Connie's Ramblings

Tiny bit of positive news… one of the recent updates to IE8 (Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer 8 for Windows XP (KB969897)) fixed the invoice printing in MS Money. I can now again print my invoices to Adobe Acrobat pdf! YEAH!

I’ve also decided to hold off a bit on Quicken as there was a note posted by a Quicken representative on the MS Money Forum stating that they are working with Microsoft to develop a file conversion process that will help Money users better convert their existing data files to Quicken. Right now there is a conversion tool however it is said to be buggy: It has issues importing more than 10,000 transactions (I’ve used Money completely since 1997, pretty sure I’m well over that) and can only support 15 character names for categories and accounts…

According to the post, they hope the new converter will be available for the 2010 version of Quicken to be released fall of this year.

Microsoft has officially announced they are discontinuing MS Money…

Microsoft’s Announcement on the MS Money Home page
CNET’s Announcement

This past Tuesday Windows Updated pushed IE8 to my Windows XP desktop computer… Since I have my Windows Updates set to Notify I did have the option to opt out of this updated but since I’ve been running it on my Vista Laptop with no issues I figured why not… what could go wrong… LOL…

First problem I noticed was that I could no long print out invoices using MS Money… This apparently is a known issue and anyone interested in reading more about it the MS Money Forum has several threads on it. Apparently MS Money invoice printing and the IE8 final used for Vista and XP don’t play well together. Specifically, if you try to print an invoice to Adobe PDF (my standard method), any printer, or Microsoft’s XPS Document Writer you end up with blank page(s). There are reports of success with Windows 7 RC however, I’m not quite ready to build a new computer… later this year perhaps…

Most ‘fixes’ tell you to uninstall IE8… of course doing so creates a completely different set of problems in that the uninstall/roll back of IE has never gone well. It is better to re-install a backup from before the upgrade and just upgrade any other programs since then – that is if you make regular full back-ups/images of your operating system drive. (Highly recommended!)

I did managed to find two other ‘work arounds’ to use until MS actually decides to fix the problem. The easiest is to print to SnagIt. Snagit is a great screen capture program created by TechSmith. It is very easy to set MS Money’s Invoice printing to print to SnagIt and then once SnagIt has it, SnagIt allows you to package the printing to a pdf which you can either email or print.

Another note on SnagIt – if you have ForceField running, when you go to capture you can only see a white screen as ForceField by design inhibits screen capture due to keyloggers. It is suggested to have ForceField set to only https… I’ve kept mine running and if I run into a site I want to capture from I temporarily turn off ForceField and reopen the site to make the capture…

The other option requires MS OneNote, print to OneNote does work – however getting that into a format that is easy to print properly or send to a client is more work than it is worth if you already have SnagIt…

After getting the one problem sorted out, yesterday I found another… I have a video capture card on my system and use BeyondTV by SnapStream… well IE8 breaks the WebAdmin Program Guide… the guide sort of works (if you don’t mind jumbled times) in compatibility mode (Tools > Compatibility View on the IE toolbar). Apparently version 4.9.2 which is in RC right now fixes this issue so for the time being, I’m sticking with IE8 and the couple quarks I’ve found in hopes that things will be sorted out soon…

So much for thinking this would be a stress free upgrade…

I’ve been using the Now Reading Plugin by Rob Miller as a means of keeping track of the books I read. I encountered a problem a couple months ago in that it was no longer able to retrieve books from Amazon and so I had to enter them manually.

Yesterday I came across A Modest Construct which has a post on Now Reading for WordPress 2.7+ this version actually works! I like how Helio has made adding a book manually always available. Something of note however is that when you add a book manually, you don’t have the option to include or later edit an ASIN.

I started looking around the code and found where to make a few simple additions to allow the editing of the ASIN of a book.

In the file admin-manage.php, after line 126 add:

<tr class="form-field">
<th valign="top" scope="row">
<label for="asin-0">' . __("ASIN", NRTD) . '</label>
</th>
<td>
<input type="text" class="main" id="asin-0" name="asin[]" value="' . $existing->asin . '" />
</td>
</tr>

Then in the edit.php file, after line 49 add:

$asin = $wpdb->escape($_POST['asin'][$i]);

and after line 104 add:

b_asin = '$asin',

And now the ASIN number is editable when you edit the book… having an ASIN number for a book allows the plugin to create the links to amazon. It annoyed me that half my books had links and the other half did not.

Now that I have managed to get the plugin actually working, I might look at actually styling the individual book pages…