Regsvr32 goes wild

Task manager displayI was getting very odd results from Regsvr32 (the program for registering COM objects in Windows): it wasn’t doing anything other than creating a lot of processes which burned CPU for about 30 seconds before dying.

At first I thought it was the DLL I was trying to register. But even running the command with no argument produced the same result.

It turns out some errant install had replaced my pristine Windows XP SP1 copy of regsvr (version 5.1.2600.0) with some old copy (version 4.00.1381, which sounds suspiciously like it is from Windows NT 4).

Having found a colleague’s pristine copy, all was well again.

Mind you, XP complained shortly afterwards that some vital system files had been replaced, and asked for me to insert the XP CD. Do you think it would tell me which files had been replaced? Nope. Even the More Information button on the warning merely elaborated on the fact that the wrong CD was in the drive. Yeah, very useful.

Using Atomz free search with WordPress

I’ve set up the Atomz free search to index both my old site toxiccustard.com and my personal blog at danielbowen.com together. Atomz allows you to specify multiple entry points for its crawler, putting all the specified sites into the one index.

Given the free search only allows 750 documents in its index, the catch with WordPress is to avoid it indexing individual blog entries, but doing the monthly pages instead. This is done using the URL Masks feature, so for instance with my blog structure of danielbowen.com/year/month/day/entry-slug I specify

exclude regexp http://www.danielbowen.com/..../../../*

The other ones I’ve excluded are RSS feeds (which it chokes on, and wastes processing time on), comments and category URLs.

exclude http://www.danielbowen.com/category/*
exclude http://www.danielbowen.com/comments/*
exclude regexp http://www.danielbowen.com/*/feed/*

This keeps my current total number of pages (both domains together) down to 519, which is pretty good, and well under the 750 limit for the freebie version.

It’s also handy in that the crawler logs broken links. I’ve got quite a few that have shown up as I move my old blog archives into WordPress, so I can just work through the list and fix them.

That’s just stupid

Okay okay, I admit it, when my USB port at home was suspect, I loaded up my new iPod at work. Now I’ve got a new computer, I plugged the iPod into it, and fired up iTunes. I didn’t expect this:

Dialog inviting me to wipe the iPod clean, since I'm plugging it into a new computer

No two ways about it, that plain sucks.

I know Apple probably needed to show it was providing a degree of copy protection to get the co-operation to set up the iTunes store, but really, this is stupid. They could have at least allowed you to connect the iPod to a handful of computers.

There is an alternative: a Winamp plugin called ml-iPod which lets you copy tracks to the Pod without that kind of nastiness. I haven’t got it to work yet, mind you — it doesn’t see the device. Rest assured that I’m working on that…

Acquired by Microsoft

Just pondering Microsoft products that they originally bought (or bought with) or licenced from other companies:

What others?

RSS adverts go mainstream

Google has moved RSS adverts into a wider beta, and Robert Scoble has been considering the benefits or otherwise of them. And he ranks types of feeds from worst (Headline only, with ads) to best (Full text with no ads).

Deciding whether or not to put adverts in your RSS (and indeed if your feed has all your text or just the partial text) is, I think, a matter of what you’re trying to do with your content. To bring it to total black and white, are you trying to make money, or get your ideas out?

Reality, of course, is shades of grey. For one thing, if you go the total black option (headlines only, ads in the feed, and presumably more ads on the site — since that’s the only reason you’d want to provide only headlines in the feed) then unless your content is pretty damn compelling, you’ll get no readers (at least not from feeds, and this is increasingly the way people consume their web sites), and thus no money, and your content goes nowhere.

Other end of the scale (full text in feeds, no ads anywhere) is okay, as long as you don’t get snowed under by readers, and end up paying so much in bandwidth that you can’t afford it anymore. Not likely these days, but theoretically possible, especially if your content is multimedia.

For most of us, I suspect, the balance is somewhere closer to white than black.

Daniel’s new box – part 3

I asked Tony if he knew anything about a good broadband sharing router to buy. Now I’m a two PC household again, no way was I going back to using Internet Connection Sharing. Okay, so it works, but it’s fiddly, your main PC has to be on to use the second one, and getting the firewall (ZoneAlarm Pro) to work with it was a buncha hassle.

Tony said get a LinkSys WRT54G Wireless-G Broadband Router. So I did. Well okay, I read up on it a bit first to verify it was what I wanted, and then I got it. Widely available in AU for about A$130.

I don’t actually need wireless at the moment, but may at some stage, so I can turn it on then. It was surpisingly easy to do the basic setup… I’m betting there’ll be more hassles though when I try to get the work extranet software and BitTorrent running with its firewall (and the XP SP2 firewall), as well as enabling file and print sharing between the two PCs.

(Here’s one page about BitTorrent and firewalls, and ooh lookie, a shiny new page that uses the same model router as I just got as its example!)

Next step is to load up the new PC with all its software, and move my files over. I doubt I’ll write about it here unless something spectacularly bad or amusing happens though.

Proximity sense travel cards are vital; processes support falible memory

I lost my train ticket the other day. My monthly. A hundred bucks worth. I recalled that I’d validated it on the bus to get home (because the bus was there; I don’t wait for it if it’s not there – the timing’s a little vauge and I’m not that adverse to exercise). I remembered left in my back pocket along with a bus timetable. And I knew it was lost, because I have processes to deal with a decaying memory. I lock the car with the car keys now, because the car can be locked without them and I know that I can and have left the keys in the car; so locking it with the key means I can’t do that. I knew that I’d only recently walked in the door, and that I’d only been in a limited number of places. I knew that there was only one place it should have been, where I leave all my pcoket stuff – phone, wallet, MP3 player, keys, coins, ID lanyard and travel ticket. And it wasn’t there. Because I was in the process of trying to put it there. But the other stuff was. It wasn’t in any of my pockets.

I concluded that the only remaining explaination is that I had dropped it, which seemed ludicrous. How could that have happened? It was in my pocket! I retraced my steps back to the bus stop, and halfway there I found the bus pass. Another hundred metres and I found the ticket. During the walk home it had worked its way out, sliding up against the bus timetable and onto the footpath.

Now, the reason I had it in my back pocket was because it was a Friday, and on Fridays its casual day at work and as such my shirt didn’t have a pocket in it. So, there was process failure there, but it was to be expected. Little I can do about casual day.

I’ve had scares like this in the past. The reason I keep my ticket in my pocket is because I need it easily accessible, for feeding into the barriers to let me in and out of the train stations. There are most secure locations I can keep it, but they are less accessible. So I’ve left it in the pocket of the previous day’s shirt and not realised until I’ve arrived at the train station.

But the crux of the matter, the reason this is a GeekRant article, is because if the damn ticket was proximity detect I could keep it in my wallet or on my ID lanyard and never lose it and also have it ready to validate at a moment’s notice. The lanyard would be best, because then I couldn’t get to work without taking my lanyard with me, which would remove another thing I could forget and would inconvience me. And this is all the more important now that I’m lugging a thousand buck yearly ticket around with me. It’s not like it can’t be done either – all the validating machines have proximity sense detectors on them. At least the yearly tickets are plastic and will survive a trip through the washing machine.

Stupid MetCard.

Is Windows getting too net-centric?

Searching Microsoft Office onlineIs Windows (and Office) getting too net-centric?

Case 1: Printer drivers

I hooked up my Lexmark E322 printer to my new computer. Windows XP recognised it, then wanted to go out onto the Internet to get the driver. But the computer’s not online yet. The XP CD apparently doesn’t have the driver. I suppose I could use a separate (online) computer to go to Lexmark’s web site and find a driver, but isn’t that over-complicating things? If XP knows what the printer is, why doesn’t it have the driver on the disc?

(Hey, here’s the web page for Lexmark’s E322 drivers. Someone please tell me it’s some kind of sick joke having three URLs embedded in one like that.)

Case 2: Office 2003 help

To take a theoretical example, search in Word Help for mail merge. It searches Office Online, then presents me with some options. The most useful one turns out to be on their web site.

Obviously having a lot of this content online is beneficial in reducing what is installed on local machines, and even the size of install packages on CDs. It also lets the vendors easily keep software and content up to date.

But… What if my network’s down for the day? What if I’m in a corporate environment and haven’t been granted Net access through the firewall? What if I’m setting up a PC for my mother to use just for word processing, with strictly no Net access?

Today I can re-install and use old versions of Windows, including printer drivers and application help, without network connectivity. Will the same be said for Windows XP in ten years? What if Microsoft drops support for it, including their online driver library? Will Office 2003 still have help available at the end of this decade?

Of course it’s not possible to keep users’ CDs or computers updated with the latest drivers and help files, but shouldn’t at least a basic version of these essential materials be available without network connectivity?

PS. Even after I did get the PC connected to the Innanet, when it tried to go get the driver by itself, it couldn’t find it. So I’ll be downloading it from Lexmark after all.

Prank

So, that shiny new computer I’ve been given and my propensity to save power have combined with boyish enthusiasm with a practical joke to create a very embarrassing situation for the two other contractors I work with.

I normally leave my box locked overnight, shutting it down on a weekend. So a discovery of a week ago had to wait until Monday to play out.

My new computer has a temperature sensitive main case fan that’s ducted – at higher temperatures the fan is cranked up to increase the airflow over the water cooled CPU heatsink. There’s a BIOS setting to set the idle fan speed; the default value is almost imperceptable, the highest is a roaring not dissimilar to a jet taking off (mainly because of the ducting and air being forced through the heatsink – all the turbulance is very noisy) and certainly seems to move a lot of air. Apparently the other guys here discovered this setting, and thought it would be a great idea to crank up the idle fan speed to “stupidly high” while I was away.

When I powered up the box, and the roaring fan started, I immediately went to Dean, the guy who did the swap-over to the new box. Having a CPU cut out because of overheating is not cool; I imagined that the heatsink might have come off somehow. He couldn’t imagine what was going on, and did note that the air wasn’t hot. Opening it up revealled everything in its place.

At this point the pranksters saw that this could escalate well beyond a prank and intervened with an explanation. Whilst I wasn’t put out, other people put the pranksters in their place. So, kids, be careful with those pranks. They could blowback on you (oh, I hadn’t intended that pun!).