Rick Tech

The dreaded blue screen of death, unaffectionately known as the BSOD, is one of the computer geek’s curses. They are such a part of culture that people spend their time looking for them in public and the BSOD has even been seen most recently at the 2008 Olympics.

But luckily, some of them can actually be fixed. On the surface NO_MORE_IRP_STACK_LOCATIONS is pretty scary, but as OSR Online explains this is happens because too the driver submitted the wrong stack number in the I/O Request Packet. Microsoft has a bug fix for this, but explains that it happens because more then three anti-virus (or anti-spyware) programs are installed. They also state that it only happens when logging in to a domain, but the same error message pops up when doing simple network transactions such as copy and paste, or renaming folders.

If the Hot Fix does not work, or you are not comfortable editing the registry then here some other possible options.

In most cases, it’s probably a good idea to do all three of these things in addition to running the hot fix if possible. These should help and will help alleviate Windows reinstallation fear.

If you find another fix for this, please let me know in the comments below.

First up is a great article on how to build your own PBX for digital phones using Linux and Asterisk. This is actually pretty useful as I know a lot of companies that are now using Asterisk in conjunction with Polycom Phones.

The Dell-Apple rivalry took another notch up this week. Tim Bucher, who was fired personally by Steve Jobs joined Dell and is heading up a project called Zing. Zing is calculated to over throw iTunes by providing a way to bring all sources of MP3’s and digital movies together into one location, and provide a way to synch with handheld units. It remains to be seen if this will happen, but it does come closest to the Apple Model which works well.

Vista continues to be Microsoft’s sore subject. A new report suggests that 35% of new PC are being downgraded to XP.

In the project management world, Microsoft Project is the premier software that just about everyone users. Unluckily in Mac heavy shops this causes quite a few problems. Two programs are aimed to fix this. The first is actually an online tool called Liquid Planner. This has the advantage of being able to share projects among teams. But for those wanting a bit more security, iTaskX fills that niche. Unluckily it does not have a server component.

Next is a story about non-IT people hiring for IT positions, and a process called Pink Box Testing. HR unsafe jokes aside, it gives a good reason to be sure you test your recruiters.

One of the biggest pains I have with surfing the Internet is the pop-up ads that tell me my computer is infected with Virus. Of course, when I’m on Mac or Linux this is a bit on the hard side to believe. Most of these ads are virus in themselves in an attempt to get people to pay money to buy “protection”. I’m not sure how much they make scamming people like this, but I’m sure it’s a lot. In the meantime here are instructions to get rid of XP-Antivirus-2008 which is one of the most common scam virus going around right now.

The Wall Stree Journal has a great article about hobbyist who build their own working nuclear fusion reactors. In their garage! Most of them take more energy then they put out, but is this the next step in energy for home use? Find out more on their web site.

Netflix had some big shipping issues this week, and Wired.com says that they should give up go 100% digital delivery.

With the size of the Internet a lot a files, thoughts, musings, writings, paintings, pictures, etc, get “accidently” made available for those who have not paid for them. Students copy and paste whole sections of documents for their own papers, and less scrupulous individuals copy for their own reasons. A lot of companies have gotten around this by instigating DRM protection schemes, despite protests by consumers. The worst part though is that for those of us who provide content on the web, it’s actually pretty hard to keep that information secure.

Plagiarized text files are one of the easiest to find. Tools like Google are actually very useful here, but have the potential to come up with way too many hits. There are a lot of pay-per-use or subscription tools available on the market that will search for plagiarism, but Reprint Writers has put a great tool online that searches better then Google does. Unfortunately it only searches Yahoo so it may miss some hits.

On the other hand there are times when one does need to publish materials online and may not be the original author, or the original author may not be readily apparent or available. The Library Copyright Digital Slider tool could be very useful. Geared towards Librarians, it is extremely useful in identifying works that may have become public domain.

If the publication in question is a book it should be copyrighted via the Library of Congress. Some of that information is online via this link . Unfortunately, a good portion of this information is still offline, but it is being added slowly but surely. The provided link also has information about how to contribute to this project.

More recently web photography has really taken off. A lot of people with cheap digital cameras are posting pictures left and right, and just as quickly those pictures are being pulled from services such as Flickr and used by others.

Idee, Inc has a new tool that is in beta called Tineye. It actually goes out on the web and searches for pictures. Pictures that it’s seen before (and it’s constantly searching,) are given a unique identifier based on pixels in the graphic. Tineye scours the web for any picture that comes close, including those that were photoshopped or other wise altered.

In this day age copyright is an important concern for everyone involved. Using the above tools will make it easier to identify such cases and take appropriate action. Doing so will also help keep the unintentional infringements from happening.

Really Simple Syndication feeds or RSS is one of those technologies that makes sense when you think about it, but just isn’t as widely used as it should be.

As a blogger, I too at one time went with Blogspot/Google/Blogger to do my thing. One of the things that made me move to Wordpress, and an independent site, was the lack of a simple way to create RSS feeds.

Since then, Blogspot has seen the problem and fixed it. Take the address of the site you want to use and add /atom.xml to the end of the address.

So http://ricksawesomeblog.blogspost.com becomes http://ricksawesomeblog.blogspost.com/atom.xml

Take the new line, insert into your RSS reader and you’re good to go!

The feed for this humble blog is a tiny bit more complicated http://www.1nova.com/blog/?feed=rss2, but readers are welcomed, and hopefully informed.

With the rise of Javascript and other web based programing languages, links to certain webpages have grown downright unwieldy. Places like eBay, Amazon, and many online shopping programs are the worst cases. But these portals provide such a vast number of items that any flat file based system from the 90’s would require a team of people to update it 24 hours a day as prices change and stock comes and goes.

Enter a plethora of web sites that “shorten” a given URL and present it in a friendlier format.

Tinyurl is one of the oldest and most popular of such services. They even provide a link that can be dragged to the browser tool bar for on the fly URL shortening services.

For instance: http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FHeroes-Season-2-Jack-Coleman%2Fdp%2FB001B7CNZ6%3Fpf%5Frd%5Fp%3D294635701%26pf%5Frd%5Fs%3Dright-5%26pf%5Frd%5Ft%3D101%26pf%5Frd%5Fi%3D507846%26pf%5Frd%5Fm%3DATVPDKIKX0DER%26pf%5Frd%5Fr%3D06WM4R0ZBZMYJDY834NZ&tag=ricktech-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325

Becomes: http://tinyurl.com/5gvb4j

Minilink.org does the same thing, and even has a tools page that has a tool bar Javascript link just like Tinyurl. This site has one huge advantage over TinyURL though. Their links include the server name to keep people from inadvertently visiting the seedy parts of the Internet.

Thus the above link becomes: http://lnk.nu/amazon.com/n4m.html

While not every URL needs to be shortened, there are plenty that do. These two tools will certainly help in cases when it is needed. Email, IM’s, forum postings, etc would all benefit.