Tech Tips

In a previous post, I described a screen capture application included with Windows, called Snipping Tool.  Since then, I’ve been using it regularly for my screen capture needs. That is, until I realized an interesting flaw: the application, after a few uses, stops working. In Vista, here’s the error message I get:

It eventually appears when you try to launch the tool, preventing you from using it. The advice the dialog offers (restarting your computer and then trying again) is totally unacceptable, in my mind. Because of this problem, I could not rely on the tool – so I instead started using Jing more often. Eventually, I tried to see if I could do something to fix this problem whenever it occurred.

Solution

The solution I found was to kill the Snipping Tool process, and then re-launch it. This way, rebooting isn’t necessary. Simply fire up Task Manager, right-click the SnippingTool.exe process, and select End Process:

Once the process has been killed, you can try re-launching Snipping Tool – it should now start up correctly.

If that doesn’t fix it, and rebooting also doesn’t, you might need to run Office Diagnostics – other users have had success with that.

See Also

• Adil Hindistan’s Blog – Vista snipping tool error
• Forum Post: Snipping Tool/Sticky Notes Cannot Start
• Technet Forum Post: Snipping Tool Fails
• Microsoft Office Help Article: Diagnose and repair crashing Office programs by using Office Diagnostics

Microsoft’s Server operating systems are specifically aligned to offer, above all, top reliability and performance. It is therefore no surprise that Windows Server 2003, at first glance, seems to lack the standard Luna desktop theme that XP users have been accustomed to. Here’s the thing: The feature isn’t missing, it’s just “hidden” by default. Solution Here’s how to enable it:

1) Open the Services Management Console by entering “services.msc” in the Run dialog.

To open the Run dialog, click Start > Run, or press Windows Key + R.

2) Locate the Themes service, right-click it, and select Properties.

3) On the General tab, select the Startup Type dropdown, and choose Automatic.

4) Click Apply.

5) Click OK.

6) Right-click the Themes service again, and select Start.

7) Close the Service Management Console.

8) Right-click on the desktop, and select Properties.

9) On the Themes tab, select the Theme dropdown, and choose Windows XP.

10) Click Apply.

11) Click OK. The Windows XP option, by default, is not listed as an available theme in the Display Properties dialog. When we started the Themes service, the option was added… and there you have it. You can now use the XP theme (Luna), in a Windows Server 2003 environment.

When Microsoft announced their new Bing search engine, I was immediately curious about how it compared to Google. I changed Bing to my default search engine, and tried using it daily. Ultimately, I returned to Google, which always seemed to have slightly better search results – in most cases. Despite this fact, I visit Bing it at least once a day  – but not to search. I visit it daily specifically to see the new background image they are using. They change this background image every day, and each one is usually impressive. In fact, in most cases, seeing it actually makes me want to find out more about what I’m seeing.

As an example, consider the following screenshot:

Great image – the type of image that makes me want to know more. This brings us to the problem, though. Bing doesn’t actually tell you anything about what you’re seeing – other than the copyright information. They do give you more information if you are using the United States version of the site – but I’m Canadian. Not only that, but they don’t have the same images on the United States version of the site. Essentially, this means I’m stuck trying to figure out what the photo is depicting, by myself. I found a pretty simple, albeit manual solution: looking at the source code of the page. The background image filename is actually prefixed with some text, in this case, “CalabriaCoast”:

http://www.bing.com/fd/hpk2/CalabriaCoast_EN-CA1974044658.jpg

Once you have that name, you’re in business – search for that text on the web, and you’ll likely find some informative pages among the top results. Worse case, if you don’t have anything useful on the first few pages, at least you have a lead to work with. In my experience, once you have that name – you have it all. That is, of course, if the picture is of something unique, rather than yesterday’s photo: “Zebras”. If you were interested in where the zebras were, you’d have to guess based on the photo alone.

Now… as for how to actually find that name – I have a pretty quick process. I’ll explain how to do it here – covering the major browsers – but keep in mind, these methods aren’t very elegant – some of them require the use of developer tools. I hope Microsoft eventually makes this easier for regular users… and while they’re at it, people that don’t live in the United States.

How to Find the Bing Background Filename Using Your Browser

Google Chrome 2

Using Google Chrome

1. Right-click the background image.
2. Select “Inspect Element”.

A window appears with the element selected – notice on the right sidebar, you’ll see a URL that is partially cut off. Hover your mouse over this URL, and a tooltip will appear – revealing the whole thing. You can even right-click it, and copy it from there. See the screenshot.

Internet Explorer 8

1. Right-click the background image.
2. Select “Save Background As”.

A window pops up asking you to save the file. Take note of the name it is suggesting, as that is the name of the background image.

Mozilla Firefox 3.5

Using Mozilla Firefox

1. Right-click anywhere on the Bing page.
2. Select “View Page Info”.
3. Click the “Media” tab.

You’ll see the background listed along with other images. See the screenshot.

Safari 4

1. Right-click anywhere on the Bing page, and select “View Source”.
2. Click CTRL+F, and then type in “.jpg” as the search term.

Cycle through the search results – there should only be three. You will find that one of them is actually background image URL.

Here’s a really quick one: I kept getting this error when I tried to launch my recently purchased copy of Fallout 3. I googled around a bit, and while I found people with the same problem, no fixes were available.

Solution

While not an actual solution, I’ve been able to circumvent this problem by closing Steam, and re-opening it. This will allow you to launch the game successfully, but only once. If you quit the game, and try to launch it again, it won’t work. To get it to launch again, simply repeat the process – close Steam, re-open it. I’ll try and figure out how to fix this once and for all.

See Also

Steam Forum Post – Fallout 3 fell over and went boom 🙁

UPDATE January 8, 2023 – Old comments posted to my previous site can be seen here.

I’m sure most of you have encountered this type of error, at one time or another, while using Windows:

It appears when you try to delete a file or folder that is currently in use by an application. To be completely accurate, the file needs to be in use and locked by the application to prevent external edits – the lock is likely the reason we see the error message. Sometimes it is really obvious which application has a locked handle on the file – for example, if it is complaining about a Word document – perhaps the document is still open in Word. Personally, I consider scenarios like that acceptable because they can be solved easily; unfortunately, all too often I get into trickier situations where I can’t figure out which application is holding onto my file. In those cases, I used to just reboot, and that would usually solve the problem. Yet, there were still cases where rebooting didn’t even do the trick.

Eventually, I was tired of struggling in those moments, and began searching for an application that could help – that’s when I found Unlocker. It allows you to remove locks from individual files via an “Unlocker” option within the Windows context menu. Definitely a nice feature… but listen to this – they took it a step further via  a system tray program called Unlocker Assistant. If you encounter the “Access is denied” error while Assistant is loaded, Unlocker will automatically pop up a few seconds after you click “OK”, and it will show you the culprits:

From their interface, you have the option of either killing the process, or unlocking the files themselves – effectively breaking the hold the application has on the file without having to terminate it. Very handy. You can download Unlocker here.

If you’re more inclined to trust Microsoft-sanctioned applications, grab Process Explorer – a Sysinternals app. I didn’t try it for this purpose specifically, but from what I’ve read, it isn’t as simple as Unlocker when it comes to removing the “Access is Denied” error specifically. It serves multiple purposes, whereas Unlocker is specialized.

Lately, I’ve been getting 2-3 of these errors whenever I try to open Firefox:

I tried re-installing it, and also repairing it – but neither solved the problem. After spending some time googling to find a solution, I found a great knowledgebase article from the Mozilla guys themselves. Since it was difficult for me to find, I decided to offer the solution here too. Here’s the description of the problem, from the article:

The term chrome has been used in Mozilla development for 10 years, referring to the that part of the Firefox window that lies outside of a window’s content area. Toolbars, menu bars, progress bars, and window title bars are all examples of elements that are typically part of the chrome. It is in no way related to Google Chrome.

Chrome registration is something each Firefox add-on must do to work in Firefox. While some add-ons come with the appropriate chrome.manifest file, other add-ons rely on chrome.manifest being automatically generated when you start Firefox.

Chrome registration failure can occur when an add-on has come bundled with Firefox and you don’t have system rights to edit files where Firefox is installed. (Thus chrome.manifest cannot be generated.)

As for how I happened, I suspect it was either the fact that I applied a System Restore state recently, or a NoScript update I downloaded was flawed.

Solution

To fix it, I ran Firefox with administrative privileges once – and never saw the error messages again. The Mozilla article offers additional instructions, if that doesn’t fix your problem. See below.

To prevent this error from happening again, you need your system administrator to log on with an administrator account, and run Firefox at least once.

(Windows Vista) Right-click the Firefox icon in the desktop and select Run as Administrator.

If that isn’t an option, you can disable the offending add-on.

3:

1. At the top of the Firefox window, click the Tools menu, and select Add-ons.
2. The Add-ons window will open. In the Add-ons window, click the Extensions panel.
3. A list of installed extensions will be displayed. If you see any extension that you did not install yourself, select it, and click Disable.
4. Above the list of extensions, click Restart Firefox.
5. If the error still occurs, try disabling a different extension.

See Also

Firefox Knowledgebase Article – Chrome Registration Failed

Last night I set up Subversion on my main development machine, which is running Vista. To do this, I followed the steps outlined by Jeff Atwood on his Coding Horror blog. His article was very helpful – it allowed me to install Subversion rather painlessly, despite the few HTML glitches I encountered in his instructions.

This morning, I opened the “Show log” page for a particular file using TortoiseSVN, and noticed one of the revisions I checked in was missing a comment. I right-clicked it, and selected “Edit log message”, wanting to add a comment then and there.  A little text editor popped up, and I typed the message. After I pressed OK, I was hit with this:

Solution

To correct this, I needed to create a file in the “hooks” folder of my Subversion repository. On my system, it was located at C:svnrepositoryhooks. I created a file called “pre-revprop-change.bat”, and I set the contents to this:

rem Only allow log messages to be changed.
if “%4” == “svn:log” exit 0
echo Property ‘%4’ cannot be changed >&2
exit 1

This solution was suggested in the TortoiseSVN documentation.

After saving the file with those contents, I was able to edit the revision comments without encountering the error message.

See Also

TortoiseSVN Users Mailing List: RE: Labels and Comments

TortoiseSVN Documentation: Server side hook scripts

What I’m going to cover now is a pretty minor feature of Windows. I would of skipped this article, but I encountered a few people that never heard of this trick. I’ve personally found it useful in scenarios where I was working with custom file extensions… for example, I knew that a particular file with the uncommon extension “.def” could be opened in Microsoft Access.  The file extension “.def” is not typically associated with Microsoft Access, but I knew it was a valid file.

To explain how the feature works, consider your typical, everyday “Open File” dialog:

In this example, the dialog wants you to select a “.torrent” file by default. Because this is the active filter, you only see files that have a “.torrent” extension in the folders you view.  What if you had a file with a “.abc” extension – and you knew it was a valid torrent file,  just with a different extension? If you wanted to select it, you’d have to change the filter dropdown to “All Files”, and then find it that way. If you had a lot of files in the same folder as the “.abc” file, you’d have to look through the list to find the one you want.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply filter for “.abc” files, even though the dropdown doesn’t have it as an option? Guess what… you can.

Simply type:

*.abc

in the “File name” textbox, and click press Enter.

This is the result:

Notice how the “.torrent” file is no longer visible? This is because we just applied a custom filter, one that told the dialog to only display the files having an extension of “.abc”.  This little trick can be useful when you’re dealing with lots of a files –  it can reduce the clutter and make it easy to find something specific.

Here’s an interesting detail: if you take another look at the filter dropdown, as show in the screenshots, you’ll notice that the filter itself is shown in the name of the dropdown choice. Consider the “Torrents” filter from the above screenshot:

Torrents (*.torrent)

The portion within the parentheses (green font) is the filter that Windows is internally applying when you select the dropdown. All we’re really doing by typing the filter directly in the “File name” textbox is bypassing the limited options in the user interface, likely using the same approach as Windows would had the option been available as a dropdown.

Have you ever been in a situation where you’re not sure why your hard drive is as full as it is, and you wonder what exactly what is taking up the most space? I’m pretty sure most computer users have encountered this before. What I used to do when I hit this problem was look around for big folders on my drive. This ultimately works, but it takes some searching to find the problematic folders – and you’re likely to miss some stuff.

Determined to find a better approach, I looked around for an application that could help me, and eventually found one called WinDirStat that utilized a method called treemapping to help users visualize their disk usage. I tried it out, and was immediately pleased with how it worked.

Here’s how it looks:

Each of those colored rectangles actually represents a file on the hard drive. You can hover your mouse over any one of them, and WinDirStat will reveal the name of the file as well as where it is located. It is also possible to quickly determine which types of files are using up the most space, using the “Extension” frame.

Overall, I’ve found that these features are a godsend when trying to free up disk space. I’m hoping future operating systems comes with this type of application built-in, as everyone I know seems to find this an invaluable tool when it comes to cleaning up a hard drive. It could also be useful in online applications that allow you to store data online, like Dropbox, or other similar services.

When I first tried Steam’s Backup Tool, I was pretty impressed. The tool allows you to backup your games through a Steam interface, and what it does beyond a simple copy-paste is this: it compresses the game files, but also allows you to split the compressed files so that they can fit on multiple CDs or DVDs. It also allows for backing up multiple games in one shot, housing them all within the same set of CDs or DVDs.

I liked the concept, and so I backed up my Left 4 Dead files to a DVD using this method. To my surprise, when I tried to restore the game afterwards, I encountered this error message:

I executed the “steambackup.exe” file straight off the DVD, and got that error right after clicking “Restore Left 4 Dead backup”. Considering I had at least 40 gigs free on my drive, I immediately started to suspect that the Steam Backup Tool was trying to install the files on the DVD, which would never work.

Solution

To get it working, I had to copy the files from the DVD to my hard drive. When I ran the “steambackup.exe” from there, it actually worked fine – proving my theory.

I’m a bit surprised Valve would allow such a bug to exist, especially considering how easy it is to encounter. They could of averted this by simply asking the user which drive to restore the backup to.

Update: It seems this only happens when you try to restore the backup on Vista and Windows 7 machines – XP  works fine. Thanks to Morph for the tip.

Update 2: Better solution is available in the comments section. Take a look at the posts by “Chwynn”.

See Also

Forum post: There is not enough free disk space to run Steam.