My Insights

I found myself in a jam when I needed to print a source I had cited for a paper and the publishers of the PDF (source) were overzealous in protecting the file.

As you can see, I could neither copy the text over to a word document and neither could I ‘print’ it to a different format. I tried a few approaches and I’ll list the failures and the successes:

1) FAILURE: Email it to yourself using Gmail and try to print the HTML conversion- this doesn’t work because gmail refuses to convert this file to HTML

2) FAILURE: Use Foxit reader to print the file - Foxit is smart enough to detect the PDF protections and refuses to send the print job to the printer

3) SUCCESS: Use Sumatra PDF reader - This client is light enough to ignore security provisions and seamlessly just agrees to send the print job.

Let me start off by saying that Internet Explorer 7 was designed for Windows XP and above. So why the misleading title? Let me explain with a picture-

I work on a Windows 2000 machine at work and am not sure if I should be proud or ashamed of my dependence on IE 7 on Vista thereby rendering me inefficient on IE 6. I don’t know how I ever lived on Internet Explorer 6. Anyways, since Internet Explorer 7 just refuses to install on my Win 2000 machine, I thought what better way to get tab functionality than to try FireFox?

So I downloaded and installed FireFox and I hate the default ‘theme’ that firefox comes with. I don’t know WHY somebody would go to great lengths to make a theme that looks like the FireFox default theme on Vista. Anyways, I remembered reading on digg about a Vista Theme for FireFox and I decided to check it out. For some reason, I couldn’t find a download link for the theme on devianart and I didn’t feel like poking around.

I ended up using the myFireFox theme available on mozilla’s website and the above screenshot is firefox using the myFireFox theme. Amazing isn’t it?

I struggled today to get Windows Live Writer to work with my blog. I am running Movable Type and I kept getting a 406 - Not Acceptable error. I even tried BlogDesk and when BlogDesk gave me the same error,  I started to think that the error was on my server’s end.

It turns out that the server admins had implemented a fairly aggressive security policy that was preventing remote procedure calls to movable type. To correct the problem, I added a file called .htaccess to my cgi-bin directory with the following content-

<FilesMatch “(mt-xmlrpc.cgi)”>
SecFilterEngine Off
</FilesMatch>

That fixed it!

*NOTE: For some reason, MovableType would not let me “xmlrpc” as a string and I had to use the 7-Bit ASCII equivalent of one of the letters to do it. See http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_ascii.asp for all the 7-Bit ASCII codes.