procedure will run for several DAYS . . .   The Problem The story goes like this.  Fresh new instance of a Windows 2012 Server is great.  It runs fast and smooth.  But after 5 or 6 months MySQL service having hard times to start up.  And a little later – couldn’t start at all.  The only way I can make it run is to start it from a command prompt.  And finally the whole server just slows…

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WordPress: Image Editor is not loading in IE under tight security

2017/08/09
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Modified: 2017/06/25
WordPress - Image Editor is not Loading

Let’s say you have a very thigh zone security setup in IE.   All Internet sites are set to High security level, and  Trusted sites are set a Medium-High. In that case you might experience a painful WordPress problem – Image Editor is not loading in IE.  It is getting stuck on a dark loading image. Symptoms: when you click on Add an Image or Edit Image buttons, all you see is your screen is darkening and running image in the middle imitating loading is staying on, forever. To solve this problem without killing your security settings add site about:blank to you trusted site list and here we go – problem is solved!

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Win 7 and Win 8 – How to Rename All System Directories
(and W2K8 Server, and R2, and XP too)

2017/07/30
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Modified: 2017/06/25
Multiple Windows Installs on One Drive

If only you could control names of directories, where Microsoft installs Windows, Data and Program Files. If you could, you  would be able to  install multiple instances of operating system on the same drive.  So. let’s do it anyway.  To do that you need two parallel installs of you favorite operating system on the same computer.  For now it has to be on 2 different drives.   You need this so you can manipulate locked files and directories of one install, while booting into the other one. Disclaimer This article applies to any Microsoft operating system, and uses the most complicated Windows 7 64-bit as an example.  This method was also tested…

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Resolved: The system cannot find message text for message …

2017/07/28
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Modified: 2017/06/25
NewCMD-Bad

What a pleasure to resolve a long standing problem.   And not by an accident.   No.  But by applying a heavy-duty problem-solving pressure tactic.  This is gold, Jerry, gold!  Can I use it? At some point you are so fed up with a problem, you are ready to tackle almost anything. Ever since Vista and Windows 2008 Server, if you rename cmd.exe for security reasons, you wouldn’t be able to see any messages in a Command Prompt, and what is even worse, you wouldn’t see any error messages. Instead all you see is something like this: The system cannot find message text for message number 0x2350 in the message file for Application.…

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Remotely Power Up or Wake Your Wired PCs Over the Internet

2017/07/26
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Modified: 2017/06/25
Power-Up

Idea – Reduce Noise, Save on Electricity My electric company installed an electricity consumption gadget, and ability to monitor usage online. A few month into the experiment I realized, that I can easily reduce electric usage, if I turned off my server. It is been over a year since I migrated all my sites to Amazon cloud, so now my server only needs to be on, when I need it on. All the nights and 90% of all work hours it can be off.  But how to do that? I recall seeing something in BIOSes of Intel motherboards called Wake-On-LAN.  First time I saw something like this was in May of…

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Apply Color Scales Conditional Formatting to Multiple Rows in Excel

2017/07/24
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Modified: 2017/06/25
Excel - Color Scale Conditional Formatting

When you might need to apply color sales Conditional Formatting to multiple rows in Excel using a Macro?  We found that is most useful, when you have a perfectly arrange row-by-row conditional formatting, and you are trying to insert a new row.  You can try to fix the resulting formatting rules mess manually, or use this macro to set all formats in the range. First you n first row need to select the range were your conditional formatting will apply and clear all formatting rules. Next, you need to setup proper color scale conditional formatting in the first row of the range. Now, you should create a name range to reference…

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Read Registry value into a batch variable

2017/07/06
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Modified: 2017/06/25
Rue-Sainte-Catherine--2015-

Before I forget, let me share with you a fantastic way to read values from Registry into a batch file variable. Say you need to determine, what is the date format of this machine.  Normally you would read a value from HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\International like this: REG QUERY "HKCU\Control Panel\International" /v sShortDate   That command will produce an output similar to this: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\International sShortDate    REG_SZ    M/d/yyyy But you do not need all that.  All you need is the string  “M/d/yyyy” (or “yyyy-MM-dd”).  To get just that string you need to skip to a second line and read third field on the last line.  How you can do that in a batch…

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SQL DB2: Concatenate TEXT from multiple records

2017/06/30
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Modified: 2017/06/25
Concatenation Road in Winter

    Scenario   Here is a recipe on how to concatenate a field from multiple records into one field. There are two pre-conditions for this method to work: First. Your source file needs to have an equivalent of a line number field.  This should be a numeric field indicating the sequence in which to concatenate the records.  This field doesn’t not need to be  consecutive. Second. The difference between lowest and highest line numbers should be a reasonably low number.  In this example the max difference is 11, and it means that at the very maximum we would need to concatenate 11 text fields together.   Step One Generate a driver file with MIN…

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Block PC Outbound Connections on Router Level (All but RDP)

2017/06/27
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Modified: 2017/06/25
Router-Open-Ports-for-RDP-3389

This article applies to a scenario, when you already can establish RDP to a machine on your internal network from a remote network.  Now you’ve decided to tighten security screws and close all external access to and from that machine except for RDP on the router level. Inbound connections to a server you can block easily using firewall on the machine itself.  This article deals with a situation, when you need to block access for any process or application running on your server to the external resources.  Other machines on your network still would be able to make external connections through the router. Note: It is good a practice to change…

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Properly Validate TextArea Length (IE vs. Firefox)

2017/06/26
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Modified: 2017/11/12
TextArea Length - Firefox

Let’s consider this example, where HTML page has a TEXTAREA and an INBOX.  When user types inside TextArea, Inbox should show the length of TextArea string. <script type="text/javascript"> function TTLength(objTT){ var tt= document.getElementById('TXT1'); tt.value = objTT.value.length; } </script> <textarea onKeyDown="TTLength(this);" onKeyUp="TTLength(this);" rows="10"> This Text Area Contains a string With Newline Characters </textarea>  <input type="text" id="TXT1" value="TT Length"/> Let’s see how this page behaves in IE8 and in Firefox 3.6.11. IE8 Firefox As you can see that IE and FF return two different values for the length of an identical  string in TextArea and that could be a serious problem, if you are trying to validate the string length before updating the…

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