akselvoll.net

James at War - Popstar

(Direct Youtube link)

Sorry, but this post is not available in English

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.

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

(Direct video link)

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>

Clicking this may crash IE7

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.

I was looking for a way to split a pdf into one file per file and found this excellent, free piece of software. Highly recommended!

AccessPDF - Pdftk
Pdftk - the PDF Toolkit

If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses. Pdftk is a command-line tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents. Keep one in the top drawer of your desktop and use it to:

* Merge PDF Documents
* Split PDF Pages into a New Document
* Decrypt Input as Necessary (Password Required)
* Encrypt Output as Desired
* Fill PDF Forms with FDF Data and/or Flatten Forms
* Apply a Background Watermark
* Report on PDF Metrics such as Metadata, Bookmarks, and Page Labels
* Update PDF Metadata
* Attach Files to PDF Pages or the PDF Document
* Unpack PDF Attachments
* Burst a PDF Document into Single Pages
* Uncompress and Re-Compress Page Streams
* Repair Corrupted PDF (Where Possible)

Pdftk allows you to manipulate PDF easily and freely. It does not require Acrobat, and it runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris.

Pdftk is free software (GPL).

Todays search in the Youtube archives: Covers that are better than their originals. I think.

(Direct link)

(Direct link)

Sorry, but this post is not available in English

I recently had the following problem: When inserting a USB drive (or any other USB hardware), Windows Vista did not find its drivers automatically and asked me to insert the CD that came with the hardware. The temporary solution was to ask Windows to search in “c:\Windows\System32″. However, although Windows did find its drivers there, and installed the device correctly, it did not remember that path and it had to be given every time (and often several times) a new pen drive was inserted.

Now, I finally found the solution and just wanted to write it down in case I (or anyone else) should ever need it again. The solution was found on this page and said:

XP asks for drivers or just want to install new hardware

XP comes with drivers for USB mass storage. If it asks for drivers then it has forgotten where they are…
Start the Registry Editor (Run -> Regedit). Check if under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft
\Windows\CurrentVersion the item ‘DevicePath’ points to ‘%SystemRoot%\inf’. Additional items, separated by semikolons, are ok but ‘%SystemRoot%\inf’ has to be one of them.
Then delete the file C:\WINDOWS\inf\infcache.1 - XP will recreate it.
Another thing to check is if the values ‘FactoryPreInstallInProgress’ and ‘AuditInProgress’ are set to ‘1′ under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup
and
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Factory
. They should be 0 or non present.

Although this was written for Windows XP, it worked on Vista. Specifically deleting C:\WINDOWS\inf\infcache.1 was what made the trick for me.

I recieved the following mail a couple of weeks back: [The name has been changed to protect the presumed guilty.]

FROM: Nando C R <xyz@xyz.com>
TO: xyz@akselvoll.net
DATE: Apr 25, 2007 12:54 PM
SUBJECT: Consulta

Hola Magnus,

He estado viendo tu web y he visto que eres programador en .NET y me preguntaba si estaría interesado o conoce a alguien para realizar un pequeño proyecto de fin de carrera, por motivos laborales me es imposible el poder realizarlo yo y estoy buscando un programador que quiera ayudarme, evidentemente será pagado adecuadamente. Muchas gracias

It basically says:

Hi Magnus. I have been reading your web page and have seen that you are a .NET programmer and I was asking myself if you or anyone you know would be interested in doing a small, final university project for me, since I, due to my work, will be unable to do so myself, and I am looking for a programmer that would like to help me, that obviously will be paid adequately. Many thanks.

[I have tried my best to write it in the same style as he did.]

Yes, “Nando”, I would love to do your project for you. Just send me the contact information for your professor and I will contact him directly so that he can explain me the details.