Microsoft Automatic Reboots

I ran into the most annoying (understatement) thing about certain Microsoft automatic updates (on Windows XP Pro). It seems that last Tuesday was yet another 'patch-Tuesday'. Nothing unexpected about that, but this update (or at least one of them) required a reboot of the PC (yet, still nothing wrong with that).

Normally, the automatic update process bugs you about rebooting, but somehow this reboot interface had a timer. A timer of 5 minutes. After these 5 minutes the PC will reboot.

Totally ignorant to open (modified) documents. The shutdown process kills all open programs / documents and reboots. Without waiting for user input on e.g. saving files.

I tested this with opening a notepad document, altering it and leaving it open. After 7 minutes, the PC had rebooted, and all changes to the document were lost.

Yet another 'Thank You, Microsoft'

Major Wordpress 2.6 Bug

A couple of days ago I upgraded to Wordpress v2.6. After the upgrade I opened the blog, and added a new post. Both of those actions worked properly.

After the upgrade I noticed a major decrease in comment and trackback spam. But today I discovered the real reason why comments AND page views were close to zero.

There's a bug in Wordpress 2.6 where the permalinks are not working correctly. If you're using permalinks with the date, name, etc. (e.g. /index.php/switched-to-mac/) you get a 'Not Found' error. A definite WTF moment.

When you change the permalinks setup in the wordpress admin pages to default the pages/posts are accessible again. It seems that the issue is known and will be fixed in Wordpress 2.6.1. Untill then, most of the Google search results which end up on my website will result in a 'Not Found' error.

I would go back to an earlier version if I could. After the upgrade (which I thought that worked correctly) I removed the 2.5 installment... Yet another lesson for the future.

UPDATE: the pageviews are returning to normal :)

FireFox 3 Bug??

Like most security conscious people I use Firefox (FF) for my everyday browsing on the Internets. So when the Mozilla guys released version 3 I installed it on all my machines (2 Windows and 2 OSX platforms).

It was a bit getting used to. The underlying FF part had been changed. Bookmarks, history etc are all stored in sqlite databases. So no more flatfiles. This took me a couple of hours to figure it out, but finally I got 'there'.

Using FF was business as usual... Apart from one very annoying bug; Opening new windows (not new tabs) results often in an empty bookmarks bar. And this is happening on Windows and OSX versions of FF.
The bookmarks are 'there' but not click-able. Using the right mouse button (on OSX: ctrl-mouse click) on the bookmarks bar and selecting 'Open All in Tabs', FF opens every bookmark in the bar.

The only way of restoring the proper bar is the completely shutdown FF and restart it. After that it works for a certain amount of time.

The problem isn't isolated to my environment. Just google on the issue, and you'll find more people. There's one suggestion I haven't tried yet. Starting with a fresh/clean profile, but I do need my settings/passwords/bookmarks. I'm lost without those :(

UPDATE: I tried a new profile, and this seemed to work. After this I started to repopulate the new profile with the old settings, etc. Everything went fine until the point where I added the extensions. It seems that even old / not active extensions (SwitchProxy in my case) are still able to f*ck things up.

Windows/Office Frustrations

The title should cover the topic appropriately.... The last couple of days there's this delay on opening Office documents on my work laptop. Every MS-Word or Excel document I open (by double clicking the document) takes approximately 25 to 30 seconds to open.

Using tools like procmon (formerly known as filemon from SysInternals) displayed nothing interesting. Apart from a 15 to 20 seconds delay between the WINWORD.EXE appearances in the logging.
Since this nagged the hell out of me, I tried some stuff (in a non-chronological order);

• Removed McAfee AV
• Removed all tooling I installed in the last couple of days
• Removed  MS-Word
• Removed Office 2003 completely
• Removing all references to Office, MS-Word or Excel in the registry, and on the filesystem.

Running Word with the /a switch or even typing winword.exe c:\test.doc works fine. Everything works, except the default opening of a file by double clicking it.

Someone suggested to add another user on the system and try it with that user account. So I did. I logged on as the new user and every document launched as it's supposed to do :-) . So I logged out, and tried the original user, and guess what? The document opened lightning fast. I couldn't be more happy, because I didn't feel like reinstalling the entire system.

After working a couple of hours I restarted the system (application update), and everything went back to 'normal'... Opening documents took forever again.....
It seems that launching Word from a FRESH user account resets something. Everything afterwards works fine, just as long as you don't reboot... And since it's Windows...... Well, Friday is gonna be a re-installment day. Am I looking forward to that (that's something of a rhetorical thing).

SMS Costs

Not every cellular provider gives unlimited SMS for free. Some of them have dataplans in which you buy unlimited SMS for a price. More and more contracts have so-called unlimited dataplans. This means that you can surf / e-mail all you want on your phone, but this doesn't mean that SMS is for free as well.

When you think about the costs of SMS, it is probably more expensive than a barrel of oil, or even more expensive than a bottle of printer ink.
A single sms costs about 10 to 20 cents a piece (depending on your SMS 'plan'). This SMS contains a maximum of 160 characters (=160 bytes). This makes 1 Megabyte of SMS messages costs about 650 euro (@10 cents a SMS).... So, why even sms at all?

Massive Blog Spam

I, and probably the rest of the world as well, am being hit with spam in the comments at this moment. Over 100 comments a day are intercepted by Akismet.

It seems that all the spamjerks have found a way of creating userprofiles on public websites/forums/blogs and are referring to those in the spam. Below are some examples URL's which were active at the time of me writing this:

• http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/profile.jspa?editMode=true&userID=678271
• http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/profile.php?id=699061

I send an e-mai lto Lonely Planet descibing their problem. Let's hope that they fix it soon.

In the mean time; All hail Akismet!!!!

Laptop Heatstroke

It could have been a regular Monday. My work laptop doesn't feel like working and stopped. Probably caused by overheating. Just when there are deadlines to be kept. Well, it's all in a days work.

Symcaimport Safety

No matter what you do, there are always social rejects (and this is saying it nice) trying to sabotage you. I've been getting various virus alerts on my CA import tool for mobile phones. Every on of them seems to be an attempt to upload a trojan. Thankfully, the AV software intercepts them.

 Just to reassure you all; each upload is given a unique name (8 characters). If such a filename already exists, it will be overwritten. So the chance of you getting someone else's file is (almost) zero. Just make sure that you use the correct name / URL when you're trying to download the certificate on your phone.

Updating Capture NX on Mac

When I bought my Nikon D300, I got a free copy op Capture NX (v1.3.0). After installing, the application reminded me to update. There were a couple of new versions available (current version is 1.3.3).
This is were the quest began......

The Nikon Update application kept crashing on me. 50MB downloads took over three hours (before crashing), while a single download from the support pages would take 5 to 10 minutes. So I needed to get the files from the web instead of using the updater.

First, the D300 was bought in the Netherlands, so you might think that the software would also be the Dutch version. I wouldn't know this because I install everything in English (if there's a choice). So I downloaded the Dutch updates from the Nikon support pages.

Note: I used the 'Dutch' CD which came with the camera.

None of the updates worked (Error: No version of Capture NX was found)....

I literally downloaded 12 different versions from different continents. Finally, I found a 1.3.1 update (a file called cnx131_en.dmg) which worked. So I needed to get English versions of the software. Not US, or Canadian versions, but English versions.

After this it was easy; Created an account on the UK Nikon support website and found Nikon Capture NX v1.3.3 for OSX. This update worked. So finally, after a gazillion downloads, multiple crashes, and 5 hours well spend, I got Capture NX v1.3.3 up and running.....

So, even if your camera is officially purchased in the Netherlands, you need to get the updates from the UK.

UPDATE: It seems that I'm not the only one who ran into this. I keep getting referers from some fora around the Internet.
I think that if you're running Windows instead of OSX you might have similar problems. So yet another crossplatform solution :)