Ishida Tech Solutions, Ltd.
The personal and professional home of Brad Ishida

I recently switched to ViaTalk for my home phone. ViaTalk has somewhat of a reputation for not being user friendly, but if you’re a typical do-it-yourselfer, it’s a pretty good deal. I’m paying less than half of what I paid with Vonage and the ability to blacklist phone numbers over the web is absolutely great. ViaTalk does not supply you with a softphone, but it does provide you with the settings to use with 3rd party softphone software. CounterPath (http://www.counterpath.com/x-lite-download.html) offers both free and not-free softphone products. X-Lite 4.0 beta is the free softphone that will work with OSX Snow Leopard. The default settings did not work for me. I could place and receive calls, but I could not hear the other party while they could hear me. I’m fairy sure this problem was caused by routing confusion dealing with NAT. I finally figured out the settings that make everything work (see screen shot below). This setup makes me pretty happy. I’m saving money, I can blacklist phone spammers, I have callerid on my desktop softphone and it works well using my built-in speaker and microphone as well as my Logitech USB headset.

While trying to install the latest update to Parallels Desktop 5, I ran into an installation road block because the installer claimed 10 different Parallels applications were running and needed to be closed. Clearly, this was not the case. My first thought was to blame Parallels, but then an Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader update failed for the same reason–the installer claimed certain applications were running when they were not. While using the OS X Terminal, I realized certain commands were not working. I could not “less” a file. “grep” returned nothing even when I searched for strings that were clearly there. It turns out my entire /usr/bin directory had multiple executable files showing 0 bytes! “less” showed 0 bytes and also showed thousands of links to it–the same was true for many standard command line utilities. Installers like Parallels and Adobe depend on command line utilities found in /usr/bin. For example, to determine if certain programs are running, the installer will run a shell script that uses the “ps” command. If you’re curious what that would look like, here is the exact script that Parallels Desktop 5 uses:

#!/bin/sh

if ps -w -w -A -ocommand | grep -nq ‘^/Library/Parallels/Parallels Server.app/Contents/MacOS/prl_vm_app’; then

exit 1

fi

if ps -w -w -A -ocommand | grep -nq ‘^/Library/Parallels/Parallels Service.app/Contents/MacOS/prl_vm_app’; then

exit 1

fi

exit 0

I set up a single box to dual boot Windows 7 32 bit and Windows 7 64 bit. When booting up, the boot manager asks me which OS I want to start. The problem is that both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions have “Windows 7″ as the description. So… I get the choice of booting “Windows 7″ or “Windows 7″. This is even less useful than it sounds. To fix this, I boot up in to one of them and then open a command window running as administrator: start->all programs->accessories->right click “command prompt” and run as administrator. Next, I use a command called bcdedit. Run bcdedit with no arguments and it will list your bootable partitions. Each one will have an identifier inside curly brackets–something like {current} or {aa572c50-fa57-11de-9aae-9f4b2a2101ad}. To set the names you see in the boot menu, use bcdedit like this:

bcdedit /set {aa572c50-fa57-11de-9aae-9f4b2a2101ad} description “Windows 7 32 bit”

Just repeat the command and adjust for the other partition and you’re good to go.

My plans to install Windows 7 on an empty partition hit a snag when I got this error. I have a Promise RAID card and had just finished installing the drivers for it in order to proceed with the Windows 7 installation. This 0×80300001 error wouldn’t let me select ANY partition though. It turns out this is the Windows 7 way of saying “take the drivers CD-ROM out of the drive and put the Windows 7 installation DVD back in”.

Recently, nearly every page on the web was crashing both Firefox and Safari. It turns out the Flash plugin was the culprit–actually some bad permissions on the Flash plugin files. You can fix this problem by repairing the permissions on your hard drive using the Mac OSX disk utility. I’ll attach a screen shot that shows the problem.

I was doing some Access 2007 debugging for a client today and a search using a form was taking close to 10 minutes. Even with a half million records, this seemed horribly slow for Access. Changing the query from (year = 2007 or year = 2008 or year = 2009) to (year < 2006) made the 10 minute search turn into a 2 second search. Apparently testing for equality with Access is terribly expensive in terms of process time.

All is back to normal now, but on my first boot up after installing Mac OS X Snow Leopard, the screen of my Mac Book Pro was black. For some reason, the upgrade set my screen brightness all the way to zero and then the screen brightness keys (F1 and F2) would not respond for about 5 minutes after boot up. This seems to be a completely different quirk than a similar one I’ve seen with minor updates to 10.5. In that case, a black screen could generally be solved by powering down the Mac Book Pro and removing the battery for a few minutes–then booting back up.

If you want to set the Return-Path value in your mail header in a message sent using the Mail Mailer Perl module, here is one way to do it:

Declare your mailer object with the -t and -ba flags.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Mail::Mailer;

my $mailer = Mail::Mailer->new(’sendmail’, (’-t’,'-ba’));

The Return-Path value will become the address you specify in your “From” line.

I recently upgraded to iTunes 8 and all my music videos stopped playing in iTunes. Some files would produce a message “This computer is not authorized to play ’song’. Would you like to authorize it?” Authorizing the computer does not help–it just asks you to authorize over and over. Some music videos would play audio but not play video. Here is how I fixed it:

1) Quit iTunes
2) Move this file to your desktop: /Users/YOURNAME/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.iTunes.nnnnnn.plist
3) Restart iTunes

Note that you need to replace “YOURNAME” with the name of your user account. Also, you will have various letters and numbers replacing the nnnnn part of the file name above.

If it works, you can delete the file you copied to your desktop. If it doesn’t work, you might want to put it back where you got it.

Unless you’ve gone out of your way to prevent information about your server being shared in HTTP headers, it’s probably there. Here is a quick way to see what all those evil-doers out there can see about you.
telnet yourserver.com 80

GET / HTTP/1.1 [press ENTER key once]

Host: yourserver.com [press ENTER key twice]

At this point, the home page will display in your terminal window. You can press CTRL+] to get the telnet prompt and then type ‘close’. When you scroll back to the top of your window, you will see all the header information that is shared by your server. You may see your PHP installation, apache version, OpenSSL and anything else you have configured on your web server.