Stefan Helander

Minolta Dimage Scan Dual III AF-2840 in Windows Vista

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So, did you also try to get this negitive/slide scanner to work in Windows Vista?  No success? Thought so. Unfortunately I have found that Minolta scanners seems to have kind of a short life cycle in the eyes of the manufacturer. Like many other computer accessories that are not professional grade, drivers are availible for the current operating systems but when new arrives there just isn’t being any drivers developed. For this scanner I believe it was Windows 2000 and possibly Windows XP it had drivers for. But the arrival of Windows Vista was the death for this otherwise perfectly good scanner.

Minolta Dimage Scan Dual III AF-2840Like cameras, a good scanner do have a longer life cycle than normal computer accessories, which means that updated drivers are needed. Hopefully manufacturers will pick that up. Even though this scanner is not a professional grade scanner it has good performance and when sold it was not cheap, more in the price class of a good camera. I think as a consumer you should expect a bit longer life than that. Enough complaining.

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Stefan Helander

Pimp my router! Linksys WRT54GL on steroids… or at least on Tomato

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I while ago I got my hands on a Linksys WRT54GL broadband router. This little fellow runs on Linux. Nice, I thought. After fiddling around with it for a while I found that the firmware had bugs.

Linksys WRT54GLI added timed access restrictions (to cut off my teenagers Internet access automatically in the evening). This worked fine until I added another rule that had nothing to do with the first and suddenly my teenagers had Internet access all night long. I also want an incoming VPN connection (PPTP) that I forward by using port forward. This worked fine for a week and of course, it stopped working when I was abroad and needed it the most. Apart from that, there is no telnet or ssh login to the router (it is running on Linux you know).

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Stefan Helander

MySQL community protests against acquisition by Oracle

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The MySQL community around the world are getting worried about the possible acquistion of Sun Micosystems by Oracle. MySQL is community driven and often competes head to head with Sun Microsyftems commercial Oracle products. More than 14.000 MySQL users, developers and enthiusasts have signed a petition sent to regulators at the European Commission, Russia, China and other countries as a protest against the aqcuisition. According to eWeek it might be to late as the European Commission is expected to approve the deal within the next month.

You can sign the petition here to support the protest.

Stefan Helander

Windows XP users should immediately upgrade Adobe Flash plugin

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Microsoft has sent out an urgent message encouraging all Windows XP users to upgrade their Adobe Flash plugins immediately due to a security issue. This includes users of both 32 and 64 bit Windows XP and both SP2 and SP3. The current version of Adobe Flash plugin is version 10.0.42.34.

The latest version of Adobe Flash plugin can be downloaded here.

Stefan Helander

Google Wave – what is it all about?

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A while ago I recieved a Google Wave invite from a friend who had like 7 or 8 of them. Google Wave invites are not (yet) hard to get as the Spotify invites are. My first thought was that Google Wave was a service like Spotify where you can listen to music online. The word “wave”  made me think of  sound waves. How wrong could I be.

Google Wave preview

So what is Google Wave all about? I think Googles problem with Google Wave is that it not directly clear what it should be used for. The name is a bit confusing and when you’re in there it is not really obvious at a first glance. Maybe that is Read more

Stefan Helander

Windows won’t boot and you need the data on the harddisk?

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There is a nice solution to this little problem – called Active@ boot disk LiveCD. Download it as an ISO image (on another working computer of course), burn it to a CD and boot from the CD on your malfunctioning computer. The LiveCD is filled with utilities for you to get your valuable data off your crashed computer.

Even though there is a working free download I would encourage everyone that finds it valuable to pay the license so those guys at LiveCD can continue their good work on this product.

Stefan Helander

Bastard Operator From Hell

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Any BOFHs out there recognizing themselves? 🙂

(Yes, I know, this is not the original BOFH, but this guy is acting like a BOFH.)

Stefan Helander

All icons on the desktop has Microsoft Internet Explorer icon

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There is a practical joke being spread to Windows Vista users trying to fool them to associate .lnk (shortcuts) files with Microsoft Internet Explorer (MS IE). The so called joke in this is that it is very easy to do, but almost impossble to undo of you are not a skilled computer technician. This is because there is no possibility for the user to “unassociate” a file extension once it has been associated.

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Stefan Helander

FreeBSD 6.3 end-of-life January 31, 2010

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FreeBSDThe FreeBSD 6.3-Release is heading towards it’s End-Of-Life on January 31, 2010. This means the release is no longer supported and maintained by the FreeBSD security team. Users are strongly recommended to upgrade.

Conservative users can upgrade to FreeBSD 6.4-Release (EoL November 30, 2010) or FreeBSD 7.1 (EoL January 31, 2011) which both are extended life releases. Others should upgrade to FreeBSD 7.2-Release or 8.0-Release.

For more information, see FreeBSD.org.

Stefan Helander

New year – and a little year 2010 bug

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The 200x ended and we went into 2010. So we got ourselves a little 2010 bug. It was in the spam filtering software Spamassassin. Or to be more precise in it’s rulesets.

The problem was actually discovered and fixed months ago but someone forgot to include it in the rulesets for Spamassassin 3.2.x. No hard feelings about that. Those guys are doing a great job and shit do happen. It was fixed in a couple of hours on January 1, 2010.

The problem was that all incoming mail filtered by Spamassassin was flagged with FH_PAST_DATE_20XX and given an extra +3.4 spam score which results in false positives.

Those that were running sa-update by cron had this automatically fixed as the updated rules were on the servers around noon on January 1, 2010. Those not running sa-update by cron… still have problems unless they have run sa-update manually. Saying that, running sa-update by cron might be a good idea to keep your Spamassassin rules updated 🙂 A script for doing so and getting a mail with the result can be found here.

Some FreeBSD users reported that sa-update was not able to pull down the updated rules. A manual workaround and links to details around the problem is found here.