my2cents

By coincidence I dug up the long lost URL to a super interesting online riddle: http://www.deathball.net/notpron/

Recently I tried to use dnsjava to resolve whatever address request.getRemoteAddr() would return. This worked very well in most cases. However, in some cases I would see something like:

java.net.UnknownHostException: Invalid address: fe80::1d9:b65a:ed86:7940%11

Not being much of a networking expert I was puzzled about the ‘%11′. Once again superuser.com came to rescue:  http://superuser.com/questions/99746/why-is-there-a-in-the-ipv6-address.

…not really learning DOT because it’s so simple – at least in its most basic form. I don’t understand why it took me so long to finally sit down and understand how the input for Graphviz works. What a glorious day today…

You want to learn DOT, too? Wonderful, for a quick-start try this online editor with preview: http://graphviz-dev.appspot.com/

When you search the Internet for answers to questions like “Why does Windows Explorer take so long to start” or “Windows Explorer takes too long to start” you’ll find thousands of hits. One I can recommend for a nice overview is here: http://ask-leo.com/why_does_windows_explorer_take_so_long_to_display_sometimes.html

As mentioned in the article the cause usually is that Windows stumbles over a remote connection i.e. a mapped network drive that became invalid or unreachable. HOWEVER, what many overlook is one very important Explorer setting:

Tools -> Folder Options -> View -> Automatically search for network folders and printers

Activating this flag may easily slow down the start of Windows Explorer by 30-40 seconds!

On Windows machines I’m used to using FinePrint to pre-process every document before it’s actually sent to the printer (2 on 1 page, 4 on 1, booklet, watermark, template, etc). From that suite of features what I miss the most on OS X is the ability to print booklets. Turns out there are at least two tools for OS X that provide that:

1. Create Booklet
2. CocoaBooklet

I tried Create Booklet and was quite impressed – it does what it says it does and it does that well. The documentation, however, is quite poor. In fact there’s none at all one the developer’s site. The DMG file contains a Quick Introduction.pdf that serves as a good documentation – if you don’t overlook it. The developer should have put the document’s content online. Then people could get a glimpse of what the tool does before they download (and install) it.

If you’re faced with the challenging task of exporting a mailman subscribers list through the mailman web interface (e.g. because you don’t have SSH access to the server) look no further, there’s a nice Python-based solution for this.

Download http://msapiro.net/mailman-subscribers.py onto your Python-enabled system and run:

./mailman-subscribers.py -f <host_URL_without_http://> <listname> <password>

…A temporary issue with the Google Talk client requires that the Gmail service be added to any sign in account. If you don’t want to have an active Gmail account but want to use the Google Talk client, please sign up for Gmail once and delete the service permanently…

http://www.google.com/support/talk/bin/answer.py?answer=141360

My rather new Brother started raising “false” alerts (at least I think they’re false…) about empty/dead toner. I had only printed a few hundred pages so far. In search for an answer Google directed me to http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/forums/laser/39806.

It’s a long and chaotic thread but about 1/5 from the top there is a posting that advises to do following for Brother HL-4040 and similar models:

For the toner life reset menu:
1 Open the front cover of the printer
2 press and hold the cancel button
3 press the reprint button while still holding cancel
- here is the reset menu – go to the appropriate cartridge on
- the menu and reset it and you’re done!
FYI… Pressing the “Go” button and the up arrow gives you the parts life reset menu (drum, laser, fuser, etc.)

I also did the electric tape over the windows – which worked before the reset – but I thought this fact would be helpful too.

For anyone that is asking “what window?” I think it is the clear plastic opening on the sides of the cartridges where you can actually see the powder inside the cartridge – the color of the toner (magenta, yellow, or cyan). I didn’t really know that for sure when I tried, but it made sense, and it worked. So I am fairly sure that is the “window” you should be trying to cover.

Thousands of people are having troubles with those Huawei USB modems (assumption based in search engine results and forum posts). Here’s a list of steps to try out or hints to consider if you run into issues installing the drivers and/or software:

• Always log in with a user account that has local admin permissions.
• Once you’ve found an USB plug that works, always hook up the modem to the same plug.
• If you see an error that “the device has been disconnected or is unavailable” when you try to connect, the following might help. The problem was that during installation Windows didn’t recognize the modem’s data interface. Hence, no modem was installed as far as Windows is concerned:
  • Go to My Computer -> Properties -> Hardware -> Device Manager
  • Disconnect the USB modem.
  • Right-click on each entry in Universal Serial Bus controllers and choose “uninstall”.
  • Restart the PC.
  • Re-connect the USB modem to the first USB plug. Windows will initialize the device, pay attention to all the messages it displays at the lower right bottom of your screen. It will most likely initialize the device as an USB mass storage device, a CD-ROM, etc. AND hopefully as a “Data Interface”. If it never shows the mesage for data interface you have to try the device on the next USB plug.
  • If Windows brings up an installation dialog for the data interface, allow it to get the drivers from the internet, but tell it to also check in <folder_where_you_installed_Swisscom_software>\Driver\WinXP for suitable drivers (it might not find them otherwise).
  • If the Device Manager doesn’t list Huawei in the Modems and Ports section, you won’t be able to open a connection. Start all over with this guide

List of Windows control panel application and the name of the respective .cpl file in the %systemroot%\system32 folder. Uuuhhhm, you ask how knowing this should help you? Well, in the control panel you can’t simply right-click an application an chose “Run as…” from the context menu – that option is not available. Hence, you need to find the respective .cpl file and repeat that operation there…

For explanations check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Control_Panel_applets_(Windows)