The World According to SAP
Select a country from the list of valid countries. If you don’t select from one of these countries, you will fail to save your expense report, and hours of frustration will go to waste.
The world consists of only 3 countries according to SAP
November 2nd, 2010Ahh, Brings back memories of Win95
October 20th, 2010
Painting the screen with a hung application
Haven’t done that in a while…
IE froze, and anything in front of it was painted on it. Good work SAP.
What the hell is Explorer doing?
October 5th, 2010It is 2010, and yet when I browse a shared drive over the WAN, explorer slows down to a crawl reminiscent of the days when we were trying to FTP things over a 2400 SLIP connection.
Seriously, what is Explorer doing that it takes a full minute to retreive a directory listing of 16 objects? And why must it completely take over the whole computer while it’s doing it?
Worse still is if you are browsing a very large directory listing, and try to scroll. Then it hangs again, and this time, stops painting, so you get a big white square on the screen. And then the Start menu stops responding. And then you can’t Alt-Tab to other processes.
“Oh, well it’s retrieving information about all the files in the directory.”
No. Because when I click on the file, I have to wait another 30 seconds for the context menu to appear.
“It negotiating security priveledges.”
Uh-huh. We are all in the same domain, and I am several levels deep into the directory structure.
Does anyone know how I can browse file-shares over the WAN in this lifetime?
If Facebook existed years ago
October 1st, 2010
SAP error de jour
September 30th, 2010
After asking around, apparently this means that the charge code I was trying to use is not valid.
This one was great. I had blocked myself out, and couldn’t continue.
Spanish Word of the Day: Perroflauta
September 21st, 2010Spanish Hippy. Usually seen playing the flute, and usually accompanied by a dog.
Running gvim in the background by default
September 21st, 2010I am constantly running gvim from the bash prompt within Cygwin, and loosing control of my session. I’d have to quit gvim, and restart it in the background.
Finally got around to fixing that. Put this in your .bashrc:
function gvimBackground() {
/cygdrive/C/Program\ Files/Vim/vim72/gvim.exe $@ &
}
alias gvim=gvimBackground
alias vi=gvim
alias vim=gvim
Using Squid as a centralised Proxy
September 16th, 2010Many programs do not use the built in XP proxy configuration. Firefox, Dropbox, Google Translate Client to name a few.
Moving between networks is a pain, and I had previously tried to automate the task of changing the proxy settings, with mixed results.
Enter Squid.
This article explains how to configure it to connect to an parent proxy that requires authentication.
Make sure you change the http_port parameter to only bind to 127.0.0.1, unless you’re doing something sneaky with your iPad, which cannot use the parent proxy….
Update:
A few more usefull tidbits:
- Install Squid as a service with the -i command line option
- Start and Stop with the
net start|stopcommands - You should modify the ACLs from those in the article linked above. Here are mine:
acl localhost src 127.0.0.1/255.255.255.255
acl all src 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0
acl INTERNAL src 172.28.0.0/255.255.252.0
acl NAUGHTY_STUFF dstdom_regex →
-i "etc/domain_blacklist"http_access deny NAUGHTY_STUFF
http_access allow manager localhost
http_access deny managerhttp_access allow localhost
# http_access allow all
http_access deny all
Mysterious hidden proxy settings
September 7th, 2010Well OK, not mysterious, and not really hidden. And I did cause it, but since I had forgotten what I did, I had a hard time finding it.
Normally, to configure a proxy, you go into Internet Options -> Connections -> LAN settings. At least that’s how you do it on XP; Windows 7 is different.
These settings are stored in the registry thus:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings] "MigrateProxy"=dword:00000001 "ProxyEnable"=dword:00000001 "ProxyHttp1.1"=dword:00000000 "ProxyServer"="http://ProxyServername:80" "ProxyOverride"="<local>"http://support.microsoft.com/kb/819961
I was trying to find a way to modify these settings from the command line, and include it as part of my “fix_routing” script (which needs a write-up). So I tried some stuff, and it didn’t work, and I gave up and moved on.
This weekend, we set up a SlingBox at a friend’s place, and I found that I couldn’t connect to it. TCPVIEW showed the program trying to connect to a bogus proxy, and I couldn’t find this anywhere in the configuration file. Then I remembered my previous attempts, and had to search around for that information again. Luckily, I found it.
There is another set of settings, stored in the WinHttpSettings key. These settings do not show up anywhere. If TCPVIEW is showing that an application is trying to connect to a proxy, and you can’t find where that is configured, try here.
Note: It appears that the REGEDIT search tool will not search inside a REG_BINARY key, which I suppose makes sense. This was why a search of the registry for the proxy address resulted in no matches.
The only way to modify these settings, is via the PROXYCFG tool in the system32 directory.
C:\Documents and Settings\aujaha>proxycfg Microsoft (R) WinHTTP Default Proxy Configuration Tool Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Current WinHTTP proxy settings under: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Connections\ WinHttpSettings : Proxy Server(s) : 10.10.0.229:8080 Bypass List : *.local;*.big.corp;10.10.*;<local>
I zeroed out this key, and things seem to be working again.
First post from the new iPad
September 2nd, 2010Pretty cool so far. Although I did have to do the “error code 9808″ dance