Jay's IT blog

Now this was a weird one. The user said he was unable to work because every 20 seconds, his programs in which he was working were hidden and the desktop would show up. He told me he already rebooted the machine. So I opened the End Tasks dialog with Cmd-Alt-Esc and forced a finder restart. Still the same behavior.

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To all other sysadmins out there in the world: Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day 2009!

My boss is working with tons of mails every day. Part of his workflow is to use the “followup” -> “add reminder..:” function in the right-click menu of messages. When I upgraded his Outlook from 2003 to 2007, he asked why that function was gone. I did some investigation, including a phone call at Microsoft tech support, and found out the following:

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I use a little tool to manage my MP3s called “MP3 tag tools“. It’s quite powerful, it allows you to mass edit some or all ID3 tag fields, fill them from a file name scheme and vice versa (create folder structures and/or file names from the ID3 tag fields). Now when I recently cleaned up my collection using that tool, I noticed that I had about 400 double entries. I just didn’t notice before because the file names were different. Now as this tool tried to rename the files and put them in the appropiate subfolders, it threw error messages that existing files can’t be overwritten.

So I had 400 files that I could safely delete, which I did. Now I had 400 dead entries in the iTunes library (marked with a !) which I wanted to get rid of easily. Apparently, iTunes does not have a function to remove dead/broken entries, I’d have to try to play every song from my playlist so iTunes would mark all missing entries and then… then what? iTunes doesn’t even let me sort by the ! column. That’s really stupid.

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Recently, I had a support query where a colleague had three “Flash Player” items in the open with menu when he right clicked onto a .swf file and I was asked to remove them. I learnt that it’s not as easy as it often is with Windows, where every file extension has an entry in the registry which you could edit. Mac OS X uses the so called LaunchServices database to assign applications to file types.
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Hi folks!

I have that ultraportable notebook, a HP 2510p. It features a 12.1″ LED-backlit screen, ambient light sensor, fingerprint device and so much more. After about one year of usage, I can say that I love this device and wouldn’t want to miss it anymore. However, it’s not perfect. Battery runtime is pretty acceptable, about 5 hours w/ wireless LAN enabled. The CPU, an Intel Core 2 Duo Ultra Low Voltage @ 1.2GHz is surprisingly fast.

The only big problem is the harddisk. Read the rest of this entry »

These are my post-installation steps in Fedora 10.

After I read that Fedora 10 is out on heise.de, I thought, let’s give it a try. Here I’ll describe what I did to set up the fresh install for my needs.
Note: I installed Fedora 10 from the full i386 DVD (not live CD!) on my HP 2510p notebook, just in case you’re interested about hardware.

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Often people ask me what is so wrong about the Internet Explorer. Apart from security issues, one of the reasons is the implementation of web standards. I recently stumbled upon the Acid3 Test which can be used to test how well web browsers follow web standards (read the wikipedia article if you want to know more).

So I fired up my browsers and opened the test pages. While the Acid2 test is mostly based on cascading style sheets (css), the Acid3 test mostly tests JavaScript and DOM implementation.

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Today I experienced one of these problems: My colleague in Berlin had that external hard disk drive. It was connected to a Buffalo TeraStation (that’s a NAS, sort of, with a super small linux). It was used as a backup drive there.

Now the TeraStation was horribly, almost hilariously damaged. It couldn’t be accessed from Windows machines anymore because the smb.conf was completely empty. I could edit it with vi (you don’t have vim on that minilinux) and save, nothing would happen. I could also echo stuff > smb.conf – it would always stay 0 bytes in size. Yes, I was root, I was owner, smb.conf had 777, everything. Whatever, that’s not my point here. Just as advice: NEVER EVER BUY SUCH CRAP!

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Have you ever had an “unknown device” in the Windows device manager and wanted to get rid of it installing the appropiate driver? You just had no idea what device was meant?

This happened to me with a 32-bit PCMCIA Compact Flash adaptor for my notebook (ok, I knew what device it was, but I couldn’t find a driver).

Here is what I found out on wikihow.com:

1. Open the device manager (I usually do this with the keyboard shortcut windows+pause -> hardware -> device manager)
2. Right-click the device and click “properties”, then click “details” tab
3. Choose “compatible IDs” from the drop-down menu
4. Click on the first item in the list and use ctrl+c to copy it to clipboard
5. Click Start -> Run, type “notepad”, this will bring up the text editor
6. Press ctrl+v to paste
7. Let’s say you have an ID like this: PCI\VEN_11AB&DEV_4320&REV_14
   This is the vendor/manufacturer ID, device ID and device revision number.
8. Now go to www.pcidatabase.com/vendors.php?sort=name. This brings up a list of hardware manufacturers and their IDs. Look for the manufacturer ID you got in the previous step (ctrl-f is your friend) and click the name. In my example, 11AB leads me to Marvell Semiconductor.
9. Now you have a list of known devices from that manufacturer. Again, find your device by searching for the device ID. My example brings up this:

   Chip Number: 88E8055
   Chip Description: Marvell Yukon PCI E Gigabit
   Notes: http://www.marvell.com/drivers

10. Now the device is identified. I can now go to the manufacturer’s homepage and try to find a driver.