Month: March 2009

Downloads: DropboxPortable Syncs Files to Your Thumb Drive

Windows only: Free application DropboxPortable makes the popular file-syncing application thumb-drive friendly, so you can access your synced bucket from your thumb drive no matter what computer you’re using.

Downloads: DropboxPortable Syncs Files to Your Thumb Drive

I finally gave this program a test run and I was pleased with the results. Recently I split up my KeePass password database into three databases, work, charity work, and personal. I kept a copy of the files on a USB dongle so I could deal with the occasional emergency at work or at home.  I used SyncToy to keep the files  synchronized but I have screwed up on more than one occasion and updated the passwords in two locations without synchronizing first. DropBox has the potential to eliminate that problem. I am slightly uncomfortable with storing a strongly encrypted password file in the cloud but I am pretty sure there are much easier ways of getting my passwords than cracking this encryption scheme.

IE8 Compatibility Problem

I have been pretty busy this year with a move to a new warehouse so I did not get around to checking IE8 out until last week. So I installed the released version of IE8 for a quick checkout. It is scheduled to go on automatic updates in late April. The first screen I tried failed. All I got was a blank screen. No error messages at all! We use this screen to login to the administrative side of our web site. It is a classic ASP page with HTML validation issues that was written long before I got here. I tried to quickly fix the HTML validation errors but ASP barfed up some cryptic error codes with the HTML fixes I tried. So I am leaving this nugget for next week while I work on the issues my boss is most concerned about. Since I am old, I have a few rules about computer programming maintenance that keeps management happy with me.

  • Rule #1 – Don’t fix things that are not broken.
  • Rule #2 – Don’t fix things that they do not ask you to fix.

Until last week both of these rules applied.

My New Cell Phone is a Blackberry 8900

blackberry8900A week ago my old cell phone, Blackberry 7100 died. It would no longer boot. Although I was interested in the iPhone and Android the biggest features I use other than the phone features are the email and web browsing. After using the 7100 for several years the feature I yearned for than anything else was a full keyboard. It is really painful to reply to email and surf the web without a full keyboard. The keyboard issue dropped the iPhone out of the mix. Of the phones with a full keyboard, the Blackberry 8900 was the safer choice for a Blackberry user. Due to contract complications that the store could not resolve, I had to order my phone directly from T-Mobile. So I put my SIM chip in an old Nokia I had forgotten to recycle and ran as a regular cell phone for a week. Last Friday I finally received the phone and synchronized it with Outlook. That was good timing since I had to make an unscheduled out of town trip on Saturday. My father died. He had been in the hospital for over a year battling MRSA. He won that battle with MRSA but he lost the war. This week the rest of his organs started failing.  By the time I got on the road the diagnosis was that he would not see another sun rise. The hospital had given him a sedative to make him more comfortable. He died before I got there. When I got to my parents house my nephew was still trying to hack into my mom’s wireless router. She had recently gotten broadband access and did not remember anyone giving her the passphrase. I quickly read my email to make sure that nothing bad was happening and then got back to the real meaning of the trip.

Recovering from registry 51 error

For the last couple of months I have been trying to fix an old ThinkPad that failed on us. It was a low priority item but we were pretty sure we would need it fixed eventually. In an unfortunate sequence of events the battery ran down, the LCD failed, and the disk/registry got corrupted. Under most circumstances we would buy a new laptop and re-install the necessary programs. In this case we pretty sure there were some custom programs on the laptop we would need in the future. I had a backup of the data but I did not have a plan for re-installing the custom programs. Frankly none of us knew what programs we needed to save.

With the beginning of the new year I was informed that one of the custom programs that existed only on the laptop was a custom interface to QuickBooks and a SQL database. It was used in reconciling annual inventory and we needed to reconcile the inventory for tax purposes. The Boss had been thinking ahead and bought an almost identical ThinkPad laptop off of eBay. The plan was to take the old disk drive and put it in the newly acquired laptop. So I made an image copy of the drive, inserted the drive into the laptop, and then booted the laptop. Within a short period of time I was looking at a BSOD, Registry Error. So I tried to repair the installation using the XP installation disk. I surprised when it gave me a BSOD, too. Since re-installing the programs was an option we did not want to pursue at this time, I went searching for a way to repair the corrupted registry. I found this Microsoft Knowledge Base article, How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting.

I had never seen this KB. Over the years I had almost no success going back to the last known good configuration so I was game. I followed the instructions and restored to an old system restore point. When I booted all of the installed programs worked as expected! This would have been the end to the story but after the laptop was running for awhile I started getting BSODs with a PFN_LIST_CORRUPT error message. A quick search of the Internet said this error was frequently associated to memory errors so I booted off my copy of the Ultimate Book CD for Windows and ran Memtest86. Sure enough, I got a bunch of memory error messages. I tried to swap out the memory but I kept getting memory error messages. This was not good! This laptop was bought to fix problems not replace old problems with new problems. In a strange turn of events I finally solved this problem by taking the drive out, putting it back into the old laptop, and hooking up a spare monitor to the laptop. It is not the way we wanted to run the system but it works. Hopefully we will finally migrate all of the important stuff off before we need to use it again.