I recently switched to running XP as a limited user after getting a virus. However, I soon realized that I couldn’t use my Sony VAIO S260’s power management features anymore. When I went into the VAIO Power Management tab, everything was grayed out. Logging in as Administrator, I could create profiles, but then I wouldn’t be able to see them in a regular user. Here’s the solution:
- Allow the limited user account (LUA) to change power options. This will let you change the Windows built-in options, but not the VAIO-specific options.
- Temporarily make your LUA administrator either manually (requires logout/login) or using MakeMeAdmin.
- Open up the Power Options control panel (
powercfg.cpl).
- Set up your power profiles as you want them, using the VAIO Power Management tab. These will be visible since they’re created in your own user account, rather than Administrator’s.
- Now you’ll be able to switch between profiles without using MakeMeAdmin–just click the battery icon in the notification area. Changing the VAIO-specific options of profiles still requires MakeMeAdmin though.
Finding out how to get my charts into LaTeX took way longer than it should have. First, I tried pasting it into a Writer document and then using Save As Picture, but its EPS output resulted in 0-byte files, SVG output was broken, and raster images came out at screen resolution. (I couldn’t find a way to export higher-resolution charts in Excel either!) So here’s how I finally did it:
- Copy and paste the chart from OpenOffice.org Calc into OpenOffice.org Draw.
- Export the drawing as PDF.
- Use
pdfcrop <image.pdf> (provided in the texlive-extra-utils package on Ubuntu 8.10) to crop out the whitespace
- Now just use the image with
includegraphics{image-crop.pdf}.
The results are crisp and clean. Amazing!
For future reference, the cryptic error from mod_fcgid:
[Thu Feb 12 22:10:27 2009] [warn] (104)Connection reset by peer:
mod_fcgid: read data from fastcgi server error.
[Thu Feb 12 22:10:27 2009] [error] [client X.X.X.X] Premature end of
script headers: dispatch.fcgi
means that dispatch.fcgi failed to start. Possible reasons are:
- Missing Perl modules. Unfortunately, I don’t know where the stderr output ends up. Try running the script directly; e.g.
perl dispatch.fcgi.
- Missing Perl modules that you installed locally (e.g. local::lib) but Apache doesn’t have it in
$PERL5LIB.
Remember that the folder must not be group-writable, and that any executable must be run from the directory root that suEXEC was compiled for! These will fail with a more useful error though, complaining of “suexec policy violation: see suexec log for more details” (the log is at /var/log/httpd/suexec.log for CentOS systems).