• Fix for Excel 2007 Not Printing Embedded Chart Titles

    The other day, I was trying to print some Excel 2007 worksheets that had my data at the top of the sheet followed by charts made from the data below. The charts had titles included, which showed up fine in Preview, however, when I actually printed, the titles were missing! Very strange indeed!

    After some digging around, it seems that Office 2007 Update KB2596596 is the cause of the problem. At first, the only solution I was able to find said to uninstall this update and that would fix the Excel printing problem, but I wasn’t satisfied with that.

    After some further digging, I found out that Microsoft has released a Hotfix that fixes the problem. (In Microsoft parlance, a Hotfix is a patch that will fix an issue that hasn’t undergone a full suite of testing.) KB2597962 can be requested from Microsoft (i.e. they’ll send you a download link in email, since it’s an unsupported file) by going to the KB2597962 article and clicking on View and Request Hotfix Downloads. Fill out the form and acknowledge the fact that the Hotfix hasn’t been fully tested, and you’ll have a shiny download link in your inbox in no time.

    For what it’s worth, I installed the Hotfix on five machines and it has caused me no trouble at all.

  • Installing Debian 6 on an Asus Eee PC 1015PE from a USB Flash Drive

    I used Universal USB Installer to put a copy of Debian 6 on an old 2GB flash drive so I could install it on my Asus Eee PC 1015PE netbook. I stuck the flash drive in the USB port and fired up the Eee PC. It proceeded to boot to Windows, even though the flash drive had been detected by the BIOS. I had already went to the BIOS (via F2) to make sure my first boot device was set to Removable Device. I rebooted, went back into the BIOS, and disabled the hard drive as a boot device. This time, instead of booting from the flash drive, I now see a message telling me to insert a valid boot device. I took the flash drive out, stuck it in another machine, and turned it on. The other machine boots into the Debian installer just fine. What’s a geek to do?

    Since the netbook has an AMI BIOS, I tried an old-school trick that AMI has favored for years. It turns out that the 1015PE has an undocumented feature (not listed on the BIOS screen): If you hit escape at the BIOS screen (repeatedly works best), it’ll bring up a one-time boot menu that lets you select from valid boot devices. My flash drive was listed there! I selected it, pressed enter, and after about a 20 minute install, my 1015PE is happily running Debian 6.

  • Free Utility to Generate MD5 and SHA1 Checksums in Windows XP/Vista/7/8

    It turns out that some time ago, Microsoft released a free command line utility called the File Checksum Integrity Verifier for generating MD5 and SHA1 checksums. Best of all, it’s really small (at less than 84 kilobytes) and doesn’t require installation (i.e. can be run from a flash drive).

    Microsoft is clear that this is an unsupported utility, but there’s no need for support as it is really easy to use. It will in no way modify your files! To generate MD5 or SHA1 checksums for a file, do the following:

    1. Download the fciv.exe file.
    2. Open a command line by pressing Windows Key and R at the same time, typing cmd, and pressing Enter.
    3. cd into the folder where you downloaded fciv.exe to.
    4. To get an MD5 Checksum for a file, type fciv pathToFileYouWantToCheck (refer to this post for an easy way to copy a file path that can then be pasted here)
    5. To get an SHA1 Checksum for a file, type fciv pathToFileYouWantToCheck -sha1

    Happy Checksuming!

  • What to do if you can’t update your Android SDK Tools because “folder failed to be renamed or moved”

    I got up bright and early this morning to update my Android SDKs (during HughesNet’s all-you-can-eat bandwidth time between 2am-7am). Much to my dismay, the Android Tools wouldn’t update from revision 15 to revision 17 because “a folder failed to be renamed or moved.” I have not had this problem updating in the past, so I was stumped.

    The folder that failed to be moved ended up being the tools folder in the Android SDK directory. The problem was that SDK Manager.exe had launched tools\android.bat which uses a whole bunch of files in the tools folder. Of course Android can’t move that folder if the program (and it’s dependencies) doing the updating are in the folder to be moved!

    Luckily the solution to this turned out to be really simple:

    1. Go the the android-sdk folder (wherever that may be on your system).
    2. Make a copy of the tools folder (my copy was called tools – Copy).
    3. Open the folder that is a copy (i.e. tools – Copy).
    4. Launch android.bat from that folder.
    5. The updater will launch and update whatever you tell it to.
    6. After the updates are finished, close the updater.
    7. You can then delete the tools – Copy folder and launch the SDK Manager like normal.
    8. Observe that everything updated.

    Such a simple solution to a goofy predicament!

  • February 14 is Not Just Valentine’s Day…

    …it’s “I Love Free Software Day” too. If you don’t know much about free software, click the lovely banner to find out more!

    I love Free Software!

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