badc0ffee

In VS 2005, "The associated source control plug-in is not installed or could not be found" is another opaque catch-all error message that may or may not apply to your situation. In my case it meant that part of my project wasn't bound to source control. I had to follow the instructions here.

One of the things I find frustrating about Windows is that the error messages are so opaque. When I see "the document failed to print" for my network printer I have no way of finding out why. There's no log, no specific error message (not even "can't connect to server"), just a useless list of troubleshooting steps.

After reinstalling drivers, the spooler service crashed. It crashed again after I restarted, and it was crashing every time I restarted it. This page has some great tips on how to fix this. Why is that acceptable? I mean, I know printer drivers will be buggy, but why is it possible for them to bring down the printing system? And why doesn't the spooler log anything useful to the event log before it dies?

Close to home:

Heritage Posters & Music - 11 Ave. & 14 St. SW - until 6 Mon-Fri, 5 Sat, 4 Sun
Small, well-organized, well-stocked used selection. Also sells posters. Owner is a nice guy, but isn't always there at the hours posted. Phone ahead:

Hot Wax 114 - 10 St. NW - until 6 Mon-Sat, 5 Sun
Large, well-organized, well-stocked used selection.

Melodiya Records - 2523 - 17 Ave. SW - until 6 Mon-Wed,Fri-Sat, 7 Thu, 5 Sun
Used & New. Probably the city's best selection of new indie releases. Medium sized used section, but there's lots of garbage and it's hard to browse. Connected to Phoenix Comics.

Sloth Records - 17 Ave. & 4 St. SW
Used & New. Small selection of new indie releases. Small used section that never seems to change - lots of garbage and hard to browse.

Megatunes - 17 Ave. & 9 St. SW
Primarily a CD shop, but there is a small rack of new vinyl & reasonably priced reprints.

Further afield:

The Inner Sleeve - Small, well-organized, well-stocked used selection. Also a book store.
Recordland - The city's best used selection. Probably the biggest record store in western Canada. Not for browsing.
The Right Stuff - Small used section that never seems to change. Also sells rock memorabilia, has large Beatles section. In the basement of a sports card collector's shop.

Boutiques:

Phonics - Electronic stuff I know nothing about, new and used(?). Also clothes.
Giant 45 - Small selection of electronic stuff, new and used(?), clothes.
Brix - Hiphop. I've never been to Brix.

I was able to install VMware Workstation 4.5.2 on Fedora Core 2 without any problems, but I did have some issues getting my guest VM (running Windows 2000 Professional) working. Here are the problems I encountered, and the fixes I found:

1. The guest OS will not recognize the CDROM device on boot
   The solution is to configure the CDROM device to use "Legacy Emulation". Note that Legacy Emulation is not optimal, as the host OS is pretty slow when the guest is using the CDROM drive, and you can crash the guest VM if you eject a CD.
   
2. After a while, the VM crashes with error NOT_REACHED F(5036):2253
   The solution is to remove, not just disable or disconnect, the sound device.

While waiting for my Logitech LX-700 kit to arrive I've been using an old 3-button serial mouse, Radio Shack model 26-8432.

I figured that with a 3-button mouse, clicking the middle button would have the same effect as clicking the scroll wheel on a new mouse. But this wasn't the case, because Windows XP decided that my mouse only had two buttons. In an effort to get PuTTY and Firefox working just how I like them, I did some searching and found this:

http://www.a4tech.com/en/download3.asp?ID=12

I'm going to guess that any Mouse Systems-protocol 3-button mouse will work with these drivers.

The buttons are working, but I've found a drawback: the pointer motion is now choppy and slow. It's not smooth like with the default Microsoft drivers, even at the highest speed.

Here's a UNIX shell script I wrote that summarizes file sizes in the current directory and all its subdirectories, and sorts and tab-separates the output. Sizes for directories are not printed. It requires a recent version of du (one that supports --apparent-size), from the GNU coreutils:

#!/bin/sh

OUTFILE=/your/file/here
DU=/usr/bin/du

find . -type f -exec $DU -b --apparent-size {} \; > $OUTFILE
find . -type d >> $OUTFILE
sed -r 's/^([^\t]+)\t+([^\t]+)/\2\t\1/' < $OUTFILE > $OUTFILE.tmp
sort $OUTFILE.tmp > $OUTFILE

The output goes to /your/file/here, and the script clobbers /your/file/here.tmp.

The SGI Depot:
http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/sgidepot/

The site is there to sell used SGI hardware, so it has pictures and descriptions of all the old workstations, but it also has benchmarks of the various processor and video board options. It's a good indicator of what's available on the market and how much these machines are worth.

Valuable information categorized as humour:
http://www.disenchanted.com/dis/humor/coffee.html

If you can ignore the angsty and violent sarcastic comments, it's sage advice that cuts through the misinformation and incomplete guides to making coffee.

Someone at work was looking for a utility called "runprog" that was mentioned in some documentation.

For future reference here is where I found it:
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/lab/labsrc_area/src/misc/runprog/

It's an old utility written for UNIX that starts a process and kills it if it doesn't exit before a timeout.

Here's an HTML version of the man page:
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/lab/labman/lookup-man.cgi?runprog

In the wake of the recent US election, there's been a few maps floating around the net showing new nations carved out of the Republican states, and (most of) Canada + the Democratic states.

I won't get into how silly that is given how little Americans and Canadians really know about each others' societies and political systems/parties. Maybe it sounds clever if you've never seen a country geographically divided by party affiliations after an election.

American friends, if you'd still like to make/discuss these silly maps, I'd like to present this:
http://atlas.gc.ca/site/english/maps/reference/elections/election2004

This is how Canada voted in the last election. No more hearsay or guessing required when you carve up Canada (although how Candian parties map to American parties is a complex issue).