Technology Insights

Windows XP Task Manager Missing Tabs, No Processes, Performance, Networking, or Users Tabs

Insights16 Comments

I was troubleshooting a Windows XP computer that had been brought in to my friends computer shop this afternoon and noticed something odd going on with the Windows Task Manager. The computer had multiple issues including various viruses, Norton Internet Security installed, hadn’t been upgraded or patched for over a year, and numerous other items going wrong. I will say that Norton Internet Security is probably the worst antivirus software I have ever come across because not only does it take over every aspect of your computer but on top of that it doesn’t even save your computer from getting infected by viruses. After getting the computer in working shape by removing Norton Internet Security and beginning the installation of Windows XP patches I launched Windows Task Manager to view something and when I did the list of running applications displayed but I could not click other tabs that normally appear at the top of the Task Manager. Below I display an image of what the Windows Task Manager looked like and how I easily resolved the issue.

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Technology Errors

CentOS Linux: Can’t install RMagick 2.7.0. Can’t find Magick-config

Errors13 Comments

While prepping a development server earlier this afternoon I ran into an issue installing the rmagick gem. This was one of a list of 30 or so gems required by a Ruby project that was being installed onto the development server. I thought initially something else was wrong because I had run into this issue before but I thought I had installed ImageMagick via the yum package manager to resolve the problem. Anyhow after verifying ImageMagick was installed I still had the same issue on the development CentOS Linux server. Below I describe the error in detail along with what was done to resolve the issue.

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Technology Insights

RubyGems ERROR: Error Installing Cucumber, hoe Requires RubyGems version 1.3.1

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While creating a development environment for a Ruby project earlier I ran into an error installing some of the gems required by the project. I realized that I had installed an older version of RubyGems which was causing problems with some of the gem dependents that needed to be installed. Below I list one of the examples of the errors I was running into and how I resolved the issue.

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Technology Errors

Yum Warning: There Are Unfinished Transactions Remaining, You Might Consider Running Yum-Complete-Transaction First To Finish Them

Errors2 Comments

During the build of a Linux development server earlier I performed a “yum update” to update all of the packages after installing CentOS 5.4. I got busy with other tasks and left the server at work without checking to verify that the update had worked properly. Now after dinner I started to get back to work on the server by installing some new packages via yum and received a yum warning message which I describe in greater detail below along with how to resolve the warning.

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Technology Insights

How To Convert .WRF Files To .WMV, AVI, MP4, XVID, or MPEG

Insights66 Comments

Someone sent me a WebEx webcast they wanted me to view this afternoon. The file had a .WRF file ending which stands for WebEx Recording Format which is one of the two file formats that WebEx webcasts are saved as. The other format that WebEx files are saved as is the ARF or WebEx Advanced Recording Format. Typically you could simply download the WebEx Player available by clicking here however you may want to convert this video, which requires the WebEx Recording Editor, to provide to others in a format they can view without having to install an application. It took me awhile to figure out how to convert this file properly since I only seemed to be able to find the older WebEx Editor versions. I finally signed up for a trial account and was able to download version 3 of the WebEx Recording Editor which allowed me to convert to WMV format and from that I was able to convert to any other video format including AVI, MP4, XVID, and MPEG. Follow the directions below to first convert the .WRF to .WMV and then the second set of directions if you want to convert to another video format.

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