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Java icon appears in system tray, even when you told it not to?

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Alright, here's some Sun Java silliness I ran across a while back and just found the fix for.

If you're running Java applications on Windows, you may have noticed that Sun likes you to see a Java icon in the system notification area when a Java application is running. You can get rid of it by right-clicking on it and selecting "Hide icon," but it'll just come back next time. There's an option in the Java control panel to hide the icon... But sometimes, in Vista, it shows up even though you've told it to hide.

More...

Category: Software | Posted by: Aaron

WDS and WPA with Apple Airport Extreme

Monday, April 14, 2008

Apple Airport Extreme (and Express) wireless base stations support WPA encryption, and also WDS, which allows you to use multiple access points to create one big wireless network (so you don't actually have to connect each access point to the same "backbone" network, as they will create wireless links between each other).

In this day and age, you'd be silly to use anything less than WPA encryption (WEP is fundamentally flawed), but there are a few caveats with setting up WPA and WDS together on Apple's devices that I ran into while setting this up for someone recently.
  • WPA only works with Airport Express or Extreme access points. (It does not work with the original Airports, or the "snow" models.)
  • Upgrade your access points to the latest firmware, some earlier versions have a bug that prevents WPA and WDS from working together.
  • Your wireless network name (SSID) must be the same on all access points participating in WDS. (This doesn't seem to be documented anywhere, and without WPA, you can use different SSIDs.)
Category: Computer Repair | Posted by: Aaron

Migrating Vista's Windows Photo Gallery database

Thursday, March 13, 2008

I've taken a liking to the Windows Photo Gallery application that comes with Windows Vista. It's nice for organizing photos and videos, and the killer feature for me is the hierarchical tagging, a feature that I cannot find in any other free photo management app for Windows.

Windows Photo Gallery stores tag information directly in the files you are tagging, when possible. For instance, when tagging JPEG files, the tags are stored in the JPEGs using XMP. Also, if you modify other information about the files (such as the date/time a photo was taken), that information is stored in the file if possible.

In some cases, the information cannot be stored in the file itself; for instance, if the file is marked "read only," or if the file format does not support metadata (PNG, AVI, etc.). In this case, Windows Photo Gallery still allows you to do anything you could to a file that it could store the information in, only, it stores the information in its own little private database. This is transparent to the user.

If you want to move your "gallery" to a different machine, and your gallery consists only of JPEG images, you can probably just copy them all to the new machine, and Windows Photo Gallery will automatically index them and rebuild its list of tags. However, if you have other types of files in your gallery, the information will not be carried along with these files and you'll have to re-tag them. Ugh.

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Category: Software | Posted by: Aaron

STOP 0x0000007E error during 64-bit Windows Vista install

Saturday, January 19, 2008

Here are the symptoms:
  • You have 4 GB of RAM (or rather, more than 3 GB).
  • You are trying to install the 64-bit version of Windows Vista.
  • After the first reboot, when your computer boots off of the hard disk for the first time, Windows crashes with a BSOD with error code 0x0000007F.
  • Whatever hardware swapping you do doesn't seem to help; it still gives you the blue screen at every boot.

A friend ran into this issue earlier today. After some searching and digging through a lot of not very useful information, we found out that the solution is pretty simple.
  • Remove 2 GB of RAM, or whatever it takes to only have 2 GB in the machine.
  • Run the Vista install.
  • Install the x64 version of the KB929777 hotfix from Microsoft.
  • Put your RAM back in.

Note that this particular issue should not occur if you are using a Windows Vista SP1 (or newer) install disc, it is only an issue with the RTM version.

Hope this helps someone. :-)
Category: Computer Repair | Posted by: Aaron

The Sharper Image Digital Photo Album -- Software Download / Driver Download

Monday, December 24, 2007

I received for an early Christmas present a mini digital photo album for a keychain by The Sharper Image. Both the device and the accompanying software are a little finicky, but it works (kind of).

Searching around online, I was unable to quickly find any place to download the software, or any kind of support page for this device. In light of this, I made a .iso image of the CD that came with it and I am posting it here in case anyone needs it. Here is a picture of the device for comparison with your device (to know if this is the software you need).

Download version 2.3 of the software (1.92 MB, Windows and Mac OS X software included in the image).
Category: Software | Posted by: Aaron

Thoughts on Facebook

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

They messed up again, and finally decided to admit it, with Mark Zuckerberg, head guy at Facebook, posting this on the Facebook blog.

Did everyone forget that almost the same thing happened a little more than a year ago? Are we learning anything here? I wonder what the next thing will be.

I'm taking a break from all of that until they get their act together.
Category: Software | Posted by: Aaron

Changing Default Message Views in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

I deal with a reasonable amount of e-mail, I suppose. I like to keep most of the (somewhat useful) e-mail that I get, but up until now, I've been pretty lazy with it, keeping a folder in Outlook called "Message Archive" and just dragging all of the mail there. With approaching 20,000 e-mails in this one folder, I decided it was past time to start keeping it more organized. So, I made a nice mail folder structure, new mail gets sorted as it arrives, and I've been going back and sorting my old mail bit by bit.

I mostly like the default Outlook message layout, but I don't really have any use for the "Categories" or "Flag Status" things that it wants to display next to every message by default. You can remove these columns, sure, and doing this manually on each folder in a small set of folders is not too much trouble, but it starts getting annoying to make changes to each folder once you have a lot of them. And then there's the thought of, if I ever migrate this to another machine, will I have to do this all again?

So, I investigated how to modify the default Outlook view. It's not very hard, but it's not very obvious either.

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Category: Software | Posted by: Aaron

Bluetooth + VMware = INTERNAL_POWER_ERROR

Monday, October 08, 2007

It seems that having a standard Microsoft USB Bluetooth dongle hooked up to your machine with VMware Workstation 6 (or a newish version of another VMware product) will lead to a bluescreen upon bootup with the error message "INTERNAL_POWER_ERROR" and stop code 0x000000A0.

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Category: Computer Repair | Posted by: Aaron

Windows Vista: Cannot connect to System Event Notification Service

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

This is a problem I've been having for several months: Sometimes, upon booting my 64-bit Vista desktop machine and logging in, I get one of those taskbar balloons that tells me that "Windows could not connect to the System Event Notification Service," and some other stuff about because of this, non-admin users will not be able to log in, and I should check the event log for details. This seems to happen to me almost without fail after I had installed some Vista software updates and rebooted from that installation (I guess since that seems to jog up the order that things happen in at boot time), but anyway, it was not exclusive to that, although it would almost always be fine after I rebooted again.

Since I'm an administrative user (and there's only one account on my machine), there seemed to be nothing else wrong after the notification went away. The System Event Notification Service is running, even. Still, errors like this are somewhat disturbing.

Anyway, I Googled around a little and found little useful information; however, I believe I have fixed it on my machine.

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Category: Computer Repair | Posted by: Aaron

What happened to my favorite application?

Thursday, September 13, 2007

I am now going to use this space to rant about some software issues in general, and about a couple of image-editing programs in particular. And I'm going to begin with a story, that sort of illustrates my complaint.

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Category: Software | Posted by: Aaron


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