My sister asked to help her laptop this past weekend.  Its was a goofy little error and I didn’t want to forget about it in case I came across it again.

She had an issue where every time she opened Yahoo! Messenger on her fairly new Vista laptop, she would get an error stating the following:

This program requires flash.ocx, which is no longer included in this version of Windows.

If you click the “Cancel” button, the error goes away and Yahoo! Messenger runs fine for that session.  She had already reinstalled both Yahoo and Flash to their latest versions and neither stopped the error from popping up.

Well, OCX is the file extension for ActiveX controllers under Internet Explorer.  Since these are potentially very dangerous pieces of code, they aren’t installed automatically like in previous versions of Windows.  Between Vista’s User Access Control and IE 7, you must approve the action before installing an ActiveX plugin.

Appearantly Yahoo! Messenger has its hooks into IE in some way, most likely to display Flash based advertisements.  When initially setting up my sisters laptop I made Firefox the default browser, so the plugin wasn’t asked to be installed.  To get rid of the error for good, reinstall Flash from Adobe’s website using IE.  By allowing the ActiveX plugin to be installed it will create a flash.ocx file (possibly flash9.ocx, flash10.ocx, etc. depending on the version of flash being installed.) This corrected the matter immediately.

In my research I did find that this doesn’t always work for similair issues.  It was often suggested that you should make a copy of flash(insert_version_number).ocx to just flash.ocx.  For instance if you are using Flash version 10, then do a search for the file flash10.ocx, copy it, and place the copy in the same folder with the filename flash.ocx.

I can’t vouch for how secure this is from a system security standpoint.  ActiveX controllers are risky things and should be avoided whenever possible.  In this case I’m placing a bit of trust with Adobe.  I’m figuring that a such a widely distributed plugin would be repaired rather quickly if a devastating vulnerabilty, lest Adobe suffered serious embarassment. (Naive of me, I know.)

For some time now I’ve seen several videos around showing off what seemed like a miracle machine. The Looj from iRobot. iRobot, if you are unaware, are the same geniuses behind the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. It looks pretty spiffy, don’t you think?

Now I have never used a Roomba myself but they seem to be all the rage these days and I’ve gotten several positive reviews from close colleagues. Now every year around this time I venture into the scary outside world and clean out my parents gutters. I figured iRobot’s reputation was pretty sound and if it meant less time dangling from a roof in the hot sun, then it might be worth a shot. I went to Amazon, placed my order for the Looj 125, and two days later I was ready to give it a try. Hmm…So there seems to be a 15-hour charge time for the battery. Two days and 15 hours later I was ready to give it a try.

The basic premise seems simple enough. A small radio controlled treaded vehicle uses a bristled auger that spins and flips debris from the gutter onto the lawn. However iRobots implementation doesn’t quite work out in practice. Initial impressions is that the Looj feels more like a plastic toy than a tool. Despite being treaded it fails at getting past the most simple obstacles, obstacles its suppose to be able remove from its paths. All it did was splash around like a baby in a bathtub. It made more of a mess than anything else. Granted it was a bit wet up in the gutters, but the Looj is advertised as waterproof up to 1-foot of water. The website also claims that the “Looj blasts through debris, clogs and sludge.” It’s far too underpowered to accomplish this. My gutters weren’t too terribly clogged and this should have been a simple task. Had I have brought the garden hose up with me I would’ve cleared it out quite easily.

To sum it up, I basically found it useless. I was patient and gave it a fair shot because I really wanted this to work. It’s just too underpowered to get anything more than dry autumn leaves out of your gutter. I do think the idea has potential. If instead of the 7 volt battery we loaded in a 18 volt, and put in a stronger motor for the auger, we might have something.

Been using version 9.04 of Ubuntu, Jaunty Jackelope, for a few weeks now. I have it running on 2 of my 3 personal machines and I get pretty regular use out of it for my daily computing. The first machine I installed it on was my Asus 901 EeePC. I did a fresh install on my netbook so I could see how smoothly the installation would go, and to judge how netbook ready the new OS was. Setup was a breeze. Not really a big surprise there. Since there was a lot of focus placed on making Jaunty Jackelope much more netbook friendly I was pleased to find all my hardware working immediately. That is something that took a new eeepc specific kernel in previous versions of Ubuntu. Some of the function key hardware controls, such as Fn+F2 to turn the wireless on and off, still do not work until you install the eee-control packages. That is really a minor nuisance. I’ll just have to add it to my list of post-ubuntu-setup packages I regularly install on a new system (currently being compiled for a future blog post).

Now since Jaunty is so netbook friendly now, they have issued the Ubuntu Netbook Remix as its own ISO. If you’ve already installed the standard version of Jaunty, you can add the additional functionality through a single package now at the command line, instead of half a dozen. Simply type: sudo apt-get install ubuntu-netbook-remix This does include a desktop switcher application to flip between the UNR interface as well as the classic desktop, though I still find it quite flaky when it comes to preserving my taskbar applets.

My second install was on my full sized laptop. This time I tried the upgrade solution. It worked well when moving from 8.04 to 8.10. I was expecting similarly positive result. Not so much this time. I got two status bars in before I gave up. After a couple of hours of the “Downloading the upgrade tool” dialog ended up hanging on the first step of “Upgrading Ubuntu to 9.04″. After going to bed and waking up while still at the same screen, I canceled the install. I tried to do the same upgrade on my desktop but encountered the same problem. At that point I decided to just wipe the laptop and start fresh. At least I knew that would work. Now its entirely possible that Canonical’s file servers were just under far too much strain to do an upgrade at that time. It was only days after the release. Perhaps this has been rectified.

Having finished the install on my laptop I was pleased to find a lot more hardware support than I previously had. I have a Gateway ML3109 laptop I picked up for around $300. It’s always given me trouble with the sound and wi-fi. They both worked fine without any modification this time around. There is a bit of a trade off though. My laptop has an ATI Radeon Xpress 200M chipset for graphics. My options use to be either the open source driver which wasn’t very useful for video playback and GL, or I could use the restricted fglrx driver. Seems though with an upgrade to both the fglrx driver and X server were upgraded and no longer support the chipset. I haven’t fully tested out video playback on my laptop yet so I’m not sure how much of a problem this is going to end up being for me.

Using Ubuntu 9.04 in day to day practice hasn’t really made any drastic changes to my life. It is a bit prettier, as each version seems to get. It is definitely faster on when it comes to booting, which is great for portables. But once you get past the improved hardware support at the initial setup, the excitement stops there. It’s more or less back to same old Ubuntu we know and love. It’s definitely a step in the right direction. No reason not to use it if you are setting up a new machine. But I wouldn’t necessarily suggest that you have to upgrade to keep on the cutting edge this time around.

It’s been a few months now since I’ve gone completely Linux on my computers. As you would expect you start figuring out the little quirks of a system from day to day use. I’ve been doing my best to make notes as things crop up and what the solution is.

One of my more frequent issues is regarding Adobe Air. I only have a couple of applets that I use but I use them often. During it’s initial beta period on Linux, the Air platform when through pretty regular updates. I noticed a problem every time I updated it on Ubuntu. Adobe Air would break my Add/Remove Applications manager. The window would show up completely blank every time I loaded it to go hunting for a new program. After a little research on the Ubuntu forums I found the quick and easy way to reinstall the manager itself. Nothing too fancy, just open up the terminal and enter:

sudo update-app-install

It’s worked every time so far without issue. I just wanted to make a permanent note of it here for my own reference above everything else. And possibly share it with anyone else who stumbles across the same problem.

As my cable provider begins to cap my bandwidth with a monthly limit.  I begin to ponder two things.  The first is, what took them so long.  The second is a bit more disturbing.  We are well into the age of cloud computing, a bit of computer history in the making that I initially found ironic.

Having moved from terminals and mainframes to supercomputers on our desk, we seemed to have returned full circle.  What was once a mildly humorous concept is starting to cause me a bit of concern.  It seems the way applications are used today, and how we access our applications are in opposition.  Everyday I find myself using more and more tools on the web to manage my data, while Internet providers across the nation are cutting off my access to that data.

If my Internet Service Provider decides to not to provide me with Internet services, what do they think is going to happen to them?  Perhaps the circle will continue.  Maybe well move back to storing all of our information on our desktops until new methods of communication take place of the cable and DSL companies.  Maybe we’ll have another Dot-com bubble were everyone will get rich and then quickly get poor again.

While this all makes for an interesting intellectual exercise, I simply don’t have the allotted bandwidth to discuss it any further.  My time on the mainframe is almost up.