Alex Scoble's IT Notes - An Information Technology Blog

Zamzar - Free online document converter

I wrote this blog post a long time ago regarding Microsoft's Project viewer.

Today I found a much better solution. It's called Zamzar and it's a free file conversion service.

They handle many different file types and will convert them to more open standards.

Microsoft Project, Microsoft Publisher, Word, and many others. And it works. I used it to convert a Publisher document to PDF and the results were very good.

Highly recommended solution to the ever pesky problem of dealing with file formats when you don't have the native app required to view it.

Patching is killing Windows (AKA the problem that Microsoft MUST solve in order to remain competitive)

I wrote a blog post back in 2005 on my Computerworld blog detailing 4 things that I thought that Microsoft needed to fix in Windows in order to remain competitive. Unfortunately, the biggest thing on that list, the land of a thousand reboots, hasn't gotten much better.

Right now, one of my main functions at my job is to manage patches for nearly a thousand Windows systems. "Pain in the ass" doesn't even begin to describe the difficulties of patching that many Windows servers and workstations.

First off, you can't do it without an enterprise tool like LANDesk, Secunia, GFI LANGuard, Microsoft SCCM, etc. These tools are big, complex, hard to manage and typically require agents which often have their own issues.

Second, the number of third party apps that you have to track and patch is significant and growing. Because of compliance requirements, some organizations have to assess every single "security patch" for applicability. To do this, you have to know every piece of software that you have installed in areas requiring compliance and you have to regularly search for security updates to all of those applications. Yes, it is as laborious and mind numbing as it sounds. I have a lot of fun at my job, but this area is totally not intellectually stimulating at all.

Third, because of the fact that Windows patches require a reboot, scheduling downtime of critical production systems can be a total nightmare.

I should mention right now that Linux does all of this far better. If you pick your tools right (limit the tools that can't be installed from a repository), you manage all of your patching from one place. Yum for RedHat/CentOS or Aptitude for Debian. If your server is headless (who needs a GUI that takes up all of those resources and adds another 200 packages that need to be updated), patching a brand new server up to current takes minutes and requires ZERO reboots. It's as easy as typing "yum update". Since it can be used to track what security patches are applicable for each system, there's no research that needs to be done on just about anything other than the stuff that you installed from source.

Linux is quite simply light years ahead of Windows in this area. It is probably the main reason that I'm getting into Linux so much of late.

It sometimes takes over an hour to install a service pack on a Windows server. I can build up a new Linux server and fully patch it in less time. In fact, I can build up a new server with the LAMP stack, install an app on top of that (for log management, for instance) AND fully patch it in less time.

It's no wonder that Microsoft's share of datacenter systems has remained weak and will continue to slide. This situation is unacceptable. Even with clustering, which is expensive, hard to maintain and requires a lot more hardware, Microsoft can't maintain the kind of uptime that Linux is able to. Because guess what, patching invariably BREAKS your cluster.

On Windows 7, it can take over an hour to fully patch a new laptop or workstation and thats with SP1 already installed.

Even a shark with a congested nose can smell the blood in the water.

Linux administrators are able to perform patch management on their systems without buying expensive tools, without wasting a lot of time performing CVE and NVD searches for their apps, with a minimal amount of downtime and with significantly lower risk to their systems. Not to mention that it's much easier to deal with patching of systems isolated from the internet because you can build your own repositories.

Microsoft will continue to bleed marketshare and loyal customers like me until they solve this problem.

It will likely take a complete rewrite of Windows to do it, but given that the survival of the company depends on it, at least in my opinion, it would be stupid of them not to do it and soon.

I won't hold my breath though.

Fix for Word not properly displaying Visio drawing lines

I work with Word and Visio a bit for incorporating network diagrams into documents. By default, Word will munge dashed lines of a Visio drawing when the drawing is embedded into Word and this is of course highly annoying when you are embedding Visio drawings with dashed lines into Word.

After some searching I found out that this is known behavior because of the way that Visio saves longer lines to save space, but there is a registry hack to fix the problem.

Go into the registry and 

Locate, and then click the following registry key:
Visio 2007 - HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Visio\Application
Visio 2003 - HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Visio\Application

On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value. Type MetafileDashLineAsSolid, and then press ENTER.

Make the value of that key 1 instead of 0 (2 is the default behavior, but 1 fixes the problem) and there you have it.

Now when you insert Visio drawings into Word as embedded objects, your dashed lines will show up correctly and will print properly as well.

This fix is based on the information in the Microsoft KB 837294 article.

Add Outlook 2003 Desktop Icon

Used to the behavior of the Outlook desktop icon from versions previous to 2003? Where you could right click on the icon and select Properties in order to change mail server settings and profile settings.

By default, Outlook 2003 no longer creates this icon on the desktop, but makes you use the icon created in the Start Menu instead.

Here's how to create the icon on your desktop (click here for original Microsoft Office Article):

To re-create the Outlook desktop icon

1. On the Add/Remove Registry Entries page in the Custom Installation Wizard or the Custom Maintenance Wizard, click Add.
2. On the Add/Modify Registry Entry page, complete the fields to create a new registry key:
   • Root: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
   • Data type: REG_SZ
   • Key: SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace\{00020D75-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
3. Select the Create empty key check box.
4. Click OK.

Word missing "Excel Workbook" in "Insert File" "Convert from" types?

Ever run into a situation where you want to insert another document or file, using Insert->File, into a Word document, but the document type isn't listed?

Chances are, the proper file for converting that type of document is missing from the \Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft\TextConv file.

Had a user that was missing several of the files, but in particular, the excel32.cnv was not there, which meant that she couldn't insert Excel workbooks into Word. Insertion of Excel workbooks into Word as "objects" still worked, however, as this is done through a different mechanism.

Anyhow, the fix was to copy the excel32.cnv, plus any other missing converters, from a working system to the problem system.

My Post Today on ComputerWorld - Microsoft Announces More Open File Format for Next Office

Made a post tonight on my ComputerWorld blog about Microsoft's big Office file format announcement. You can click here to go to the post.

How to Crack, Unprotect or Remove Document Protection in Word

Ever run into situation where someone sends you a read-only password protected Word document, but wants you to make changes?

Here's how to crack it if you are using the newer versions of Word:

If you are using office XP or 2003, you can change the view to HTML-Code using Microsoft Script-Editor by pressing the [Alt]+[Shift]+[F11] key combination.

Search for "Password" and you will find somethimg like this:
  <w:DocumentProtection>ReadOnly</w:DocumentProtection>
  <w:UnprotectPassword>19E8E61E</w:UnprotectPassword>

To remove the protection:
  -Just remowe those two lines, and after saving the document , the protection is gone.

To remove the password:
  -replace the Password, here "19E8E61E", with "00000000", save the Document and close "Script-Editor".

Alternative you can save your document as .html and use a html-Editor.

Now if I could only figure out how to crack protected Acrobat files.

Note that this does not work for File Open password protected Office files. Office encrypts the files with a 40 bit key for this type of protection. To break that you have to use either a brute force password hacker or a decrypter that tries all possible key combos until it finds the right one.

There's actually a free command line utility, named GuaWord that will decrypt Word documents. Keep in mind that it takes a few days to go through all the combinations to find the right one.

There are also other 3rd party tools to do the same thing that cost from between $30-60 dollars for a single system license.

Thoughts on Firefox

I've been trying out Firefox for about a month or so now.

I've got to say that it's a pretty good browser. Certainly seems to have less problems with spyware, popups and the like than IE.

But lately, I've been reminded about why I switched to using IE after 5 came out in the first place. When I use IE, that's all I need to use. When I use Firefox, there's plenty of websites out there that I still need IE to use properly. Some examples are Windows Updates, the web interface of our Netscreen firewall, the Trend Micro online virus scanner, and Yahoo Games.

So while Firefox is in many ways the better browser, it certainly isn't the more standard browser. Everyone makes sure that their sites work for IE (if you don't you shouldn't be building web sites, unless you want most of the people of the world to NOT visit your site) but not so for Firefox.

Having said that, I will continue to use Firefox where I can, but anyone who makes it out to be the end all-be all web browser is smoking some good stuff and needs to look at the facts instead of just wallowing in their emotional response to Microsoft.

Word Printing Behavior

Some days I wish that Microsoft would purchase WordPerfect from Corel and incorporate a lot of the structural features of it into Word.

In Word 2003, if you print to a printer other than the default printer, the next time you go to print a document, Word defaults to the same printer instead of the default. This behavior is different from WordPerfect and from Word 97, I do believe.

If anyone knows how I can change this so that Word only uses the non-default printer for the specific job required, I'd appreciate it a lot.

Language Keeps Changing in Word

As much as I like Word, it really does cause a lot of headaches for everyone that uses it and through them, me.

Latest issue that's popping up...Word documents with some words or all the words set to a language other than English - US, such as French or Spanish.

This really screws up the spell checker, as you might imagine and it's not exactly intuitive on how to fix it (hint, you can't change the language setting through the spellchecker).

Select the whole document, go to Tools->Language->Set Language->select English (US) and select OK.

Now the question that I have is this, if the normal.dot is set to English (US) why would Word ever change the language of a document based on normal.dot.

I don't know, maybe these sorts of "features" creep into Word and cause problems because the Office team is giving users what they want instead of what they need.

What my users need is a word processing application that always works and that does EXACTLY what the user wants it to do, when they want it to do it, nothing more, nothing less. Word is generally stable, but fails on the second parts. WordPerfect seems to do better on the second parts but fails horribly when it comes to stability (pro viso for this is that I have used WP 8, 9 & 10).

Unfortunately, Microsoft is pretty much now the only game in town when it comes to word processing.