Archive for the ‘software’ Category

« Older Entries

Erroneous “This modification will affect transactions from closed periods…” prompt in Quickbooks

Friday, May 8th, 2015

I was highly disappointed to discover that a current version of QuickBooks will give this error message:quickbooks-depends-on-computer-date-format

 

 

If you have your Windows user date format set differently from the other users of QuickBooks – I assume that it would work on some days and not others! At this particular client’s site, 2 users were using a mm/dd/yyyy date format, and the 3rd, the person who couldn’t make postings, was using dd/mm/yyyy. I was able to triage this to a Windows user issue, since other QuickBooks users using this fellows Windows login also were not able to make postings.

It took a few tries while searching Google to find the magic search terms to confirm that I wasn’t the first to find this particular issue.

It is 2015, I would have bet that a very common software package from a large firm would have had time to learn to convert dates to a single standard, maybe UTC,  prior to applying business logic. But… I would have lost that bet with QuickBooks.

Meh, I guess this gives us something to point to when people find bugs in our websites. :)

Tags:, , ,
Posted in annoying, software | 1 Comment »

Google Drive broke itself? Deleting the user settings…

Monday, February 2nd, 2015

About 3 weeks ago, I think Google Drive tried to update itself and broke itself. This happened on multiple computers running at one of our client’s businesses. These were Windows XP Pro computers, in Workgroup mode, and the users are running in Limited User accounts. I’m not 100% what the trigger to the problem was – it didn’t seem to be a  wide spread problem, since, my brief web searches on the topic didn’t turn up anything recent.

I tried an uninstall and re-install of Google Drive, but that didn’t work. In hindsight, I should have tried disconnecting the drive from a Google user account, and then re-connecting it.

What I actually did was to delete the Google Drive user level files (and, as it turns out, the settings). As far as I can tell, this seems to reset the software. It looks like Google Drive doesn’t really use the Windows Registry – this makes sense, it makes it easier share code across platforms like OSX or Linux (if such clients exist).

So, I renamed this folder, to “break” Google Drive:

C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Drive

I think Windows Vista and later would have it here: C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Drive

 

Upon re-opening the Google Drive client, I was prompted to do the initial setup. And after entering the Google Account username and password, and pointing to the original drive folder, it started to work. There was an initial sync check, where all the files were compared to the cloud copy, and then a prompt to correct any discrepancies.

I’m not impressed that this happened, it makes me wonder about all these automatically updating programs, like Chrome (which has also caused me grief after an automatic update).

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in annoying, software, windows | No Comments »

Free way to trim a WMV File

Friday, August 12th, 2011

The other day I wanted a 5 minute segment from a WMV, Windows Media Video, file. To be more precise, the codecs used are WMA2 for audio and WMV3 for video, according to VLC.

My normal tools of choice for taking clips from video are VirtualDub, and Avidemux. Unfortunately, both of these tools failed on the WMV file. Both could preview the input file, but neither was able to create a new video file that worked. I tried both the fast “copy” method, and the full re-compress method. This didn’t surprise me too much, neither application is known to work very well with Microsoft WMV files, and I think I’ve run into this issue in the past. Both work great for AVI, MP4, and various other files that I’ve worked with over the years.

I really wanted this video clip, so I did some searching for some new tools to use.  I found AsfBin, which is free for non-commercial use. It worked like a charm.  The preview window seems a bit quirky for me, but the resulting file works fine, so I’m happy.

 

 

Tags:, , , , , , , ,
Posted in annoying, software, video | No Comments »

Whoops. The Perceptus Forums needed some fixing.

Sunday, August 8th, 2010

Whoops. The login pages to the Perceptus Forums, has been broken, probably for a while – it’s a quiet forum, it was easy to miss.

Anyway, it has been fixed. It’s too bad we don’t get frequent posts, or else we would have noticed earlier.

Tags:, ,
Posted in downtime, software, support | No Comments »

Explorer.exe Crashes After Selecting a Large HuffYUV AVI File

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

I’m playing with massive 20GB-90GB video captures from the TV tuner. You learn a few tricks when you start playing with 50GB files. It’s mind boggling, only a few years ago, the hard drive in my day-to-day computer was not this big!

Anyway, they’re HuffYUV compressed AVI’s. HuffYUV is a neat codec for video capture, it’s lossless, and it’s fast. I am transcoding these files to MPEG4 on the computer downstairs, but, Windows’ explorer.exe kept crashing every time I highlighted the .avi. It was either the massive file size, or something with the AVI. It turned out to be the code, HuffYUV, I think.

Installing ffdshow tryouts, which includes a multitude of codecs for Windows, including HuffYUV, seems to have done the trick! Plus, I’ve probably updated a whole bunch of codecs that were several years old on that computer.

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in annoying, software, windows | No Comments »

« Older Entries