tony spencer

I wanted to run rsync on a Windows XP machine for some incremental backups of a server so I installed Cygwin. A few days later I decided to just setup a cron for rsync on my Mac at home so I uninstalled Cygwin.

It started the uninstall process with no confirmation. When it was done removing files and registry entries it started killing all running applications and restarting without asking me! After it finished rebooting I couldn’t login with my normal user account. So I logged in as admin and discovered that my normal user was gone! Completely removed.

Beware of cygwin.

I bought my first Bluetooth USB adapter from Best Buy last night so that I could sync up Outlook with my new Audiovox SMT5600.

I got the Kensington Bluetooth USB Adapter only because it was all they had in the store.

This device stinks. The driver is not signed which means XP doesn’t play nice with it. Also the software is extremely slow and seems to be consuming a lot of CPU. The worst part though is that the signal strength is horrible when the phone is sitting on my desk at just 6 feet away.

If you have trouble mapping a network drive to another computer running Windows XP (i.e. – keeps throwing up the login prompt) try these steps.

1. Make sure you are connecting as a user that is in the administrators group on the remote machine.

2. Open Windows Explorer on the remote XP computer, click the “Tools” menu, click on “Folder Options”, click on the “View” tab, scroll down, and uncheck “Use simple file sharing”.

i tried to install the latest firefox browser on my machine. i was unpleasantly surprised to find that there was no quick and easy installer. instead i had to download the .gz file, unpack it, unpack the tar, and run the install script. i had to guess which file actually performed the install because there was no README file.

i picked the right script and the GUI wizard launched. i thought i was on my way. WRONG. half way through the setup wizard i received the following error: “Couldn’t open xpistub library.” I googled for the phrase and found masses of folks with the same problem.

i found one reply to a frustrated user that stated that you needed a fairly recent version of RedHat for the install to work (WHY?). so i decided to upgrade my RedHat install since it is about 1 year old. i remembered that RedHat now has a handy update manager much like Microsoft so I figured this would be pretty fast. WRONG! I double-click the RedHat Network Update icon on my desktop and I receive the following exception!

Exception type SSL.Error

Exception Handler Information

Traceback (most recent call last):

File “/usr/bin/../share/rhn/rhn_applet/rhn_applet.py”, line 424, in refresh

self.model.refresh(force)

File “/usr/bin/../share/rhn/rhn_applet/rhn_applet_model.py”, line 264, in refresh

self.rpc_server.refresh(force)”

I am also told to email this stacktrace to RedHat at a specific address which I did.

Finally I go to the RedHat website as a last resort to upgrade my OS so that I hopefully can get Firefox to install. When I navigate to www.redhat.com I am greeted with:

Site Maintenance

In order to provide you with a better experience on redhat.com we are currently doing site maintenance and upgrading our systems. We apologize for any inconvience this may cause. Please come back in a few hours for full access to our improved site.

To contact Red Hat Support please call 1-888-RedHat1.”

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Bottom Line:

Linux has a VERY LONG WAY TO GO.

Can I figure out all the problems? Sure.

Do I want to? No.

I have more important things to debug.

One of my mac using friends sent me a Missy Elliot remix today. When I tried to play it I realized it was a .m4a file type which wasn’t associated with any application on my machine.

Solution:

Rename the file to .mp4 and the file plays great on Quicktime.

Update: 02/25/2004

Boy do I feel stupid. The easiest solution is to download iTunes