danny’s space

The lab got a new Lacie 300gb external HDD the other day for backup and mass storage for microscopy imaging files which often take up a few DVDs at a time. So I hooked the drive up using USB (one of its many interfaces which include this thing called Firewire 800 which has a weird plug) to the computer running the microscope, but it didn’t recognise the drive! And then I found out Windows NT 4.0 doesn’t have native USB support, even under SP6.

So went scouting on the internet, found various 3rd party drivers that sounded like they would work. Anyway, settled on this driver from Digi.com (ftp://ftp1.digi.com/support/driver/i4usb406.exe) and it worked a treat! After installing the program/driver, even without a restart, the computer immediately recognised the drives and they were accessible. Woot.

Turned a potential few hundred dollar paperweight into a working piece of hardware.

Pretty nifty. And annoying. Visit Compound Security, a UK firm specialising in this teen control product. It’s quite painful to experience actually.

Got it from an SMH article about a teen ring tone, which is a 17Khz ringtone that only teens can hear, letting them know calls/SMSs are coming in without adults like teachers/parents knowing. It plays fine through the computer speakers, and boy is it piercing.

Alas, the timer is irreparable, at least with my dodgy electronics skills. The guts are shown.

In other news, this Photopress plugin for Wordpress is quite good. Many options to play with, upload feature, automatic thumbnails, the list goes on.

Honours has entered a new stage. Today I went into uni to smudge some bacteria and to put on some overnight cultures for processing tomorrow.

Today was a Sunday. How sad. Uni is pretty much deserted on Sundays. There’s still people around on Saturdays, but virtually is a ghost town on Sundays. Yes, I went in on Saturday as well. It so doesn’t feel like Sunday now, and another week is about to begin. Great.

In other news, the new server is going well so far. It’s webhostingbuzz.com. There’s been quite a few bad reviews about them, but you can’t beat their price. I have no complaints so far, but this is only 1 day in. Thankfully they have a 30-day money back guarantee, but hopefully I won’t need to use it.

Finally got Wordpress working on the new domain name. My blog is now hosted on quantumspark.net instead of quantrix.net. I’m not sure what my fascination is with names that have ‘quant’ in them.

Never remove a paper jam if you don’t know how to. Forced yanking will not fix the printer - it will tear the print head and cause black ink to run all over the printer stand and possibly the carpet. Thankfully black ink is water based and easy to wipe. Unfortunately it’s harder to wipe off your hands.

I came home yesterday to a post-it on the printer saying something along the lines of ‘malfunction, paper jam’. Sure enough, someone (I won’t say who) had tried to yank the paper out of the printer without knowing what the heck was going on, had destroyed the black ink cartridge print head, causing all 42mL of get black ink to stream out of the printer. It was bleeding ink.

Thankfully the printer is an HP, the 930C. Old-ish printer but has served us faithfully for many years, and it’s still going. A quick visit to the hp support website gave the answer (well, with a bit of tweaking). And now we have a fully functional, albeit dirty, inkjet again.

The LAN in the building I work in now for honours uses network printers - by this I mean printers physically hooked up to the network through their own RJ45 ports, meaning they have their own IP addresses.

A problem exists with Windows XP SP2 (not SP1 or before) and TCP/IP printers in that whenever you try to bring up the Print dialog box, it is slow and takes ages to load. At least 10 seconds, although I’ve read reports on Google groups that it can take up to 1-2 minutes.

I searched and searched for answers to this problem - lots of people using TCP/IP network printers and SP2 seem to have this problem, but few solutions. Some suggest using a server share name, like //server/printer, but unfortunately that doesn’t work for TCP/IP-configured printers. Some suggest updating the network hardware or something to do with a thing called Samba, but I have no idea about that plus I’m not a network admin. Other suggestions have been made too - a search of Google groups will bring them up.

The only suggestion that works for me is disabling NetBIOS in TCP/IP WINS settings. The Print dialog pops up straight away (well, at normal speed) now. Unfortunately, you win some you lose some. Disabling NetBIOS over TCP/IP means that I can’t access the network drives at home through the DHCP router. Argh! But if I enable NetBIOS at home but still have the lab printer set up, the Print dialog still takes ages to show up. Which means that whenever I need to share files at home, I need to remove the printer, enable NetBIOS, and go. And when I’m in the office/lab, I need to add the printer, disable NetBIOS, and go. Pain in the ass.

Stupid Windows XP SP2. If this problem is so widespread, why doesn’t ol’ Billy Gates fix it up? Especially since it apparently affects so many users on corporate networks with TCP/IP printers?

I post this so that perhaps someone (who might Google the problem) will benefit from what I write here.

Thought 5: HP devices are getting cooler and cooler. HP multifunction printer/scanner/copier/faxes are totally cool. They even come with free ink (well, to be expected since you can’t really print anything without it), free photo paper, a cool resealable photo paper storage bag (which I think is the best bit), etc etc. The installation went smoothly, even a banana could set it up. Included HP software looks pretty useful on first glance. Plus $100 cash back, what a deal. The black print speed is super quick. Only gripe so far is that the new Vivera inks from HP are a bit strange - there are 5 little separate colour cartridges (cyan, dark cyan, magenta, light magenta, yellow, or something like that) that look like they’ve only got enough ink for 2 decent photos. They must be expensive as well. Damn.

Thought 6: What’s with people and turning right? On Yanko Road a stupid van driver took a bigger risk than the police car earlier today, turning right from a side street onto Yanko Road when I was probably only 10 metres away going at 60. Of course, I honked him (twice actually). I like honking. There’s something about public humiliation and helping people to become better drivers.

Thought 7: Finally finished building a shelf-like thing for storage of large boxes other things like that (see picture). Unfortunately the thing isn’t exactly that well built, and it still sways a bit, but hopefully it’ll withstand semi heavy stuff. Hmm, actually, I worry… The thing was too big to assemble and then carry into the room, so I had to build the frame in 3 parts, lug it into the room, and then assemble it with the shelf boards. It’s 2.4m high and 1.8m wide, quite a monster. Needless to say everything smells like sawdust now, and there’s plenty of it all over the ground.

Thought 8: For those who leave their computers on all the time and don’t use it for much demanding stuff, visit World Community Grid and lend your processor time to science! This is another one of those distributed computing things where normal run-of-the-mill desktop computers in peoples’ homes are used to do big-time research by combining the power of thousands computers around the world. This particular one is non-profit and researches things like anti-HIV drugs and protein folding.

ah, addictinggames.com comes to the rescue again..

this is a game for all those button mashers out there and for those who are procrastinating.. visit King of Buttons! do the ‘time attack’ minigame and you have 25 seconds to click a button as many times as you can.. the lactic acid really builds up, but i guess it’s only 25 seconds.. this is definitely one for chap..

try it and see how you go! unfortunately the high scores don’t seem to work for me so i can’t see how i compare to others.. oh well.. pretty sad i know..

if it ain’t broke, don’t update it..

i think this mantra applies to software updates, unless you are masochistic of course.. a few weeks ago i updated adobe acrobat 6 (the full version, not the reader) because the software kept bugging me to update.. so i eventually succumbed to pressure (rather, annoyance) and updated the software.. updating wasn’t such a big deal but what came later was..

suddenly, every time acrobat started up, that annoying windows installer window would pop and and try tl ‘update’ and ‘install’ acrobat.. what gives? i just press cancel and it doesn’t seem to affect acrobat’s operation much..

until today.. i started word up after many weeks of using it to type notes without any troubles.. and today when i start it up, it shoots an error message saying ‘compile error in hidden module: autoexec’.. so automatically i panic because i think it’s some crap vba virus, what with the hidden module and all that.. and so i google it.. lo and behold, it’s a damn acrobat problem.. micro$oft has written a nice knowledge base article about it..

so i remove the pdfmaker.dot and pdkmaker.xla files (renaming them to *.old) from the office startup directories, and everything works again.. hmm.. well, everything except for the pdf maker buttons that acrobat embedded into word and excel that were totally useless anyway since printing straight to the acrobat pdf printer was much quicker..

stupid software..

as i read somewhere a few days ago.. if every tuesday we tied our shoelaces the normal way and our shoes exploded someone would say something.. but this happens all the time with computers and no one seems to mind..