Wednesday, January 19th, 2011
This is a problem I noticed many months ago, but did not seriously look in to until just now.
I like to use the monthly Mozilla Foxkeh desktop wallpaper. Right now, I have the January 2011 wallpaper — this nice, large, lossless PNG. (By the way, the word that he is in the progress of writing is “火狐”, which literally means “fire fox.” How cool!)
Anyway, I noticed that there is crappy compression on the image shown on my desktop, particularly around the numbers that make of the calendar. This has been occurring in the wallpapers for past months as well. If I open up the PNG (that I told Windows to use!!) and zoom way in, the image is crystal clear. But on the desktop, it is junk. Take a look, I zoomed in on the “2011″ at the top-left of the calendar. On the left is the data from the PNG as viewed in any decent graphics application, and on the right is what appears on my desktop.
Yuck!
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Tags: Image Compression, PNG, Windows 7
Posted in Software | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, January 4th, 2011
Nowadays, most local area networks have a DHCP server running on them. This is, of course, how hosts on the network are assigned their IP address and other stuff they need to know (router address, DNS servers, etc.).
The DHCP server has a pool of addresses that it is allowed to hand out to clients, and it will often hand out these addresses sequentially. In some cases, the address chosen for a particular client may be based on some sort of hash function on the client’s MAC address (so that the client will always be assigned the same address, unless there is a hash collision).
Of course, sometimes it’s nice to assign a particular device on your network a specific IP address (a “static” or “fixed” IP address). This way, you will always know without any doubt what the IP address or your printer or file server or whatever is. Of course, you can just set the address manually on the device, taking care to place it outside of the DHCP pool.
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Tags: DHCP, Ubuntu Server
Posted in Software | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, December 29th, 2010
In VMware Workstation, I’ve been getting this error for a while when I tried to start up a VM using the “Bridged” network interface.
Cannot open file “C:\ProgramData\VMware\dndlogs\dndlog.conf”: The system cannot find the path specified.
The network bridge on device VMnet0 is temporarily down because the bridged Ethernet interface is down. The virtual machine may not be able to communicate with the host or with other machines on your network.
Not too big a deal, usually using the NAT interface works just fine, but it does prevent other machines on the network from talking to the VM which is sometimes a handy feature to have.
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Tags: VMware, VMware Workstation
Posted in Software | 3 Comments »
Saturday, November 13th, 2010
Here’s something that I thought would be nice.
Lightbox is a nifty little JavaScript/CSS package you can download that allows you to make nifty slideshows on a web page with little effort. Pretty much, your page has thumbnail images that link to the larger images, with a specific rel attribute on the a tags that make the links, and Lightbox takes over to display the large image in a nifty Flash-free box when you click on a thumbnail. If you have several images, it’ll make a nifty slide show for you. You can read more and see it in action if you click the link at the start of this paragraph.
Well, the box with the image in it has a close button at the bottom. What if I want to put it on the top instead?
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Tags: JavaScript
Posted in Software | 14 Comments »
Friday, November 12th, 2010
Today, I installed the new Parallels Plesk 10.0.1 on Ubuntu Server 10.04. This is the first release of Plesk that supports any version of Ubuntu newer than 8.04. Anyway, after the install, I went to log in and filled out the initial setup information, and was then given this error:
Unable to restart Named: dnsmng failed: dnsmng failed: dnsmng: Service /etc/init.d/bind9 failed to restart
(What a great error message.)
Whoops. Turns out there’s a problem with the default Plesk configuration of the DNS server BIND (run it in a chrooted environment) and Ubuntu’s configuration (run it with AppArmor, explicitly configuring which files it is allowed to open). You have to give BIND permission to open the files in its chroot environment. The solution to this problem is to edit the file /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.named and add these lines before the closing brace at the end of the file:
/var/named/run-root/etc/* rw,
/var/named/run-root/var/* rw,
/var/named/run-root/dev/* rw,
Then, reboot the machine and you should be good to go.
Tags: Parallels Plesk, Ubuntu, Ubuntu Server
Posted in Software | 9 Comments »
Friday, November 5th, 2010
Mildly annoying problem with a simple solution.
If you use the Eclipse IDE on Windows 7, you may notice that it does not behave nicely on the taskbar. If you pin it to the taskbar, once your workspace is open, Eclipse will add a second icon to the taskbar (and right-clicking it does not yield any option to pin it). From what I’ve read, you may have to be using the 64-bit version of Eclipse to experience this issue.
To fix it, you need to add the path to your 64-bit JDK’s bin directory to your system PATH variable. And, it needs to come before C:\Windows\system32 on your PATH.
The reason for this is Eclipse will execute under C:\Windows\system32\javaw.exe if that is the first potential JVM that it finds. Eclipse only demonstrates this troublesome taskbar behavior when it is running under javaw.exe. If you add a JDK path to the PATH variable that it will find first, it will use that JDK’s jvm.dll as the JVM and everything will be fine.
If you need help figuring out how to set your system PATH variable or where your JDK is installed, consult Google. If you’re using Eclipse, then you must be a programmer, so I am assuming that you know about such things.
That’s all!
Tags: Eclipse, Java
Posted in Software | 13 Comments »
Sunday, October 31st, 2010
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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Tags: Canon, TWAIN, WIA
Posted in Software | 29 Comments »
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.
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Tags: Google, Google Update
Posted in Software | 1 Comment »
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.
Tags: VMware, VMware Server
Posted in Software | No Comments »
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.
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Tags: Ubuntu, Ubuntu Server
Posted in Software | 2 Comments »
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