Patch Tuesday July 2013

Usually I do not talk much about Patch Tuesday from Microsoft, but this time round, it totals to about 30 or so updates on most system with Windows and Office. I think that is would the mention. Not only that, there are 6 rated CRITICAL and many which does not have full details on what and how it is exploited as Microsoft got the vulnerability in private. Doesn't that worry you? It should. For all you know some of these vulnerabilities had already been used in the wild, so I suggest you roll in these patches as soon as possible. (How about NOW??)

So, what are fixed in this round? Here is a summary of it:

• Kernel driver bug due to TTF (yes, I know your WTF look, why would a TTF font be injected into kernel...?) This allow escalation and there is full source code available.
• Several .Net Framework and Silver patches 
• Vulnerability in GDI+. Seriously, I think they will never get this fix since it comes back every time.
• IE. For once, IE 10 is badly hit. Usually most vulnerability would not affect IE 10 (on Win8 especially). Well, this is really the patch you need to install ASAP since IE will be your first point of contact.
• Directshow with GIF files. Makes you think how a simple file format thing like PDF, PNG (oh yes, last month we just had one), DOCX or sort. It does seems to have a trend of attacking file formats nowadays.
• Windows Media Format. WMF. There we have it, just to prove my previous point.
• Windows Defender. It's a path transversal. Well, even the big giants has faults sometimes. But the scary part is Microsoft does patch it... Do you see other AV vendors patching their main program much (I know you get updates, but those are AV signatures, they are different things)?

And other patches involving SD card removal, new camera models, language pack and fonts. 

So, you can see its going to be a busy busy week. And whoever is using those exploits will probably be sweating or trying their last strike to make good use of it before you patch your computer. 

How to activate Office 2010 beta products

While some of you might had been downloading Office 2010 beta products and happily installing it and realized that there is no prompt for CD-KEY. While, don't be too happy. It is meant to be that way. If you had not put in your CD-KEY, do check this, open your Office product and go to the File>>Help. You will find that it says your product is either not activated or no licensed. Well, if you do not want to wait until it expiry and prompt you, you can actually activate the product yourself. If you had not gotten a CD-KEY, I suggest you do so and not make use of any of those found online, which could be already activated (which you will need to repeat the whole process below)

1. Open any Microsoft Office 2010 Beta product.
2. Open Backstage view by clicking on the File tab.
3. Click Help in the set of tabs on the left.
4. Shift your focus to the right side of the screen and click on Change Product Key option. 5. Enter the Multiple Activation Key (MAK) which was provided to you, when you downloaded Office 2010 Beta. 6. Check the box to activate automatically or restart the application to activate using the activation dialog box.

Do take note that you will need to activate Project, Visio and Office each separately. I strongly advise all of you to actually go register and activate Office 2010. There is no reason to be using a pirated or warez copy since it is free and those version may contains other "applications" which is not included in the original product.

Word chart does not update

I had came across a rather stupid problem. I had an Excel chart which has some data and a nice graph on a Word document. the problem was, when I wanted to edit the data and change the graph, the chart did not get updated. The data and chart is updated on the excel sheet, but no on word.

How to solve this problem:
1. Highlight the graph
2. Under the top tab, go to Chart tool.
3. Under the Data group, click Refresh Data.

Hope this helps somebody.

Office 2007 SP1

Yes, its out officially now. However, it will probably not be delivered by automatic update for like 3-6 months. So why wait?

Downlooad this direct from Microsoft :
http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/8/1/08186057-e110-49fb-b455-17899cf082d8/office2007sp1-kb936982-fullfile-en-us.exe

Office 2007 Trial expired!

To remove the trial activation :

1. Close all Microsoft Office applications.
2. Run Register Editor by clicking on Start -> Run, and then type “regedit” in the Open box and press Enter key.
Navigate to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Registration
Note that inside the registry key, there should be another subkey that resembles the following:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Registration\{90120000-0030-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE
or
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Registration\{91120000-0011-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE
3. If there is more than one registry entries or subkeys that reference Microsoft 12.0 registration, open up each subkey, and then identify the product by the ProductName value data until you locate the subkey for the product which you want to remove the existing product license key.
For example:
ProductName=Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007ProductName=Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007
4. Once found the correct registry subkey, delete the following values:
DigitalProductIDProductID
5. Close Registry Editor.

Next, we want to delay the expiry.

1. In Windows Explorer, brose to the following folder:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\OFFICE12\Office Setup Controller\Proof.en\
Right click on Proof.XML file, select “Open With…” in the right click menu.
2. In the “Open With” window, select Notepad to be used to open the XML file. In Vista, if you can’t see the Notepad option, simply double click the “Other Programs” to unhide it.
Scroll down to the bottom of the Proof.XML to locate the following lines:

3. Change the AlwaysInsalled to neverInstalled so that the line looks like following:

4. Save the Proof.xml file. In Windows Vista, you may need to take ownership and grant full access permission to yourself before able to modify the file.
5. You can now launch Microsoft Office 2007 application such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook and etc without prompting for activation.

However, I wish to stress that this is a delay technique only. You will still be missing updates, patches and other important features of Office 2007. However, this will give you enough time to quickly make the purchase and reactivate it to enjoy the full version.

Microsoft Office 2007 File Formats

Ya, they are in XML and pretty small actually. I had PPTX and DOCX files which are about 5-10% of those of 2003 formats.

anyway, I found that there is a way to read / write to the 2007 formats. Just read this and install the pack :

http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/converter.mspx

Now, you got no excuse cannot read my office files liao. :P