Category Archives: Computers

Nokia OVI is awesome…

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Nokia OVI is awesome.

Sorry just had to say that, after the wedding I needed a place to upload photo’s… Flickr’s free offering unfortunately has a limit and so does Picasa (Google’s offering) but while I was playing around on my Nokia N78 I found OVI. It doesn’t appear to have a limit and comes with features that allow you embed a little flash applet that has the photo’s in it.

You’ll see them on the Honeymoon page on our wedding website. One of the other cool features is that I can Sync my phone’s calendar, address book, notes and other items on my phone with the OVI website which is an awesome feature, it allows me to maintain the address book and calendar on any PC which is very nice and means that I have a backup of my contacts if I ever loose my phone.

You can also take photo’s and upload straight to the OVI website the same as with the Flickr integration.

If you have a recent Nokia phone I highly reccomend that you go and look at the OVI website.

FNB Online Banking – Still Down :-(

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Any FNB customers out there? I’m sure you’ve noticed that their online banking is still down… I first checked it yesterday around 9am and it was down and still down now, 24 hours later. After doing more reading up I see its actually been down since Sunday’s scheduled maintenance.

**Just a quick update it appears that debit cards were also affected by the downtime.

**Another update you can follow this twitter (@rbjacobs) feed to get live updates on the status of the FNB banking site.

They’ve got a little link telling you to use Cell phone banking, but of course I can’t remember my cell phone banking pin.

You can find more info on the My Broadband forums and on this news item from MyBroadband.

I wonder if FNB will be paying out for lost interest or bounced debit orders etc because of the site being down and people unable to transfer money? I know I can go to a bank, but are they going to pay the fees associated with doing banking at a real bank?

SGI personal Supercomputer

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SGI, previously (or better) known as Silicon Graphics Incoporated have released a “personal” supercomputer. It can go up to 80 cores with up to 1 Terabyte of RAM. I can think of plenty of uses for this, although I’m guessing its gonna be a little loud and you might need a re-enforced desk if you plan on putting on the desk.

Octane III is office-ready with a pedestal, one-by-two-foot form factor, whisper-quiet operations, easy-to-use features, low maintenance requirements and support for standard office power outlets. While a typical workstation has only eight cores and moderate memory capacity, the superior design of the Octane III permits up to 80 high-performance cores and nearly 1TB of memory for unparalleled performance…
Octane III is easily configurable with single- and dual-socket node choices, and offers a wide selection of performance, storage, graphics, GP-GPU and integrated networking options. Yielding the same leading power efficiencies inherent in all SGI Eco-Logical compute designs, Octane III supports the latest Intel processors to capitalize on greater levels of performance, flexibility and scalability.

SGI Octane IIIOctane III is office-ready with a pedestal, one-by-two-foot form factor, whisper-quiet operations, easy-to-use features, low maintenance requirements and support for standard office power outlets. While a typical workstation has only eight cores and moderate memory capacity, the superior design of the Octane III permits up to 80 high-performance cores and nearly 1TB of memory for unparalleled performance…

Octane III is easily configurable with single- and dual-socket node choices, and offers a wide selection of performance, storage, graphics, GP-GPU and integrated networking options. Yielding the same leading power efficiencies inherent in all SGI Eco-Logical compute designs, Octane III supports the latest Intel processors to capitalize on greater levels of performance, flexibility and scalability.

SGI Unveils Octane III Personal Supercomputer (via BoingBoing)

Google Gears enabled Sites.

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Google GearsRecently I’ve been enabling Google Gears on sites that support it, most notably I’ve enabled it on the WordPress backend of this site which means appears to fix some loading issues I had when I had a dodgy internet connection.

I’ve also enabled it on my Gmail account where its improved my email experience a lot. My biggest problem was when SAIX is having international connection issues which is when Gmail tended to get a little flake-y which is a problem as I use it as my primary email client. I’ve decided to not install Google Gears in Firefox but rather switch to running Chrome, Firefox is still my favourite browser but Chrome feels faster when running Gmail and I can easily pass it different proxy settings which is nice when I’m moving around from one client to another.

Next up… I’m busy enabling it on Google Docs, can’t wait to see how that goes.

Howto Debug an odd problem – “Load Datalogic Scanner XML Settings Failure!”

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I had an odd problem today with a USB barcode scanner and its OPOS driver. The scanner in question is a DataLogic 2200VS USB scanner and I’m using its OPOS Driver (USBScanner is the OPOS Device name) on a Windows Vista machine with UAC switched on.

When I lauched the application I was running it kept giving a error when it tried to open the device “Load Datalogic Scanner XML Settings Failure!” No amount of searching online was able to reveal the answer to this error and because its load via the OPOS control which is in my application via COM.Interop there is no easy way to step into the code and see why its going wrong.

After a little testing and debugging I discovered that it works if the application is “Run As Administrator” it’ll work fine so it had to be a permission problem just wasn’t sure which permissions were wrong.

If only there was a way to see which files and registry entries the driver was trying to access and which failed because of a access denied error… Thats where this cool tool called Process Monitor comes in. Lauching the app it’ll show you everything going on in your system, a few quick filters so that it only shows my apps calls then tried to use the scanner, it gave the error again but this time I could track down the cause.

It turned out that it was trying to write to the C:\Program Files\DLSOPOS\ folder and was failing and was trying to access these 2 parts of the registry and getting access denied errors.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\OLEforRetail\ServiceOPOS\Scanner\USBScanner and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\DATALOGIC\DL_OPOS_Service

Changing the permissions on those registry keys and the folder fixed the problem.

Unmountable_Boot_Volume BSOD on Windows XP

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A friend brought round her computer today that was constantly rebooting while Windows was trying to boot. After a bit of fiddling I got it so that I could see the error message which was a BSOD (blue screen of death) with the message “Unmountable_Boot_Volume” on it.

A littile googling found this post on MSGoodies with the following details:

Start the recovery console. If you do not have it installed – or when that version does not work – like in this case, boot from an installation CD and select R for repair. You can easily mix languages – I used an English CD on a Danish Windows

Run these command –
chkdsk c: /r /p
fixmbr
exit (to reboot)

And it worked great, saved me alot of fiddling. I’ve put the details up here in case I need it again in the future.

Podcasts and Walking

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I try every morning to go for about an hour walk with my Fiance’, it helps wake me up for the day, gets the blood pumping and hopefully ease me into the whole exercising everyday thing.

I’ve found having something to listen to helps make the time go by quicker, I tried listening to the radio but I haven’t found a station that I like. They either play silly music I don’t like, behave a little stupid or start taking calls from random strangers who complain about stupid things.

I like music but I prefer it in the background while I’m doing something else to being the only thing I’m doing. This morning I decided to try something a little different and put a podcast on my cellphone (which is what I’ve been using to listen to the radio on.). I haven’t listened to any podcasts in a while so I wasn’t exactly sure what was out there and started looking around. I don’t want something to “heavy” as I’m half asleep at that time in the morning, its got to be something light hearted, funny and at the sametime interesting… ideally I would like to learn something new while going for a walk.

So I tried a Stack Overflow podcast with Geoff Atwood and Joel Spolsky and it was actually very good, I’m not sure if I actually learnt anything but it was entertaining the recording quality was very good and time did fly by. I know in the past I used to listen to LUG Radio which I enjoyed too. If my morning commute to work was longer (its currently less the 5 minutes) I would listen to more podcasts.

If you know of any good podcasts leave a comment and I’ll go look it up.

Remote desktop to console session on Windows 2003 Server

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One of our clients Windows 2003 servers was doing strange things, on connecting to the server via Remote Desktop all you got was a blue screen (default windows background colour). My guess was that a session or 2 was still running in the background and needed to be killed off, but because we couldn’t get access to the server via Remote Desktop or physically we had a bit of a problem. Thats when I remembered the following neat trick.

If you pass /console (/admin on newer versions of the Remote Desktop Client) to the Remote Desktop Client (mstc.exe) and then connect to the server you connect to the servers console and not a new terminal server session. I believe there are ways to specify that you want to connect to the console in the hostname field but I haven’t gotten that working yet.

In my case it allowed me to kill off the troublesome Sessions and get access back to the server.

Found this info on this site. (Which BTW is a useful site.)

Proxy servers in Google Chrome

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Network Access MessageAt the office we have a weird Windows 2003 install running the ISA Firewall/Proxy which sits between us and the outside world, for some as yet unknown reason we get brown “Network Access Message: The page cannot be displayed” error messages occasionally when visiting websites (like the example on the right.). I haven’t been able yet to find the cause, but it gets frustrating when some sites are inaccessible for no reason.

In order to get trouble free internet I installed a linux machine with a squid proxy, now the problem is that I don’t always want to use the squid proxy as it comes with its own internal network issues on our network.

After a bit of research I found that Google Chrome can be made to use a defined proxy by supplying a command line option. I created a new shortcut for Chrome and set the target too:

“C:\Users\Dale Nunns\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” –proxy-server=192.168.0.20:3128

That makes it use my squid proxy (192.168.0.20:3128) when ever its started from that shortcut. Another nice option that I stumbled across awhile ago is to add “-incognito” to the end to start the browser in incognito mode.