Windows Live Writer for Blog

I have been struggling to post into my blog from Microsoft Word 2007, as it would be a nightmare to write a article in word and format it once, and again do the same in Blogger, just because it has different formatting, and it cannot be a just copy paste for that matter.

On a Monday evening, I wanted to post some stuff which went into few pages on the word, so I did not feel like formatting again on the blogger, after a an hour of research I understand that MS Word 2007 does not have full support for blogging from word, including picture, so its no point trying it.

There is something called, Windows Live Writer, which is a MS tool which can be used to blog, which also supports adding pictures, So I downloaded and configured it, and this one is sample post from the Writer, and also to give some information about the live writer.

Live writer comes with the Live essential tools, which comes free (mostly for legal version of windows). It can be downloaded from here.

There is one thing you need to remember while configuring for the first time, do not give the blog address correctly, just give http://text. Otherwise it seem to mess up things, later in steps things can be configured manually. So don’t worry. All the best. Happy Blogging.

Error message when you click a hyperlink in Outlook

Today morning, When I open my outlook for joining a meeting, I was not able to click the link for meeting, it was working when I pasted the same on browser,  When you click a hyper link in Microsoft Outlook, you may receive the following error message: "This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator." I was clueless as everything was working fine a day before. Did some search on google and found that microsoft has published a solution for the same.

This was said to be a problem due to some corrupted registry keys after the internet explorer upgrade, and there is patch executable released by microsoft which would fix the problem for you, check this link

If you find any issues after this, do let me now :)

Fix for Scroll Issue with Picasa 3.8 on Windows 7

Recently I faced a strange issue with picasa, the photo organizer/editor from Google. The scroll does not work !!, It was working perfectly fine on my personal laptop, but was not working on my office laptop, and scroll works fine in rest of the applications. I was thinking there is something to do with the installation, but reinstall also did not solve the problem,

Later I found that, Most (almost all) mouse drivers cause mouse wheel events with a "delta" of ±120. This is an arbitrary value that has been choosen by Microsoft in the past to allow finer control.

Since then, several programs use that value directly to test whether the mouse has been scrolled down or up (delta / 120 == 1 -> down, delta / 120 == -1 -> up, or something like that).

However, the Intellipoint software causes mouse wheel events with smaller "delta" value (the expected finer grain control), and programs which use the 120 value that way just fail to register the wheel movement, because in integral values, 30 / 120 = 0...

Let's hope Picasa developers would fix this issue soon, by modifying the mouse wheel handling method.

There are ways you can fix this issue temporarily, one is by using the Autohotkey. Autohotkey is a program you run in the background, which loads simple or complex scripts controlling the mouse and keyboard inputs, as well as other wanted behaviors in your Windows system. You can intercept the mouse wheel event and change the delta value before passing to a particular program, so if you make it 120 again, you would solve the issue.

1. Download and install AutoHotkey (http://www.autohotkey.com)
2. Right-click an empty spot on your desktop or in a folder of your choice.
3. In the menu that appears, select New -> AutoHotkey Script. (Alternatively, select New -> Text Document.)
4. Type a name for the file, ensuring that it ends in .ahk. For example: Test.ahk
5. Right-click the file and choose Edit Script.

In the window that appears (likely Notepad), copy the lines of the script above. Save your document.

AutoHotkey does not run by itself, it runs a script. So you need to put the script file you just created in Startup, and it will start automatically when Windows start. This should fix your mousewheel problems with Picasa.

I have found that the latest IntelliPoint 8.0 software (released August 2010) fixes the scrolling issue. It also does the same thing, it detects that the picasa is running and changes the delta value to 120 and things would work just perfct

You can download the latest version of Intellipoint software for your mouse from here,