Computer Tips -Tech Info

For most people here in the US, this last weekend was known as Labor Day weekend, for me though… it was more like Audio on Linux weekend. I’ve mentioned before that I use my computer for most EVERYTHING and that’s not far off…. I have watched movies on the PC, I’ve recorded multitrack audio, captured tv shows to disc, and of course, work…. database server, digitial photos/editing, test web sites, word documents, test various hardware, etc. etc. test software, etc…. vmware…. oh the list could keep going and going and going…. Well, sometimes it seems that optimizing the machine for one thing comes at the expense of another. Since I had to swap out the system board on the main machine (massively failing probably due to overheating…. multiple pci slots had failed, etc….) I hadn’t had a chance to see why some things didn’t work the way I used to….

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I ran into something I hadn’t yet seen firsthand today. A PC (running Windows XP home) with 2 optical drives (CD-RW and DVD drive). However, neither cd drive showed up in My Computer and both of them had a yellow exclamation point in the device manager listing. Of course, two drives don’t just go bad at the same time, so I wondered if it might be the Secondary IDE connector on the system board or the cable that was causing the trouble. In retrospect, I might could have assumed that they wouldn’t show at all if that were the case, but I checked against a usb connector and good cd drive just to be sure that we could rule out hardware as the problem. So, then it came time to see if the driver was the problem.

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Today is the first chance I”ve had to try out my new usb/ ide adapter “in the field”. I have previously used external ide enclosures for either laptop (2.5″) or desktop (3.5″) drives as well as larger (5.5″ cdrom’s) But, it was a bit of a nuisance to have to remove the drive that I had in the case and carrying around an empty case seemed like a waste, so I ordered this from Newegg.com It’s made by Sabrant (in China..) and is designed to connect any IDE or SATA drive to the usb port.

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I remember several years back I tried out gocr which is an open source character recognition engine. I wasn’t thoroughly impressed, but it sort of worked. Yesterday, I saw the news that Google has released Tesseract as an open source Optical Character Recognition engine. It was originally developed by HP and has been shelved for some time, it’s supposed to be among the top 3 in accuracy according to testing by UNLV. The source code is available at their sourceforge.net page. It’ will be good to see this taken up and integrated as a backend by open source scanning applications. (Maybe even office suites as a “recognize text in image file” type option….)

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Yesterday codeweavers announced a beta release of their Crossover Office product geared towards Apple Mac OS X users. The software will allow certain windows applications to run on top of Apple’s operating system. They’re of course, seeking feedback and suggestions for what direction to take the project. This is based on the wine project, codeweavers also has Crossover Office for Linux. (The beta release is 6.0, currently the linux version is at 5.0.3)

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A new Internet Explorer bug was published on Monday. It’s been given a CVE (2006-4446) and affects IE 6.0 SP1. It’s worth considering alternative browsers. Details from bugtraq indicate that it’s a buffer overflow in the DirectAnimation.PathControl COM Object(daxctle.ocx)… could cause DoS and possibly remote code execution.

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We’ve got an antivirus false positive to pass along… apparently, a signature update for CA eTrust Antivirus has flagged lsass.exe on Windows 2003 as an undesirable program. There have been updates to address the problem, but if you’re running CA eTrust on Windows 2003 Server you’ve probably already seen the effects. Sans reports some 2003 servers as failing or being unable to reboot.

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Mozilla is soliciting people to test the candidates for version 1.5.0.7 of both Firefox and Thunderbird, so that sounds as though release is VERY close for that version. It sounds as though there are security issues addressed. (September 7 is the tentative release date… according to this page.)

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First, Linspire released the freely available “freespire” release of their operating system (based on debian linux). Now, users will no longer have to pay an annual subscription for the click n run service. That’s now available for free as well. There is a writeup here. Previously the annual subscription fees were $20/$50 per year depending on service level. This does not mean all software through cnr is free, there is commercial software available there for a fee. I know that not long ago there was some talk about opening up cnr (click n run) to other distributions, possibly starting with debian based distros such as ubuntu.

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I’ve FINALLY tracked down what was causing the issue with displaying my page in Internet Explorer 7 (RC1). It turns out that the stattraq plugin in wordpress (stattraq site) is part of the problem. Now, I don’t understand exactly WHY… because I do have stattraq on each of the sites, but one… onlineradiotv.com carried this error at the bottom of the page (ONLY in IE7 by the way…) “Fatal error: Call to undefined function: () in /var/www/html/radiotv/wp-content/plugins/stattraq.php on line 90”

The other pages just failed to display as though there was a network problem…. until…

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