How-to: Clear Stuck Print Jobs (Windows XP)

Posted on by

At Hope’s Library, 90% of our computer problems in recent memory are printer related. Last week, due to a printer misconfiguration and high printing demand, there were quite a few Windows XP computers with stuck jobs in the print queue causing delays and confusion. Normally you open Control Panel -> Printers, right click cancel, but they refused to delete. Reboot – still there. ARGHH!!

No stress, no worries. When Windows bugs out and gives you attitude, just go turbo.

  1. Run services.msc, or open Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Administrative Tools -> Services.
  2. Find Print Spooler in the list. Stop it.
  3. Open c:\windows\system32\spool\printers\.
  4. Open Tools Menu -> Folder Options. Select “View” tab. Select “Show Hidden Files” and uncheck “Hide Operating System Files (Recommended)”.
  5. Delete all random looking folders.
  6. Go back to Services and start Print Spooler.
  7. Now go back to the misbehaving Printer Queue and gratifyingly delete those suckers!!

Stay tuned… Next, I’ll throw up a batch script that does all this for you – automagically!

IE Bug – iframe Cookies Blocked

Posted on by

At Hope College we use Google Apps and it’s great. Especially the Forms in Google Docs. Create the form using an editor, they give you a snippet of code to include in your web page, and bam! Your form is web 2.0 and the data conveniently gets saved into a spreadsheet.

But what if you want the form to be private? No problem. Specify who can access it from your domain and require authentication. Easy enough.

There’s just one problem – Internet Explorer refuses to load the page after sign in, saying “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage.” All hopes and dreams of easy forms are now shattered. Well it turns out that IE’s overzealous security blocks third party cookies from within an iframe, and yup, you guessed it, the Google Form loads within an iframe.

There are several workarounds, but unfortunately none are ideal:

  1. Add google.com to the list of accepted sites in IE’s security settings for every user using the form. Not realistic.
  2. Just point directly to the form instead of using the iframe to load it within another page. Not always ideal.
  3. Use any other browser in the world. Sure, tell that the millions of people who think Internet Explorer is the Internet. But if your audience is limited to a small group of people, this is possible.
  4. Security through obscurity. Don’t link to the form’s page anywhere on the web. Not a bad idea. For a while. Eventually, though, someone might link to it and a spammer will find it.
  5. Make the form public and do not require sign-in, but lock down the webpage or directory using another authentication mechanism. If your organization uses a single sign-on like Hope College does, with an LDAP server or similar that integrates with Google Apps, this is not a bad option.

The last two solutions are the most consistent means of providing secure access, but still, these methods make the form anonymous. One of the advantages of requiring a sign-on is to track who submitted it. Requiring a name field is fine as long as no one maliciously lies about their identity.

If anyone has a better solution, I’d love to hear it. For me, Google Forms is still one of those not totally usable features of Google Apps.

IE Bug – Floated Links Not Linking

Posted on by

The other day I ran across a silly bug in Internet Explorer 7 and 8 (and probably 6) where my links weren’t actually working, clickable links, but the mouse was turning to a pointer! Bizarre.

It took quite a bit of Googling before I found the culprit – and a solution.

The deal is, when floating div elements, sometimes the anchor link elements flow behind other elements, so links don’t work, even though they may be visible. In my case it was an unordered list of links that made up a sidebar menu.

The solution is simple. Add the style attribute ‘position:relative’ to the main parent floated div as in this example:

<div style="float:left; position:relative;">
<ul>
<li><a href="">link</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

The reason this works is because IE will now correctly order the elements from front to back, but in a real, standards compliant browser, the position:relative attribute is meaningless because float elements are by design relatively positioned.

I’m sure this IE bug has provided hours of frustration for many savvy developers and designers. By no fault of your own, your site becomes useless! And unfortunately, it looks like we’re stuck with this one for a while, since it wasn’t fixed until IE 9.

Oh well. Think of it as job security. And be thankful it’s a simple fix compared to the many other gross IE bugs!

Movie Review: Catch and Release (2006)

Posted on by

View IMDB record

In times of hardship and struggle, when we are weak, that is surprisingly when we are made strong by those who love us. Life changing events can bring out an individual’s best qualities.

Catch and Release is a heartfelt story about such an event, to which anyone who has lost much can relate. It is raw and real, a reminder of how fragile life is and the significant role that friends, family, and strangers play in shaping it. As a tight group of friends try to cope with loss, each one’s struggle becomes deeply personal. In the process, they (re)discover their true selves, while woven through it all is a complex and powerful love story.

I would like to have seen richer character development, but Jennifer Garner (Gray) was perfect and Kevin Smith hilarious, while Timothy Olyphant was interestingly gentle, mysterious, and suave – a refreshing role that I have never seen him play before. However, I disliked Juliette Lewis (not a huge fan anyway), and her character seemed especially out of place here. What in the world was Gray’s fiancé thinking anyway?? Seriously, though, it seemed to throw the focus of the movie way off.

If it weren’t for all the comic relief, mostly from Smith, I think I would have been annoyed and bored, but in the end I appreciated the attempt to make sense of things when life gets messy. That is when one learns who a person really is, and that is what makes this movie such an unexpected gem.