Internet Explorer 6 on Windows ME…
Last weekend I tried to update Internet Explorer from version 5.5 to version 6 on my dads Windows ME machine.
I am always anxious when installing something new or updated on his machine. This time did not disappoint me, it failed. I would just like to upgrade the machine hardware and OS to something more recent, but with all the special hardware and software installed on it for his visual handicap, I am not that eager to take on that project. Most of the time I am out of the country for work, so if anything would need a bit more time it would take weeks to finish. My dad, due to his handicap, relies on his PC to read news, books and stay in touch with friends and family.
The installer gave the very unhelpful message ‘Set up was unable to install all the components’, the helpful message would have been something along the lines of ‘Set up was unable to install the following components X, Y, Z because we suck at creating proper installation routines and we Microsoft still don’t understand Windows good enough to make it work properly’. That would have made much more sense…
Today I did a bit of searching on this issue, because it always nags at me when these kind of things just don’t work the way they should. It appears we were not the only one hitting this issue.
From the posts I found some people suggest to download the full installation of Internet Explorer 6 including Service Pack 1 (ie60sp1.exe) instead of only the downloading-installer (ie6setup.exe). Sadly enough from the Microsoft download site only the downloading-installer can be downloaded. Using Google I was able to find a number of sites where it could be downloaded, but I don’t trust the kind of sites I was redirected to. Normally the site Oldversions.com is the solution, but I could only find Internet Explorer 6.0 without the Service Pack. So I might download a version from one of those sites anyway and then first try the installation within a Virtual Machine to see it is a proper install kit or something more devious.
Microsoft’s Knowledge base has some articles related to the message ‘Set up was unable to install all the components’;
1. Err Msg: Setup Was Unable to Install All the Components
2. Error Message: Setup Was Unable to Install All the Components
If all goes well I can install it on my dads machine in two weeks time, since coming weekend my girlfriend and I are going to Paris. Hopefully the weather changes for the better, the way it looks now we are in for 4 days of rain…
To be continued….
Updated to BagTips and MailTips
Yesterday or better said early this morning I have updated two of my World of Warcraft Addons, BagTips and MailTips.
I had installed the Addon InfoPanel and from that moment one the tooltips displayed by both BagTips and MailTips did not like right anymore. The names of the items from either a bag or a mail message was displayed using two lines within the tooltip instead of just one. After a bit of searching I found that InfoPanel uses the pipeline character in some displayed text (plugins RaidInfo and Zone).
InfoPanel_SetText(f, "%.1f |cffffff00|||r %.1f", x * 100, y * 100);
Somehow this has an influence of information added to tooltips and fontstrings that use the texture tag to add images to textstring
tooltip:AddDoubleLine( " |T"..value.texture..":0|t "..key, value.count, r, g, b );
It appears that when you are using the method and using the code InfoPanel uses the actual width for the fontstring is not calculated correctly. To quickly workaround this I just add two spaces after the item name like so
tooltip:AddDoubleLine( " |T"..value.texture..":0|t "..key.." ", value.count, r, g, b );
and everything works again as expected.
Now I only need to fix UberInventory, because it has similar issues. Hopefully I can get those issues resolved today as well.
Firefox Addons
Ever since the release of Firefox 3 I seem to a rekindled interest into the Firefox Add-ons out there. Currently I have a total of 10 Addons installed. Here is a quick run down of all of ones I got installed.
This one tries to block adverts from being displayed. Based on filter it decides whether or not a certain image or plugin is considered an adverts and if so it hides (or removes) the element from the page. So you never have to search between the adverts to find the content you wanted to read.
This one I really like. Form my daytime job I need to build web sites from time to time. But not that often that I consider myself to be an expert. This addon got tons of goodies that will help you view the layout of your site, validate your (x)HTML code, switch between style sheets and much, much more.
Just a few days ago I used it to finally make some of my web pages pass the XHTML 1.0 strict test. Of course I could have done it without using the addon, but it surely helped me getting the issues resolved much quicker, than I could have done manually.
To be honest I haven’t used this addon a lot yet, but it looks very promising. What I have seen so far looks nice. Definitely the inspect window is very powerful, on the left you see the structure of your web page and on the right it displays the related style sheet information. Within the style sheet you can see what gets inherited from other parts and gets ignored or has an override.
Combined with Web Developer Firefox becomes a very fully featured development environment for HTML designing/coding.
Just a little neat addon show a country flag for the sites you visit. Very funny to see, certainly when visiting web sites from larger companies, where all of there data centers are located, just as an example
www.oracle.com Finland
forums.oracle.com United States
otn.oracle.com Finland
blogs.oracle.com Singapore
Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer
This one I really love. For my work I travel from customer to customer. Depending on the customer I can either use my company laptop or I need to work on a machine the customer provides me. This is all fine, but every time it is a pain to the bookmarks I need to do my job. Previously I just copied the bookmarks.html file to an USB stick or mailed it to myself. But more often than not I forget to copy or mail the latest version of my bookmarks.
With this addon I can always access my bookmarks. You just add/remove bookmarks within Firefox, press a key and they get synchronized to the server. From another PC you do the same and everything gets nicely synchronized. I have been using it for about a week now and I already find myself
You need to signup for this service to make it work or move it to a private server.
Remove sections from web pages. Useful when you want to print a web page has not implemented a style sheet for printing the page. Using the addon you can remove to side banners and all the other clutter that really does not need to get printed.
ScribeFire is a blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. See also on of my earlier posts on ScribeFire.
Used ScribeFire again to post the blog message ;)
StumbleUpon discovers web sites based on your interests, learns what you like and brings you more. Just as Foxmarks you need to sign up for a service to be able to use it. So far I like it, this has brought me to some really nice pages that I would never have visited. I find myself pressing the ‘Stumble!’ button constantly, just wondering what comes next. It is just like an addiction, you know you need to do other stuff but just can’t wait to see what gem might be lurking around the corner.
Not only does TwitterFox notify you of updates to your friends’ statuses of Twitter, but it also allows to you make posts to Twitter, reply to posts. I am just to lazy to visit all of the individual Twitter pages, now the updates popup when the addon checks for them.
Fake your User Agent. Comes in handy when for instance a certain web site only will show a page when it detects Internet Explorer. Just select ‘Internet Explorer’ from the ‘User Agent Switcher’ menu and revisit the site. None the wiser :).
This addon generates errors within the Error Console of Firefox, but it seems to work regardless.
Social Networking
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