Sheryl's Blog

In the old days, before everyone had a personal computer, paper appointment books provided a permanent record of what we did when. Sometimes that’s useful – sometimes you need to refer back. Today, I use Outlook on the PC and Pocket PC to keep track of my appointments. And when things are electronic, there is the potential for problems.

I have a recurring weekly appointment in Outlook, and I wanted to change the time of the appointment. That should be easy, right? You’d think you could change all the times going forward? But noooooo. Outlook warns you that if you make a change, all exceptions will be lost. But actually, it’s worse than that. It changes the time of every appointment – including appointments that occurred in the past. Happily I found a workaround.

Continue reading ‘Change Outlook Recurring Appointments without Losing Your History’ »

I use the open source, instant messaging client Pidgin to connect to multiple IM services at once. From my home computer, I had no problem configuring the program to work with AIM, SMS messaging (my cell phone), MSN Messenger, Google Talk, and Yahoo Messenger. But at work I encountered firewall problems with the last three.

Here’s how I was finally able to connect (listing only the changes from the default). I’m running Pidgin 2.5.2. All the setting changes are on the “Advanced” page of the account setup dialog. Of course, what worked for me might not work for you, but hopefully it will help.

Continue reading ‘Configuring Pidgin from Behind a Firewall’ »

I’m still trying to decide how I will use this blog, now that computer technology is no longer my main focus. But yesterday I installed the latest Wordpress software, imported posts from my old MovableType blog, and wrote an .htaccess file to preserve the old MT links, so I have computer technology on the mind. Here are two great utilities – one for programmers, one for everybody.

What Color Is That?

I use Dreamweaver 8 (Macromedia version) for Web development and while I like it a lot, it’s a resource hog – so much so that I can’t launch my bitmap editing program at the same time to access its color selection feature.

I wanted a color selection program with a tiny footprint – something that does everything I need but nothing more. After looking at over a dozen of them, I finally found one that’s just about perfect – all the more so because it’s free: Color Cop. (Voluntary donations are accepted.)

Color Cop lets you identify any color on the screen, enter a color code to see what it looks like, use a standard Windows color selector to find a color, determine whether a color is Websafe, snap to the closest Websafe color, and sample colors using multi-pixel averages. It’s nicely designed, intuitive to use, and the entire executable is just 96K.

The elegance of Color Cop reminded me of another very elegant program I found that has nothing to do with programming.

Continue reading ‘2 Elegant Little Programs’ »

Ever since Microsoft pushed Version 5 of Windows Update onto my XP SP1 system, I have been unable to access Windows Update – until just now. I found it!! I just accessed Windows Update and successfully downloaded and installed updates to my system.

The particular error message I was getting was 0×80072F78 (appeared when Windows Update tried to find the updates for my system), but I think this solution will fix the problem on systems getting other error messages as well. If your error code starts with “800″, I think there’s a good chance this solution will help.

Continue reading ‘Fix for Windows Update 5 Errors’ »

To select wisely from the blizzard of options, you must understand the basics.

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This is an expanded version of my article in PC Magazine on creating an online store, posted here due to popular demand. I received many requests from readers for additional information.
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Online stores have become an essential element of doing business, but selecting wisely from the blizzard of options is difficult without an understanding of the basics. Depending on your choice, you can pay anywhere from 2% to 20% of each sale, not to mention monthly, annual, and startup fees.

Continue reading ‘Creating an Online Store’ »

My article on XP’s Windows Error Reporting system for O’Reilly’s WindowsDevCenter.com was targeted towards end-users, so a developer section on how to get crash reports on non-XP systems didn’t really fit. Still, it’s interesting for developers, so here is the section that was cut. For background, please refer to the published article.

Continue reading ‘For Developers: How to Get Crash Reports on Win9x/2000’ »

This article was originally posted in a MovableType 2.661 blog – now imported into WordPress, which is much easier to use.

The Web Log you are now reading was created with a server-based publishing system called Movable Type. Installing server-based software isn’t difficult, but it requires many more manual steps than installing a program on your local computer. Before you can run an installation script, you must first put the files in the correct places on the server, set the correct permissions, manually create any necessary databases, and correctly specify configuration parameters.

This is not hard to do if the software comes with precise, complete, and clearly written instructions. But unfortunately, the Movable Type installation docs are not as good as the software itself. So my first blog entry is a tutorial on how to install Movable Type, focusing on the parts that were unclear to me when I was doing it.

Continue reading ‘How to Install Movable Type’ »