Dell stops releasing driver updates for a laptop rather quickly. However, the same hardware is found in other laptops, and often these drivers will install. Drivers can even support similar hardware which is not explicitly listed. For example, a driver's description may claim support for one wireless card, but the driver may support all of Dell's Broadcom based wireless cards. A while ago I fixed audio glitches in Vista by installing a newer driver for my Dell Wireless 1500 Draft 802.11n WLAN Mini-Card.
Today I found that Dell had a Broadcom Wi-Fi driver for Windows 7 (R242438), but that driver refused to install. The error message was: "No compatible hardware found. The software you are attempting to install is not supported on this system." Despite this warning, I could manually install the driver via Device Manager without any warnings. After a manual install, the wireless card worked, but I didn't have the utility which shows signal strength in the tray and other components.
Since the driver seemed to be compatible, I searched for a way to do a proper installation. The driver installer unpacks itself to C:\dell\drivers\R242438. In that directory there is a "DellInst.enc" file. It doesn't look like anything, but it may be decoded via "BcmCrypt.exe" (also in that directory, USAGE: BCMCRYPT -e or -d <input> <output>). The file decodes into a text file which shows what cards are supported and what systems are certified with each card. The "Dell Wireless 1500 Draft 802.11n WLAN Mini-Card" (PCI\VEN_14E4&DEV_4328&SUBSYS_00091028) was supported, but my system was not in the list of systems in that section. I simply added the "0x01BD ;Inspiron 6400" line for my system and encoded the file with BcmCrypt. After that the driver installed properly and everything worked, although the highest speed seemed to be 130 Mbps. After changing some advanced settings in Device Manager, I finally got 270 Mbps.
While doing this I also found that there are three different drivers in three subdirectories of C:\dell\drivers\R242438. DRIVER_US is for the US, DRIVER_JPN is for Japan, and DRIVER_ROW is for the rest of the world. For example, it's possible to manually install the driver from C:\dell\drivers\R242438\DRIVER_ROW using Device Manager and gain access to channels 12 and 13. I never tested these channels and I now use the US driver which the installer installed, but it's nice to know that I can change that easily.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Windows Live Messenger 14 doesn't report message delivery failures?
Occasionally, Windows Live Messenger fails to deliver messages. In version 8.5 this would result in a delayed notification saying that a particular message could not be delivered. In version 14.0.8089.726, messages fail to deliver without any notification. I have never seen any message delivery failure notification in version 14. Miranda IM is still able to report message delivery failures, so it doesn't seem like a server-side issue.
Friday, October 09, 2009
I used Picasa's facial recognition to find friends and myself in photos
In the past I tried tagging my photos with tags corresponding to the location, major things and people in the photo. This was mostly a waste of time. Folder names were already sufficient for finding photos by location and I wasn't interested in finding particular types of things (eg. lakes) in my photos. The only useful part was tags corresponding to people.
The last tagging was a long time ago, and so I had a lot of untagged photos. Recently, I felt like adding tags corresponding to people, but I assumed that it would be very tedious. Then I learned that Picasa has facial recognition and I decided to give that a try.
Starting the process was surprisingly easy. When I added a folder to Picasa, it first scanned the folder in the usual way and generated thumbnails. Then it started scanning the photo for faces. It quickly started filling a list of faces, and I just had to start identifying people. After a bit of manual identifying, Picasa was able to automatically identify some people.
There were certainly some issues and limitations. More than a third of the time, Picasa found a face but failed to identify the person. Occasionally, a person was misidentified (or maybe it was a sign that I look like some relatives). Then there were all the strangers in the background, whom I had to remove from the list. The most interesting issue was occasional identification of faces in artwork (eg. Mt. Rushmore, paintings and T-shirts) and even patterns of reeds or clouds. Fortunately, dealing with all these things was fun.
When the scan finished I wanted to see how many faces were missed. At first I was somewhat disappointed. Picasa easily dealt with sunglasses, but tuques or harsh shadow boundaries often caused faces to be ignored. Picasa also seemed sensitive to face orientation. It did well when a face was vertical and viewed from the front or side, but other angles were a problem. Manually adding people was a bit more trouble than it should have been. I had to go to the photo page, draw a box around the face and select the name. I wish I could have added tags from the thumbnails page without defining the person's location. After doing all this, I felt that Picasa automatically found the faces in the majority of the best photos. Even the automatic face detection wasn't anywhere near perfect, it was good enough and I was satisfied.
Picasa's automatic face detection also provided an unexpected benefit: the way it cropped faces was sometimes very aesthetically pleasing. It actually improved some photos, and it provided many images which could be used online.
Now I'm wondering whether to continue using Picasa or extract the face information and uninstall Picasa. I'm happy with the way I organize things into folders, and generally not interested in programs for managing libraries of files. I still have to see a bit more about what Picasa offers.
The last tagging was a long time ago, and so I had a lot of untagged photos. Recently, I felt like adding tags corresponding to people, but I assumed that it would be very tedious. Then I learned that Picasa has facial recognition and I decided to give that a try.
Starting the process was surprisingly easy. When I added a folder to Picasa, it first scanned the folder in the usual way and generated thumbnails. Then it started scanning the photo for faces. It quickly started filling a list of faces, and I just had to start identifying people. After a bit of manual identifying, Picasa was able to automatically identify some people.
There were certainly some issues and limitations. More than a third of the time, Picasa found a face but failed to identify the person. Occasionally, a person was misidentified (or maybe it was a sign that I look like some relatives). Then there were all the strangers in the background, whom I had to remove from the list. The most interesting issue was occasional identification of faces in artwork (eg. Mt. Rushmore, paintings and T-shirts) and even patterns of reeds or clouds. Fortunately, dealing with all these things was fun.
When the scan finished I wanted to see how many faces were missed. At first I was somewhat disappointed. Picasa easily dealt with sunglasses, but tuques or harsh shadow boundaries often caused faces to be ignored. Picasa also seemed sensitive to face orientation. It did well when a face was vertical and viewed from the front or side, but other angles were a problem. Manually adding people was a bit more trouble than it should have been. I had to go to the photo page, draw a box around the face and select the name. I wish I could have added tags from the thumbnails page without defining the person's location. After doing all this, I felt that Picasa automatically found the faces in the majority of the best photos. Even the automatic face detection wasn't anywhere near perfect, it was good enough and I was satisfied.
Picasa's automatic face detection also provided an unexpected benefit: the way it cropped faces was sometimes very aesthetically pleasing. It actually improved some photos, and it provided many images which could be used online.
Now I'm wondering whether to continue using Picasa or extract the face information and uninstall Picasa. I'm happy with the way I organize things into folders, and generally not interested in programs for managing libraries of files. I still have to see a bit more about what Picasa offers.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Why I consider myself atheist now
Religious stories involving the supernatural seem to be mythological, and literally believing them seems brainwashed or even crazy. However, scientific understanding has such gaping holes that it's impossible to rule out that something like what religions talk about is part of reality. So, for a long time I considered myself agnostic.
Recently I realized that calling myself agnostic can imply that for all that mythological and crazy stuff, I'm saying "I don't know, it could be true". It doesn't feel right, and being unsure about delusions can lead to more delusions. To see the problem, imagine being unsure about something which is generally recognized as a delusion: the idea that there are satellites which read your thoughts and put thoughts in your head. This is kind of like the idea of God hearing your prayers and providing guidance.
I don't deny that religion can be a useful psychological tool. I don't deny that it can offer moral and ethical guidance. However, this doesn't mean that religion is fundamentally true, and I don't think that it's necessary for these purposes.
Recently I realized that calling myself agnostic can imply that for all that mythological and crazy stuff, I'm saying "I don't know, it could be true". It doesn't feel right, and being unsure about delusions can lead to more delusions. To see the problem, imagine being unsure about something which is generally recognized as a delusion: the idea that there are satellites which read your thoughts and put thoughts in your head. This is kind of like the idea of God hearing your prayers and providing guidance.
I don't deny that religion can be a useful psychological tool. I don't deny that it can offer moral and ethical guidance. However, this doesn't mean that religion is fundamentally true, and I don't think that it's necessary for these purposes.
Thursday, September 03, 2009
In Vista, the "Previous Versions" tab requires administrative shares
No matter what I did, the "Previous Versions" tab for every file said "There are no previous versions available". System Restore was turned on, and both the GUI and vssadmin said that there were restore points. I was able to access old versions of files using syntax like "\\?\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy1\config.sys". I was even able to access old versions via the "Previous Versions" tab when I accessed files via shared folders (eg. "\\computername\public").
The solution was enabling administrative shares (such as C$). In the past I set the dword at "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\LanmanServer\Parameters\AutoShareWks" to 0, which disabled them. I simply deleted that registry entry and restarted. (Note that even though Vista is a workstation OS, the registry entry is under LanmanServer.)
I wasted way too much time on this. I hate when something fails and there is no indication what went wrong. (I imagine something was trying to connect to C$ and it was failing, but that error was never reported.) This is actually my main complaint about Windows.
All this also applies to Windows 7.
The solution was enabling administrative shares (such as C$). In the past I set the dword at "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\LanmanServer\Parameters\AutoShareWks" to 0, which disabled them. I simply deleted that registry entry and restarted. (Note that even though Vista is a workstation OS, the registry entry is under LanmanServer.)
I wasted way too much time on this. I hate when something fails and there is no indication what went wrong. (I imagine something was trying to connect to C$ and it was failing, but that error was never reported.) This is actually my main complaint about Windows.
All this also applies to Windows 7.
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
JMicron JMB36X vs. Maxtor 92040U6
While backing up a partition to a Maxtor 92040U6 IDE (PATA) drive, Linux occasionally tells me stuff like:
I'm curious because Windows 98 SE used to lock up when I was using the drive, and when I tried Windows 7, it would occasionally hang for a while with the hard drive light lit. In both cases there were no error messages, so I couldn't be sure what was happening.
If Windows 7 doesn't log error messages when there is an ATA timeout on a hard drive, then the people who wrote the ATA driver are idiots. Meanwhile, Firefox fails to properly display the Linux source file which produced the error message, and searching through a lot of text in Internet Explorer 8.0 is insanely slow, as if some evil genius invented a search algorithm that's even slower than a totally dumb algorithm. Sometimes, software sucks way too much. But hey, in this case at least it gives me something to do during the backup, and I don't have to routinely use PATA and deal with these errors.
ata9.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozenSo, there a "write DMA" command timed out and the drive is ready. I'm not sure what else one can learn from that. I wonder what's at fault. The motherboard is Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R. The PATA port is handled by a JMicron JMB36X chip, and the hard drive is a 10 year old Maxtor 92040U6 drive with MA540RR0 firmware. I've in the past I've had problems with the Memorex 3202 3292 PATA DVD+-RW drive which make me suspect the JMB36X. However, I also suspect the hard drive.
ata9.00: cmd ca/00:00:ff:02:c9/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 131072 out
res 40/00:03:00:00:08/00:00:00:00:00/b0 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
ata9:00: status: { DRDY }
ata9: soft resetting link
ata9:00: configured for UDMA/66
ata9:01: configured for UDMA/33
I'm curious because Windows 98 SE used to lock up when I was using the drive, and when I tried Windows 7, it would occasionally hang for a while with the hard drive light lit. In both cases there were no error messages, so I couldn't be sure what was happening.
If Windows 7 doesn't log error messages when there is an ATA timeout on a hard drive, then the people who wrote the ATA driver are idiots. Meanwhile, Firefox fails to properly display the Linux source file which produced the error message, and searching through a lot of text in Internet Explorer 8.0 is insanely slow, as if some evil genius invented a search algorithm that's even slower than a totally dumb algorithm. Sometimes, software sucks way too much. But hey, in this case at least it gives me something to do during the backup, and I don't have to routinely use PATA and deal with these errors.
Do all OSes still use a dumb LRU algorithm for caching?
I am backing up a partition from SystemRescueCd using dd and gzip. Occasionally I run ls to see the size of the output file. If I haven't used ls in a bit, the DVD drive spins up. So, it seems like Linux is using a dumb "least recently used" algorithm for caching, and the partition backup I/O is constantly removing ls from the cache. Do all operating systems still use such a dumb algorithm?
Friday, August 28, 2009
Connect to WebDAV folders from the command line to avoid a Vista bug
Microsoft's WebDAV implementation has been very buggy. One issue is that Vista cannot connect to a WebDAV folder if WebDAV is not supported in the server's root. That was supposedly fixed with KB942392, which was supposedly included in SP2. With SP2, if I attempt to connect via the "Connect to a Web site that you can use to store your documents and pictures" feature, that behaviour persists. I can successfully connect from the command line (using something like"net use r: http://servername:portnumber/foldername").
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