To right click, use the following keystroke combination:

Ctrl-Shift-Click

Also, if you are in Full Screen mode and cannot exit, you can try the following:

Alt-Command-Enter (Return)

Hope that helps someone else out there.

Note: I am using Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac.

Initially, I thought I had a problem font so I disabled all my fonts except the usual culprits, ie. Arial, Helvetica, etc. That didn’t work either. So, I re-installed Illustrator — and that didn’t work. Ugh!

I googled some more to see if other users had similar issues. Luckily, I used more-specific words, like “Adobe Illustrator CS2 hanging reading fonts”, for my search and I located this article, “InDesign and Illustrator CS or CS2 fail to launch after applying the Mac OS X Acrobat 8.2 update.”

After performing the steps listed under Solution 1, I tried to start the program again. Lo and behold, the program was starting right up! Success! *Happy dance*

Below are the steps, if the above link fails…

Replace the corresponding files present in the “ /Library/Application Support/Adobe/TypeSpt/Unicode/Mappings/” folder with the one attached to this document.

1. Download the attached Mac.dmg file to a machine where the issue is seen.
2. Close all Adobe applications
3. Double Click the Mac.dmg file to mount it.
4. Copy Mac folder from mounted image. Paste it to /Library/ApplicationSupport/Adobe/TypeSpt/Unicode/Mappings/.
5. A message appears to confirm to replace the existing ‘Mac’ folder. Replace the ‘Mac’ folder.
6. Launch Illustrator or InDesign CS or CS 2.

Anyone who knows IE, knows that wasn’t the end of the story. As I relayed the test URL to my peers, who also had IE8, they were pinging me to let me know that it looks terrible in their browsers. I thought they were kidding until receiving screenshots.

After much research, it seemed liked IE8 was making the page appear in Compatibility View for my co-workers — which makes the page render like it was being viewed in an older version, ie. IE7. I clicked on the “Compatibility View” button on the browser toolbar and lo and behold, I saw what they were seeing. Ugh!

After spending countless hours trying to modify my css, I wondered if I could force IE8 to make users view the page according to IE8 standards only. I googled a bit and located a forums thread on the MSDN site.

Within this thread, it linked my to an article that allows developers to specify compatibility modes on a per-page basis by using a simple META tag, which looks like:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />
You can specify other browser versions from IE5 on up.

Now, it forces users to view the page in IE8 based only on IE8 standards. Whew!

I use a stored procedure to execute the bulk insert command. The following is the basic syntax to run the bulk insert.

DECLARE @BulkSQL varchar(2000)
SET @SQL = 'BULK INSERT DestinationTable FROM ''//UNC/Path/To/Server/flatfile.dat'' WITH (ROWTERMINATOR=''\n'', FIELDTERMINATOR = ''|'' , FIRSTROW=2)'
EXEC (@BulkSQL)


A little bit of explanation may be necessary. The flat file format is as follows:

• 1st row is the header row where each column is delimited by a pipe (|)
• The remainer of the rows contain data also delimited by pipes.

NAME|ADDRESS|CITY|STATE|PHONE
John Doe|123 Main St|San Francisco|CA|415-234-2344
Jim Smith|33 Elm St|Oakland|CA|510-542-4562


The bulk insert statement has some attributes that you can customize. The field terminator attribute describes how the fields are delimited. The row terminator defines what character will symbolize the end of row marker. The firstrow attribute states which row to start importing from. Since there is a header row, firstrow should be set to 2 (second row).

When I tested the stored procedure containing the bulk insert command, I received the following error:

Server: Msg 4863, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
Bulk insert data conversion error (truncation) for row 1, column 5 (PHONE).

The problem was that it would work sometimes and sometimes it would fail. I had no clue what the deal was. I would switch between flat-files; some worked and some failed. I realized that the truncation error was happening only on column 5, the last column, which was a fixed size of 12 characters. But all the files had a last column of 12 characters! Argh!

I opened up the flat-file.dat in Notepad++ (a free source code editor) as seen below

Then I noticed the “Show All Characters” icon in the toolbar, which looks like symbol for a paragraph mark (or backwards “P”).

Then lo and behold, I saw the problem characters, the CR (carriage return) and LF(line feed) characters.  I read somewhere that

• Windows uses carriage return – line feed.
• UNIX uses line feed.
• Macintosh uses carriage return.

But the bulk insert looks for a newline “\n” character to mark end of rows in the data file. Note: sometimes, people consider newline and linefeed the same thing. So, the file was using CR+LF as row terminator, but the bulk statement was looking for “\n” as it’s row terminator (or LF).  So, the bulk insert was considering the CR character as part of column 5, thus, creating a truncation error.

Before I changed any of my code, I wanted to be certain what end-of-row marker a fresh data file coming from the other application uses. What I discovered was that it used only LF (line feed) markers.

So, to convert my current data file from CR+LF to just LF, I just selected Format > Convert to Unix as seen here.

And now, I get

Since I changed to row terminator symbol to use line feed, I had to modify the bulk insert statement to the following:

DECLARE @BulkSQL varchar(2000)
SET @SQL = 'BULK INSERT DestinationTable FROM ''//UNC/Path/To/Server/flatfile.dat'' WITH (ROWTERMINATOR='''+ CHAR(10) +''', FIELDTERMINATOR = ''|'' , FIRSTROW=2)'
EXEC (@BulkSQL)


So, I tested the stored procedure again, and it worked perfectly.

Below is a table defining control characters and their  ASCII equivalent.

Enjoy! … and don’t laugh too hard.

Here’s the basic information from the ScrewTurn site,

“ScrewTurn Wiki is based on Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5, meaning that you need a Windows operating system to run it, such as Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008. Desktop operating systems are supported by ScrewTurn Wiki Desktop Edition.

ScrewTurn Wiki can be extended and customized with plugins and themes. It can store data using a simple, built-in file-system provider or, if you need performance and scalability, it can use SQL Server or MySQL*. If you use Active Directory, you can integrate with that too.”

After downloading the latest release, version 3.0, installation was pretty straightforward. You can find install instructions here.

Initially, the application was using file-system data storage (local pages provider) to store the data (pages, users, files, cache and formatter). Due to the fact that we wanted to be able to use the users’ table from another application and integrate the wiki, I needed to migrate the wiki’s user data storage provider to a SQL Server implementation.

Logged in as admin, I attempted to enable the SQL Server Users Storage Provider (under Providers tab, selected User Providers radio button). Much to my dismay, it would not allow me to enable it (or even save a db connection string). Note: Enabling the SQL Server Storage Provider for Pages worked fine.

After googling for possible/known bugs, I was beginning to pull my hair out. Eventually, I was reading a miscellaneous tip from the ScrewTurn site.

“ScrewTurn Wiki requires the database to be set with a case-insensitive collation. You can use the following script to change it.

alter database [ScrewTurnWiki] set single_user with rollback immediate
alter database [ScrewTurnWiki] collate <your collation>
alter database [ScrewTurnWiki] set multi_user

Replace with a case-insensitive collation, for example Latin1_General_CI_AS.”

So far, ScrewTurn’s Wiki 3.0 is running fantastic and theme’ing it was very simple. Great job!

The installation was pretty straightforward and quick. It really wasn’t a super upgrade; nothing stood out at me, as I was playing with the OS. I did notice that waking up from sleep and shutting down was a lot faster. This helps if I am at an airport and want to shut down fast.

The biggest issue was trying to run my virtual Windows XP machine through Parallels. Upon double-clicking the alias/shortcut to launch Windows XP, I received an error saying that Parallels 3.0 cannot run in my current OS version (Snow Leopard).

So, I decided to upgrade Parallels 3.0 to 4.0. It helped that it was reduced to $39 (from $49) for the Mac Upgrade. After payment was made, I received the download link and activation keys in my inbox. I downloaded the software and tried to run the installation package and managed to get through few of the software wizard screens then reached a screen regarding a “Conflicting virtual machines” error. The problem was it was saying that a virtual machine was running already — which it wasn’t. To make sure I rebooted and re-ran the install but same error occur. After much dismay, I managed to locate the exact error AND solution in the Parallels site which is located at the following URL: http://kb.parallels.com/en/6659

I hope this helps someone else out there as well. Good luck!

As I begin my journey down the rabbit hole better known as Search Engine Marketing, I came to realize I was only scratching the surface. I will do my best to describe my findings and post them here. Stay tuned!

Instantly, I began to google and bing the term, cscript. It seemed like a harmless file. From the microsoft.com site,

“Cscript.exe is a command-line version of the Windows Script Host that provides command-line options for setting script properties”.

So why was this harmless file taking up so much freaking cpu power? There seemed to be numerous causes and solutions based on my Google findings.

Once the *bleeping* computer-hogging script was running, I used my Windows cmd window to list out all the tasks and processes running. I wasn’t sure how to find the source of the cscript startup. So, at one point, I decided to kill the process using a "/T" switch parameter in the command, ie. taskkill /PID 3124 /T.  This command killed the cscript process as well as another process.  The “/T” parameter runs a tree kill – It terminates the specified process as well as any processes that were started by it. By doing so, it killed a process that was affiliated to a process called "WZCSLDR2", which lived in the "Program Files/ANI/".

I quickly Googled this "ANI" term and noticed some references to wireless adapters. Suddently, I recalled that I didnt notice the whirling fan noise until I installed a USB wireless adapter (In this case, it was the DLink Wireless 150 USB Adapter DWA-125).  So, after uninstalling the DLink software, my computer was mine again! Thank goodness…

I probably didnt have to uninstall the software; I just needed to remove it from the StartUp items using the System Configuration Utility (type Run > msconfig). But I was too peeved! I wanted it off my machine.  Happy days are here again!

I found a solution by Doug Avery on the Viget.com site and so I will copy-n-paste the solution from their site. (I hate when I link to some web content — only for it to go away later). NOTE: Colors still may not look the same on all monitors or machines; Apple computers may experience lighter colors by default.

The following text was taken verbatim from the Viget.com site.

Step 1: Color Profiles

Color profiles define how Photoshop interprets the raw color data in your files. That’s right: That means they change how you see the colors. This kind of precision is great for photography and print design, but it’s got to go if we’re making a website. With no images open, go to Edit / Color Settings.

We’re going to essentially turn off all this profile nonsense by changing the top drop-down to Monitor Color. Let’s uncheck “Ask When Opening” while we’re at it….from now on, when you open an image that has a color profile, Photoshop will give you a brief heads-up that we’re tossing it out.

Step 2: Proof Setup

Now, let’s go up to View / Proof Setup / Monitor RGB. This is to make sure Photoshop won’t be showing you skewed colors on your nice new profile-less images. A note, though: If you’re on a Mac/PC and want to see how an image is going to look on the other’s default gamma setting, you can come back here and test using “Windows RGB” or “Macintosh RGB.” Just remember to switch it back, or you could accidentally be designing in (shudder) PC mode.

Step 3:

After all this hard work, Photoshop still wants to sneak color profiles into your images. Most web browsers ignore them, but new Safari and Firefox builds DON’T, and IE can be set to work with them too. This can result in the weirdest cross-browser headache yet, so we need to make sure the colors we save out are sans profile.

Thankfully, it’s an easy fix: Open up any image on your machine and File / Save For Web. Next to the Preset option, there’s a sneaky little arrow…click it and uncheck “Convert to sRGB.” (Note: From what I can tell, this is only the default setting in CS3)