Create a new file on your desktop, called “officefix.txt”

Paste this into it;

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\OfficeLive]
"FirstRunCredsDeleted"=dword:00000001
"FirstRunDontShow"=dword:00000001

Then rename that file to “officefix.reg”

Double click it to add it to your registry.

Re-run word, powerpoint, or whatever.

Thank me in the comments.

Here’s a picture of the free stuff

If you disable PDF compatibility, it will save, but that’s not good enough!

You may also have a problem in Photoshop, where whenever you try and type on the canvas, it says an unknown error has occured in the font rendering engine or something to that effect. Again, similar error, stupid Adobe.

Turns out if you go to your fonts directory, hit CTRL-A to select all items, then go to the file menu, “copy fonts to” and select a folder on your desktop. Copy all the fonts to this folder, wait till it’s done.

Now go ahead and download a free trial of Font Agent for Windows. And let it analyze all your fonts. It will tell you which fonts are bad.

Go back to your windows font directory, delete the bad fonts. Restart Photoshop, or illustrator, and you should be able to save again.

This comes after probably 6 hours of trying different fixes with the transparancy settings, the font cache, font .lst files, adobe presets deleting, app setttings deleting, etc this is the only thing that fixed it.

Maybe it’d be nice if Adobe included a little “verify my fonts” checkbox and alerted us to bad fonts. That’d probably be too easy though.

Wrong.

Adobe does not support Right to left languages like Hebrew or Arabic. Instead you must purchase the separate “Middle Eastern” version of Creative Suite, Photoshop or Illustrator. There are also a couple plugins available that we found that claim to enable Right to Left typefaces in Photoshop. When we actually found them, it turns out that most are for Mac, or just dont’ work past Photoshop 7. We use CS3, so we were out of luck.

So, after much searching, trying, etc. What did we end up doing? What we should have done in the first place.

We downloaded The Gimp for Windows, created a new artwork, typed our arabic text in, and used a proper Arabic font. Then we saved the item as a 600 DPI psd file and imported it into photoshop. It’s not editable like real text, but, it’s good enough for us.

Might save someone else some hours of frustration. Good luck.

For example:

• Billy wants to visit http://www.mycompanyname.com
• Billy can’t because that particular site is hosted off the external IP of the network he’s on. Gosh, what to do?
• Billy Reads the Howto Setup SPLIT-SPLIT DNS with SBS 2003 DNS Server below
• Billy can now visit http://www.mycompanyname.com because it’s mapped to the internal ip of 192.168.1.1 or whatever your networking scheme is.
• Billy is now happy.

Off we went to Google, to try and find out what we needed; DNS Redirection? No, IP Port Redirection? No, Redirect External IP to Local IP, No. Tiresom it was, searching for this.

Then we decided to try and jump right in to figuring it out. First, we tried doing it at the router level, but none of us are IOS guru’s so this quickly became out of the question. Next we tried running a secondary DNS server on the SBS2K3 Server, and transferring the domain from our live server at the Datacenter in Seattle. This also didn’t work because once the domain was transferred into our secondary DNS on the Windows 2003 Server we weren’t able to edit any of the records. Pitty.

So, on we were to IRC. Ahhh, IRC. Not too many people use it anymore, but usually really cool people are available to help out. After asking in a couple channels we figured out that what we needed to do was set up something called Split-Split DNS. Basically all this is, is the method of running two DNS Servers. One inside your network, and one external to your network. Here’s a Microsoft Article on the subject of Enterprise DNS Design which involves Split-Split DNS. This allows for internal hosts behind NAT networks to see external hostnames as if they are on the internal network.

With a bit more searching we came across this excellent post by Ginger Lime. Using their instructions we have created a simple howto for doing the same thing on your internal domain.

With our little howto, you’ll be able to get this done quickly and easily on your internal windows sbs 2003 domain name server. Please readon for the howto.

First, we’ll have to open the DNS control panel. This is in the main server management console, under the computer management box. Here’s a screenshot. Make sure you enter into the Forward Lookup Zones box.

Now, right click on “Forward Lookup Zones” and click on “Add New Zone“. Like This.

Now you’ll be presented with the New Zone Wizard window. Click Next.

Now, Select a primary Zone for this tutorial.

Disable the storage of the information in Active Directory. Click Next.

Now type in your domain name that you want to resolve internally. Some common ones might be dev.yourdomain.com or www.yourdomain.com or similar. Click Next.

This window will be automatically filled out for you. Just click Next.

Now, make sure you don’t allow dynamic updates. This record is something you should be manually updating only. Click Next.

Your new zone is complete. Click Finish.

Now, Right Click your new zone (external.hostname.com), and select to “New Host (A)”. Let go of your mouse button now.

Now, add your internal IP address to the host, but leave the Name blank. Like this. Also leave the PTR record one un-checked since we don’t need it. Click Add Host.

You should see a message like this pop up.

Click on the Done button to leave this window.

Now you should see a blank host, with the internal IP address you specified during the last section of this tutorial.

Now you’re finished setting up a SPLIT-SPLIT DNS server using SBS2k3.

Go over to a different computer on your network that uses the Windows 2003 SBS Server as it’s DNS Controller, and try a nslookup or ping against the external hostname you’ve just added. If you get ping returns you’re good to go.

Today you’ll make history with Firefox
Are you ready to make history? Are you ready to set a World Record? Today is Download Day. To become part of the official Guinness World Record you must download Firefox 3 by 17:00 UTC on June 18, 2008, or roughly 24 hours from now.

stsadm –o addsolution –filename AbsenceVacationSchedule.wsp
stsadm -o deploysolution -name AbsenceVacationSchedule.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm –o addsolution –filename BudgetingTrackingMultipleProjects.wsp
stsadm –o deploysolution –name BudgetingTrackingMultipleProjects.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm –o addsolution –filename BugDatabase.wsp
stsadm –o deploysolution –name BugDatabase.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm –o addsolution –filename CallCenter.wsp
stsadm –o deploysolution –name CallCenter.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm –o addsolution –filename ChangeRequest.wsp
stsadm –o deploysolution –name ChangeRequest.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm –o addsolution –filename ComplianceProcessSupport.wsp
stsadm –o deploysolution –name ComplianceProcessSupport.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm –o addsolution –filename ContactsManagement.wsp
stsadm –o deploysolution –name ContactsManagement.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm –o addsolution –filename DocumentLibraryReview.wsp
stsadm –o deploysolution –name DocumentLibraryReview.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm –o addsolution –filename EventPlanning.wsp
stsadm –o deploysolution –name EventPlanning.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm –o addsolution –filename ExpenseReimbursementApproval.wsp
stsadm –o deploysolution –name ExpenseReimbursementApproval.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm –o addsolution –filename HelpDesk.wsp
stsadm –o deploysolution –name HelpDesk.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm –o addsolution –filename InventoryTracking.wsp
stsadm –o deploysolution –name InventoryTracking.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm –o addsolution –filename ITTeamWorkspace.wsp
stsadm –o deploysolution –name ITTeamWorkspace.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm –o addsolution –filename JobRequisition.wsp
stsadm –o deploysolution –name JobRequisition.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm –o addsolution –filename KnowledgeBase.wsp
stsadm –o deploysolution –name KnowledgeBase.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm –o addsolution –filename LendingLibrary.wsp
stsadm –o deploysolution –name LendingLibrary.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm –o addsolution –filename PhysicalAssetTracking.wsp
stsadm –o deploysolution –name PhysicalAssetTracking.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm –o addsolution –filename ProjectTrackingWorkspace.wsp
stsadm –o deploysolution –name ProjectTrackingWorkspace.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm –o addsolution –filename RoomEquipmentReservations.wsp
stsadm –o deploysolution –name RoomEquipmentReservations.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm –o addsolution –filename SalesLeadPipeline.wsp
stsadm –o deploysolution –name SalesLeadPipeline.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate

stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs

In order to fix this, I had to do the following:

1. TS to SBS Server
2. Navigate to \\SBS\netlogon
3. Edit the SBS_LOGIN_SCRIPT.bat file in this directory. It should look like:
   

   \\SBS\Clients\Setup\setup.exe /s SBS

   Change it to this:

   @echo off
   rem ==================================================
   rem
   rem Title: Login Script
   rem Author: The Author
   rem Date: April 4 2008
   rem Description: Network Login Script
   rem
   rem ==================================================

   :SBS_SETUP
   rem Default sbs2k3 client setup
   \\SBS\Clients\Setup\setup.exe /s SBS

   WSCRIPT.EXE \\SBS\logon_scripts\rm_sync_ext.vbs

4. Now you have to navigate to My Computer
5. Go to your C:\ Drive
6. Create a New Folder named “logon_scripts”
7. Right Click the folder, select properties
8. Go to the Sharing Tab. Enable Sharing. Call it “logon_scripts”
9. Click OK to save
10. Enter the c:\logon_scripts directory
11. Edit your login script (rm_sync_ext.vbs), which should look like this
    Const sComputer=”.”
    Const HKEY_Current_User = &H80000001 ‘HKCU hive
    Const sKeyPath = “Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\NetCache\ExclusionErrorSuppressionList”’73
    Dim oReg
    SetoReg=GetObject(“winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\” &
    _ sComputer & “\root\default:StdRegProv”)
    oReg.CreateKey HKEY_Current_User, sKeyPath
    oReg.SetDWORDValue HKEY_Current_User, sKeyPath, “.mdb”, 1
    oReg.SetDWORDValue HKEY_Current_User, sKeyPath, “.pst”, 1
12. That’s it. Now you should be able to add more lines to the botton of your script to stop from syncing other file types.

Enjoy!

In the past it’s been a bit of a pain in the ass to replace notepad with notepad2 on your windows xp box. This weekend I decided to replace it on my system with the new release, which now supports .ini files.

I’ve created a package that includes:

• Notepad.exe
• Notepad2.ini
• Msvcr70.dll
• install.bat

Download the installer packet here: Download NOTEPAD 2.0.15 INSTALLER

So, what you need to do, is download my installer package. Modify the notepad2.ini file so it points to where the INI file is located (on my system, I chose to put it in c:\windows). The code in the ini file looks something like this:

[Notepad2]
Notepad2.ini=%WINDIR%\Notepad2.ini
;Notepad2.ini=%APPDATA%\Notepad2.ini

As root, you’ll need to follow these next steps:

Now, you will also need to set some permissions after this, but first, run the install.bat to install notepad2 over your regular files. Make sure to create a backup of notepad.exe if you want to migrate back to using it (not sure why you’d want to, but just to be safe).

You might have to run install.bat a few times until it actually over-writes your file. I find clicking on it about 3 times does the trick. This is because of windows built in security features and not letting “system” files get overwritten. So, click 3-4 times on install.bat, and now you will have notepad2 installed.

Verify that notepad2 has replaced notepad.exe by going to start -> programs -> accessories -> notepad and opening it up. If you go to the Info tab, it should say “notepad2″ instead of “notepad by microsoft” or whatever.

Now, notepad2 will work fine for your administrator, but what if you run as a user? Well, this is where we need to set the permissions. Log off your user account, and login as root again.

As administrator, go to your c:\windows folder, and change the permissions on notepad2.ini and msvcr70.dll to allow “everyone” read and write access. Now logoff of administrator and back into your user, and notepad2 should be replaced and working fine within your user.

Let me know if you experience any issues in the comments and I’ll do my best to help. Enjoy using notepad2 instead of the standard notepad.exe, I know I do!