Computers

Some people may be unpleasantly surprised to find out that they can't print any PDF file from Adobe Acrobat (paid version) after installing 9.4.2 update.  It appears that Adobe has missed a bug in their update release, which causes the program not to print PDF files (mostly to HP, network printers, but has been noticed to affect other printers as well).

You can fix it in two ways:

First the long way - Uninstall the Acrobat, resintall all updates except for 9.4.2

Second is the fast and easy way:

1.) go to the installation directory of Acrobat (C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 9.0\Acrobat)

2.) Look for the file "Adobe.Acrobat.Dependencies.manifest"

3.) Open it and delete the line <file name="atl.dll" />

4.) Reboot your machine after saving that file

This should fix the issue of being unable to print PDF file after installing 9.4.2 update for Adobe Acrobat.

As a photographer who is paranoid about the safety of my work, I’ve been looking for the best possible backup system for a while. I’ve tried it all – online backup companies such as Carbonite/Mozy , tried many types of external storage devices, custom built systems, etc.  At the end I’ve finalized the specification list for the ultimate digital content professional storage and backup system:

1.    Redundant hard drives
2.    Fast network transfer speeds
3.    Ability to automatically synchronize with device or service in a different geographical location
4.    Low power consumption
5.    Easily replaceable hard drives
6.    Support for Windows and Mac backups
7.    Support for Windows and Mac file browsing
8.    Access permissions
9.    Ability to back up the backup device
10.    Ability to access backups/files over the internet
11.    Ability to access images from networked TV to play slideshows for clients/friends
12.    Failure notification
13.    Ability to increase capacity on the fly

Surely this seems like a tall order for any system, but I have found just the perfect device line up by storage manufacturer QNAP, which makes these systems for home, small business and enterprise use. I have acquired two units from Amazon.com (the place with the lowest price and best return policy) – one single drive QNAP TS-119 Pro and a second one QNAP TS-259 Pro. (Full spec list of features)
Here is how and why QNAPs fit the bill:

1.    QNAP systems come with space from 1 to 8 hard drives. Each system supporting 2TB drives or larger. All models with 2 or more hard drives can be configured for RAID 0/1/5/6/5+hot spare. This allows one to configure the desired level of fault tolerance on the unit in order to safeguard the data.

2.    These units come with 1 Gigabit network adapters, in fact most of them come with 2 built-in network cards. These cards can be “teamed” to make a single super-fast connection (requires switch that supports this feature). To top it all off – QNAPs put more memory and faster processors in NAS devices than any other manufacturer at this price point. This combined with well written software results into very fast network transfer speeds. On a 2 drive unit TS-259 Pro I see sustained speeds of 60+ MB/s range with only a single gigabit connection in use. A single 7GB file can be copied in less than 2 minutes.

I was having major problems with streaming Netflix on our new Sony Bravia internet enabled TV recently. It used to work great, but at some point it started to take really long time to do “speed test” that Netflix uses to determine the compression level and picture quality your connection will support as well as load the movie itself. I’ve reset TV, removed TV from Netflix account, restarted firewall, restarted my cable modem, did speed tests, checked my cabling and switch…and more. At the end – everything looked right, but Netflix was still very slow to start the movie. After getting finally fed-up with the situation, I’ve decided to use network packet sniffer to capture traffic on my wired gigabit home network to see what TV was doing and why it was taking so long.

This lead to several interesting discoveries, which I’ll tell you about in a second, but, first – let me describe my home setup:

Cable modem<-> SonicWall<->gigabit switch<->Sony TV

As you can see – all the network traffic is flowing through the gigabit switch, to the sonicwall and then through the cable modem right out to the internet. One of the great features of the SonicWall firewalls, is that even in low end models like mine, they have enabled “network packet monitor” that shows you individual packets that are going through it. You can see every piece of data passing through your network in these “packets” and on occasion – you can derive some very interesting information about the network traffic itself.

But let’s get back to my Netflix streaming problem. Once I’ve configured the packet monitor to only show me data sent to and from my TV, I’ve quickly discovered that some DNS packets from the TV were dropped and as a result, the name resolution on TV would have problems.

If you are experiencing error "WindowsUpdate_80096004 WindowsUpdate_dt000" when running Windows Update on Windows 7 64bit Ultimate, Vista 64bit Ultimate or other 64bit versions - please try the following:

Just discovered a "feature" of recent versions of windows that can lead to loss of your data. In fact, this is something that has happened to me, but luckily I've had backups!

If you try to MOVE any of your personal folder within your profile (such as "My Documents", "My Pictures", etc) they will be moved to a new location, but you will still have "My Documents" or "My Pictures" which will point to the new location. Windows does this automatically, so you never loose track of your files. However, later you may discover that it appears that you have files in two locations - the old one on drive C C:\Users\username and in the new one (where ever you've moved the files). If you delete to clean up your computer and delete files from that "OTHER" location - you will erase all of your personal files. You don't actually have files in two locations - Windows makes a link in your "C:\Users\username\ to the new location.

I thought i had files in two places and deleted one of them - well, they were gone from both.

If you've done this - restore from backup. If you don't have a backup - stop using your computer immediately and use a data recovery software before you overwrite those files. They are still probably on your computer, but are marked as "free space" by windows.

Good luck and be careful!

I'm evaluating Windows 7 to see if it can be recommended to our clients as the new desktop platform. So far it works great with a few small exceptions. Most of the negative points that came up have to do with the changed interface and not the speed or reliability of the system. Microsoft have done away with several very useful and familiar tools, buttons and features. One of them is the "Show Desktop" button present in the Windows XP/Vista quick launch toolbar (right next to the start button). It was one of the best additions to the toolbar since Windows 2000. But the icon is not present in the Windows 7. At first I thought it was completely gone, but then a quick search with Google gave me good news - it has changed it's look and was moved, but it is still present. Now it is located at the very right of the toolbar (just right of the clock - yes, see the little vertical rectangle?)

Let me tell you a story of a simple task that turned into anything but such. I needed to setup a small and very basic site with a few pictures and about four pages with various information. Since at the time MacBook Pro was next to me, I've opened up iWeb and shortly had the site ready. Everything looked great in the iWeb, I've exported the pages and looked at them in Firefox and surprise - the colors of all the pictures are way off! It happens that iWeb embeds color space information into pictures when it creates pages, even though pictures have the right profile/space specified. Color space that it assigns doesn't match he one used to create the pictures though. Not a big deal, right? Just a small bug, this can be fixed manually by reassigning the color space.