Archive for the 'Troubleshooting' Category

Firefox ProQuest PDF Bug?

Published by Yuletide on March 17, 2008 in Software and Troubleshooting. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Site: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=0&did=12033281&SrchMode=1&sid=3&Fmt=6&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1205792003&clientId=28381

Problem Type: Plugin not shown

Description:
Not sure exactly what’s going on here… but when I try to view a “formatted document” from ProQuest in Firefox, it shows a page with two frames. A small frame at the top with a header, and a blank white frame below, which seems to be linked directly to a pdf or something (since I can’t even right click on it). The page views fine in IE, and I can open PDF’s in Firefox w/out incident (except for in this case). Now it says in the status bar “The document has been closed by Acrobat - press the Refresh button to reload”. Also, I installed the “pdf download” plugin that intercepts pdf’s before they are handled by the adobe viewer (hoping this might somehow solve my problem) and the plugin doesn’t even intercept the pdf.

Platform: Win32

Product: Firefox/2.0.0.12

OS: Windows NT 5.1

Gecko: 2008020121

Build Config:
–enable-application=browser –enable-update-channel=release –enable-official-branding –enable-optimize –disable-debug –disable-tests –enable-static –disable-shared –enable-svg –enable-canvas –enable-update-packaging

Useragent:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12

Language:
en-US

Hallelujah!

Published by Yuletide on May 13, 2007 in OSX and Troubleshooting. 0 Comments

I have worked a miracle!!! From the threads I posted on the help BBS’s…

Blue Screen of Death & Can’t Reinstall OSX?! Help!!
Hey everyone,
Critical Info:
Machine: MacBook Pro 2.33Ghz 2GB RAM
OSX 10.4.9 with all latest updates, then 10.4.8 combo installer over that

So, I managed to really screw up my whole system, and then in the process of trying to fix it, made it much worse. The last thing I did was use Pacifist to install the 10.4.8 combo update over my 10.4.9 system. (Initially my problems stemmed from stupidly running Monolingual). It went fine, but when I went to reboot, it froze at a light blue screen (before showing the “MacOS” loading bar…) I tried booting in safe mode… no dice

I started up off the OSX Install discs that came with the machine, and was hoping to do an archive and install… But then the installer loaded, thought for a while, and gave me an error message: “Alert: This software cannot be installed on this computer.” with two buttons, “Startup Disk” and “Restart”. I tried setting the startup disk to the install cd, but it just repeated the whole process again. And I ran disk utility just for giggles (no problems to repair).

SO, I guess the only thing I can imagine working short of a complete erase-volume-and-reinstall (which would be not-good since I don’t have a recent backup… If I had to I guess I’d mount this HD via FW on another machine and back stuff up that way, but thats a last resort) would be somehow to mess around in Terminal to either a) Force the install, or b) Fix things enough that the Apple installer will behave itself.

I tried briefly to get Pacifist to open via the command line, but it complained that the commandline tools it needed were missing. Next step would be to reconfigure the PATH variable to include my HD (right now its using the CD) so Pacifist can find the tools?

SO, as of right now my machine is Kaput!!! Any advice?!

And my final triumph:

Hallelujah! I have worked a miracle!!!
I decided to try one last thing… I had already downloaded the 10.4.9 combo update (tried installing that one first, when that didn’t fix things I went to 10.4.8… etc..)

Anyways, booting from the CD,
I used Disk Utility to mount the combo update DMG, then quit Disk Utility and opened terminal to run installer.app (included on the dvd) >>/Applications/Utilities/Installer.app/Contents/MacOS/Installer
Then I navigated to the install package on the mounted 10.4.9 image and… it installed!!! And then booted normally!
I have no idea why the update would install and not a fresh install of OSX, but at least the machine works now!

ANyways, I’ll prolly still do an archive and install just-in-case.

I love when stuff like this works!

[tags]troubleshooting, OSX[/tags]

Fixing the Damage from Monolingual: SMB error -50…

Published by Yuletide on May 12, 2007 in OSX and Troubleshooting. 0 Comments

So I found a few threads on the net that described similar problems and how to fix them… Basically, due to either the latest Apple security update, or my running Monolingual, there was a conflict between the mount_smbfs and smbfs.kext versions. The solution? Use your OSX disc to extract and reinstall the previous version of the smbfs Kernal extension (1.6 rather than 1.7).
The problem? I don’t have my disc with me here at school.
The solution? Use the 10.4.8 combo updater. (It worked!)

I wasn’t sure which to update, so I went ahead and reinstalled smbfs.kext and AppleSMBios.kext, and I reinstalled mount_smbfs just for good measure.

Then, after a restart, I get an Error -36 blah blah could not be read or written…
Wtf?
After checking the Console, I saw this error message:
mount_smbfs: /sbin/kextload command failed, exit status 1: Operation not permitted
mount_smbfs: SMB filesystem is not available
Now, the ingenious bit that made me feel like a l337 h4rdc0r3 h4xx0r…
>>sudo /sbin/kextload -t /System/Library/Extensions/smbfs.kext
kextload: extension /System/Library/Extensions/smbfs.kext appears to be valid
kextload: /System/Library/Extensions/smbfs.kext loaded successfully
The -t is just to print diagnostics…
So now it works!!! Yay!
Now, why couldn’t it load the kext on its own? That, I don’t understand. Maybe the SMBios thing shouldn’t have been reverted? I’ll try putting back the old (newer) version and see what happens…

But at least I can mount my shares again!

Update: I replaced the SMBios thing, but I think what ended up fixing it was that I went into /System/Library/Filesystems/SMB.fs/ and edited the plist files to match the version I had rolled Samba back to (1.3.6). Or something. I know I messed around with SMB.fs, since the error above says “filesystem unavailable” which meant there was something funky goin on with SMB.fs…. (what help I am… ! But hey, its late and I have two finals due tomorrow…. AHHHHHH)

Update: So everything turned out fine, and I didn’t even have to do an archive and install! What did I do? I borrowed a friend’s MacBook Pro install discs and forced it to “update” my installatin of osx. The initial installer app runs a test to see if it can install Tiger, which my computer failed. So, I had to dig into the installer and select the package manually, and install from there (this is after having started up from the cd). I believe I had to use the command line to actually open Installer.app so I could install it manually, but I forget. And pacifist doesn’t work in that context because a bunch of stuff it needs aren’t loaded. So after installing over things, and then perhaps also using Pacifist to do some more forced installing for selected directories that were suspected of giving errors earlier, just to be safe, everything was back to normal. Yayyyy!
[tags]troubleshooting, OSX[/tags]

Exporting from Zotero to RefWorks

Published by Yuletide on May 7, 2007 in Software, Troubleshooting and Web Applications. 0 Comments

FINALLY I got it to work. Since Zotero’s been CRASHING on my ass, I decided to export my ridiculous bibliography over to Refworks, which is web-based and clumsy, but at least it doesn’t crash Word.

  1. So export your stuff from Zotero as BibTeX format (I tried lots of formats and this method works best).
  2. Open the resulting file in some text editor that allows for Regular Expression search and replace.
  3. Then run this query:

    4. Search for: \n},
    Replace with: \n} (no comma)

  4. Then save, and import the file into RefWorks as a Bibtex file with the default options (I selected UTF-8 for good measure)

While i’m on this topic I might as well continue my delirium and show the regex for converting from Ottobib BibTeX (Who knew there were so many kinds!?) to Zotero-importable BibTeX.
Search for: '(.*)'
Replace with: {$1}
Yay.

ReactOS and Qemu Working At Last!!

Published by Yuletide on October 24, 2006 in OSX, Software and Troubleshooting. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

And I did it all by myself! I figured out a super clever way to get it to work… (haha)
[Picture went Bye-bye…]
So yeah, basically, I downloaded Q (Qemu packaged for mac osx) which at first, didn’t work on its own (you can actually download reactos from within Q, but it always froze upon completion.)
Continue reading ‘ReactOS and Qemu Working At Last!!’

Making VbrFixQt4 Work on OSX When It Can’t Find Libraries…

Published by Yuletide on September 24, 2006 in OSX and Troubleshooting. 1 Comment

So, I’ll give the short explanation now since I’m short on time, but I may come back later to expand on things… Basically, the app was looking for libpng in a random place and wasn’t finding it, and so wouldn’t run at all! The install image only contained Qt (as it should, since libpng is already on here in at least one place. I have fink installed with its /sw directory so I used the libpng located there…).

Initially I tried actually editing the vbrfixqt4 binary with a hexeditor to tell it where to look, but once I fixed that it was the Qtgui framework that gave the libpng error… So rather than go messing around with a hex editor in the /Library directory, I decided to just make a symbolic link.

So… My libpng library was located at /sw/lib/libpng.3.dylib (which actually was a link to libpng.3.1.2.8.dylib, but I kept things simple and just used libpng.3, which also protects against future upgrades of libpng3 breaking things.)

So first I made the directory it was looking for:
mkdir /opt
mkdir /opt/local
mkdir /opt/local/lib
Then, create the link.

cd /opt/local/lib
ln -s /sw/lib/libpng.3.dylib

Done! Now everything works fine!
This should also work if you link to the OSX libpng library, which you can find using spotlight. I found one in something called the Mono framework, which I didn’t really investigate, but I suppose could be part of OSX? (Since OSX has native png support? I’m in over my head here…)

But anyways, now the app works!

Some relevant links:
Vbrfix
Fink
Fink Commander (Fink GUI Frontend)

Itunes 7 Sucking Cont’d

Published by Yuletide on September 24, 2006 in OSX and Troubleshooting. 0 Comments

Huhhhh?
Sep 23 11:47:41 Apoctrack-Computer loginwindow[76]: sendQuitEventToApp (iTunes Helper): AESendMessage returned error -1712

Technorati Tags: , ,

Itunes 7 SUCKING

Published by Yuletide on September 23, 2006 in OSX and Troubleshooting. 0 Comments

So yeah, it’s sexy, though many people have been complaining about the UI, I like it. And the new browsing features are cool too. But it’s SLOW. And when I try to quit, it HANGS…>! And doesn’t even force quit!

This is what iTunes SUCKING looks like:

Analysis of sampling pid 436 every 10.000000 milliseconds
Call graph:
    94 Thread_0f0f
      94 0x9b4c
        94 0x9ca4
          94 0x23a5b4
            94 0x39b7c
              94 0x49660
                94 0x494cc
                  94 0x49298
                    94 0x44610
                      94 0x987c4
                        94 0x2d0b80
                          94 0x2d36b0
                            94 0x2d2318
                              94 0x2cf938
                                94 0x2d3fb0
                                  94 0x2d1648
                                    94 0x2d193c
                                      94 0x2d17bc
                                        94 SCSITaskDeviceClass::CreateSCSITask()
                                          94 SCSITaskClass::alloc(SCSITaskDeviceClass*, unsigned, unsigned)
                                            94 SCSITaskClass::Init(SCSITaskDeviceClass*, unsigned, unsigned)
                                              94 IOConnectMethodScalarIScalarO
                                                94 io_connect_method_scalarI_scalarO
                                                  94 mach_msg
                                                    94 mach_msg_trap
                                                      94 mach_msg_trap
    94 Thread_1003
      94 _pthread_body
        94 CAPThread::Entry(CAPThread*)
          94 HALRunLoop::OwnThread(void*)
            94 CFRunLoopRunSpecific
              94 __CFRunLoopRun
                94 mach_msg
                  94 mach_msg_trap
                    94 mach_msg_trap
    94 Thread_1103
      94 _pthread_body
        94 0x30d88c
          94 0x2225d0
            94 pthread_cond_wait
              94 semaphore_wait_signal_trap
                94 semaphore_wait_signal_trap

Total number in stack (recursive counted multiple, when >=5):

Sort by top of stack, same collapsed (when >= 5):
        mach_msg_trap        188
        semaphore_wait_signal_trap        94
Sample analysis of process 436 written to file /dev/stdout
Sampling process 436 each 10 msecs 100 times

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