Normally when its enabled there’s a hibernate tab to the Power Options Properties where you can enable and disable the feature. The tab only appears if the hibernation facility has been switched on and that is done with the following command.

• Open the Command Prompt
  • Start > Run > “cmd” > OK
• To Turn Hibernation On
  • powercfg.exe /H ON
• To Turn Hibernation Off
  • powercfg.exe /H OFF

Now with hibernation turned on I’m a happy bunny again.

Microsoft Office 2007 encountered an error during setup. The Windows Installer service cannot update one or more protected Windows files.

Well that’s not very useful is it!  I did a bit of searching as you do when you have a problem and came across the solution. The problem, at least for me, was that the unnamed file was missing from my system. The file is fp4autl.dll and the steps I took to solve the problem were…

1. From the i386 directory on the install disc find and open the file  FP40EXT.CAB
2. Find the fp4autl.dll file
3. Copy the file to C:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\40\bin\
4. Restart the Office 2007 installation

That worked a charm and now I can use Office again

If you’re not familiar with SMS Server Tools it’s a really great utility for sending text messages from your PC (I use the term generically) it works on (almost?) all UNIXs and Windows too. It works by having folders which it monitors for text message files and then sending them via the phone. It was very easy to set up just download the source, make, make install, edit the config file and away you go.

I set it up so I could send myself text alerts when I get new emails. I did have it set up last year on my Gentoo machine and I used a bash script to process mail passed from Kmail. This time I’m using my Mac Mini and OS X with Apple’s Mail and a bit of applescript.

The biggest difference between the way Kmail and Mac Mail does things is that Kmail would run the bash script each time a message matched a given rule. Mail passes a collection of messages to the applescript that match the rule.

SMS File Format

The SMS files are just plain text files with unique file names;

To: 447xxxxxxxxx

Message Text goes here

Notice how the phone number you’re sending the message to is international format without the leading + and that there is a blank line inbetween the number and the message text.

The Applescript

This is the applescript I’m using to send the messages. I don’t have much experience with Applescript so anyone who can see a better way of doing things (especially the writing of the file) then I’d appreciate some feedback.

using terms from application “Mail”
on perform mail action with messages theMessages
repeat with theMessage in theMessages — loop through the messages sent by Mail
–Extract the desired details
set theSubject to subject of theMessage
set theSender to extract address from (sender of theMessage)
set MessageRecipients to get recipients of theMessage
set firstRecipient to item 1 of MessageRecipients
set toAddress to ((address of firstRecipient) as string)

–Create the randomly named file
set dir_prefix to “~/sms/”
set the_file to do shell script “mktemp ” & dir_prefix & “tempfiles/XXXXXX”

–Output the message
do shell script “echo To: 447xxxxxxxxx > ” & the_file
do shell script “echo >> ” & the_file
do shell script “echo From: ” & quoted form of theSender & ” >> ” & the_file
do shell script “echo To: ” & quoted form of toAddress & ” >> ” & the_file
do shell script “echo Subject: ” & quoted form of theSubject & ” >> ” & the_file

–Move the text message to the spool directory
do shell script “mv ” & the_file & ” ” & dir_prefix & “outgoing/”
end repeat
end perform mail action with messages
end using terms from

You can download the script from here. You will need to change the directory variables to suit your setup and you’ll need to replace the mobile number with the one you wish to send the messages to. I decided to edit my /etc/smsd.conf to define the spool folders to be in my home directory.

The solution is to use PERL:

• To convert Unix style line endings to Windows style
  • perl -p -e ’s/\n/\r\n/’ < unixfile.txt > winfile.txt
• To Convert Windows style line endings to Unix style
  • perl -p -e ’s/\r$//’ < winfile.txt > unixfile.txt

The use of single quotation marks in both command lines is important because it prevents the shell from trying to evaluate anything inside.

That’s it. A simple way to quicky convert line endings letting you get on with the job.

Turns out, that you can force Internet Explorer (and other browsers) to parse your cascading style sheets strictly by using a strict doctype definition. I used the one below for my project;

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd”>

This was news to me, but welcome, because now I can center my divs in a cross-browser compatible way and move on to other problems like why background images for input elements aren’t loading on https pages (please let me know if you know why).

Oh and if you’re interested in more information http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/ has a useful table of which doctype definitions trigger what behaviour in the popular browsers.

What I really liked is there’s a linux livecd available so all you have to do is burn the disk image stick it in and aside from a few simple commands to boot the cd correctly it loads and starts Gparted.

The main screen looks like this:

You select a drive from the drop down menu in the top right hand corner and the current partitions are displayed with their colour coordinated filesystems. Here my windows partition is first (green) then Gentoo (purple) and finally my swap. Used space appears yellow and free space is white. Select a partition to edit then click on ‘resize / move‘ to see the following dialog:

Its a simple matter of choosing how you want to resize the partitions using the graphical sliders. Once you’ve set up your changes click apply and it’ll go and do all the hard work for you and display its progress as it works.

I used it to repartition space from an ext3 file system with Gentoo on it to a partition with an NTFS file system containing Vista. The whole process took a few hours and I hadn’t defragmented either of the drives or backed up any of my data. I strongly recommend that if you use this utility that you take adequate precautions to backup your data. Or if you’re feeling lucky just roll with it.

As it happens I didn’t lose any thing and Gentoo booted just fine afterwards. Windows, however, was a bit more troublesome. It complained at boot and made me put my installation disk in to ‘repair windows’ which was fine and after a reboot and chkdsk it was fine.

There was a note on the Gparted livecd about not being able to shrink Vista and it sometimes working and sometimes not and a set of instructions for using command line utilities to do the job. I didn’t shrink windows I expanded it but it worked for me.

Have fun

For some reason loads of people are having trouble installing Office 2007 SP1 an update windows considers not optional, nor recommended, but important. Until now I was one of those people. There are loads of forum posts knocking about that recommend reinstalling, repairing the installation and most agree that you need to do these things with the office cd in the drive else you’re screwed. They’d be wrong.

Apparently, you do need a disc in the drive but it doesn’t matter what it is! I actually had ‘Gattaca’ in the drive (a damn good movie).

After a couple of failed attempts I couldn’t believe how simple and bizzare the solution turned out to be. I found the solution here and now I find the fact that it installed without a hitch because I had a DVD in my drive hilarious. There were some forum posts where people claimed to have attempted to install the service pack up to nine times. I think they need to learn how to use search engines better.

Update 20090426
Since I wrote this post the link above is no longer freely accessible the site requires a subscription to view the content.