Archive for May, 2009

Trillian Hijacks Ctrl+Shift+A and two other shortcuts

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

All of a sudden, Ctrl+Shift+A stopped working in Outlook and Windows Mail. In Outlook, I used it to create a new appointment, and I use it in Windows Mail to mark all messages in the displayed newsgroup as Read.

Long story short: It was Trillian, which I recently started using, albeit sporadically. Until yesterday, apparently, I had not tried using Ctrl+Shift+A while Trillian was running.

Trillian was reserving, but not using, three keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+Shift+I, Ctrl+Shift+A and Ctrl+Alt+C. Reclaiming them for your own purposes is a two step process. First, the delete them from Trillian’s Advanced Preferences. Then, you close and restart Trillian.

Right-click Trillian in the system tray, and choose Trillian Preferences. Click on Advanced Preferences. In the left pane, click on Automation. Under Automation, scroll down until you see the first reserved keyboard shortcut. Click on it, and Change… and X (delete) options appear. Click the red X, and poof! Remove any other offenders in the same way, then close the Preferences box, and close and restart Trillian. Those keyboard shortcuts will no longer be hijacked.

Posted in Computing | No Comments »

Another problem solved, but I don’t know why

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

When trying to visit Microsoft’s connect.microsoft.com site earlier today, I was consistently getting the error message:

Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage

This was using IE8. Firefox and Opera both worked fine, so I was a bit perplexed. My impetus for using IE8 (I use Firefox whenever possible) was that a destination site was not working properly. So, I decided to try IE8 to see if it would work correctly. Ultimately, it did, verifying my guess that IE8 isn’t fully disposable quite yet. Along the way, however, I was hitting the “cannot display” roadblock.

I Googled the problem, got a lot of hits, and tried going through a whole shopping list of things to try to resolve the “cannot display” problem. Nothing worked.

Since Firefox and Opera were working, it didn’t occur to me that it might be some kind of DNS issue. Otherwise, those would have been having problems as well. So, I didn’t pursue that angle.

Ultimately, in a whim of desperation, I did an NSLOOKUP on connect.microsoft.com, and tried plugging the IP number into the address field in IE8… and bingo! It worked. I logged in and all looked normal after a detour through the live login site.

After closing and restarting IE, it now works using the name of the URL, as well.

Go figure.

Posted in Vista | No Comments »