Jay's IT blog

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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!

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

When I connected my Acer AL2216W 22″ widescreen monitor to my HP 2510p notebook, I didn’t expect there to be problems. But there was a problem: For some reason, I was unable to set the resolution to 1680×1050, which is the monitor’s native resolution.

This took some more googling to find a solution. Here’s a short summary of what I found out:

1. Open the registry editor and do a Find on “DTD”.
2. Populate every occurence of TotalDTDCount with the number 1.
3. Populate every occurence of DTD_1 with the following string:

   21 39 90 30 62 1A 27 40 68 B0 36 00 D9 28 11 00 00 1C 37 01

   and be sure to keep searching until you are sure you got them all.

4. Reboot, and 1680×1050 should become available.

Now, if you need to set another resolution, things get a bit tricky.

You need to find out the correct DTD string (see step 3) for your resolution. That can be done using a small tool called MonInfo. How to do that and how to proceed is described in this article (it’s long but worth reading); I suggest you have a look at it

If you ever need to change the user name or the serial number of your Mac Office…

remove these two files:

Office 2001:

HD/System Folder/Preferences/Microsoft/Microsoft Office Settings (9)
HD/Applications (Mac OS 9)/Microsoft Office 2001/Office/OfficePID

Office v.X:

~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Microsoft Office Settings (10)
HD/Applications/Microsoft Office X/Office/OfficePID

Office 2004 (SP1):

~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Microsoft Office Settings (11)
HD/Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Office/OfficePID

(~ is your home directory)

The OfficePID file is hidden, so the best thing is to delete it via terminal.
The next time you start a Mac Office application, you’ll be prompted to re-enter user info and serial number, just like after the installation.

Oh and if anyone knows how to retrieve the used serial number, let me know.