Walt-O-Matic

I own a Garmin GPSmap 60CSx in order to geoencode my photography using HoudahGeo.

Garmin now has a means up updating the firmware in their GPSs by using a WebUpdater, of which I use the version for the Mac.

I Got Myself Into Trouble
In retrospect, I got myself into trouble by starting the program, it failed to detect the GPS, to which I turn on the GPS, and plugged it into the USB port. While the WebUpdater saw the device and went to update, it stayed in the “Erasing… Do Not Unplug” state for about two hours before I got brave.

What I Did, And Boy Was I Lucky
I couldn’t cancel. I couldn’t Quit. So I had to Force Quite by using Command-Option-Escape, that at least got WebUpdater to stop. The GPS was still stating “Loader Loading…” when I pulled the USB, and when that didn’t change anything, I turned off the power to it. I wasn’t so sure I was going to see much of anything when I powered it back on.

I got lucky. I turn the power back on and I was still at the old revision. Then plugged in the USB to the computer. Then started WebUpdater, which again noticed the GPS version, downloaded the firmware again, and had no problems installing it. Seems doing things in this order works just fine.

My Plans If I Was Unlucky
Over on Bill Turner’s site, he’s written an article about Fixing a Dead Garmin GPSMap 60CSx. It seems he’s learned holding down the Power Button and the Up Arrow at the same time while starting the WebUpdater software (I think he has three hands to pull this off), he’s able to force the GPS to identify itself to the updater. Problem is, according to his instructions, you have to keep holding down these button chord during the update; some comments on the blog state it isn’t necessary, and there’ve been mixed results as to whether this works universally or not.

I’m not sure I would have had the bravery to just go killing processes plain outright, but since Bill did such a nice job of providing an alternative, I felt it was worth the risk — even if I didn’t have to go that route. Thanks Bill for blogging your GPS recovery notes.

This morning Anti-Virus Guard,AVG (not the free version), decided that TRMSRV.DLL in the System32 directory was threat and copied it out of the directory.

The result was that Terminal Service no longer works. That means that software like Remote Desktop Connection 2 (RDC), can’t connect, although the machine responds to pings and Samba requests.

Placing a exception in AVG to not check that directory (sounds bad, eh?), and restoring the file from another machine seems to have temporarily address the problem.

I wonder if AVG knows about this.

We’re also seeing that Cygwin and the System Restore Point is also among the collateral damage.

UPDATE 11-Nov-2008: Looks like AVG is now flagging Windows as a virus.

Warning this is a very geeky entry aimed at apt-get users of Ubuntu, readers seeking humorous content should skip this post. Remember, this is a technical blog.

If you’re still with me, then I suspect you’ve just been plagued by the message:

Depends: libldap2 (>= 2.1.17-1) but it is not installable

I’m using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Hardy Heron, specifically on a 64-bit AMD system.

Normally, when I do an $ sudo apt-get update things go very smoothly, but not today. Here’s what I got.

The following packages have been kept back:
alpine dovecot-common dovecot-imapd dovecot-pop3d libpq5 postgresql-8.3 texlive-base-bin trac

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
alpine: Depends: libldap2 (>= 2.1.17-1) but it is not installable
dovecot-common: Depends: libldap2 (>= 2.1.17-1) but it is not installable
Depends: libpq4 (>= 8.1.4) but it is not installable
libpq5: Depends: libldap2 (>= 2.1.17-1) but it is not installable
postgresql-8.3: Depends: libldap2 (>= 2.1.17-1) but it is not installable
texlive-base-bin: Depends: libpoppler0c2 (>= 0.4.2) but it is not installable
trac: Depends: python-genshi (>= 0.5) but it is not going to be installed
E: Broken packages

Unfortunately, where ever I went, I didn’t find a solution. [1] [2] [3]

The ‘recommended’ solution is: $ sudo apt-get -f install
This did not work for me, nor others.

Neither did: $ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

At this point, I went on an apt-get remove and apt-get autoremove binge. This didn’t help either.

This got me into a horrible loop, where packages sysvinit-utils, sysvinit, and initscripts needed to be installed, but could not because:
Unpacking sysvinit-utils (from …/sysvinit-utils_2.86.ds1-47~bpo40+1_amd64.deb) …

dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/sysvinit-utils_2.86.ds1-47~bpo40+1_amd64.deb (–unpack):
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man1/mesg.1.gz’, which is also in package sysvutils

I even tried manually installing packages one at a time. Didn’t work. I was even so desperate as to move the file mesg.1.gz elsewhere. That didn’t work.

Then I tried the following and things got a little better:

$ sudo apt-get clean
$ sudo apt-get autoclean
$ sudo apt-get check
$ sudo apt-get purge
$ apt-get -f upgrade

But I now had a problem where packages, specifically alpine, depended on on libdlap2, and it was telling me that it couldn’t install it, so upgrading wasn’t possible.

I made the mistake of $ sudo apt-get remove alpine, which would not let me undo that mistake by reinstalling.

My hunt brought me to libldap2-dev, but while this installed, it didn’t help alpine’s dependencies.

Even with the super-duper do-everything command, nothing helped:

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y

Then it dawned on me, perhaps some of the repositories that I added to /etc/apt/sources.list were giving conflicting dependencies. Luckily, I annotated heavily what I had ever added to this file.

There were only two things: Subversion, and Mono. Here they are. You want to comment out these lines:

## Subversion obtained from https://edge.launchpad.net/~clazzes.org/+archive
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/clazzes.org/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/clazzes.org/ubuntu hardy main

## Mono added by request of FogBugz installation
## http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/docs/60/topics/setup/UnixGettingYourServerRead.html#deb
deb http://www.backports.org/debian etch-backports main contrib non-free

Then, I did a $ sudo apt-get updatee, followed by a $ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade, then a $ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade.

All of my problems were solved. No package dependency problems what-so-ever, and I was able to install alpine, and all the others, bringing me up to the latest and greatest.

Finally, I uncommented my sources.list file back to the way it was and tried the upgrade again. No errors. Everything was fine.

The solution was that something, and I don’t know which one, was causing conflicts. Reverting back to the virgin sources.list file state was enough to get Ubuntu happy to do the upgrades.

Unfortunately, since re-commenting the lines didn’t reintroduce the problem, I’m unable to tell you which repository caused the problem in the first place.

Today I learned that there’s a nifty little utility called Maintenance 3.8 out on Apple’s site. You can find it by going to Apple / Mac OS X Software…, and when the web page pops up, type Maintenance in the search box.

It’s an automator script to repair permissions, verify preferences, updating prebindings, do cleanup, update databased, rebuild indexes, empty Trash, and so forth. My guess is it’s much like Onyx.

Deciding to give it a try, I downloaded it, opened the .DMG file, and double clicked the automator icon, selecting Restart when done. And while I got a very little in the confirmation department that things were working, I saw a lot of CPU activity running utilities I was familiar with.

So, with the laptop plugged in, I left to to chug away. I heard the restart sound several minutes later. And, I ignored it.

Later, I picked up my laptop and went to login.

Nothing.

The “breathing LED” on the front was off, and nothing was responding keyboard or mouse wise. The screen was black.

So, I decided to check the battery. Full power.

But then I noticed something. At the steep angle, in the near pitch black of my LCD screen, I saw the login window. What was happening: the backlight wasn’t coming on. Fiddling with the brightness control didn’t help either.

Sure enough, I could make out the cursor once I located where it was.

I tried opening and closing the lid. Nope. Backlight still off.

So, I restarted (as I mentioned, it was operational, I could barely make out the GUI).

The machine sprang to life, showed me the blue background, and right before it went to the login screen, the backlight cut out again, leaving me in pitch black.

Titling the screen back again (with the keyboard sticking up in the air and the screen flat on the table), again I could make out the login box and mouse. I did a restart again.

This time I held down Command-V as it booted. And I watched as it came up, lots of normal diagnostic messages, and then the blue background, and right as the login screen appeared, back to pitch black.

Annoying. But now I’m wondering if all the times I’ve ever woken my laptop after a case where the lid didn’t quite clasp perfectly, was this what was happening — could the machine be up, but the backlight off?

So, one last time, I restarted. Only I held down Command-Option-P-R (four fingers) to reset the power management settings. Several chimes later, I let go, and the machine booted perfectly, and the login box appeared, backlight and all.

I’m hoping that my experience may lead to an additional piece of the puzzle about the Mac waking up funny. I would have never have noticed anything on the screen if I looked at it dead on, as I always do.

It’s fairly well known that if you close the Mac’s lid, but down engage it fully, the lid will pop back up, but not after putting the machine to sleep. At that point, it becomes a little dance with the lid, trying to get the lid back down, so that the machine can see it re-open, and that usually wakes it. But sometimes the screen is still dark, and you have to play with the power button (and if frustrated, hold it down to restart).

Sometimes this same problem manifests when you wake the machine, enter your password, and suddenly everything goes dark. You wiggle the cursor and hit the keys and nothing happens. Caps Lock toggles, but it feels like it’s gone back to sleep.

Well no more. From now on, I’m going to tilt my screen back and see if I’m operational. That way I won’t lose data from an unnecessary restart.

In trying to repair a Windows laptop which was acting really slow and appeared to be riddled with problems, I discovered it was running Norton / Symantec Anti-Virus.

Ugh.

It’s been shown with benchmarks that this software kills PC performance. And, in other tests, AVG, which costs less, catches more, without being a resource hog.

So, I go to uninstall Symantec, which can be a chore unto itself. But this time I was greeted with a new source of irritation.

I got a dialog box which said “Please enter the uninstall password”. Great. Just great.

So, given that this OEM laptop had paid support by Dell, I figured I’d ask.

The answer I got back was “I wasn’t aware there was a password to uninstall.”

While Dell was dodging the support question, I found this very helpful article:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/05/hack-to-removeuninstall-symantec-norton-antivirus-sav-client-without-password/

In it, it said change the value of this registry key, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\INTEL\LANDesk\VirusProtect6\CurrentVersion\Administrator Only\Security\, from 1 to 0 with RegEdit.

I tried it. It worked. No problems. Problem solved.

So, I tell the Dell Support person the point is moot, I got past it, and shared the link with him so that future customers with the same problem could have the problem solved. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be? Learn something, and share — that way others don’t waste time down the path you traveled?

Dell’s tone instantly changed, they didn’t seem happy I got past it. And, then he tells me that Dell support doesn’t give passwords, or tell how to override them, even for OEM installed stuff; they would not be sharing the information, no matter how useful.

So, did they know about the password and just feed me a line? I was certainly left with that impression.

Incidentally, I’ve been told by an IT person, the next time I encounter the password box, enter: symantec

You’ve got to be kidding me.

A co-worker showed me an interesting problem with Firefox today. He loaded a page from our application (running on localhost) and the page content loaded instantly, but the page load itself didn’t end until a time out 20 seconds later. Literally.

Everything we saw a measured from the browser or from the sending application showed that the content was sent in milliseconds, and the page load was just sitting there doing nothing. We were even using the latest Firefox beta.

Other browsers had no such problem.

Turns out, we figured out what was going on using the Tamper Data add-on.

Turns out there was a Connection: keep-alive in the header. When we changed it from keep-alive to close, the browser behaved as expected. That is, it loaded the page instantly.

A little web investigation showed that when you use the keep-alive attribute, you must also use Content-Length: header, which the sending application wasn’t doing.

A quick application tweak to send the content length, and everything ran super spiffy.

Now, if you don’t have access to the application that’s sending you web pages, you can twiddle with the about:config and change the network.http.keep-alive setting to false.

While trying to iChat using Leopard to a system running Tiger, I ran into a problems that I never had using OS X 10.4 before: bad video quality to downright refusing to connect.

With a little research, I ran across this article and that was enough to resolve the problem.

Here’s how to get iChat working on OS X 10.5
…if you’re running Parallels.

See, turns out that Parallels, I’m using 3.0 Build 5582 (Dec 5, 2007), appears to be running some services, even when the virtual machine is active, that gets in the way of iChat.

Get out of iChat.

Go to Apple / System Preferences…, select Network, and click on Parallels NAT and change the Configure drop down to Off; then go to Parallels Host-Guest an change the Configure drop down to Off. Press Apply.

Get back into iChat and try again. For me, it instantly fixed the problem.

After doing a number of disk clean up and optimizations, I found myself in the circumstance of OS X’s spotlight returning no results. Whether I searched for a keyword in Mail, or by Spotlight using Command-Space, I got no results backs - just an empty list for my troubles.

It turns out there’s a neat utility out there called Rebuild Spotlight Index 2.7 that does all the grunt work for you. Problem is, it didn’t work for me.

What’s going on is actually fairly trivial, and it’s possible to simply do everything via the command line.

The metadata utilities need to run as root, so to see what your drive is up to, you’d enter something like: sudo mdutil -s /

This shows the status on the root volume.

To turn indexing on for a volume, you enter: sudo mdutil -i on /

And, to force Spotlight to rebuild its index, you simply erase the master copy of the metadata stores on the volume like this: sudo mdutil -E /

However, while I did all this, Spotlight was still not building the indexed for me.

Here’s how I solved it, using just the Terminal.
First, I wanted to see the schema file, so I printed it out using to the standard input using: sudo mdimport -X

At the bottom of the schema listing, I say a reference to a schemaLocation, and took a shot in the dark that perhaps that Spotlight’s index rebuilding needed to check data against its schema before it would start. To do that, it might need network access, if not back to the local machine.

And, for good measure, I went to check the date/timestamp on the Spotlight directory using: sudo ls -la /.Spotlight*

While most of the files had the timestamp of when I tried to delete the index, not all the files had the current date and time. Additionally, the file sizes were not growing, a good indication the index was not being rebuilt.

Thinking to myself, “what could be causing network traffic, even internally, not to be working”, I realized that I had just rebooted and PeerGuardian2 was currently active and blocking traffic. This is a great tool for blocking malware and unwanted network visitors, but occasionally it gets in the way. So, I turned it off.

Then, I did the following commands to ensure indexing was on, the spotlight metastore was really gone, and that I wanted it rebuilt:
sudo mdutil -i on /
rm -rf /.Spotlight*
sudo mdutil -E /


The moment I did the last command, this time the system sprung to life, the directory /.Spotlight-V100 was created, and the files inside it were growing quickly. Spotlight on the toolbar showed a progress bar, indicating the system would be done indexing in a bit. The big difference? I turned off the network traffic blocker for a moment.

Today’s tip comes from John Cook, who reports that upon purchasing a new Dell Inspiron E1505 laptop with an ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 graphics card running Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 2 (build 2600) and using the “Synaptics PS/2 Port Pointing Device” as a mouse, the cursor appears as a vertical bar.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing on the Internet that tells how to correct the problem.

SOLUTION: The problem is with the hardware acceleration.

Right click the desktop, choose properties, go to the Settings tab, click Advanced, choose the Troubleshoot tab, and slide the slider one notch to the left. Click Ok, then OK.

Today’s trick will give you an astounding performance boost, while at the same time make you just shake your fist at Microsoft.

First of all, to start with, let me say that my Dell Precision 470 (2.8Ghz Dual CPU with hyperthreading on) and 2GB of RAM running XP Pro is …slow. I mean the kind of slow where clicking the Start button takes several seconds to draw the rectangle for the menu.

I have a dual monitor system. I’m using a Dell 2005FPW via DVI at 1680×1050 60Hz as my primary monitor and a Dell 1907FP via analog SVGA/XGA at 1280×1024 60Hz as my secondary. Both are driven by an ATI FireGL V3100 using the latest drivers from ATI’s site for XP Professional, and hardware acceleration is set to full.

I first noticed the severity of the problem when using iTunes 7.3.1.3’s music visualizer. Here’s how playing a simple CD turned into a fantastic diagnostic tool.

With the iTunes visualizer running on the primary monitor, I noticed that when I put the mouse on the secondary monitor the visualizer ran at full speed and was completely fluid. When I put the mouse on the primary screen, even when I wasn’t moving it, the frame rate dropped to about two frames every second (music, however, played fine).

Task Manager, after a violent killing spree, showed a minimal number of processes and services, idle times in the high 90%s, and no interesting page or interrupt activity — but the behavior continued. Opening additional applications didn’t affect performance, as long as the mouse was on the secondary screen.

When I showed this behavior to a friend of mine, Brian Busch, he suggested I turn off mouse trails. And, to humor him, I did. Instantly my system sprung to life and the problem was gone.

That’s when it struck us. Windows XP’s mouse pointer options don’t use hardware acceleration. And to confirm it, I pressed the CTRL button, which showed the location of my mouse. As the little target was drawn around the cursor, the frame rate dropped. When Microsoft’s little visibility animation ended, the system resumed at full speed.

Why was mouse trails on? Because Dell still hasn’t fixed the jumping mouse problem. But I don’t love them enough to kill my system’s responsiveness. Laptop users, beware.

Performance Recommendation: Go to Settings / Control Panel / Mouse, select the Point Options tab, and in the Visibility section uncheck ‘Display Pointer Trails’, ‘Hide pointer while typing, as well as ‘Show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key’ and press OK.