Dave Page » Software

WP 3.0.1 and Atahualpa

dave — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 20:56:23 +0000

So I upgrade to WP 3.0.1 using Atahualpa and cannot edit pages. Page, edit, left menu but no text, no nothing. Bad. Have to hold off upgrading all the other blogs. Upgrade Atahualpa to 3.5.3. No good.

After weeks of search, found this post which sez PHP4 does not cut it.

What does 1&1 supply by default?
(uiserver):xxxxxx:~/xxxxxx> php --version PHP 4.4.9 (cgi) (built: Aug 12 2008 13:28:34) Copyright (c) 1997-2008 The PHP Group Zend Engine v1.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2004 Zend Technologies

Update .htaccess. Add:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

Works nice. Thank you very much.

Microsoft File Transfer Manager

dave — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 22:12:05 +0000

Today I was using this to download 4Gb ISO files from MSDN. Browsers failed, even the Firefox DownItAll! Plugin. It was slow, bursts of 100K with 10 second intervals. The speed was that of a bad modem. And it would hang up every 10 minutes and require a manual resume command.

After 10 hours and much hair pulling, found a post recommending disabling the SSL connection (Options…, Connections Tab, Uncheck HTTPS).

Wow. Download complete in 10 minutes. All in one piece. AArrggghhh.

Mavica 411

dave — Sun, 17 May 2009 00:05:55 +0000

At Bette’s school, the classroom digicam is a Sony Mavica MVC-FD200, circa 2002, very old school with a FLOPPY drive or Memory Stick media.

…Memory Stick card slot and can store up to 128MB of images

(from Steve’s Digicams) We found a compatible Memory Stick on eBay, but this time she did not have it, so used the floppy disk drive. I shoved the disk it, and all I found was a series of .411 files.

Huh? Would not open in Paint Shop Pro, ThumbsPlus or renaming to .jpg did not help. After a bit o’Googling I found they are thumbnail files for the camera, made to go along with an HTM file which the camera produces. The only way I could find to show the images are with an old-school Java 1.1 app, Javica.

So I downloaded the Java 1.1 JRE from Sun and installed it. Tried to run the javica.jar file, would not start. Reset JAVA_HOME and the PATH environments.

Test it:
C:\devtools\Java\jre1.1\bin>jre -cp .\Javica.jar Java(tm) Runtime Loader Version 1.1.8_010

Opened the JAR with WinZip, read the Manifest. Nothing. Looked thru the class files. Found com.javica.Javica.class. Very sensible.

Take 2:
C:\devtools\Java\jre1.1\bin>jre -cp .\Javica.jar com.javica.Javica
Bam! The GUI comes up and shows horrible lo-resolution thumbnails. Basically unusable. But I could tell they were pictures of our house. Huh?

Then I noticed the files were from 2006. I found that I used the wrong disk. All jpgs were on the ORANGE floppy! These were thumbnails from older 2006 pictures, of which I had the jpgs.

At least I can say I ran a 1.1 JRE. Now I need to repair the registry:
Registry key 'Software\JavaSoft\Java Runtime Environment\CurrentVersion' has value '1.1', but '1.6' is required. Error: could not find java.dll Error: could not find Java SE Runtime Environment.

These cameras are $988 on Amazon why?

nLite

dave — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 23:58:14 +0000

I bought an old computer from Steve, dual core, better that I have now. Anyway, I am reinstalling a retail Windows XP onto it, and want to install SP2 fresh, not SP1 and upgrade. Creates a lot of junk. So we slipstream, merge SP2 into SP1 install CD. Can do it with lots of steps. How about easy?

Enter nLite. Pick a folder, with two dvd drives creates a bootable iso. Burn and go. Easy.

Used it many times. Recommended

UPDATE: now, I can try SP3 without upgrading SP2 first. I have heard bad things — this might avoid some of them.

nLiteOS

Course: Edward Tufte, Presenting Data and Information

dave — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:00:20 +0000

Karin from work and I attended a one-day course, Presenting Data and Information, by Edward Tufte at the Hyatt Regency Chicago.

I had read some of his stuff a year or two earlier, tried to go to the Chicago course, and our crack clerical staff missed the deadline and it was full. So here we go! Long walk from Metra station to E Wacker Drive. But nice. Good weather. Nice walk.

Showed up, found our way thru the rabbit warren, and registered. We were issued a heavy cardboard box of 4 of ET’s books, and a homework assignment for reading before the class started. I grabbed a Starbucks from the lobby, and off we went.

Big room, lots of people, and not a lot of personal space — typical seminar. We plopped down and read. ET held “office hours” for autograph seekers and questions before, at lunchtime, and afterwards. When does the guy go potty?

The course itself was interesting. The guy is a great speaker, engaging and interesting. The time flew by. He showed 16th century books as examples of books and graphics as timeless art. Neat.

We did the fast 15-minute lunch at Houlihan’s next door. In and out quick, I had a nice chicken wrap, but by the time you walk there, eat, and return it was time to get going again. And the Starbuck’s went away in the PM.

Most of the items listed on the list of items to be covered were indeed covered. The final items were design of information displays in public spaces and design of computer interfaces and manuals. These were the items we were interested in. We got some of the kiosk discussion, but I don’t think we got much of the design of interfaces and manuals. NOTE: I found a review of Visual Explanations with references to Web development, but upon review, it is good stuff, but not a cookbook, more a philosophy.

Tufte manages to get everything important about Web design onto pages 146 through 149 of this book: let the information become the interface, use text rather than icons, don’t let the Web site mimic the bureaucratic structure of the publisher. The most remarkable thing is that he wasn’t even writing about the Web!

On the way home, got some combo cheese-and-caramel corn from the Garrett’s popcorn kiosk in the Metra station. Made a nice snack for us later.

Summary: Good course. Neat to see the 16th century books. If you read and have the books, probably a waste of time and money. If you don’t do technical presentations with lots of tables trying to prove things, (like us) perhaps limited use. But hearing “KISS” once more can be a good thing. And bashing PowerPoint is always fun.

One-day course, 380 USD per person.
Includes:

Thanks 1&1 Ya Dopes for not including Subversion

dave — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 02:50:00 +0000

OK so they warned me. They moved to a new Linux platform, and Subversion stopped working.

I used my own instructions to rebuild. No good. Errors.

After some Googling I found an article by Nick Sergeant and he basically had the same routine. But he dumped 1&1. I can’t afford to now.

So I tried the latest subversion 1.4.6. Looks like it built. Will it update WordPress and Gallery?

WordPress: yes. Gallery: probably. Looks like we are in business.

Why can’t 1&1 at least provide a subversion client?

clip.exe

dave — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 19:14:18 +0000

I wrote a utility called clip many years ago — you pipe output from a DOS program into it and it puts it on the clipboard. Then you can paste it somewhere.

e.g. dir > clip

I found a link to Copy Command Line Output to Windows Clipboard Directly. Turns out Microsoft had the same idea and put a clip.exe into Windows 2003 and Vista. He links to a site, but not trusting them, I checked out a local Windows 2003 install, and yes, there it was!

The MD5 is B265B924104C248FB94C3B6D7E8D4050, CRC (zip) is 0C7584A7 — just as shipped from the great god Microsoft. I would use a local copy, if you have one, but it looks safe enough.

Changing CVS roots in existing checkouts

dave — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:16:06 +0000

SO I got a chunk of CVS and the server has been moved. See this for the Unix version.

I am on windows, with no Cygwin (in this machine).

use strict; use Cwd; use File::Find; use File::Copy; use File::Basename;


my $NEW_CVSROOT = ':pserver:xxxx.xxxxxnull@xxxxx:/cvs/xxxxxx';

my $RootFolder = cwd();

&find( \&Filter_OverwriteRoot, $RootFolder );

warn "$0 Process complete. Terminating...\n";

exit(0);
#########################################
sub Filter_OverwriteRoot # ()

{

    my $fileSpec = $File::Find::name;

    my $fileName = $_;
    # if a file...

    if ( -f $fileSpec )

    {

        # Root is done

        if ( $fileName =~ /^Root$/i )

	{

		print "update  $File::Find::dir $fileName \n";

		open (FILE, ">$fileName") || die "Can't open $fileName: $!\n";

		print FILE $NEW_CVSROOT . "\n";

		close(FILE);

	}

} }

Run this in the root folder for the checked out code. Seems to work…

MAKE SURE YOU ONLY HAVE ONE ROOT LINE PER CVS/Root file! The other solution replaces them all. Mine doesn’t.

Paint Shop Pro X2 Duplicate Error Messages

dave — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 18:24:35 +0000

I just upgraded to Corel PSP X2, and when I start it up got a bunch of dialogs complaining about duplicate image names related to the default brush, tube, and other files installed with the product. After some Googling and analysis, I found the filenames were stored with two cases for the drive letter, like “C:\Program Files” and “c:\Program Files” and PSP was being case sensitive in its dupe checking.

I decided to ignore the messages.

Today I was trying to create a custom brush from a selection and got the same messages. I happened to click on the File Locations button in the brush selection box, and there was under the Brush File FOlders list, two paths to the same location “C:\Program Files\Corel\Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2\Corel_01″ and “c:\Program Files\Corel\Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2\Corel_01″. So the program loaded all the files from these locations, and did case-sensitive compare — and found duplicates! No way!

Remove the path. No more problems. Also work your way down the list and look for more duplicates.