Flash 10 kinks with FF 3.5

Sometimes it's a matter of figuring out "what have I just done?".

All of a sudden my URLs in emails stopped working. Outlook will say "cannot find the file specified", and Thunderbird just does nothing when clicked. I toggled default browser, and IE 8 would work fine, but Firefox 3.5 still no go. I found a report on Sophos scanning plug-in causing the issue. Of course I don't use it, but it did remind me that I just installed Flash Player 10 to check out a friend's new pictures from Tibet on photoshop.com. That action added an extension (content download manager) as well as a plug-in (Flash 10.0.32.18)

So I removed the extension. No help. Then I disabled the plug-in. URLs came back to life! Then I re-enabled the plug-in, and things stayed OK.

Something not very smooth between Flash 10 and FF 3.5.2 then. As usual, they need to do a better job testing. Granted I'm an advanced user with unique needs sometimes, but look at this long thread with annoyed users and webmasters alike, you know they could definitely do better...

VMWare Server 2 & Ubuntu kernel upgrade

Today is the first time I ran "sudo apt-get dist-upgrade" on the machine that runs VMWare Server 2 on Hardy Server.  It's actually a lot painless than I expected.  All I needed to do was to run "sudo vmware-config.pl" after the kernel upgrade.  The only thing I didn't quite know to do was to have the headers ready before the vmware recompile.  That's just a "sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)".

Then I sorta did the same thing on a Ubuntu guest (Hardy as well with a generic kernel), expecting to run vmware-config-tools.pl.  But that turned out to be unnecessary.  Not sure why, as I had so much trouble last time.

Fixing a non-starting firewall on Vista

Windows Security Center informed me that WFW isn't running, but it couldn't start it. Event log shows ID 7024 with error code 0x5. Googling around led me to this thread, which towards the end suggested KB 943996. Basically the KB suggested to check permissions for account "NT Service\MpsSvc" on several registry keys. This first key I checked and corrected was
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SharedAccess\Epoch (needs Query Key and Set Value permission),
and then the Firewall started!

How did that permission got lost?

By the way, still don't know what is the NT Service\MpsSvc account. You have to search that exact name to turn it up on the permission setup screen.

Encode VOBs into xvid AVIs on Etch

The output would mainly be consumed on Windows client.  The workhorse I can use is a virtual Debian Etch on XenServer 5.0.   I tried the ffmpeg installation from Etch native repository.  It worked fine but it can only use FMP4 for default video codec.  Windows Media Player / MPC just didn't play the video on my Vista x64 with Klite installed.  I was searching for a solution.  Some suggested configure ffdshow to support FMP4, which it already did ("other MP4" enabled).  Some suggested changing the 4CC of the file, which looks like too much work.  As I was fudging along, I wanted to double check what error message WMP had, if any.  But this time it played!  Weird.  All I did was checking the ffdshow config and using G-Spot on the file...

Anyway, this is all too unreliable.  I gotta produce xvid AVIs.  So I chose to use debian-multimedia.org.   Pretty easy to use.  After I added the repo to sources.list, updated, ffmpeg is ready with xvid.  The syntax that worked for me is just

ffmpeg -y -i VTS_01_1.VOB -vcodec xvid -b 1000000 -f avi my.avi

For multiple VOBs, it'd be a simple concatenation:

cat VTS_01_0.VOB VTS_01_1.VOB VTS_01_2.VOB | ffmpeg -y -i - -vcodec xvid -b 1000000 -f avi my.avi

BT file transfer from BlackBerry 8330 to Dell Latitude D630

I largely followed the steps detailed here.  Once the two paired up, I had two issues.  First, BB device software promptly crashed, rebooting itself.  Second, Vista is asking for driver for a new device.  The second issue seems to be OK according to people here - basically just tell Vista "don't bother".  The first one might be tougher to solve... (to be continued)

Unscientific comparison of Vista and SUSE startup speed

It just so happened that I started two machines almost at the same time, and side by side.  The SUSE machine is an original HP MiniNote, with a lowly VIA C7, 512 MB memory, and 4 GB SSD.  The Vista machine is a relatively beefy Dell Latitude XT2 with Core 2 ULV 1.4 GHz, 3 GB memory, and 80 GB 5400 RPM HD.  Neither has much additional software on beyond the factory default.  I didn't time the two, but since realized the interesting comparison, so I did note the time difference.  From power on to browser open (Firefox for SUSE, IE 8 for Vista), MiniNote was only about 10 seconds behind XT2.  Both startups were between 2 to 3 minutes I think.  I'm sure SUSE 10 was optimized for the setup, while Dell's Vista install probably less so, but still the slowness of Vista was too apparent, considering how well equipped that XT2 is.