TO-Tech Blog

I’m constantly amazed and annoyed that printing takes up 100% of CPU resources on any Windows based PC I use. The dips you see are the lulls while the printer waits for one side of the page to dry before printing on the other side of a duplex inkjet printer.

This Windows Vista driver war with my HP Photosmart C6250 gets nuttier and nuttier all the time. In February, HP’s scanning software decided to store scanned images in folders by month. It did not do that for December or January. Over the past few months, Vista seems to lose sight of the HP printer and reinstalls the driver again and again. It just did it again this evening as I was preparing to use the scanner.

Anyone have any comments on the Canon multi-function fax, scanner, copier, printer devices? I’m probably going to be in the market for one by the end of the year.

Dave Winer’s blog post titled Plan B got me thinking about my own plan B. Winer created a new business venture (NewsJunk) that relied on Twitter. I had just started using Twitter by feeding my own 140 characters or less tech news comments and links on my personal blog sites to provide more tech info. But, when Twitter crashes, which happens daily these days, my web pages don’t render making them difficult or impossible to view. I think I have a Plan B. It is not as easy or simple to use as Twitter. But, it seems very stable and provides a clean RSS feed. Will play with the idea later today.

This Information Week article…

Windows 7 Testing Must Start ASAP, Microsoft Warns Hardware Makers

…notes that Microsoft is imploring hardware vendors to test with Windows 7. That’s good, of course. But, it would also be nice (nicer, in fact) if they would test hardware with Windows Vista now too! Vista still encounters daily internal blue screens with auto-recovery (i.e., I see the message but not the blue screen). Nvidia has been doing a pretty good job of providing updated drivers for my, hmm, four year old PC? But, it hasn’t helped much so far.

Based on the comments on this blog, it looks like I’m not alone in having various hardware driver issues with a PC running Windows Vista.

Information Week has a useful article titled….

How To Tame Microsoft Windows Vista’s UAC

Among other tips, it talks about using the impossible to remember utility name Icacls that I learned about when trying to delete unwanted OneCare backup files from my external hard drive.

I don’t want to turn off UAC. However, it is so annoying that I find myself using a Mac more often these days.

Technology Review’s article…

Alarming Open-Source Security Holes: How a programming error introduced profound security vulnerabilities in millions of computer systems

…is alarming as-is. However, there is another issue I want to point out here. Note the last paragraph of the article’s first web-page:

So how did the programmers make the mistake in the first place? Ironically, they were using an automated tool designed to catch the kinds of programming bugs that lead to security vulnerabilities. The tool, called Valgrind, discovered that the OpenSSL library was using a block of memory without initializing the memory to a known state–for example, setting the block’s contents to be all zeros. Normally, it’s a mistake to use memory without setting it to a known value. But in this case, that unknown state was being intentionally used by the OpenSSL library to help generate randomness.

I’ve never used it, but I’m sure Valgrind is a fine Open Source source code profiler. However, it is just that: A tool. It is meant to augment human work, not replace it completely. The end-result of trusting Valgrind to the extreme resulted in what appears to be a very very serious problem for many of us who use anything that uses the OpenSSL library (like SSH/SCP). Even worse, this problem has existed for two years now. And, there’s more. The patch distributed doesn’t correct the problem on systems that have deployed keys in the past two years based on the broken code. Ouch.

Google continues to amaze me. Google Doctype is a completely open wiki that is an: encyclopedia and reference library. Written by web developers, for web developers. It includes articles on web security, JavaScript DOM manipulation, CSS tips and tricks, and more. The reference section includes a growing library of test cases for checking cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility.

Looks like a great web developer’s reference.

Aren’t you really really glad that you spent that extra money for Windows Vista Ultimate Edition so that you could get all these Ultimate Extras every, hmm, 12 months or so? I really really wanted these extra DreamScenes and SoundScenes (ok, that is new, but do I really care since I usually have my speakers turned off to avoid all that Windows beeping and booping). These extras became available last week (April 22) according to Windows Update. They are optional installs. So, you need to manually select them from the Vista Windows Update window.

I just picked up a Western Digital MyBook Home Edition 500GB USB/Firewire drive to back up files on my PC. Plugged into a PC running Windows Vista and the EULA window you see above popped up. I have no idea what WD wants to put on my drive, but it is not going to happen. I’m reformatting the drive as a NTFS partition right now (it came formatted as FAT32).

I downloaded Ubuntu Linux 8.04LTS and tried to install it on an old Dell Latitude L400 that I’ve tested previous Ubuntu versions on. The installation seemed to proceed normally. However, it took forever to boot up after the installation completed. And, after the login, the desktop appeared, then disappered leaving only a blank black screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left corner. I guessed that Ubuntu had finally become too bloated for the 256MB RAM notebook. And, yes, I’ve tried Xubuntu. It didn’t work correctly on the L400.

Next, I tried installing it as a Guest OS under Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 on a Dell Latitude D620 notebook. Virtual PC doesn’t like current generation Linux distros and 8.04 felt its wrath. So, I searched the web and found this detailed item on the Arcane Code blog…

Installing Ubuntu 8.04 under Microsoft Virtual PC 2007

The steps in the blog body didn’t work for me. However, there were comments that provided additional information. The additional instruction was to press F6 to add additional options and add…

noapic nolapic vga=791

…to its option line and before the terminating double dashes (–). Be sure to leave a space between “791″ and the terminating “–”. The next step is to be very very patient. The installation process (I installed from a physical CD-ROM burned from the ISO) takes a long long time and mostly blank screens (first black and later beige) before anything interesting appears in the Virtual PC window. However, at some point the Ubuntu graphical desktop shows up with the warning window shown above. This is still the Live CD mode. Clicking the Install icon fires up the CD again resulting in another long delay before anything happens.

If you forget to make the changes to the kernel boot options like I did, you can apply them temporarily from the Grub menu and then make them permanent by editing the kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst.

Downloaded and tried out…

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1

…on Windows Server 2003 R2 in a virtual machine (the only safe way to test stuff like this). Windows Update didn’t work after the installation. Fortunately, I remembered that IE8 has an IE7 emulation mode. Turning this on let me use Windows Update from IE8.

I just read about three bloggers who died recently over at…

In Web world of 24/7 stress, writers blog till they drop

I don’t blog for a living. But, I do blog and write quite a bit. I blog regularly for O’Reilly Media and try to regularly update my personal blogs. And, a bunch of Windows Mobile articles were just published over on the Microsoft.com Windows Mobile site. Over the past few months, I decided to cut back writing on my personal blogs just to get a bit of time back for other things. What used to be 6 or 7 posts per blog per week is probably down to 4 posts per week.

For those who think blogging full time might be the way to go, read the article. Maybe your day job isn’t so bad after all…

Take it easy out there fellow bloggers…

I could never figure out which AMD processors have the AMD-V virtualization assist feature. Search AMD’s website for this information proved futile. Fortunately, I read a Microsoft newsgroup post where a Virtual Machines MVP provide a link to a Wikipedia entry that provides this information. Here’s the link to that Wikipedia page…

List of AMD Athlon 64 microprocessors 

I remembered seeing the Realtek audio driver being listed as a problem for the Windows Vista SP1 update. So, I wasn’t too surprised to see this problem. Fortunately, the Check for solutions online button actually led me to the Realtek driver page with updated Vista drivers at…

Realtek Audio Drivers page

…and the new drivers resulted in a functional audio system on my Vista box.

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) is available. Before installing it, you might want to read more about it at…

Microsoft TechNet Windows Vista TechCenter SP1

The 32-bit version is huge weighing in at 434MB. The 64-bit version is, un, huge-er at 762MB. And, be aware that some applications, especially security related apps, might break after SP1 is installed.

I wanted to try out Xubuntu on an old Dell Latitude L400 notebook because its Xfce X11 windows manager is tuned for low-RAM systems (the L400 has 256MB RAM). Unfortunately, it only managed to display half the screen making it unusable. So, I left Puppy Linux running on the Dell.

Sorry for the blurry image. I took the photo with a camera phone.