Dave’s Happy Place

Last night I had the misfortune of updating to the latest version of the Intel PROSet Wireless application and device drivers (11.1.0.86). After updating the machine spins into a 100% CPU gobbling cycle by the ZCfgsvg.exe process. This is related to the Intel PROSet application. Killing the process moves the problem to the iFrmwork.exe process. After faffing around for 30 minutes trying to figure out what was poked I just uninstalled the whole damn thing.

The reason I upgraded was to try and resolve a very bizarre problem I’ve had for some time on my Windows laptop. Every so often the machine will throw a complete hissy fit with fonts not rendering making the machine unusable (even the Windows Start button text goes away). For some time I’ve had my suspicions that it was related to the Intel PROSet Wireless application somehow mangling something in the OS. It’s a pretty far fetched suspicion because no application should be able to prevent the OS from being able to render fonts onto the display. However, more often than not it all went pear shaped after an error box (with nothing in it) was popped up by the Intel PROSet Wireless application.

So, now I may not have the problem with fonts going away but I’m faced with using Windows wireless networking which I never got to really work satisfactorily in the past - why I moved to the native Intel application in the first place. Luckily I found another Windows download that helps resolve some of the problems I was initially having with the Windows wireless management - I’ll cover this in a later post.

Last night I finally got around to upgrading from the Edgy Eft version of Kubuntu to the recently released Feisty Fawn version. The process was amazingly simple. I updated all of the existing packages that needed upgrading and then the system very nicely told me that there was a completely new version of Kubuntu that I could upgrade to. So off I went and started the upgrade process.

The only place that I had any problems was with the MySQL configuration. A number of modified configuration files needed to be replaced as part of the installation. I had knowingly modified the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file so it had a properly networked bind-address. I needed to do this so my Xbox Media Center (XBMC) Myth TV client can connect to the MythTV backed database.

The entire process took just over an hour and overall I think it downloaded around 700Mb of data. This put a pretty big dent in the monthly download quota but it came down at approximately 350kbps so didn’t actually take that long. Who knows how much I’ve downloaded via Windows updates over the course of a year. So far everythings working as expected and fingers crossed it stays that way.

Overall I’m really impressed at how easy and relatively painless the upgrade was. Well done to the guys at Kubuntu who put the 7.04 release together.

For a while I haven’t been able to play video’s using Mplayer from the KDE GUI in Kubuntu. Playing files through the command line worked fine though. It only fails when using the "Open With" command from the Konqueror GUI and choosing "MPlayer Movie Player" I’d always get a Fatal Error box popping up saying:

Error opening/initializing the selected video_output (-vo) device.

I’ve been using MPlayer quite a lot from the command line since I’ve been doing a bit of DVD encoding of late using AcidRip so it hasn’t been too problematic.

Anyway, the problem is now resolved and what follows are some simple instructions that worked for me.

1. When the problem occurs the MPlayer window should still open (it just doesn’t play what you asked it to).
2. In the MPlayer window, right-click and choose Preferences
3. Choose the Video tab.
4. Change the highlighted Video Driver to something else. Mine was set to xmga, Matrox G200/… I don’t have a Matrox video card so that is probably why MPlayer was barfing. I changed it to xv, X11/xv and now it is working fine.
5. Click the OK button

I just updated to the latest and greatest Linux kernel in my Kubuntu installation to get the latest drivers for my Hauppauge PVR-150 card and found that the SATA driver configuration has moved in the kernel configuration.

I’ve done a kernel upgrade before so I knew to do the whole make oldconfig thing after copying over my known good Linux kernel configuration. I’d had a hell of a time figuring out how to get my machine to boot without the "Waiting for the filesystem…" halt during boot because I’m using SATA drives.

Anyway, the new location for the drivers is Device Drivers -> Serial ATA (prod) and Parallel ATA (experimental) drivers. Compiling in AHCI SATA Support worked great with the Intel ICH7 chipset that my motherboard has.

It’s possible that the SATA driver location change was somewhere between 2.6.17 and 2.6.20 because that is the jump in Linux kernel that I went through.

In one of my recent posts I thought I had stumbled upon a great way to synchronize all of my podcasts to my iPod and still be able to use smart playlists to listen to them on the iPod.

However, it turns out that when you have your iPod configured to automatically sync with your iTunes library it is not possible to play that music/podcast/whatever from within iTunes. You can play the content without any problems using the iPod directly, but with it connected via iTunes all of the tracks are greyed out and you can’t click on the play button in iTunes (even on the computer you are sync’ing with). This is particularly annoying for me because I have all my music at home and I want to listen to the music on the iPod at work through iTunes.

As of yet there is no iTunes store purchased content on the iPod since the New Zealand store just opened days ago, hoorah! So, it seems pretty weird that I can’t play any of the content via iTunes. Initially I thought that it was because I hadn’t authorized my work computer since I’d just opened an Apple account. It wasn’t though - authorization didn’t do anything. Reading the iTunes help it even mentions:

"To use your iPod with more than one computer, set up iTunes to manage songs manually."

Oh well. The workaround at the moment is to switch between manual synchronization turned on at work, and automatic synchronization at home. A little bit painful but seems to work as needed.

While updating my iPod this evening I ran into a better way to manage podcasts. It’s so simple I don’t know why I didn’t do this when I first started using the podcast smart playlist hack to get podcasts to play nicely on the iPod.

The original smart playlist hack was done because there are a couple of problems with standard podcast synchronisation and playing behaviour on an iPod.

First, as soon as you start listening to a podcast (or anything I believe) it is marked as played. So, synchronizing non-played podcasts doesn’t work very well because I often loose what I was part way through listening. To combat this I have previously configured my iPod Nano to synchronise only checked podcasts so I can actively remove podcasts that I have actually finished listening to off the iPod.

Second, the standard behaviour of listening to podcasts on the iPod is bizarre. It plays one podcast and then as soon as it is finished jumps back to the list of the podcasts in the feed. Pretty hopeless since I listen to the podcasts in the car on the way to work and many of the podcasts are only a few minutes long. To address this I have additionally had appropriate smart playlists configured on the iPod so that I can listen to each podcast one after the other based on feed. Playlists work as expected, carrying onto the next item once the current one finishes. The smart playlists are easy to setup using Podcast is true and then matching appropriately on Artist or Album.

With my latest configuration I don’t synchronise podcasts to the iPod Nano at all. I simply synchronise the podcast related smart playlists. I still have the music synchronisation configured to only pull across checked items so I can remove podcasts that I have listened to and prevent music that I don’t really want to on the iPod. So simple.

Everything is much easier to manage now with the rest of the space on the iPod is filled up with a number limited randomly ordered music smart playlist. Excellent.

So I had this really strange problem with my new mobile phone. It takes a micro SD card for data storage and I bought a Kingston 1Gb card when I bought the phone. As far as the phone was aware there was a memory card installed because it showed the pretty icon on the main screen. However, whenever I tried to access any of the Memory Card storage area the phone would just beep with a "Not Allowed" error message displayed on the phone.

Very weird. Did some searching and found some luck in the D900 Memory Card help forum at http://www.expansys.com. One of the posts mentioned that giving the card a volume label worked. I thought to myself surely not, that’s just a little too obscure. So I checked my card in the laptop and sure enough there was no volume label. I gave the card one and then it worked.

Now that is some weird ass behaviour. I wouldn’t of ever thought of doing that in order to try and solve the problem. Nice one Samsung!

Plug-ins are great, they allow feature introduction into software that the original authors didn’t dream of at the time. This commonly approached solution to preventing feature creep in the core of the product has some flaws though. When the orginal authors of the software don’t know what sorts of functionality people will want introduce they inherently have no way of knowing what hooks they need to provide plugin authors. They can’t design what they don’t know - it’s just impossible. There is somewhat of a solution though, create hooks so they plug-in authors can do anything they like! Of course, this is bad as well…

I’m desperately trying to use Wordpress at the moment for blog and page management as I try and convert my existing hand-cranked XHTML web-site to something more manageable. I really want it to work because I like the fact that I can find plugins that do cool things with the content, that I can download new themes, that all the content is in a database and so on. I really want this to work because every time I want to change the look of the existing (albeit sparse) content it’s painfully time consuming.

However, Wordpress has literally had hundreds, perhaps thousands, of plug-ins built for it. And that’s where the wonder of plug-ins starts to tarnish. There are soooo many plug-ins that I have no idea where to find the good ones to fix the problems that I’m currently experiencing. In many cases someone has started a plug-in, someone else has added something cool to it and now I don’t know which one to use. And worse, once I’ve installed the plug-in how will I know when a bug has been fixed or new feature has been developed? Unfortunately it seems that the plug-in management for Wordpress is limited to hoping that the person installing the plugin has unzipped the plug-in into the correct location and activated it. I’ve got around 20 plug-ins in my list at the moment, some months and months old and I have no idea if any of them are the latest version and whether or not there are any updates to them.

The biggest problem I’ve got at the moment is that the default editor in Wordpress is not overly useful. It’s falling over in many ways trying to get my existing content into blog posts. Especially around image and page linking. And, it seems like there isn’t any good way for a plug-in developer to hook into the editing phase (I would have thought a rather significant phase) to allow the user be perform useful things. I mean, how many hoops should the user have to jump through to reference another post in the same blog?

Plug-in authors seem to be able to do all sorts of whizzbang things when it comes to churning out cool HTML and JavaScript AJAX type stuff but can’t seem to make it easier for a user to write useful content. The user should be able to click on a button to reference an existing post but it doesn’t seem like this is possible because none of the post linking plug-ins have offered this as a solution.

What a freakin’ nightmare trying to get bluetooth to work on my HP laptop so I can get my new cellphone to talk to it via bluetooth.

To start with I couldn’t see any bluetooth devices entry in the Control Panel despite Windows Help telling me that’s where I had to go in order to configure it. After searching on the internet it seems like this is a common problem in Windows XP SP2. If Windows doesn’t find a somehow certified bluetooth device driver then it simply doesn’t show all of the Bluetooth related information in the Control Panel.

After finding that the Control Panel applet is run using bthprops.cpl I thought I could just use that directly. However, running bthprops.cpl didn’t actually do anything. So after more searching on the internet, there were more people found with similar problems of having the Bluetooth Control Panel applet simply not doing anything. Some people uninstalled the original bluetooth drivers and then had Windows install the new drivers and everything worked. Not for me though, unfortunately. Even updating the driver through the Device Manager didn’t seem to do anything because Windows Update couldn’t find any more up-to-date drivers.

Anyway, it’s all working fine now after I went to HP to explicitely download the latest drivers from Support Software for Bluetooth by HP. 20 odd Mb to download though, but at least the problem has gone away. Hooray!

If you are having problems with bluetooth not showing up in the Windows Control Panel then I suggest trying to download the latest drivers for your bluetooth device to ensure they are compatible with Windows XP SP2.

Wohoo, I’ve finally found an editor for WordPress that doesn’t scramble handwritten HTML. I’ve been trying to get some Google Gadgets and Picasa Web Album links working in posts, and the standard editor for Wordpress would scramble both cases - even when using HTML mode. Very frustrating.

The FCK editor (no not the naught word f*** but rather the unfortunate initials of the author) as part of the ChenPress plugin to WordPress seems to work a charm.

I can now happily cut and paste the HTML source from either Google Gadgets or my Picasa Web Album’s and not have to magically rejig when I click save.