Short version: If you’re logged into more than one computer with their Single Sign On (SSO) tool and you change your password at one of those computers the other SSO tool stays signed in, stops working, and offers no notification that this has happened. Outlook just shows you this lovely popup that explains everything very eloquently.

Me:
As I have been with this service for a while, we’ve had a chance to experience the password change cycle, and would like to ask for a change in function for the process.

I allowed my password to expire to experience how often the user would be notified, and how they would be notified. I tested on XP and Win7 desktops, which performed pretty much the same in this task. I received a systray notification about once per day telling me my password was expiring.

When my password expired, I did NOT get a ‘Hey, you’re expired now’ popup. Email just stops working when it expires. Outlook displays ‘Need Password’ in the bottom right, and you will get the credential popup from Outlook. The former is easy to miss, and the latter is VERY confusing in appearance to a user since the server name is nearly unidentifiable to them. Many people think they are now supposed to log into that popup box in Outlook, and never look at the Sign-In tool again!

Worst of all, the Sign In tool box still shows you as being signed in (solid blue, no red x)! We have trained our users that a solid blue Sign in tool means they are properly signed in. This behavior also occurs if a user changes their password at home, then arrives to work and wonders why their email isn’t working despite the sign-in tool saying they are signed in.

I would like to request that the sign in tool does a better job of checking its current credentials, and that its icon change in a way that notifies the user that they are no longer properly signed in. Also, either a systray popup notifying them that their password has expired/changed, OR disabling the Sign-In tool’s Auto-minimize feature when the password is expired (since many users seem to just click systray balloons away)
Thank you for your consideration.

MSOL:
We take the issue very seriously and understand the inconvenience. However, at this time the design of the system is to warn users only when their password is about to expire. Single Sign On will stay signed in even after the password expires, until the user signs off. Once the user signs off, it will prompt them to change their password. I do understand the inconvenience with programs like Outlook that constantly check for credentials every time it query’s the server.

I see that this issue has been submitted to the Development Team and is being considered for a future release of the BPOS Service. It may have an improvement when Office 365 is released later this year.

Me:
I recognize what you said in your previous communication: “However, at this time the design of the system is to warn users only when their password is about to expire.” I hope it IS being strongly considered for a change in behavior. A SSO tool that doesn’t track the user’s current authentication status across multiple machines is lacking in my opinion. Part of the utility in your service is the ease with which we can set users up with their work email at a desktop at work, a laptop, and their home computer. This advantage becomes a headache as soon as a user changes their password at one of these locations, and the other locations fail to automatically notice they are no longer authenticated.

Take the Google Talk application as an example. I have it installed on three machines. If I change my password for Gmail at any location, when I log into another location I’m nearly immediately shown a prompt to enter my current password. This is the kind of behavior I’d expect from a SSO tool.

MSOL:
Thank you for your response. We greatly appreciate feedback with issues like this from our customers, as it helps us tailor the product into a more user friendly, streamlined product. I apologize that we do not have an immediate fix for you, but it is being strongly considered for future updates and versions, including Office 365.

Well, if you made it this far, you’re either very interested or you fell asleep and your nose is on the Down arrow key. I promised a captioned cat picture, and I’m following through dammit!

This information about the Sign in tool is true as of v 1.0.1427.040.

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The Server Application, source file, or item cannot be found, or returned an unknown error. You may need to reinstall the server application.

You can try to insert via Insert Tab—>Object—>Adobe Acrobat PDF or dragging and dropping the PDF directly into the PowerPoint file.  The fix for this I found after posting to the Adobe forums. Disable Protected mode if you are running Adobe Reader X. (this is accurate as of v 10.0.1)

Disable protected mode manually by choosing Edit > Preferences > General tab and deselecting Enable Protected Mode. The fix wasn’t immediate for me oddly enough.  It made the “Create New” button work for inserting, but not “Create From File”.  This behavior ended after a day, perhaps a reboot is in order after changing the setting.  Either way, it worked!

Let me know if you’ve had a different experience. More importantly, update the Adobe forum threads discussing this if you have additional info to add.

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So, I had a lot of fun troubleshooting this one. The user has a new HP ProBook laptop running Windows 7 and Office 2007. The symptom is that they can not consistently send an email with more than one addressee. When the user sends an email with more than one address, as soon as they hit Send, they receive the error “The operation failed.” This symptom persists on both email accounts associated with the Outlook profile. (A POP3 and an Exchange account)

Searching on this error, I found many variations to its cause, and a lot of proposed solutions. What worked for me, was uninstalling the entire HP ProtectTools suite, and then performing a Repair operation on Office from Add/Remove Programs. I think that approach might be a bit heavy handed, but I was short on time at the moment, and the suite was only interfering with the user’s work, not augmenting it.

If I have the opportunity to work on this again, I’m going to start with HP’s Privacy Manager that hooks into Outlook and installs a toolbar.  Many of the posts I read seemed to have the common theme of killing a third party application that was trying to augment Outlook. If you have this problem, and come across a more elegant solution than nuking HP ProtectTools from orbit, let me know!

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It involves using the ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) command, which I’m dreadfully unfamiliar with. If you open a command shell and just type ARP, the results aren’t all that fascinating. I get the IP and MAC addresses for my internal DNS servers, and my gateway.

Now, ping the computer you need the MAC for.  You can ping it by name, or by IP. Do ARP –a, and the same servers are listed, but in addition you get the server you just pinged in the list. Handy! Depending on your recent network activities, multiple computers besides the ones I specified may be included in this list.

Thanks to ‘UberGeek316’ for the tip!

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When you use the MSOL service, you install their Sign In tool. This tool’s purpose is to manage the various applications you have available to you as part of their BPOS suite, and to log you in automatically. It’s very similar to something like the Google Talk client when you remove the “Talk” part of the client’s function. It logs you in, and provides updates to your online service.

Next, is their password requirements:

- At least 7 characters.  [No arguments here.]

- A combination of Upper and Lower case letters. [yay!]

- At least one number or symbol. [Perfect. More secure than my bank which actually disallows symbols]

- Cannot change your password more than once in 24 hours. [Eh?  I know this is to defeat people who change their passwords multiple times to get back around to their original password. But read the next bullet...]

- Cannot re-use your previous 25 passwords. [TWENTY FIVE??? With the previous bullet item in effect, this rule effectively just tracks your ability to track your progress through 25 combinations of Password01 through Password25. This adds nothing but trouble for IT who has to explain why their email password is impossible to remember. My prediction: Everyone in the company has a Post-It note stuck to their monitor with a number between 1 and 25 written on it... If we're lucky.  In reality, it'll probably be the whole password.

I thought I'd take some time and add a few more helpful rules.

- You may not use any letter or number that you used in your previous eleven password changes.
- Submit your identity for a background check and home inspection so we can be sure you're not using a family member/pet name or birthday.
- Hold the laser in your mouse up to your eye for a retina scan

Ok, I'm feeling a little better. Moving on to a new complaint. We all know how users can be about changing their passwords.  They wait until the very last day, often only changing it when Windows refuses to let them log into their computers without doing so.  (I certainly do this with my domain login.) With the Sign In tool, you receive daily notification at about two weeks out that your password is expiring. No problem there. My problem lies in what happens when your passwords DO expire.

1. Your email just stops sending/receiving.
2. The icon in your system tray that reports that you are signed in still says you are signed in, and never provides a popup letting you know your password has expired.
3. Outlook throws the following helpful box up at you:
   

Ah, good old RED001.local.  Users know what to do with that, don’t they?  Don’t get me wrong here, users had to ignore 10-20 notifications that this day was coming in order to get here, but that is what users do. Software needs to be tolerant of this. I have a request in with Microsoft to improve how their tool works and I’ll update this when I get their response.

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cscript %windir%\system32\inetsrv\fcgiconfig.js -add -section:"PHP" ^
-extension:php -path:"C:\PHP\php-cgi.exe"

The problem, is that when I tried to run the script, I got the error: Input Error: There is no script engine for file extension “.js”. It took me quite a bit of searching before I found the fix that worked for me on this IBM forum. Hopefully, if you’re facing this issue, you find my article before the 100 other articles talking about the 99 other fixes that didn’t work for me. :)

Resolving the problem

Attempting to debug a Javascript-based Resource Model in the ITM Resource Model Builder (RMB), the “Play” button/icon is selected to start debugging. The Play icon changes from Green to grey, and the Stop icon turns from grey to Red, as it should when debugging is activated. But after a fraction of a second it stops and goes back to green without starting a debugger. Check the Javascript console for the error. Sometimes if the .JS extension was associated with something else on the system other than JSFile, it won’t be able to find the “ScriptEngine” entry for that type in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, and will fail to start the debugger. The lowest frame in the RMB window has a series of tabs at the bottom (Tasks, RMB Logging Viewer, RMB Indication Viewer, RMB Event Viewer, and Javascript Console). Choose “Javascript Console” tab to see any errors. For example, it might show the following:

Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.6 Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1996-2001. All rights reserved.

Input Error: There is no script engine for file extension “.JS”.

If so, then check the current association of the “.JS” extension on that Windows system by running the following command:

ASSOC .JS

It should show something like “.js=JSFile” on a working system. If it shows something else, note what it is for safekeeping and then change it with:

ASSOC .JS=JSFile

Verify the change using “ASSOC .JS” again. Then retry the debugger to confirm it works this time, watching the Javascript console for any other errors.

This worked perfectly for me, allowing the script to complete successfully. I had tried associating the filetype in Folder Options, but for a reason I don’t fully understand, I was unsuccessful. I hope this helps!

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Selector Order Priority

I knew CSS favored more specific over less specific.  However, I mixed up what that meant. I thought more specific was just to have MORE information pointing at the item in question. It’s not quite so simple. Compare the following two samples:

<style>
p .bordered {
border: 1px black solid;
}
.bordered {
border:	5px red dotted;
}
</style>
<div>
	<p class="bordered">Bordered?</p>
</div>

<style>
p.bordered {
border: 1px black solid;
}
.bordered {
border:	5px red dotted;
}
</style>
<div>
	<p class="bordered">Bordered?</p>
</div>

How do each of these examples work out? There’s not a big change to look for, it’s a single space between p and .bordered, and it’s the difference between the border showing up or not. In this case, the bottom example gets the black border, and the top one gets the red dotted border. (Try it out yourself here. Just replace their text with mine)

Clay at Hungred goes on to show an example formula, which looks strong at face value, but the conclusion turned out to not solve my problem. His example is:

Another interesting thing you might want to know. If you have 4 specification on a single element such as the one below,

#thislist{color: black;}

ul li ul li.thislist{color: green;}

li.thislist{color: red;}

li{color: blue;}

Assuming the HTML element is

<ul>

<li>

<ul>

<li id=”thislist” class=”thislist”>hello! </li>

</ul>

</li>

</ul>

which color will appear? The answer is black! Calculate the number of times the ID attributes in the selector. Calculate the number of times the CLASS attributes in the selector. Calculate the number of times the HTML tag names in the selector. Once you done that you will have 3 digits. Each digit is meant for each description above. Next, arrange them from left to right starting from the first description to the third one. And you will have something like this.

#thislist{color: black;} /*a: 1 b: 0 c: 0 = 100*/

ul li ul li.thislist{color: green;} /*a: 0 b: 1 c: 4 = 014*/

li.thislist{color: red;} /*a: 0 b: 1 c: 1 = 011*/

li{color: blue;} /*a: 0 b: 0 c: 1 = 001*/

Don’t get me wrong, I thought he was right too at first glance, but if his statements were true, then both of my examples would have a black border because the math would work out the same. Below, I show that the example that does not get the black border, has the higher score.

p .bordered{  [adds up to 011 with his math, but has bad syntax for my intention]
border: 1px black solid;
}
.bordered {  [adds up to 010 with his math]
border:	5px red dotted;
}

So, What is the right answer? How do you know what rules will take priority? Well, I learned an important lesson. Hungred.com was right. I wrote bad CSS. What does the above p .bordered{ example say? it says to apply .bordered to some unspecified object contained inside of a <p> element. I’m not applying it TO the <p>! That is why the CSS always chose the simpler .bordered element. <p> had the bordered class assigned to it in the HTML. While the code looked fine to me, it’s very important to link the HTML and class or ID selector together if the selector is going to be assigned to that element. The math I read about over at http://hungred.com works, but syntax is very important still. Whew.

If you made it all the way to the bottom of this article, I think you deserve a reward. An example displayed in terms we can all understand. I for one, will be printing this quick reference sheet out and hanging it on my computer. Props to Andy Clarke for a spectacular diagram.

http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/css_specificity_wars.html

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Paste each of the following lines into the address bar of a windows explorer window, and hit enter. (see pic to the left for clarification) Once you are inside the folder, double click the XX.theme file in there to install it. If you browse the folders manually instead of using these links, you will need to disable hidden files and folders.

%windir%\Globalization\MCT\MCT-AU\Theme
%windir%\Globalization\MCT\MCT-CA\Theme
%windir%\Globalization\MCT\MCT-GB\Theme
%windir%\Globalization\MCT\MCT-US\Theme
%windir%\Globalization\MCT\MCT-ZA\Theme

I’ve also seen that some of the following country themes exist, though I don’t have access to them on a US licensed version of Home Premium. If you want to see everything you have available, just browse back to the MCT folder, and see what’s in there!

%windir%\Globalization\MCT\MCT-DE\Theme
%windir%\Globalization\MCT\MCT-JP\Theme

Each time you double click a theme file it will open your personalization control panel, so you may as well leave it open until you’re done. Once all your themes are installed, enjoy all of your new choices!

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The system has resumed from sleep.
Sleep Time: ‎2010‎-‎03‎-‎27T06:09:43.164534500Z
Wake Time: ‎2010‎-‎03‎-‎27T10:03:03.591291200Z
Wake Source: Unknown

Well thank you VERY MUCH for giving me so much helpful information. It may as well say “because I felt like it.” In the Event viewer, it is preceded by one other entry that seems like it might be relevant:

The start type of the Background Intelligent Transfer Service service was changed from auto start to demand start.

So, I head to the command line to see what powercfg has to say and I get:

C:\Users\CplShoe>powercfg -lastwake
Wake History Count – 1
Wake History [0]
Wake Source Count – 0

C:\Users\CplShoe>powercfg -waketimers
There are no active wake timers in the system.

C:\Users\CplShoe>powercfg -devicequery wake_armed
HID Keyboard Device

Nothing.  Not helpful at all. Why does my computer allow itself to be woken up from a source it cannot identify, based on a schedule it says it doesn’t have?  Shutting off Wake timers WILL stop the behavior, but I want to be able to use wake timers.

No answers in this post, gonna keep looking.  If you have any ideas what keeps waking my computer up… let me know!

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