Have a Canon scanner? Trying to scan from an application that supports TWAIN, but getting an error that rmslantc.dll is not found?
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Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
Google Update sneakiness
Friday, October 15th, 2010
Here’s another post wherein I complain about something!
Alright, Google wants to make sure that their software stays up to date. That’s awesome, I’m all for it. But, do they have to be so sneaky about it?
If you’ve installed a piece of Google software like Google Chrome, Google Earth, or the Google Talk plugin for your browser, chances are that a piece of software called Google Update got installed along with it. Google Update’s job is to run in the background and periodically check for updates to any Google software that you have installed, and to install them silently.
Stupidly slow disk activity in VMware Server
Monday, October 11th, 2010
Running a few VMs in VMware Server 2.0.2 on Ubuntu Linux 10.04. All works good most of the time. Except when one of them, for whatever reason, needs to do a lot of disk I/O. Then, all of the VMs grind to a halt until the disk activity is done.
Why is this? I don’t know. Obviously, if all of the VMs are using the same disk, there’s going to be some contention for disk access. But, it seems that this slowdown is way worse than it should be.
Anyway, there is a solution to greatly reduce the impact of the problem.
Set all of your VMs to use only one CPU! Yeah, that’s right. I don’t know why that makes the situation any better. Of course, there will be less CPU resources available for your VMs, but it’s worth it if they don’t stop responding whenever one of them decides that it needs to use the disk for more than a few seconds.
I got the idea from a post on the VMware Server forums and sure enough it worked fine for me. Now the VMs are much more responsive while the disk is under load. I don’t know if this problem also plagues VMware Server running on Windows, but chances are you can fix it the same way if it does.
Automatic Security Updates Not Happening in Ubuntu Server (10.04)
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010
I’ve actually run into two separate causes of this problem during my time running Ubuntu Server machines. And while I am discussing Ubuntu Server in this post, I see no reason why this same problem couldn’t affect the desktop version of Ubuntu, or maybe other Ubuntu variants (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc.).
The problem: You’ve enabled automatic security update installation, and yet, security updates are not being automatically installed.
Use VMware Infrastructure Client to manage VMware Server 2.0.x
Friday, August 20th, 2010
VMware Server is a cool free product that you can install on an existing Windows or Linux system and run virtual machines in the background. While it’s built on VMware’s awesome virtualization technology, there are a few issues that make the current version of VMware Server (2.0.2) a little annoying to use.
Out-of-the-box, it can only be managed through the web interface. The web interface itself is not too bad, but if you aren’t accessing it from the same machine that it’s running on, it forces you to use HTTPS. This is great, of course, except something is wonky with the https implementation that is used (it appears to only support SSL version 2, for which support is disabled by default or outright removed from the current version of every major browser?). So, blah. I can’t manage my VMs remotely, which is one of the reasons why I’d like to use VMware Server in the first place.
Now, there are ways around this. You could set up an SSH tunnel or some similar network trick so that you could access the web interface without being kicked over to HTTPS. Or you could use Remote Desktop or a remote X application to access it using a web browser on the same machine as the server. These work for getting to the configuration pages, but I still had trouble trying to access the remote console (which relies on a browser plugin that seems a bit flaky).
There are lots of people complaining about both of these issues (flaky HTTPS and flaky remote console). Now, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a downloadable client that could manage said VMs without having to use the web browser?
WSD printers crashing Print Spooler service in Windows 7
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010
For a while now, I’ve been noticing that my Windows printer list would come up empty in the control panel, or when I tried to print something, I’d get an error that indicates that the Print Spooler service is not running. Going and manually starting the Print Spooler service fixes the problem, but that’s silly, why should I have to do it? Why is the Print Spooler service stopping at all?
Click fraud script taking over your web site?
Wednesday, August 11th, 2010
On one of the web servers I help run, we noticed some suspicious activity. After poking around, I found a pair of suspicious files in a directory that contains user-uploaded files. One was named .htaccess (typical Apache distributed configuration file), and one was named 203497.php. Here’s my analysis of these mystery files.
Bye-bye, Windows 2000!
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
Today, support for Windows 2000 from Microsoft ends. Windows 2000 was released over ten years ago, on February 17, 2000. Although it may have had a shaky start as far as application compatibility goes, it is renowned as one of the most stable operating systems ever to come out of Microsoft, and it paved the way for Microsoft to merge the “home” (9x) and “business” (NT) lines of Windows with Windows XP, the following year.
Can’t activate Windows XP after a repair install or in-place upgrade
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
Windows XP is a picky beast. If you want to move it from one system to another, chances are that you’ll just get a BSOD upon boot. To get around this, you can do a repair install or “in-place upgrade” to convince it to take stock of all of the new hardware and then it will probably boot up fine. Of course, there’s other reasons to run a repair install, it might be able to save a system that isn’t working because of a strange configuration problem or a malware attack.
Anyway, here’s something that I’ve run into a few times now: After running a repair install using a Windows XP SP3 disc, after booting up and logging in, you’re given the message along the lines of: “You must activate Windows before you can log on. Would you like to activate Windows now?” If you select “Yes,” which is supposed to bring up the activation prompt, nothing happens. You get to stare at your desktop wallpaper until you decide to restart your computer manually. If you select “No,” you are immediately logged out. What to do?
Cygwin/X XWin Server leaves an xterm window behind when starting
Monday, February 22nd, 2010
When you start up Cygwin’s X.Org X11 server via startxwin.exe, it likes to leave an xterm window open on your desktop.
I suppose this is kind of handy if you were manually starting Cygwin/X, it’s pretty annoying if you have it set to start up when you log in to Windows. To keep this from happening, you just need to add an empty .startxwinrc file to your Cygwin home directory. That is, start the Cygwin bash shell, and use this command:
touch .startxwinrc
That’s it! No more xterm windows popping up.
Oh, if you’d rather have something besides xterm start up when you start Cygwin/X, you can just add a list of commands to .startxwinrc and it will execute them after starting the X.Org server.
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