I’m not exactly sure how or when it started happening, but whenever I would try to save a document as an Acrobat PDF document (or try to print to the Acrobat PDF printer), it would create the PDF document fine but leave me with errors in the printer queue that said it had failed to print. Deleting these entries would get rid of the errors and the printer icon from your system tray – a minor hassle.
I didn’t bother to deal with it for a while since I could just cancel the errored out jobs in my printer queue and not worry about it since the PDF would still be created, however I figured I would finally figure out the problem and try to fix it. Of course, searching on Adobe’s website turned up nothing of relevance, and a few websites I found just said to re-install the Adobe Acrobat PDF printer which was what I figured I should do anyways, so I did.
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If you’ve ever tried to get a Bluetooth headset to work in Windows Vista, you know you’re in for a world of hurt if you want to try and make it work with the existing Microsoft Bluetooth stack. You have to steal drivers from other manufacturers or basically just give up and switch to using the Broadcom WIDCOMM Bluetooth drivers.
For the longest time I refused to use the WIDCOMM drivers because their look and feel was stuck in the Windows XP days – it wasn’t horrible, but it didn’t integrate nicely in with Vista and it completely took over the Bluetooth stack which I didn’t want to do because I was afraid it would prevent my Microsoft Wireless Entertainment Desktop 7000 (Bluetooth keyboard & mouse combo) from working.
Well, the other day I decided to replace my old Plantronics Explorer 320 headset (Bluetooth 1.2) with a new Sony Playstation 3 Bluetooth headset (cheap, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR). I went and paired up the new headset with Vista, however the sound was just as choppy as before and it really didn’t seem to be any better; those old Bluetooth Audio drivers I hacked in to Vista needed updating…
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As I was testing a recent site I had designed in Internet Explorer for compatibility, I came across one of the forms which was apparently causing Internet Explorer 7 to crash. It put a real damper on the testing since it was causing a crash which I would consider to be pretty heavy on the “must fix” list before it goes live. The worst part was, I had done a lot of extensive testing with Firefox which showed no problems, and even Internet Explorer 8 was behaving as expected. Thankfully I have Internet Explorer 8 which finally has a decent set of developer tools built in, so I set forth to try and figure out what the problem was… hopefully!
My first thought was that it might be some code I had recently added to a JavaScript file which was responsible for capturing the name/value pair of the submit button pressed when you submit a form (which is the only way to get that information when using AJAX to submit form data). The code worked great in Firefox, but I hadn’t tested it yet for Internet Explorer at all, so I changed it around a bit to see if maybe some of that was causing it. My debugging progressed to completely commenting out that new code, essentially bringing me back to code I knew worked in Internet Explorer 7 before, but it was still crashing!
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If you do any sort of Web Development at all and you don’t know about either of these sites, you’re severely missing out on one of the Internets most useful resources ever created for Web Development. Sure, there are other sites, even Microsoft’s MSDN Library which has pretty good documentation on a lot of the same stuff, but none are as easy to navigate and have as many tips and information about cross-browser application.
I’m talking of course about Brian Wilson’s Index DOT Html and Index DOT Css sites. I have been using these sites over the past 8+ or so years as one of my primary resources when it comes to Web Development. They document the majority of the HTML and CSS elements and properties, how they work and what browsers support them (and to what degree) – complete with browser specific tips and notes.
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In the middle of developing a web application and doing some routine testing just to make sure my AJAX code was working, I stumbled upon a rather odd and what seemed to be rather random error in Firefox 3. It took some debugging and a bit of speculation to figure out what the problem most likely was and how I hoped I fixed it.
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