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Color brown copyrighted by UPS?
edited by on March 26th 2008, at 13:50

At the bottom of a confirmation mail from UPS, I saw this:

Quote
Copyright (c) 2008 United Parcel Service of America, Inc. UPS, het UPS
beeldmerk en de kleur bruin zijn merken van United Parcel Service of America.

Literally translated it says: the UPS logo and the color brown are trademarks of United Parcel Service of America.

Does this mean we can't use the color brown anymore without infringing this trademark?

 
[Gentoo] No module named collections error with portage
edited by on March 26th 2008, at 13:17
Had an issue on my PC at work with a corrupt reiser4 filesystem (still no clue as to why). I managed to repair the FS using RiP-Linux, but not without some data loss. After reviewing lost+found, I found most files related to some HTML cache of Konqueror, but fsck.reiser4 complained about a file that could not be recovered.
After awhile, I tried running emerge to install some new package, and there it was: a broken portage...

The error I got:

!!! Failed to complete portage imports. There are internal modules for !!! portage and failure here indicates that you have a problem with your !!! installation of portage. Please try a rescue portage located in the  !!! portage tree und  ...
 
Vista: printing to shared network printers
edited by on March 13th 2008, at 11:30
When printing from a Vista computer to a shared computer, you notice the following:

Printing takes a long time to begin.

Opening the Print dialog (e.g. in Word) takes a long time.

Selecting printers in the Print dialog is slow.

The real reason is unknown, but Vista seems to have a problem with excessive querying of the printer. Along with the usual slowdowns of network traffic, this causes serious slowdowns.

The trick is to have Vista believe it is dealing with a local printer, rather than a shared printer. This is done by specifying a Local printer port, pointing to the share, then configure the printer on that port:

Open Printers, and then Server Properties.

Select the Ports tab, an  ...
 
Reiser4 sources still available...
edited by on March 6th 2008, at 10:36

Namesys, the commercial developer of the Reiser4 filesystem, still has its website down. However, the source code and development is still going on, and can be retrieved at:

http://chichkin_i.zelnet.ru/namesys/

A good thing, because it would be a shame to lose such a good filesystem...

 
The LiveCD List
edited by on March 5th 2008, at 09:29

A collegue sent me this link. It's a list of most (if not, all) LiveCDs currently available, with links to their respective websites. Additionally, they have been classified according to functionality.

http://www.livecdlist.com/

 
Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire MySQL
edited by on January 18th 2008, at 13:03
 
Far Cry 2...
edited by on January 16th 2008, at 19:20
"Aaaah, the story continues..."

I was browsing through the future releases section of my favourite online shop for games and DVDs (http://www.mediadis.com/), and saw most pleasingly, the announcement of Far Cry 2. "Neat!", I thought, "Ubisoft and Crytek are gonna make a sequel of the very first Far Cry."
A quick google led me to the official site.

The happy feeling I got didn't last long though... After reading the features on the key features page, I was quickly disappointed by a lot of things.

First of, despite their Far Cry® 2, the true sequel to the award-winning PC game (literally quoted), it is not a sequel to Far Cry: there's no mention of anything of the first game, nor  ...
 
Network Solutions steals domain ideas
edited by on January 9th 2008, at 22:11
 
Website moved (again)
edited by on December 28th 2007, at 21:46

Just moved the website again. This time it's not a physical move of the server, but to another server altogether. It should have a bit of better performance than the old one.
If you happen to find any bugs because of this move, please let me know.

 
nVIDIA in Vista
edited by on December 28th 2007, at 21:46

For all nVIDIA users, I suggest installing the hotfixes recommended by nVIDIA: link.

If you have SLI, first install KB936710 (that's hotfix 2 on the nVIDIA page).

Most importantly, install KB940105 (hotfix 1).

And finally, there are KB938194 (hotfix 3), and KB938979 (hotfix 4).

 
Notes about latest ATI linux driver
edited by on December 28th 2007, at 17:35
This article contains some notes about the latest 7-12 ATI linux drivers. Biggest change in versions after 8.40 (aside of the new versioning scheme), is the support for Composite and AIGLX extensions, and the supposedly improved 3D performance. Unfortunately for some, support is currently limited to newer Radeon cards only.
Installation on my X700 was not entirely straight-forward, though.

Installation took place on my laptop which has a X700 on-board, but the driver only worked properly after some tweaking of xorg.conf...

Since I'm using Gentoo, installation of the latest driver was fairly simple:

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64" emerge -u ati-drivers

At time of writing, this would in  ...
 
Installing software on Terminal Server
edited by on November 11th 2007, at 20:24
A Terminal Server can be put in two modes:

execute mode: this is the default mode. In this mode, users can log in the TS and run applications.

install mode: putting a server in this mode will notify the TS of changes in the system when installing software. This is important, because otherwise software would fail to properly get installed, and there would be all kinds of ugliness going on.

In Windows 2003, a server should automatically be put in to install mode if your installation software has setup, or install in their file name. In Windows 2000, you have to put the server in the correct mode, by installing software using Add/remove programs in the Windows control panel. Note that in Win  ...
 
Photoshop CS2 and CS3 on Terminal Server
edited by on November 11th 2007, at 19:46
When running Photoshop CS2 on a Windows 2003 with Terminal Server, regular users cannot start Photoshop CS2. If they try, the following error is displayed:

Quote
An error has been detected with a required application library and the product cannot continue. Please reinstall the application

However, when running with Administrator privileges, there is no problem.

CS2 requires the SeCreateGlobalPrivilege privilege. By default, regular domain users don't have this privilege, and thus, CS2 doesn't work.

Assign the required privilege to the users. Normally, assigning this privilege to trusted users should not give any security problems. I do suggest creating a new security group and assign th  ...
 
CID detection on PSTN lines
edited by on November 6th 2007, at 22:57
The trouble with PSTN lines is that the CID has to be transmitted in-band, and there are more than one standard in doing this. On top of that, there are small differences between the various Telcos on the planet. And finally, to make things worse, documentation about it, is sparse and scattered at best.

The settings displayed usually go in /etc/asterisk/zapata.conf (either directly, or by inclusion).

How CID is handled is defined by the following variables:

cidsignalling: tells how the CID signalling occurs, can be bellcore (mostly US hardware), v23, or dtmf.

cidstart: specifies how the start of the CID transmission is indicated. Can be polarity (the polarity on the wire is swit  ...
 
.NET 2.0 Event ID 1008 flood in App log
edited by on November 5th 2007, at 23:01
After installing Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 on a Windows 2000 Server, I got a flood of Event ID 1008 in the Application system log. These log entries complain about performance counters not being able to be properly initialized.



First, try running these two commands sequentially from an NT console:

winmgmt /clearadapwinmgmt /resyncperf

Because it didn't work for me, I worked around the issue by disabling the performance counter for the particular ASP.NET services. For this, you need to download an application of the Windows 2000 Resource Kit Tools for administrative tasks, called Extensible Performance Counter List (exctrlst.exe).

After downloading (and installing) the tool, start it  ...
 
Opening Excel workbooks from Explorer fails
edited by on November 5th 2007, at 22:16
Had this issue with one of my clients: he was unable to open spreadsheets from his desktop or from his Windows Explorer. Double-clicking on the file opens a new, empty Excel session, and an error message is displayed.
After a quick search on the Microsoft support site, I found a solution.

When attempting to open an Excel spreadsheet from the desktop or from Windows Explorer (or any other program), a new, empty Excel session is started, and an error message is shown:

Quote
Cannot find the file path (or one of its components). Make sure the path and filename are correct and that all required libraries are available.

or

Quote
Windows cannot find FilePathFileName, Make sure you typed the nam  ...
 
[Gentoo] Merge of VirtualBox 1.5.x fails w/ additions
edited by on November 5th 2007, at 16:48
Got a curious error during the merge of the latest VirtualBox ebuild for Gentoo:
it fails with a die:

Quote
kmk failed

It took a bit, but looking around the output gave some indication of a problem with one or more dependencies. Looking around the Gentoo Forum, I came across this thread, which had the proper solution.

The error, more in full, is attached.
A bit more to the top of the error (sorry, but couldn't capture the right line as the new merge was already busy), it complains about Xmd.h, and GLXext.h. In that way, the solution provided by the forum thread I mentioned earlier, makes sense. In my case, issuing the following commands did the trick:

mikuru ~ # eselect opengl set xorg-  ...
 
[PC] Bioshock
edited by on October 21st 2007, at 22:14
One of the many anticipated games of this year, is Bioshock. It is described by its creators as new and unique experience in its genre.
It's set at the bottom of the ocean where the only way to survive is to use everything at your disposal, including genetic alteration to make your own body into a deadly weapon.

Title: Bioshock

Release date: August 2007

Developed by: 2K Games

Genre: FPS

Website: http://www.2kgames.com/bioshock/

Mid-atlantic, 1960, the airliner you're on crashes into icy waters. By luck, you managed to survive the crash, and among the wreckage you see a towering light house. Inside, you discover a rusty bathysphere, descending into Rapture, a city, built by a man with a  ...
 
The Simple Guide to a Media PC
edited by on October 1st 2007, at 22:06
Because of my move, I had need of a media PC system, which allowed me to watch TV, record from TV, watch DVDs, listen to music and more. Buying a pc with Windows Media Center was not an option: linux has very wonderful applications and utilities to build such a sytem.
This guide is not a real how-to, but rather the steps I took to get things running, along with descriptions and solutions to caveats and problems I encountered. Since my Media PC is still in progress of being build and configured, this guide is also a work in progress. Comments on any of the steps are, of course, very welcome.

This is a work in progress...

A PC running Gentoo, with several applications to:

Watch TV, record f  ...
 
The AMD dual-core FAQ...
edited by on September 30th 2007, at 21:54
Update: AMD and Microsoft have released patches to fix the TSC-drift problem. Read page 2 to find out where to get them.

The latest and newest in CPU technology is dual-core: this means having two CPUs on a single chip. Like real multi-processor (SMP), this greatly enhances processing power, among other benefits.
Unfortunately, there's a downside, called TSC-drift, causing serious trouble with certain applications and games.


random crashes: random crashes, which get worse the longer the computer is running. An application with logging usually complains about differences in "times".

sluggish performance: the performance of the application/game becomes very sluggish  ...
 
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