IHaBiP (I Hate Big Powerpoints)

Every day my mailbox is loaded with some huge powerpoints. Mostly they're so huge because it seems to be an unwritten law that every powerpoint should embed at least one full song!

So I've written a little .NET-tool to be able to modify the presentations in an automated way. IHaBiP is capable of removing every sound from a presentation and it can be used to export every object (backgrounds, texts, ...) to an imagefile, it can even export all slides.

It can save both to PPS and PPT. It's compatible with Office 2007, meaning it can read PPSX and PPTX, however it will only save to the 'older' file format. It runs very well on Windows Vista!

There's no help file available, but it should be very self-explaining. You can download it for free here. You need the .NET Framework 2.0 and at least Powerpoint 2000 to be able to run it.

The only thing left for now is to find a way to get rid of those annoying Incredimail messages ;-)

RealVNC and Windows Vista Home Premium

On my portable I have a Windows Vista Business installed, at my desktop I have a Windows Vista Home Premium running. After a day of hard work, I just love to sit on the couch with my portable (and my wife ;-) ) reading emails on my desktop. In Windows XP I always used RealVNC to take over my desktop. Since Remote Desktop (server) is not available in the Home-editions, I installed RealVNC on the desktop.

The first thing I encountered was that Windows Defender had the intention to block RealVNC. I created a rule to ignore this 'potentially unwanted behaviour'. I also added a rule to the Windows Firewall to allow incoming connections to winvnc4.

However, I could not connect to my desktop on port 5900. I tried using another port and I even disabled the Windows Firewall. It's still a mystery why the service didn't accept connections with the firewall turned off. I didn't had the time (I was quite tired after a day of hard work), so I tried to find a quickfix.

I unregistered the VNC Service and I started the VNC Server in User Mode. Tada, the connection succeeded! But why couldn't the Server accept any connections in Service Mode???

0FF1CE in Office GUID's

I had some problems with my Office Installation (both Office 2007 RTM and Sharepoint Designer Beta). I landed on KB928218, assisting in manually uninstalling Office 2007 beta.

While cleaning the registry, I noticed many of the Office GUID's ended on 0FF1CE (l33t for OFFICE).

This post really has no technical purpose, I just found it a little bit funny and it made me think about the 'epacsteN'-story...