Issue

Error message “Unable to find Adobe PDF resource file.” “Acrobat PDFMaker” “You must have administrator privileges to install these files. Please contact your local system administrator.”

Resolution

1. To fix this error, launch the Acrobat setup and select Modify
   
2. Uninstall Acrobat PDFMaker
   
3. Relaunch Acrobat Setup, modify, and select/reinstall Acrobat PDFMaker

Background

System was a clean install of Vista (system previously XP), Acrobat was setup and PageMaker was installed. Possible cause of this issue may have stemmed from PageMaker installing Acrobat Distiller 5.0 (Current Acrobat install was Acrobat Professional 7.1).

When using remote desktop connection to connect to a server I recently encountered the “Because of a protocol error detected at the client (code 0×1104), this session will be disconnected.  Please try connecting to the remote computer again.” error. 

The error was encountered after:

• I had just logged into the the server the night before with no issues. 
• Able to login to another server and tried to roundtrip to server in question from another server.  Still the same error persisted.
• Rebooting of my machine did not change the errors.

How to fix:

In your RDP connection window, expand options if they are already not expanded and then select the Experience tab.  Unselect the Themes checkbox (Prior to Windows 7) or Visual Styles checkbox in Windows 7. 

Try logging in again.  The issue should be cleared.

Note: After one login, I was able to click Visual styles and login normal again. 

If you frequently find yourself installing Windows applications for friends, family that has wrecked their computer or because you’re a frequent Windows Beta tester there is a great tool for you.

Ninite

Simply go to the Ninite site and select from dozens of apps and then click Get Installer and Ninite builds you a Windows installer of all the apps you’ve selected.  Much like the simple process of selecting your apps, your installation runs smoothly with little or no prompts.

There are a couple of limitations to the installer – the applications must be on their list and the machine installing must have web access.  However, lucky for us the current selection has a large number of applications unlike Google Pack and it’s extremely limited selection.

The current selection of apps includes:

Web Browsers

• Chrome
• Safari
• Opera
• Firefox

Messaging

• Skype
• Messenger
• Pidgin
• Digsby
• Google Talk
• Thunderbird

Media

• iTunes
• Songbird
• Hulu
• VLC
• KMPlayer
• AIMP
• Audacity
• Spotify

Imaging

• Paint.NET
• Picasa
• GIMP
• IrfanView
• XnView

Documents

• Office (Trial)
• OpenOffice
• Adobe Reader
• Foxit Reader
• CutePDF

Anti-Virus

• Essentials
• Avast
• AVG

Runtimes

• Flash
• Flash (IE)
• Java
• .Net
• Silverlight

File Sharing

• uTorrent
• eMule

Other

• Dropbox
• Evernote
• BumpTop
• Steam
• Google Earth

Utilities

• ImgBurn
• CCleaner
• Launchy
• Revo
• Defraggler
• RealVNC
• CDBurnerXP
• Recuva

Compression

• 7-Zip
• WinRAR

Developer Tools

• Python
• FileZilla
• Notepad ++
• JDK
• WinSCP
• PuTTY
• Eclipse

Have a shiny new Web 2.0 site where you are using just the stock busy / loading graphic (spinner.gif or waiting.gif)?  Why not go with a custom look for free. 

ajaxload.info is a new site that builds customized animated gifs for you.

Simple as 1-2-3!

1. Pick an indicator type from the Web 2.0 style drop down
2. Select your colors
3. Click Generate

Simple!  1 Site – 1 Page!

Spiceworks simply put is an IT/Network Managers best friend. Best of all – it is FREE! Building on Spiceworks strong foundation that allows IT Managers to inventory hardware, software, and other devices via WMI the new Beta 3 now allows it’s built in Help Desk to operate via LDAP and performs testing of your Exchange server. The review on Network World doesn’t do the product much justice because simply put this product is a must have. It easily saves me hours of time and notifies me of any problems that otherwise would have gone undetected. Try it for yourself. I often wonder how I lived without this software before.

Beta 3 – http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/13852
Spiceworks v2.1 – http://www.spiceworks.com/

Do you have an Intranet or a similar web site that requires the use of Integrated Windows Authentication? If so the default Firefox browser settings will always prompt you for a username and password first before accessing a site using Integrated Window Authentication.

Fortunately Firefox has the slick ability to easily modify it’s configuration to use Integrated Windows Authentication.

How to configure Firefox

1. Open Firefox
2. In the address bar type: about:config
   
3. Firefox3.x and later requires you to agree that you will proceed with caution.
4. After the config page loads, in the filter box type: network.automatic
5. * Modify network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris by double clicking the row and enter http://www.replacewithyoursite.com or http://your-intranet-server-name
   
6. * Multiple sites can be added by comma delimiting them such as http://www.replacewithyoursite.com, http://www.replacewithyourintranetsite.com

Package for Large Installs

If you are a network administrator that has a lot of installs to do, you can modify the Firefox installer.

1. Use a tool such as 7-zip to extract Firefox Setup 2.x.x.exe
2. Extract browser.xpi from the setup
3. Edit all.js contained in browser.xpi contained in binjreprefs
4. Modify the entries as in items 4 and 5 above
5. Re-package browser.xpi and use the extracted setup to install Firefox

* Special Notes

To specify all subdomains use .replacewithyoursite.com instead of www.replacewithyoursite.com, help.replacewithyoursite.com, pictures.replacewithyoursite.com

Updated March 5, 2010

Eye-tracking studies are hot in the web design world, but it can be hard to figure out how to translate the results of these studies into real design implementations. These are a few tips from eye-tracking studies that you can use to improve the design of your blog or site.

read more | digg story

Recently Microsoft released Windows Live Writer, a blog authoring tool from its BETA hell to, well, Live.  The tool has a lot of promise and is a vast improvement over the default editor in Community Server.

If you are a corporate user of this software that uses Community Servers integrated login module, you were out of luck, sort of until I discovered a forum post by Telligent employee Kevin Harder.

Windows Live Writer and Integrated authentication – Community Server

Windows Live Writer does not natively support integrated logins at this point and requires a username and password to setup a Community Server Weblog account.  To do this you need to perform one of the following workarounds.

Method A – Manipulating Community Server DB

1. Open IIS manager and drill down to your Community Server installation.  Find the /blogs/metablog.ashx file, right-click on it and select Properties.  Then click the File Security tab, click the Edit authentication button, and check the enable anonymous access checkbox.  This tells your web server to allow anonymous access to just the MetaBlog API service.
2. Now connect to your Community Server database, and find your username in the aspnet_Users table.  Note the UserId value for it.
3. Find the row in the aspnet_Membership table for your UserId.  Update the Password column value to be something that you will remember.  In addition, update the PasswordFormat column to be 0.  If you do not set the PasswordFormat column you will receive an error from Live Writer.  “An error occurred while attempting to connect to your weblog: Blog Server Error – Server Error 0 Occurred” User does not exist, you must correct this error before proceeding.“
4. You should now be able to connect with Windows Live Writer using your username and the password that you chose.

Method B – Using the CS Administration Panel

1. Open IIS manager and drill down to your Community Server installation.  Find the /blogs/metablog.ashx file, right-click on it and select Properties.  Then click the File Security tab, click the Edit authentication button, and check the enable anonymous access checkbox.  This tells your web server to allow anonymous access to just the MetaBlog API service.
2. In your CS administration panel, click the membership panel tab and then Create New Account.  Create an account that you want to connect using Live Writer and assign it appropriate permissions within CS.  No database changes required.
3. You should now be able to connect with Windows Live Writer using your username and the password that you chose.

In either case you need to allow the metablog api control permissions to be accessed by anonymous users.  Method B works around using the existing user and creates an account just for use with Live Writer.

This implementation was tested with Community Server 2007.1 (SQL2005 data store) and Windows Live Writer 2008 (build 12.0.1366.1026).