Dell

Dell’s wireless drivers for inspiron 600m

By on Tuesday, October 17, 2006

I checked on Dell’s website yesterday for the latest wifi drivers for the Inspiron 600m to fix the widely reported vulnerabilitys. Dell has a driver available but when you download the file, you can extract the files from it. However double clicking on the setup program causes the dellinfo.exe program to crash followed by a message stating “Error – This installer does not support installation on this computer.”
So far I’ve chatted with about 3 people on the dell chat program. The scary thing was when a tech asked me “Why is it your downloading the driver if the wireless card is ok?” – I had to (patiently) explain that I’m trying to download a driver to patch the critical vulnerability that is (from the readme) “Urgent = Dell highly recommends applying this update as soon as possible. The update contains changes to improve the reliability and availability of your Dell system.”
His solution was to send me the driver cd but we got cut off before we managed to exchange shipping address’s.
I checked the driver on another inspiron 600m this morning and the dellinfo.exe crashed on this machine but it tried to install the drivers but failed to do so with 2 more crashes that were reported to microsoft.
I tried chat this morning and the tech stated that the driver may be corrupt and I would need to contact customer care to report this. I called the customer care line 1 800 456 3355×7241969 who then after not understanding a word I was talking about put me through to support who then told me that they had put me through to the wrong department and I’m now on hold again – awaiting to put me through to the wireless support card. They can’t support me as apparently someone else installed the driver “2 hours ago” and therefore the download must be ok. A conference call to hardware support was the next step. Unfortunately hardware support were too busy to answer the phone so the tech guided me to the intel website and I downloaded the driver from the driver page on intel.com. Whilst I was downloading this driver my boss tripped over the phone cable, pulled the phone off the desk and hung up – I let out an involuntary wail as it was the end of 90 minutes with “technical hold support”. However the wireless drivers from Intel loaded ok but interestingly the windows driver version is the same as the version that I was currently running (9.0.4.17), but the Intel Wireless software (an alternative to Windows Wireless configuration utility) was upgraded a couple of versions to 10.5.0.3.

Note that if you scroll down on the driver page you can actually just download the windows driver by itself (something I should have done as I don’t use the IBM configuration software as the Windows Management software is easier to use as it is standard across all the laptops.

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ipod

Kristens ipod works!

By on Saturday, October 14, 2006

I’ve finally got Kristen’s ipod to work after several days (a week on and off). The symptoms were that upgrading the ipod (at itunes prompting) would just result in a hang of itunes as would a restore. I was also getting messages such as The ipod “Ipod” cannot be updated. The required folder cannot be found. The ipod “Ipod” cannot be updated. The disk could not be read from or written to.
I solved the problem by doing all of the items below. (Note that if you are going to follow these instructions, make sure you have a backup of your ipod or don’t mind loosing the data on it!)

  • Copy the data from the ipod drive in windows to a temporary location on the pc’s hard disk and then format the ipod by right clicking on the drive in explorer, choosing Format and then doing a quick format (You may need to ensure that the drive letter that Windows sees is a unique one to the drive. If this is needed, right click my computer, choose manage and then go to disk management. Right click the larger ipod disk and choose change drive letter)
  • Uninstalled itunes and rebooted
  • Deleted %appdata%\Apple Computer\Itunes and %temp%
  • Reinstalled itunes
  • Delete the temporary copy of the ipod data

When I launched itunes it all seemed to start working properly – Kristen will be pleased.
Interestingly is that when I formatted the ipod, after the pc reboot there were files and directories back in the drive -I guess the ipod autoloads its OS from the hidden partition on the disk.

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Geotagging Google GPS Microsoft Photos Real Life Zooomr

Geotagging photo’s made very easy

By on Tuesday, October 10, 2006

I’ve been trying to use Microsoft’s WWMX application to geotag some of the photos that we took on holiday ready to upload to zooomr, but the level of mapping detail for Jamaica and Grand Cayman Islands was pretty awful However I have found that by using Garmin’s mapsource to load the track data from the gps and then saving the tracks to a gpx I can then use wwmx to automatically tag the photos if I had the gps on at the time the photos were taken.

However, for the rest of the photos that were taken without the gps I needed a better way of marking where they are taken. A combination of picassa and google earth makes the job very easy. First the photo’s need to be loaded into Picassa – this will probably be done automatically (although for some reason Picassa doesn’t like to find my cruise photos and they disappear from the folder view even though I can see them being scanned). Anyway, once the photos have been loaded, select the photos that need to be geotagged and then go to the tools menu, geotag, geotag with google earth. Then use Google Earth to navigate to the spot that the photos were taken -the satellite view does an outstanding job for this. Then just hit geotag, select the next picture and repeat (or do geotag all if they are all in the same place. At this point, the locations are written to the picture (exif data I presume) and can then be uploaded to flickr or zooomr already geotagged for you.

As it will take some time to load the cruise photo’s, I took some pictures of the Pumpkin Festival at Oakland Nursery including the Worlds Fastest Pumpkin Carver and entries for the Worlds biggest pumpkin.

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AmericanFootball

OSU vs Penn State game

By on Sunday, September 24, 2006

I had a busy day yesterday as work was hosting a tailgating party for the Ohio State vs Penn State game. I was also able to attend the game afterwards due to a friend getting me tickets. We had excellent seats near the “touchline” (as I called it) but quite a way up in the C section. I was a bit nervous about taking photos as although the OSU website states that cameras are allowed (as long as they are not video or with detachable lenses), the signs above all the entrances say no camera’s allowed – OSU really need to come up with nonconflicting guidelines about what you can or cannot take into the game.
I was able to get some photos at the beginning of the game and of the marching band, but as it started to chuck it down with rain I put the camera away and enjoyed the game. The first half was fairly boring with little action, but the second half, especially at the end was great with three touchdown generating interceptions, with the touchdowns right in front of us.
I’m afraid I wasn’t impressed with the band at half time, they really should stick to what they know best, marching and playing – not singing Rolling Stones songs (which I don’t like to start with!) but the rocking guitar formation at the end was really cool.
I didn’t enjoy the drive home though – it took 40 minutes to get from the place I had left the car to the nearby main road – a distance of 1.1 miles. During this fascinating 40 minutes I came to the conclusion that crickets believe in reincarnation and come back as traffic cops, as the noise that traffic cops make as they insanely blow their whistle is very similar and annoying to the sound that crickets make – just a lot louder.

Information Improvisation

Consulting an investment center should be the first step before thinking of a huge investment anywhere. This habit is of particular importance in corporate investment. The insurance companies take considerable notice of any irate behavior in this context. This is why paperwork of any investment property should be updated in every manner possible.

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Work

1 year anniversary

By on Thursday, September 21, 2006

Monday was my one year anniversary of working in the United States. A lot of things have happened since then and I now have the fun task of filling out a review. This blog should help me remember what I’ve been up to in the past year, after all there are 40 posts in the work category but only 17 in the past year. There are a lot more things that I’d have liked to have blogged about but due to confidentiality reasons (or that I just want to keep my job!) I’ve not been able to blog about them.

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Exchange / Outlook

Roadsync provides Direct push capabilities with Windows Mobile 2003

By on Monday, September 18, 2006

Sync With Microsoft Exchange 2003 & Corporate Outlook Email Via Remote Email Access on Your Smartphone which doesnt have to be running Windows Mobile 5 (but it does need to be Windows Mobile 2003 – which still leaves my original axim out of the loop.)
It is not free (probably $99) but there is a 30 day trial so that you can check it works first.
It looks like it doesn’t support notes either – something the native Exchange Direct Push doesn’t do too.

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