Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

This is an “interesting” one- particularly if you manage a lot of windows pcs in a domain, so you have domain users and local users on your pc…

I started getting complaints from people that the spell-checker in word didn’t work. What they meant was that the spelling and grammar options simply weren’t available to them. I checked that the language was set, and found that it wasn’t, and not only that, but it didn’t seem to persist if I did set it, even if I set it as the default. When I tried to close the document after some time messing around with it, I got a message telling me that I had tried to make a change to the normal template but that I didn’t have permission to do that.

In a bit of a light-bulb moment, I temporarily set Domain Users on the pc to be members of the local Administrator group. That worked- suddenly all the spelling and grammar options were available. Now I just have to dial back that security setting until I can allow people to check spelling and still keep my IT boss happy!

Well, there was I just working away in the office, on my super-cool portable GIS setup, doing some work on a postgresql-driven database all working nicely on the USB stick. I should say that this has been working just fine in both my home (Vista) and office (XP) environment for months now.

Time came to head off home, so I stopped everything, ejected the stick nicely, took it home and went to start working on it again… only for postgresql to refuse to work. “Access Denied”, it said. “What do you mean, Access Denied?” I said. “Access Denied”, it said. So I tried it on my hubby’s Win XP machine. “No Problem”, it said. Repeat until you’re sick of trying.

So I remembered the Vista Windows Update on Monday, and restored my laptop back to before that. No joy…

Now, I have tried to be objective about Vista. I like my laptop, and to my mind the extra security measures were (until I turned them off) about as obtrusive as those on Ubuntu. I didn’t think it ran all that slowly, and had never found a programme or device that wasn’t compatible. Maybe I was just lucky.

Then, at Christmas, the rot started to set in. WinGrass doesn’t (or didn’t) work all that well. Cygwin wouldn’t play well. I ended up having to set up a virtual machine and run Ubuntu in it just to get to a stage where I could learn how to use GRASS. And now this. I’ll go to the mailing lists, of course, and try and figure out why it no longer wants to play, but please, just give me an operating system that lets me look under the hood and doesn’t unilaterally decide when to stop doing something it has quite happily done for months.

I’ll have to stick with Windows for the moment, because I need to get the portable GIS system working, and I have a sweet ITunes setup (and an even sweeter Ipod Touch), but I’m off to buy a copy of XP before it’s no longer possible to do that…

Welcome to the first Tip Day of 2008!

Problem: You may occasionally find a microsoft word document that claims to have no spelling mistakes in it regardless of the fact that you know darn well that it has. You may check the language settings and find that it is set to the correct language and uses the correct dictionary, and you may reset the spell-check and ask it to recheck the document. And you may still find spelling mistakes in it. Really obvious ones.  This is most likely to happen if you are using versions of Microsoft Office from 2003 or later but can still happen with Office 97.

Solution: Get yourself a copy of Open Office. Open the document in Open Office, select all the text, and right-click it. Choose “character” from the menu and look in the font tab. Check that the correct language is set (you’ll probably find that there is no language set at all) and click OK. Save the document and open it up again in word and you should find that it now picks up spelling mistakes and grammar again.

Cause: We think this is something to do with MS Word having the ability to set languages at the level of individual paragraphs, but have yet to figure out why it should happen to a perfectly normal document for no reason… that’s MS Office for you!

PostgreSQL from 8.2 onwards can be run easily from the command line in windows, without setting up as a service.

Go to your postgresql/bin folder and at a command line type:

pg_ctl start -D location\of\your\data\folder (as specified in initdb) -l logfile

This should output a notice telling you whether the server has started up correctly. It also saves output to a logfile in the bin folder. If the server starts without incident, open another command window at the same location and type:

psql -d yourdatabase

This will allow you to use PostgreSQL as a command line tool.

To stop the server, type (in your second command window):

pg_ctl stop -D location\of\your\data\folder