siansiew.com

      

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Just posted a write up on YamiPod (Yet another iPod manager) which is an alternative iPod management software to iTunes here.

      

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My sister got a Sony WALKMAN NW-E013F as a free gift recently and the installation of drivers continually terminated abruptly at about 70%. Initially she thought it was her fault but after some googling, it was Sony’s. >:| They somehow shipped CD-ROMs with defective drivers in them, which caused that installation troubles.

Taken from here:

Important information regarding the CD-ROM software supplied with the following WALKMAN: NW-E013/E015/E016/E013F/E015F/E016F

Some CD-ROM provided with the above mentioned models may not be used. Therefore, the Hardware Operation Guide (PDF) may not be opened and the Driver for Microsoft Windows 2000 users may not be installed.

If you’re having the same issues, just get the drivers from here and it should install fine. ;)

And here’s the link to SonicStage 4.3 which is the software used to transfer your music to the device (similar to how iTunes works with the iPod).

Sony Asia Pacific’s announcement regarding this issue can be found here.

      

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I got tired of my Windows 2003 automatic installation of security updates (and restart) when they are released, so I decided to go digging around to find a way to stop that. A quick Google search got me this site, whose step 2 did the trick. Here are the steps for my configuration:

1. Go to Start->Run, and type ‘gpedit.msc ‘ without the quotes and hit OK.
2. Browse down to Local Computer Policy->Computer Configuration->Administrative Templates->Windows Components->Windows Update.
3. The settings which I changed are:
   • Enabled ‘Configure Automatic Updates‘ and set it to ‘3 - Auto download and notify for install’
   • Enabled ‘No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installations‘
   • Disabled ‘Allow Automatic Updates immediate installation‘
   • Enabled ‘Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations‘ and set it to 1440 minutes

Screenshot of my Group Policy Object Editor:

As far as I know, Windows XP does not install updates automatically by default, so that might only be a default for Windows Server 2003 which I’m using. However, I believe the restart prompt is defaulted to 10mins for XP and 2003.

      

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Microsoft very recently released Windows Vista to the general public with heaps of fanfare, with even Bill Gates appearing on the Daily Show to promote it. It would seem to me that this is probably one of the few releases of Windows of all time with a very lukewarm response from the public and this comic pretty much sums it up nicely. :P Or maybe M$ might’ve to resort to something like this to get people to upgrade.

Jokes aside, ck has a review up at spherebox if you’re interested to read more about it. :)

      

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Miranda IM is a very lightweight IM client supporting multiple networks and is heavily based on the original ICQ client (which nobody uses anymore :(). I must say it brought back some memories of the days when I just got introduced to the world of IM. :D I decided to try it out as GAIM crashed on me the moment I tried connecting and I didn’t want to have multiple IMs installed on the work laptop which had limited amount of RAM.

First issue I had was the inability to connect to Google Talk, which HMMaster solved it for me by sending me this link. Next issue I had with it is the groupings I had with my contacts in MSN are not available in Miranda. According to HMMaster, he said there might be a plugin available for that as Miranda as heaps of plugins available, but I have not checked on that as yet.

Apart from those issues, it’s a rather good alternative to other multi-network IM clients such as GAIM and Trillian. :)

      

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That was the error code which I encountered while trying to install Python on the server at work which ran on Windows Server 2003. The installer actually executed but threw that ’setup file could not be found’ error just after selecting the destination directory for the install. Initial googling for this gave results which were along the lines of ‘clean the CD as it may be dirty’ didn’t make much sense since it was being installed from the hard disk itself!

Mr sysadmin AsenDURE didn’t have an answer for it either, so I went back to do more googling which one of them actually fixed it. Although the installer (msi) file was on the hard disk locally, it was in a network share which Windows Server 2003 disapproves of. After moving the file to an unshared directory, the install process was completed without any issues. That’s Windows I guess. ;)

Another thing which I’ve learnt after the first week is not to run services/applications which were built for *nix on Windows. I had heaps of problems in migrating CVS to SVN which would never have been an issue had it been a *nix box.

      

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If you have used word processing software such as Microsoft Word long enough, you would probably know by now that all the fancy formatting and styling you have for your document on your computer may look totally horrendous on another machine, especially when viewed with other ‘compatible’ word processing software such as Open Office’s Writer or other freely available viewers.

To avoid this problem, one easy way is to generate PDFs of your document which you can then distribute which you can be sure they would be able to view it without any issues.

Adobe’s PDF format is probably the de facto standard when it comes to document viewing. The Adobe Reader software which is used to view PDF files is free and is installed in most computers nowadays. Another free PDF viewer which you can use instead is Foxit Reader.

So now to generating PDFs! Just follow the steps below and you should be able to start generating them real soon:

1. Download PDFCreator from here (get the .msi version, i.e. zPDFCreator-0_9_3-AD_DeploymentPackage-WithoutToolbar.msi).
2. Install PDFCreator by running the .msi file which you downloaded earlier. If you go to ‘Printers and Faxes’, you should see a new ‘PDFCreator’ printer installed.
3. Open your document as usual, get to the print dialog, choose printing preferences and then select the PDFCreator printer.
4. Hit ‘Print’ as usual and you would then be prompted on the filename of the PDF file and where you want to save it to.

With PDFCreator, you can practically generate PDFs from any application which supports printing. There are other settings you can choose from in PDFCreator such as having the PDF encrypted to prevent unauthorised copying.

Another PDF generating software which you can try out instead is CutePDF Writer which does the same thing, but requires you to download and install the Ghostscript converter separately and does not have that many features as compared to PDFCreator.

      

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Since googling didn’t work the last time I tried to find a fix, I went through M$’s Windows Live Messenger’s newsgroup earlier today and actually found a fix to the problem I had! Here’s the fix which worked for me (Credit to Jonathan Yaniv for the steps below):

1. Go to Start, run, then type “regedit”
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\microsoft\MSNMessenger\Policies
3. Delete the key “contacts.msn.com”
4. Then, try launching Windows Live Messenger again.

Apparently the full uninstallation I did the last time did not remove any of the messenger registry keys (I forgot to check on that either).

I guess you could say this is probably one of the very few M$ software which I would gladly choose to use over other alternative software. :P Do try out the excellent Messenger Plus! Live extension if you’re already using WLM (adds heaps of features like tabbed chats, etc). Just remember to refuse the installation of the sponsor program unless you want adware/spyware installed on your machine. ;)

      

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Downloaded and installed the latest security and critical updates for my Windows Server 2003, restarted, and WLM decided to not sign on. The odd thing was that it was actually connected to the .NET Messenger service, but it just won’t load up my contact list nor sign me on (the messenger icon was still swirling around for more than 20mins until I decided to shut it off). No error codes whatsoever and neither did it timeout by itself.

However, WLM seems to run fine after I installed all the updates on my Windows XP laptop which makes it even harder to pinpoint the fault. Tried GAIM but it crashed the moment I added an MSN account and tried to sign on. So I’m back to MSN 7.5.

To top it of, I’ve got a very sore throat and it’s..

.. a scorching 36 degrees now! :(

If there’s anyone with similar WLM symptoms and have solved it, do let me know..

Edit: It’s now working again, check here for the steps to fix it.

      

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