Has anyone replaced their own ipod battery? I'm not worried about going into the machine itself, but whether it was relatively difficult/easy, worked okay, etc.

I got an iPod battery from here: [link]

They have videos you can watch on how to do it - I found their written instructions a little confusing but once I watched the video it made perfect sense.

aurela also asked about this a few months ago - you might want to search for those posts....

In a windows script file in XP home I cannot use appactivate sucessfully with a particular program (I'm guessing written in VB). I can use an the exec method to open the program successfully and capture a process id, but whether I use the window name (displayed in my app list) or the process id, appactivate returns false.

t OK solved the problem. For some reason trying to activate this super buggy app in a loop just hangs for ever. But if I skip the loop and just wscript.sleep 5000 before activating everything is fine. mickey mouse but it works. dunno my you can't DO while appactivate is false, but you can't - maybe constantly trying to get the window keeps the app from fully loading.

thanks tommyrot!

Pro'lly no one knows this, but we're desperate...

Is anyone familiar with running VBScript on an IIS server, with the following code being executed on the server:

set objUser = GetObject("WinNT://MEI-NT/someuserid,user")

In addition to setting up the objUser object, this automatically calls up a Windows authentication dialog thingie, where the user has to enter his ID and password. This is authenticated using Active Directory. The problem is our client changed their authentication server to bring it up to Windows 2003 standards (or something). This broke the GetObject("WinNT://MEI-NT/someuserid,user") function- the server returns a "Permission Denied" error for that line.

Anyway, is anyone familiar with this stuff?

eta: The main IT guy at the client's says he doesn't think it's a permissions issue. Nonetheless, we're trying to set up a site that runs under Administrator, to see if it at least works there....

I would agree with your client's main IT guy. I'm betting that the directory structure changed with the upgrade.

Ah. Win2003 tightens security a bit. It does not allow "2-hop" authentication - i.e. from a user to another server to the authentication server. It only authenticates for users connecting directly.

So, we've seen a recommended workaround and now we're playing with stuff along the lines of:

Set objUser = GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationlevel=delegate,authority=kerberos:DC1}")

We don't understand winmgmts (WMI) much at all so we haven't gotten it to work yet.

interesting. Thanks for the update.

Awhile ago I mentioned thinking it would be neat if Opera could read the threadsuck to me, so I make a python script to make the suck more Opera reading friendly.

import sgmllib, string, sys


class StrippingParser(sgmllib.SGMLParser):


    # These are the HTML tags that we will leave intact
    valid_tags = ('b', 'i', 'br', 'p')
    skip = 0
    name = 0


    from htmlentitydefs import entitydefs # replace entitydefs from sgmllib
    
    def __init__(self):
        sgmllib.SGMLParser.__init__(self)
        self.result = ""
        self.endTagList = [] 
        
    def handle_data(self, data):
        if data and self.name == 1:
            self.result = self.result + data
        elif data and self.skip == 0:
            self.result = self.result + data


    def handle_charref(self, name):
        self.result = "%s&#%s;" % (self.result, name)
        
    def handle_entityref(self, name):
        if self.entitydefs.has_key(name): 
            x = ';'
        else:
            # this breaks unstandard entities that end with ';'
            x = ''
        self.result = "%s&%s%s" % (self.result, name, x)
    
    def unknown_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
        """ Delete all tags except for legal ones """
        if tag == 'p' and self.getClass(attrs) == 'normal-text':
            self.skip = 1
            endTag = '' % tag
            self.endTagList.insert(0,endTag)
        elif tag in self.valid_tags:
            if tag == 'p':
                self.skip = 0
            self.result = self.result + ''
        elif tag == 'blockquote':
            self.result = self.result + 'Start Quote '
        elif self.getClass(attrs) == 'nametext':
            self.result = self.result + '
New Post By '
            self.skip = 1
            self.name = 1
        elif tag == 'span':
            self.skip = 1


    def getClass(self, attrs):
        returnValue = ''
        for k,v in attrs:
            if k == 'class':
                returnValue = v
        return returnValue
                
    def unknown_endtag(self, tag):
        if tag in self.valid_tags:
            self.result = "%s" % (self.result, tag)
            remTag = '' % tag
            self.endTagList.remove(remTag)
        elif tag == 'blockquote':
            self.result = self.result + 'End Quote '
        elif self.name == 1 and tag == 'span':
            self.name = 0
        elif tag == 'span':
            self.skip = 0
            
    def cleanup(self):
        """ Append missing closing tags """
        for j in range(len(self.endTagList)):
                self.result = self.result + self.endTagList[j]    
        


def strip(s):
    """ Strip illegal HTML tags from string s """
    parser = StrippingParser()
    parser.feed(s)
    parser.close()
    parser.cleanup()
    return parser.result


file = open(sys.argv[1], 'r')
content = file.read()
file.close()
stripped = strip(content)
file = open(sys.argv[2], 'w')
file.write('Stripped Suck')
file.write(stripped)
file.write('')
file.close()

It could probably be more elegant, but it's the first time I've used python and it was pretty quick and dirty. Anyhow, the first argument is the input file (a threadsuck saved to disk) and the second argument is the output file (an html file). I only use Opera for listening to web text, for some reason I just like the way Firefox works better.