Free memory card recovery tool

August 30, 2007 No Comments

I recently was asked to help a friend that had shot about 30 photos of a wedding when her Sony camera suddenly reported “Bad format” or something like that and wouldn’t let her take nor view photos. I inserted the memory card (Memory Stick Pro) into my computer and tried accessing it to check if the problem was the camera’s fault. But no, Windows reported that the removable media was not formatted and offered me to format it.

I had read on several web pages that this type of problem is frequent and that there exists software to recover data in such situations. I started looking around the Internet for an alternative, preferably freeware, and ended up using this one: Free Art Plus Digital Photo Recovery. The program was able to recover all photos on the memory card, however two of them had errors in them.

I highly recommend this software and suggest you download a copy and store it on your USB drive or something. It does not require any installation, is completely free and is virus and spyware free.

Support The Ocular Penetration Restriction Act

August 28, 2007 No Comments

See the video below and write your local congress member, pledging him or her to support this regretfully necessary act.


(Direct video link)

IE7 crashes when clicking on drop-down boxes

August 22, 2007 1 Comment

I have recently been having problems with Internet Explorer 7 under Windows Vista crashing with the following event in Event Viewer:

Faulting application iexplore.exe, version 7.0.6000.16512, time stamp 0×46807103, faulting module mshtml.dll, version 7.0.6000.16527, time stamp 0×469eca49, exception code 0xc00000fd, fault offset 0×00129bdf, process id 0×1dac, application start time 0×01c7e4c9cd2cd3c7.

After a lot of debugging and fearing that I needed to reinstall Windows, I finally the problem isolated on the following blog post by Jimmy Bergmark: JTB World Blog: IE7 crashes when clicking on drop-down boxes.

In short, IE will crash when you click on a drop-down list with only one item, and that item is marked as selected. The following code reproduces the error:

<SELECT NAME="NAME2"><OPTION VALUE="2" selected>Clicking this may crash IE7</OPTION></SELECT>

If you experience this problem, first verify by clicking the drop-down above. If IE crashes than Mr. Bergmark has found two solutions.

  1. Uninstall Start++ 0.6 if you have that installed. (Version 0.7 and upwards should not cause this problem)
  2. Disable the windowless select control as described in the Workaround for KB936953 from Microsoft

I have verified that both these solutions fix the problem.