Yea Books!

When I got home from work today, this greeted me:


30 lbs box from BMC Software. The vendor for BMC Remedy... My books are in.

Upon unpacking, I found nearly 20 books and a hand full of pamphlets for the new BMC Remedy ARS 7.5.00 series:


There is now much reading to do! ~sigh. I suppose that reading Iain M. Banks isn't exactly going to help me develop better ARS code now is it?

100 points to anyone who can identify the book in this photo that is nearly 10 years out of date.

Snow Leopard

After a good three years of use, I finally upgraded my MacBook from Mac OS X Tiger to Mac OS X Snow Leopard. So far the system is quite stellar. It behaves just as responsively and all the functionality seems to be there. I'm still playing around with all the new features, but it seems to be quite a quick and simple OS to use.

One of the beautiful things about the OS is that upon first boot, it automatically detected that I had one incompatible application, Parallels Desktop, installed on the machine. When I first got the Mac, I was using Boot Camp with Parallels to access my Boot Camp partition while in Mac OS. However, since that time, I've hardly ever used Parallels (it seemed to have issues trying to run Mac OS, Parallels, and Windows simultaneously), I decided to get rid of it. I also had not used Windows in ages, since the partition was too small to be of much use (only 10gb), I removed that as well (very quick and easy to resize the partition in Mac OS X Snow Leopard without reformatting the drive).

The only blip I had was that after I deleted my former Boot Camp partition, the system acted a little strange. I tried to empty the trash, and I would get a strange Mac OS X generic error. I would try to move a file, and I'd get the same error. No matter what I did, it seems that if I was updating the file system, the system would have a fit and wouldn't let the operation complete. I was really worried at this point, I thought I had corrupted the file system or something, so I ran Disk Utility, both Verify Disk and Verify Permissions. The system came out clean. Upon Restart, the system was running smoothly and I had normal access once again. Perhaps I missed reading a prompt instructing me to reboot once the removal of the Windows partition was complete? Or perhaps it was just a fluke.

Outisde of that, I've been taking a look at the new 27" iMac with the Magic Mouse. It looks like quite the beautiful machine, but it's price tag is a little high for me and and I'm still not much of a fan of the all-in-one design. I'd much rather have a Mac Pro, but those are even more costly! Ahh well, such is life. I plan on making a trip to the Troy Apple store to check out the new iMacs and the Magic Mouse specifically, as well as taking a peak at the new MacBooks. However, from what I'm getting from my fellow Mac Fanatic, Mark, the Apple Store at Somerset is closed for remodeling! ~sigh, very disappointing. It should be open again in a few days, I'll have to make a special trip sometime after work next week.

Updated Remedy Servers

This post is related to For Review.

In my previous post, I detailed how our Remedy ARS Server 7.0.01 patch 003 with MidTier (MT) 7.0.01 patch 010 was generating ARWARN 66 upon logon to the system. Well, our team team implemented ARS Server 7.0.01 patch 011. This rectified the issue, however, it generated a few issues with the default intrinsic permissions in our Remedy forms. In the end, we did have some forms that loaded without any data. Fortunately it was none of our major forms.

A few things to keep in mind when updating is dealing with the multilicense file, which we had some issues with, causing our server to go into Demo mode for about 20 minutes (during our down time window). And planning to go into Admin Only mode for the server... We didn't do this last one, usually our upgrades are pretty smooth, so we let the help desk continue to use Remedy and switch over to our Hot-Standby server. However, this time, when our main server came back online after the upgrade, our system took the services off of the Hot-Standby and placed them onto the main server, which was in Demo mode. ~sigh.

We switched it back over quite quickly, but we were really worried there for a minute.

For Review...

It has been a while since I last really got in-depth with a post. For the past eighteen months, I have been working with one of the (few) growing mid-size (now large) IT companies in the Detroit Metro area. I now work with a ticket tracking system utilizing BMC Action Request System (Remedy) version 7.0.01 (and an older server running Remedy 5). It's a much different work environment than I'm used to, seeing as now I'm doing a lost of administration and some development for this system which supports supports coming up on 2000 support users and also has a directory of a 100,000 people and tracking for nearly 2 million incidents.

Since we deal with complicated contracts and HIPPA regulated information, I am very cautious about what information I provide, but there are a few things that we are working with presently that we just have not been able to solve.

On to the issues...
The Details
Our ARS (7.0.01 patch 003) also runs Mid-Tier 7.0.01 (patch 010). Recently, we began tracking of users logging into our system upon loading of the default form (one of two customized forms that is set as default by the system administrators) and we have set a Temp field which contains a list of the groups (by ID number - eg: "101, 210, 6027" and not "Help Desk, Software Support, and AS400 Development" - this runs a search of our "notification records" form, not of the default BMC Remedy User form's "Groups." This is set so we can list just the support groups, and none of the permissions. We also now don't run into accidental over-flow of information, for example users who are a member of the "Help Desk Triage" group cannot see tickets for the "Help Desk" group in the "Tickets assigned to your other groups" table on our primary default form (the original cause of this problem was the command $GROUPS$ LIKE "something%", which is enough of a wild-card to cause these issues, but not something that we can really process in a way that is significantly different.

Not long after these two new concepts were deployed, we began getting the following message from using logging into the Mid Tier: "ARWARN 66 - The query matched more than the maximum number of entries specified for retrieval." and in most situations, the error message will display twice.

The Conditions
The only time this message occurs is when a user has logged into the Mid Tier (web-version of Remedy) and is a non-Administrator user. The message only occurs on one of the default forms (as far as we have been able to detect). It affects users system-wide, regardless of if they are logging in via the web locally or remotely, it even occurs in Firefox, IE, and doesn't seem to be cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) sensitive. The warning message does not occur on the Windows User Tool (WUT) which most users have installed 7.0.01 patch 10, nor does it occur in our Citrix implementation of Remedy (which are also based off of patch 10).

One of our active links has required us to use the special run-if qualification: $CLIENT-TYPE$ != 9 (or whatever it is for the Mid-Tier) allowing us to write a second active link for $CLIENT-TYPE$ = 9. The workflow is associated with the support group listing detailed above.

The default form that loads has several tabs, most of which contains between 1 and 4 tables worth of data that runs some type of query. When right clicking on the table and selecting "Refresh" the error does not occur. Only when loading the form itself. NOTE: There are several hidden tables which are inaccessible to regular users (including my test ID) which I cannot refresh with our current implementation.

Troubleshooting
Note: Only our PRODUCTION system currently connects to the Mid Tier. All testing has been preformed on our production system, with the specialized workflow limited down to execute only for our test user.

We have tried setting and clearing the limits in the form AR System User Preferences. No change

We have attempted to modify the active links and filters that are associated with the two bits of code above which would "deflect" my test user logon from executing any of the recently implemented code that seems to generate the error.

We have tested the limitations of the server by running high-result searches, which up to 10,000 entries have returned successfully (albeit a little slowly).

And for those ARS Admins concerned about the MT's Cache, we are flushing it after implementing new test code and before logging into the MT again.

We have checked arerror.log and found nothing major in there.

We have ran Active Link and Filter logging from both the WUT and the MT. We have also ran Filter logging on the server. Nothing shows "ARWARN 66" but the last bit of code that executes in all three situations before the ARWARN displays is the code for tracking users logging into the system.

FWIW: We are running in a Windows Server 2003 environment with MS SQL 2005. Some of our code was pushed out from ARS Admin Tool 7.0.01 patch 10 into our patch 3 server. We have resaved the primary default form from a downgraded (patch 3) version of the Admin tool. We have not changed the code on any of the tables.

Situation Analysis
After working with one of our vendors, we are working toward upgrading the server itself from 7.0.01 patch 003 to patch 010 due to a BMC ARS Software bug that causes ARWARN 66 when a filter has executed with an "Create New Request" or "Modify first result" action in it. Unfortunately, due to scheduling conflicts, we keep having to push this off.

However, we have somewhere around two-thousand filters in our system, none of which have caused this issue in the past. Many of which execute only on other forms, but upon loading of those other forms, even now, we still do not get this warning.

I am curious to find out if anyone else has had the ARWARN 66 mysteriously pop-up on their ARS Servers and what you have done to fix it or what troubleshooting steps you took to pin-down the issue.

iPod Insanity

See Update Below

I am really in a strange situation here... I've got my good ol' iPod Nano (gen 1 baby!), where I keep a lot of my tech Podcasts in a Playlist so that I can easily manage just one show at a time.

Today however, I realized that in the Windows Weekly podcast playlist shows that episode 75 is still the first on the list, but I'm up-to-date with the podcast and should have just the most recently episodes (episodes 100+) on there. So I did some checking, and it looks like the iPod has Episode 75 listed in the playlist, but nowhere else on the iPod.

I don't want to just delete it from the playlist, I want to remove it completely from the iPod. The file has long since been removed from my Mac. So the question is, where is the data file at on the iPod?

My first thought, "Oh, it must have been classified incorrectly, and is hanging out in the Music folder." WRONG. I searched there, to no avail. I even checked the Audiobook area just incase, but I also had no luck with that.

Then I thought, "Well, it's gotta be on the iPod somewhere, so if I do a 'Get Info' command on the file, I should have some rudimentary information about where the file is located at on the iPod." WRONG. Get Info did not list a single thing about the actual location of the audio file. Just gave me an indication that the file was playable on the iPod and had several variables that I could set.

That's when I realize that I might be able to push the episode from being a "Podcast" to being "Music" or something. I tried that out as well from the Get Info prompt, but had no luck. I can change the Genera, but the media type is greyed out.

I tried moving the song from the playlist to the iPod in general, but also had no luck. I tried moving it to my Music on iTunes and to the Mac desktop, but I had no luck in this at all. The only thing I can do (or so it seems) is move it between playlists on the iPod or delete the entry from the playlist (and I would rather not have the space wasted on an entire episode like that).

Googling so far has not returned any useful results. I'm not even sure what to be looking for, just trying to come up with some solution.

I'm going to keep looking, but I've got a looming fear that I may have a decision to make, either format the iPod to remove the episode, or just delete the file from the playlist and not worry about the extra space that it is taking up.

***Update
Not wanting to give up so easily, I fired up the one sure way to view the contents of the *true* file system, and not these virtual folders with hidden objects that Finder gives you, I'd use Terminal!

I enabled my root user (for just a bit, I promise) and did

AkiraBook:~indigo$ su
Password:
AkiraBook:/Users/indigo root# cd /Volumes/Saji-chan/iPod_Control/Music/F03
AkiraBook:/Volumes/Saji-chan/iPod_Control/Music/F03

From here, I did an ls -sk to show me the files and size in Kb. I looked though F00 to F05, but there was only one file that was close, WDXV.mp3 that was 35700-some Kb, which is really close to the 35.1 Mb that I was looking for. Not wanting to be unsure, I copied the file to the desktop and opened it. Sure enough, it opened in iTunes and said that it was "Windows Weekly 75."

I did a quick rm -v command, and it got rid of the file. The iPod now has an additional 35 MB of free space, and I promptly removed episode 75 from the Windows Weekly playlist. SUCCESS!

Good Things Come in Small Packages

But serious innovation comes in the smallest designs.

I just got the announcement today that Apple has released a new iPod. My first response: *Yawn* I didn't even look at the email. Apple keeps releasing new iPods. The newest Nano was pretty decent, but nothing major changed. Just got rid of the fat shape and replaced it with a sleek and skinny version. The iPod Classic hasn't changed in ages and there's never any big innovation on the Shuffle, since it is a pretty bland device... No screen? What can be done on a device without a screen?

Apparently, a whole lot. This new iPod (shown above, with its immediate predecessor) looks awesome. Smaller than ever before, and even though the old shuffle wasn't really thought of as bulky or fat, it wasn't really thought of as stylish. The new guy is the definition of sleek and stylish. It's got an awesome 10 hour batter (according to Apple) and uses "VoiceOver" a new technology from Apple that will read out song/album titles and with this feature, the new Shuffle now supports playlists... The first Shuffle to support playlists!

I plan to be visiting the Apple store within a week to check this guy out. My own Nano (first generation) is really showing its age, but I've loved the Nano style so much, I was really leaning toward a new Color Chrome Nano, but perhaps a Shuffle is in my future instead.

Visit: iPod Shuffle

so long, old friend

Last night, I came to the conclusion that my old iPod with Video (5G) had finally died out, it was my first iPod, my first HDD-based MP3 player, and the first to be over 1GB in capacity (my iPod was 30 GB).

The symptoms of impending failure were very minor. For about two years now, I've occasionally got the "You need to restore this iPod" message at start up or as I connected the device to iTunes, but the messages were really rare, and when they did occur, disconnecting the iPod and doing a reset (hold down "Select" and "Menu" for 6+ seconds) cleared up the issue. Occasionally, the iTunes database would be corrupted, and I would have to restore the iPod. Very annoying, but not the worst thing that could happen.

That is, until yesterday, when I synched up some video podcasts. I was getting behind on them and decided that using the iPod 5G would be the best option to get caught up -- the battery on my nano is starting to go anyway, requiring it to be on the charger more and more these days than. However, upon trying to play the video podcasts on the iPod 5G, the video would start although it would eventually have some type of processing problem and skip to the next episode or continue playing the sound while not updating the video. Sometimes, it would just give up and out-right freeze, requiring a reset of the device to get it up and running again. At first, I thought this was just symptoms of a poorly encoded video file stressing the iPod's CPU and causing it to crash and require a reset.

Unfortunately these frequent resets only seemed to make things worse over the evening. After two or three of those force-resets, the device powered back on and said that it was corrupted and needed to be connected to iTunes to be restored.

The restore went fine, but when I attempted to synch for the first time (a manual synch of a few dozen audio podcasts), the iPod crashed again and needed to be reset, and once again, restored.

But, this time, the restore function didn't work out so well. It seemed to freeze up as the iPod System Software was being installed, and even though the device wasn't disconnected from the Macintosh, the Mac said that it had been improperly removed. Retrying the restore didn't work either, the device was getting worse, freezing right after being connected via USB and by this time, it was crashing iTunes as well.

It seemed I was out of luck. None of the diagnostics said that there was anything wrong with the iPod, yet it seems to be having more and more difficulty starting up. It even seems to have trouble getting past the Apple logo and into diag mode now, which deepened my concern that the iPod was in serious hardware failure.

I'm pretty sure that it is hard drive failure that is getting to the device, but the Apple system diagnostics (upon reset, press and hold "Select" and "Previous" as the iPod is starting up), I found nothing wrong listed in the system diagnostics for the HDD... But, the diagnostics only list the SMART data for the drive, it doesn't actually do any sector by sector analysis.

I did do some research on running SprinRite on the iPod, but it looks like if I am to do that, I'll need to order special drive converters, disassemble the iPod and then attach the iPod's HDD to my computer (via IDE) and run SpinRite that way. I was hoping for an easier fix, such as being able to run SpinRite via USB, but it seems "via usb" isn't an option.

My only other recourse available last night was to run Disk Utility on the device, which returned no problems. The only remaining thing I can think of to try would be some of the Mac drive diagnostic utilities, which may have something in there that can work on a USB drive - I haven't gone though this option as of yet.

For the interim, I am more than able to just get by with my iPod nano (1G). I'll be looking forward to getting the latest iPod nano once the battery in this one starts to go so I can start watching videos on my iPod again, yet at the same time, I really will miss my nano 1G. Perhaps a trip to the Apple store is warranted after work sometime this week.

Error 643

I have the unfortunate luck of running into this issue after being told 30 minutes before the end of my day that this particular laptop needed to have a Norton Ghost image loaded onto it and then deployed.

My co-worker indicated that she was unable to figure out the problem.

It took me about five minutes on google... Mostly because the fist few posts went on and on about adjusting the pagefile size. That is until I ran into a fellow blogger's post, cloning a hard disk with Ghost 10 and a USB external disk from Mark Lund. He had several notes at the end of his post, including details about Error 643, where he indicated to get around the error he deleted the partitions on his hard drive and the loaded a new image onto the drive.

This is exactly what I did. Simply, I used the HP Drive Sanitizer that our new laptops come with (in BIOS). I quickly got rid of the partitions and then got Ghost up and running.

[Side Note]
I did have a much more detailed description of this issue written up on my corporate laptop... Which promptly crashed yesterday evening, losing my post. :(

Adobe is annoying.

For the past few days, I've been working on an Adobe problem at work. We had to reinstall Windows on an end-user's computer, so we pulled her licensing logs and reinstalled all her software.

Except for Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional. Her licensing code wouldn't work. After spending three hours on the phone with Adobe support, I finally got to someone who would "Re-serialize" the software... Under the contingency that I provide proof of purchase. After spending an hour pulling detailed records of her software install requests and then working with our Purchasing department to find all of our requests for Adobe software from just one of our software providers, I finally pinned down her PO, which allowed me to request the proof of purchase from our software vendor.

I cannot articulate how frustrating this has been. I'm in the process of waiting for our end user to become available for another round with Adobe support - hopefully this hasn't been a total waste of time and money.

I sense a disturbance in the Force...

...it's as if dozens of voices cried out in terror and were silenced.

Seems the Zune wasn't ready for leap-year 2008... 366 days in 2008 have caused the Zune to crash at boot.

May I say, Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha~~~aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Stupid Microsoft.

Also Reference:
Zune 30 Faq [Zune.net]
Zune Freeze Result of Leap Year [blog.wired.com]
Zune.net (forums) [forums.zune.net]
Microsoft Zune Committing Mass Suicide [it.slashdot.org]

Synergy Love

Oh, how I love the program "synergy"

But, that is like saying, Oh, How I Love VI!.

Synergy is old, not developed anymore, and difficult to configure; however, once it has been set up, it works great!

What Synergy is... A quick summary
Synergy is a small console program that when configured and ran will allow you to connect two computers and two monitors to one keyboard and mouse over a network connection. This allows you to have something that looks like dual monitors with an extended desktop. But it has a huge advantage in the fact that it is an entirely separate computer, allowing for different not only different processing power and storage, but even an entirely different operating system.

I just got done configuring up synergy to connect from my Linux desktop to my MacBook. But, I added a stipulation, from Linux, it will only transfer from the lower right side of the monitor to the laptop and from the MacBook will only go back to the Linux PC from the middle (range 25% to 75%) of the left side. This decreases the number of times that I'll accidentally move from one computer to another.

Also, this seems to allow me to use the open rage for another computer. I've configured the upper right half of my Linux desktop to connect to my PowerMac G4, however, I don't have this guy powered on presently, so I haven't verified that this works yet.

How May I Ruin Your Day?

On 11/26, I sent an email to one of our vendors (who shall remain nameless).

Their response back on 11/28 was: Please provide your Financial Account and Billing Account numbers.

On 11/29 I provided such information.

On 12/4, I asked for a status update.

On 12/5, they asked for an order number.

On 12/5, I indicated that we didn't have an order number and I was getting more and more concerned that the order was never placed.

On 12/8, they informed me that I didn't have authorization to place the order, but my co-worker, who had requested that I have access to such ordering abilities and confirmed with her manager that I was authorized for such a level of access in October, could email them and place the order in my place.

Oh, and the order? It is for a small chip that our vendor ships for free. Apparently, I don't have that level of clearance.

If fonts were people...

Thought I'd share this... I originally found this by listening to an episode of net@night.

Parallels (17 months later)

I'm one of the Mac supporters at work. Recently, I was assigned the task of reloading a MacBook Pro (2.16 Ghz, 2 GB RAM) with OS X Leopard and Boot-Camping with Vista SP1 and using Parallels to have access to the Boot Camp partition.

Things were going well (aside from a few slow downs due to shipping issues). Until I started working with Windows Vista in Parallels.

After I got all my software installed, including items such as Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office, I started my testing of the software in Parallels. This didn't turn out so well. I fired up a few Adobe applications, such as Photoshop and ImageReady. Along with IE (7 of course, per Vista's requirements) and Microsoft Office. The only problem that I found was that the system was unable to run Photoshop. Granted, we were running the Parallels Virtual Machine hardware, so I can't really blame either Parallels or Adobe for the problems I was having. --Where I can blame Parallels is for the system being unable to free up memory and being unable to shut down afterward.


Once I was done testing, I was getting ready to gather up a few things and return the laptop to the Director that assigned me the task of getting the computer configured.

All I had to do was shut Parallels down, and test the system one more time in Windows Vista under Boot Camp. This is where my problems began...

Parallels just wouldn't shut down. The system got far enough in the shutdown process that I was unable to bring up task manager. After waiting for over half an hour to shut the system down, I finally gave up and clicked on the Parallels "Stop" button, which informed me that it was possible that I would lose data if I agreed to the improper shutdown. Since I had waited for so long, I did agree, and the unit powered off. I tried to turn it back on, and guess what happened....

The system was unable to boot. It would "blue screen" at boot. It was really quite frustrating. So I booted into Boot Camp, and loaded the system in safe mode (regular mode also wasn't working for Boot Camp). I found the .SYS file that wasn't working correctly, one of the Parallel Tools system files, I moved the file, and restarted the computer. I didn't notice any other major problems, so I called it "Stable" and moved on to restart the computer into Mac OS X Leopard for Parallels testing.

Upon starting Parallels, I didn't seem to have too many problems. I had to reactivate, but that was a problem that Parallels clearly documented as a known issue with Parallels software. Strange that it would come up now, after the previous problems I had with the system, but not quite unexpected. And, after activating Vista, the system did boot normally. I tested the software, and found everything to be operational. So I called it "Stable" and shut the Parallels virtual machine down. I then rebooted the computer, to load up Boot Camp to be sure that the system was still stable on that side.

I was quite surprised to find out that Windows, on the Boot Camp side, needed to be activated. I thought it was strange, but once again, this issue was documented by Parallels. So I reactivated Windows. Things were working just fine. I was able to access all of the programs and all of the drivers seemed to have installed correctly. I called it "Stable" and decided to reboot into Leopard to test Parallels (post Boot Camp side activation) to see how it held up).

Boot Camp started normally, but it needed activation. Once it was activated, it worked swimmingly. I found no major problems, aside from the fact that Photoshop wouldn't start up. No big deal, since most of the graphic design would be done from within the Boot Camp partition.

For certainty, I decided to reboot the PC into Boot Camp to see how the install of Vista came though. Unfortunately, it didn't turn out so well --once again, it needed activation. I went around with Boot Camp and Parallels for nearly three hours, trying to figure out what was causing the system to deactivate itself. The only thing that I could conclude was that the .SYS file that I moved was the source of the problem. Unfortunately, since the system was being so stable without that file, I decided to actually delete the file, and reinstalling the Parallels System Tools did not seem to help my problems at all.

My options, that were once limited, now seemed to be down to one: reinstall Windows and see what happens.

I did just that. The system was behind schedule by two days now, but it was coming along well enough. I was able to get the operating system and the software configured and tested within a few hours. I found no obvious problems. So I called the Director, and informed him that the PC was ready for pick up. I went though a tutorial on how to use some of the features of Parallels and reiterated the limitations (and apparent sensitivity of the software). I didn't want him to be out of the state and have the system crash on him.
* * *
The following Monday, I received an email stating that the system wasn't able to boot into Boot Camp or Parallels - it was blue screening at boot. Mac OS was working fine though.

I made it into work early that day and immediately took to working on the MacBook Pro. I met up with the Director, he explained that he was finally able to get the Mac to boot into Windows after following instructions he was able to dig up with extensive digging though the internet, but found that the Parallels Tools, which he no longer trusted (since it was the cause of the blue screening issues) was unable to be uninstalled unless it was running from within Parallels - which he uninstalled from Mac OS (I would have done the same).

Unfortunately, the only option I could figure out, was to reinstall and reconfigure the Parallels software and uninstall the tools from within Parallels, and hope for the best.

The first attempt didn't work so well. The cursor turned into it's new version of the hour glass and was just "clocking" as we waited for the control panel to load up. After waiting for a decent bit of time, Windows returned that Explorer.exe had failed. We had to power down Parallels from the Parallels Stop button. Luckily, upon rebooting it, we were able to get the system into Parallels and we were able to remove the software without problem.

* * *
Well, the happiness and joy of a job well done didn't last long. It was only a few hours later that the Director contacted me to let me know that the drivers for the audio in Windows died out, he was in a desperate state to get the system up and running as soon as possible or he would miss a plane shortly there after. I did a quick check of the system, but I was unable to find a cause for the hardware problems. The system kept reporting that there was no audio devices installed. It was also reporting that all the drivers of the system were installed, just that there was no audio devices installed in the MacBook Pro.

The director eventually had to switch to using a regular Windows based laptop to take with him out of state, but he wanted to take the MacBook Pro with him to tinker with it to see if he could get it back up and running.

A few days later, he contacted me to let me know that he wants to try reloading Windows Vista to see if that will rectify the issues. This time, Parallels will be a "no-go for launch."

42 Years of Star Trek

42 Years of Going Boldly Where No One Has Gone Before.

I do have to disclaim that Star Trek is one of the biggest reasons that I got into Technology. This show has inspired so many people in so many ways. It has not only driven a new generation of scientists and space enthusiasts, but also helped mold a population of people more willing to accept one another and to venture outside of their comfort zone, to do something different - to boldly go where they haven't been before.

It's unfortunate that this anniversary comes upon the heals of The Star Trek Experience closing (last Monday, 1 September 2008).

Happy Anniversary Star Trek.

If it aint broke, don't fix it...

Such simple words for such an important statement.

Managing the Firefox executable in Linux (my install of SuSE 9.3, I should say) is fairly simple. One just opens up File Manager as root, and then navigates to /opt/MozillaFirefox/lib/ and copies lib for a backup (I leave the backup in the same directory, but name it with the Firefox software version at the end, such as lib2.0.0.16). This works fairly well. Step one done: a backup of the current version of Firefox has been made.

Next, take the new Firefox tar.gz file, decompress it. I keep mine in /home/user/daniel/My Downloads/*latest version of Firefox*/, so I went to /home/user/daniel/My Downloads/firefox-3.0.1/ (still in super-user mode in my file explorer) and opened up the one folder in there, "firefox" - so very simple and benign. Things were looking good.

Inside "firefox" is the core application of firefox and firefox-bin and all it's core "Firefox centric" files, like chrome and whatnot. Do a "select all" and then copy all the files.

Continuing on, (once again, still in super-user mode in my file explorer), and paste the contents of the folder firefox into /opt/MozillaFirefox/lib/ and permit an over-write of the files in there. It'll over write of the files that need to be updated, while maintaining anything special that one already has in there.

Update of MozillaFirefox is now done.

Note: This is more complicated than the Windows version of this update, and far more difficult than the very simple Mac version of updating software. However, backing up ones installation of Firefox is much simpler in Linux than in Windows. It is about the same to backup ones programs in Mac OS though

Now, just click on your usual Firefox icon and the browser starts.
~or, at least that is the theory.

* * *
One may get: nothing at all.

I thought, "Perhaps I didn't click it..." - so I clicked it again. No dice.

~sigh, it must be some strange error. I fired up Konsole and navigated to /opt/MozillaFirefox/lib/ and executed firefox, which returned:
daniel@Suzi-lnx:/opt/MozillaFirefox/lib> ./firefox
./firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libpangocairo-1.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

All I could think was " f r e l l . " (see references in the American Sci-Fi show Farscape) I was looking down the long slope to dependency hell, which has been known to on many occasions to cause serious over-hauls of the system's software, and on some rare major cases, reinstallation of the OS itself. I wasn't about to go down that route unless I was really aware of what I was doing, that meant research time.

Since I didn't have an operational Firefox, I chose to use Opera to google up some results, I chose to use firefox 3 suse 9 error while loading shared libraries: libpangocairo-1.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file as my search "tearm" (if one can call such a long string like that a "term") and found some results. The first result was pretty spot on, ./firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libpangocairo-1.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory at the Firefox Support Forum. Page 2 [.link] is even more useful. This second page informed me that there was a work around for this issue on good 'ol mozillaZine (my most trusted site for Mozilla application troubleshooting). The article I was told to look up is Firefox 3 on CentOS 4?

The results were pretty poor however. Install Firefox 3 though a package manager. Upgrade your pango libraries by hand. Use wine and run the Windows version of Firefox instead. Upgrade your OS - maybe it'll have Firefox 3 preinstalled.

The worst line: "It's probably not recommended, but here's one way."

Even though the post moderator has the best intentions, I find it hard to go to such extremes.

I think for now, I'm going to let FF 3 in Windows and Mac OS, and I'll work on upgrading it after work-arounds for this pango issue become well documented.

For those of you who are in need of the link to the old Firefox software releases, see Mozilla Firefox 2: Download Firefox 2.

Help - Help is not avaliable in this version of Windows!!!

Today at work, I was tinkering with a Vista computer (trying to pin down what can be done about it's excessive RAM utilization), and upon closing all of the open Windows on the computer, I found this notice behind everything.

I loved the wording of the message. "Windows Help Program is no longer included with Windows." - Strategically worded so they don't say "Help isn't included with Windows anymore... we gave up on "helping" with this version of Windows."

* * *
Why couldn't this be phased out anyway? I've even got help file viewers on Linux and Mac OS X computers, it seems a little odd that Microsoft would just stop including it with Windows. What I would have done is include the old help viewer, but start writing all the new help documentation in the new format. Maybe with the next version of Windows, include the old help viewer as an optional addition, but not have it installed by default.

At least Microsoft does include it as a download from their website [.link] - however, there is a total of 6 pages of documentation, over half of which is "known issues after installing WinHlp32.exe" - sigh.

Well, that's my two-cents anyway.

Firefox 3.0.1 (Mac OS X version) Preliminary

This afternoon, I finally decided to start some testing of Firefox 3, I've been putting it off for ages now, and with the frequent notices by Firefox about how version 3.0.1 is available (as well as the fact that the Firefox people have made it to version 3.0.1 already) I decided to give it a shot.

The way I work with new releases like this, I start by using the Mac OS X version of the software, where backing up old programs and demoing new versions is so much easier than in Windows (and lets not even talk about how hard that is to do in Linux), but I found something interesting while using the browser in Mac OS X 10.4.11: the menu bar repeats itself. On Mac, you should see something that looks like this:

[click the image below to see a full-sized version]

But, what I'm seeing with Firefox 3.0.1 is a bit different than usual Apple interface standards:

[click the image below to see a full-sized version]

The items seem to "slide" -- sometimes, the "Firefox" item is the furthest to the left, other times, "Help" or "Window" or "File" will be furthest to the left.

Presently, closing and reopening the browser has not helped the software out. I'll keep tinkering with the software, perhaps Firefox 3.0.1 isn't quite ready for Mac OS X 10.4.11 yet. I'll keep running it for now, and maybe I'll find something out there on the MozillaZine that will help out.

[update]
Since restarting the MacBook, Firefox has worked just fine. It seems restarting the software several times was not the root cause of the issue... Something must have been running resident in memory that needed to be cleared out before the menu bar would work correctly.

Still a strange error, one that I've never encountered before in the many years that I've been running Mac OS (from System Software 7 to OS X 10.5).

NewEgg's DVD store no more?

I was looking up prices on "China's First Emperor" that aired on the History Channel, it's around $35 USD + Shipping and Handing from History.com [.link]

I was hoping that I'd be able to find a better price, and not seeing the DVD listed at Amazon.com, I decided to proceed to the NewEgg DVD store - I didn't think that I'd be able to find it there, but if I did, I figured it would be at a better price.

But when I loaded up NewEgg.com, I could not find any references to the DVD store. I even did a NewEgg.com search for "Movies" and "DVD" -- nothing turned up but blank media, DVD burners, etc. So, in a last ditch effort, I did a google search for "NewEgg DVD store" which found the NewEgg DVD store [.link].

The page looked oddly blank, but it did not display an error or reference the store being closed - it is even titled as having "Blu-Ray DVD & HD DVD" movies, making me believe that it had to have recently been accessible. So I ran a search for "China's first emperor" - which returned no results. Searching for "Anime" also returned no results, and searching for "DVD" returned the same results that searching for "DVD" at the NewEgg main page did.

I can only conclude that the DVD store is gone. :( I always found good prices at the NewEgg DVD store, but I never got the change to order anything from there, I hardly ever order DVDs (I prefer to buy them at a local FYE). I guess it'll be back to FYE and Amazon's DVD store for me.

Good ol' Microsoft Software

China's Olympic coordinators trying, to stun the audience with images displayed on the walls and roof of "the bird's nest" at the Olympics [.link], stunned themselves when one of their advanced Lenovo PCs hooked up to a projector to display these images, blue screened [.link]

Also see: slashdot.org, sydney morning herald, power apple (chinese).

Note: there is some debate as to the truth of these images, but with the sheer volume of photographs showing up, it is gaining acceptance.