Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and the Long Loading Splash
Hi!
If you have used Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 (or several other CS5 products as I've read), you might have encountered long waiting times during the program launching. In the case of Premiere Pro CS5, the splash screen shows "Loading ExporterQuickTimeHost.prm" and sticks with it for a couple of minutes (yes, minutes). This is not even a one-time thing or a once-per-Windows-session, it happens each and every program launch.
When I researched this, I quickly found the answer in Adobe's forums: Premiere CS5 takes 5 minutes to start up
In fact, what's causing this is not just the Adobe program, but rather the combination of a firewall and the Adobe program. If you are as restrictive in terms of Internet access as I am, you might have forbidden Adobe Premiere Pro.exe outgoing IP connections altogether. However, it is trying to establish a TCP connection to localhost / 127.0.0.1.
The fix is to allow outgoing TCP (I chose IP, which of course includes TCP) to 127.0.0.1 for the following executables:
- <Premiere Directory>\Adobe Premiere Pro.exe
- <Premiere Directory>\32\Adobe QT32 Server.exe
- <Premiere Directory>\32\dynamiclinkmanager.exe
with <Premiere Directory> of course being the path to your Adobe Premiere directory.
Note: Of course you can still stop every other outgoing traffic. Regard the 127.0.0.1 rule as an exception.
If you are trying to apply this fix to other Adobe programs, you are on your own to find out which .exes require 127.0.0.1 TCP connections. With modern firewalls, however, this shouldn't be that big of a problem. Just look at the prompts your firewall pops up and/or determine the .exes via logging.
I hope that helps you enjoy your respective Adobe program(s) all the more. 
Good luck and, as always, thanks for reading.
Internet Connection Reset on the Speedport W 722V (Type B)
Hi!
Since I've recently found out that my new router, the T-Home Speedport W 722V Type B, apparently does not support automatic disconnecting at a specific time (in order to circumvent the 24-hour connectionreset by my ISP), I took a route that my good friend Pool has been using for quite some time.
It is a batch script, so in order to use it, you have to be able to execute it.
On a side note, the Type A model of this router does support automatic disconnecting! Make sure you choose "Other provider" when you're in the internet configuration menu in order to be able to see the setting for that. The "T-Online" option sadly does not show it.
What you need:
- A Windows machine that is running at the given time (has to execute the script)
- cURL for Windows, preferably the win32-ssl-sspi version (download page). win32-ssl should be fine as well.
- Configure a scheduled task for the script, which is not covered in this guide (but quite simple. Just make it execute the script.)
The batch script:
REM Speedport W 722V Type B Internet Reset Script v1.0 - 2010-04-29 REM Written by pl (plee.me) REM REM Works with the T-Home Speedport W 722V Type B home router. REM START CONFIGURATION REM Adjust these variables to your own ones! SET PWD=12345678 SET COOKIEFILE="routercookies.txt" REM END OF CONFIGURATION @echo off curl -k https://speedport.ip/cgi-bin/login.cgi -d "pws=%PWD%" -e "https://speedport.ip/hcti_start_passwort.stm" -c "%COOKIEFILE%" curl -k https://speedport.ip/cgi-bin/status_startseite.cgi -d "connect=0&disconnect=1&block=0&nonblock=0&abc=0" -e "https://speedport.ip/hcti_startseite.stm" -b "%COOKIEFILE%" curl -k https://speedport.ip/cgi-bin/status_startseite.cgi -d "connect=1&disconnect=0&block=0&nonblock=0&abc=0" -e "https://speedport.ip/hcti_startseite.stm" -b "%COOKIEFILE%" curl -k https://speedport.ip/cgi-bin/logoutall.cgi -e "https://speedport.ip/hcti_startseite.stm" -b "%COOKIEFILE%" del "%COOKIEFILE%"
What this script does:
It logs on the web administration interface, uses a hidden option to disconnect the internet connection, then uses a hidden option to connect, and finally logs out again.
Because the cookie is cached in a text file, it is deleted at the end of the script.
Additional information:
The lines beginning with REM are comments, so you might as well leave them out.
If you run the script, make sure that you either have the cURL directory in the PATH environment variable, or that you set its folder as the working directory, so that it can find the curl.exe and actually execute the (central) steps of the script.
I'm sure that this script can be optimized (probably a lot), but for now, it's doing the job.
I hope that was of any help to you, and thanks for reading!
PDFCreator and mybrowserbar.com (Adware!)
Hi!
If you have recently encountered a weird behavior within your browser (I only know of Firefox because that's what I use), chances are that Adware has been installed onto your computer.
When I was looking for a picture on my own website and I mistyped the URL, I noticed that immediately after it showed me my custom 404 page, I was redirected to a domain called mybrowserbar.com. The URL was:
http://www.mybrowserbar.com/cgi/errors.cgi?q=[404URL]&type=404&ISN=[funkystring32]&ccv=130&cnid=302398&cco=US&ct=12
with [404URL] as the wrong URL. [funkystring32] seemed to be some kind of MD5 string (32 characters, 0-9, A-F), maybe a unique identifier.
After searching the internet for a couple of minutes, I read a thread on the official Avira forums. In it it was explained that PDFCreator comes with an Adware called "Search Settings Plugin" that installs and enables itself in Firefox. Luckily, being a normal addon, the problem was quickly solved from there: Tools => AddOns => Extensions => Search Settings Plugin => Uninstall/Disable.
I can only shake my head at things like this.
There has also been discussion on the official pdfforge (PDFCreator) forums about this:
http://www.pdfforge.org/files/old_forum/2903.html
Thanks to the people at the official Avira forums! Oh, and nevertheless, in all honesty: thanks to pdfforge for providing such a nice tool. I have the feeling it's gonna be of great help to me in the future
Source: http://forum.avira.com/wbb/index.php?page=Thread&postID=895237
OpenVPN on Windows Vista / 7 – Ping says: TTL expired in transit
Hi there!
When I set up my VPN with OpenVPN yesterday, I found out about a little difficulty under Windows Vista and 7. Thankfully it was not that much of a hurdle as the UAC was the reason for this bug just like for a series of other bugs with different software I experimented with over the last few weeks. Nevertheless I hope that this piece of information helps you get rid of the following problem.
If you have set up your VPN and got it running without any major problems, and everything seems to be running just fine (connecting works), but you still can't establish connections to the other machines, you might find that pinging returns the error message "TTL expired in transit". This is due to the fact that Vista (or Windows 7) needs administrator privileges to adjust your computer's settings properly in order to function when you've connected to the VPN successfully. I think it's about the route.exe process, but I'm not 100% sure.
Windows Vista and 7 have the equally famous as infamous UAC (User Account Control) that prevents even administrator privileged accounts from executing programs with administrator rights by default. In order to enable these rights you have to right-click the program (or program shortcut) and click on "Run as administrator" next to the yellow-blue shield if it does not run with administrator rights exclusively anyway (in which case you'd see the yellow-blue shield in the bottom right corner of the program icon itself and would be asked for administrator privileges automatically when you launch it as any other program).
Please note that the following steps are for on-demand OpenVPN connections. For automatic connections, read further below.
OpenVPN on-demand connection
So what you need to do is launch the connection with UAC. But how do you do that if you usually launch OpenVPN connections with a right-click and "Start OpenVPN on this config file"? Even creating a shortcut to the .ovpn file doesn't give you the "Run as administrator" option.
A simple solution is to create a batch file that simply changes to the work directory and executes .ovpn with the openvpn.exe.
Example file "ovpn_connection1.bat":
@echo off D: cd \Programs\OpenVPN\config-ondemand\ D:\Programs\OpenVPN\bin\openvpn.exe D:\Programs\OpenVPN\config-ondemand\connection1.ovpn
This batch file has the following parameters/assumptions:
- Your OpenVPN dir is on the D: partition (otherwise change the drive letter in the respective paths and leave the "D:" line out altogether).
- The path to your OpenVPN dir is D:\Programs\OpenVPN.
- Your connection configuration file is located in the config-ondemand subdirectory.
Basically, you just switch to the work directory and execute OpenVPN's openvpn.exe located in its bin dir on the configuration. In a way, this works as a shortcut, but just as an executable batch.
The @echo off part is just so that you won't see the other commands displayed in the window each time you start the connection.
Now you either make a shortcut to this batch file or use it itself.
Whenever you want to start the connection, right-click on it and select "Run as administrator".
Done! Test your ping and it should be fine.
OpenVPN automatic connection
All you need to do is to move the .ovpn configuration file and all the other required files into the config subdirectory of your OpenVPN installation.
When the OpenVPN service (Start => Run => services.msc) is started, it will look for .ovpn files in its config subdirectory and execute them all - with SYSTEM privileges. No UAC circumvention needed.
So just set your OpenVPN service to "Automatic" and you're good to go!
OpenVPN on-demand connection with OpenVPN service
Just do what is described under the "OpenVPN automatic connection" paragraph except for setting the service to "Manual".
Now each time you want to launch the connection, you just need to type "net start OpenVPNService". To stop it, type "net stop OpenVPNService".
Note on using connections with the OpenVPN service
As the OpenVPN service feature executes *all* .ovpn configuration in the config subdirectory, there is no way to manually interfere with one particular connection of that directory and let's say disable it shortly. All config-connections are handled as a group with the OpenVPN service.
So if you need manual independency, look at the on-demand section.
I hope this wasn't all too fuzzy with the wordings and such.
Please comment or contact me if you have any questions on this matter.
Thanks for reading!
Disabling Windows Vista / 7 Explorer’s Automatic Folder Type Discovery
Hey!
I very recently installed Windows 7 on my desktop computer and I'm loving it so far.
One of the major things that bugged me though was the new Explorer behavior. The automatic folder type discovery just goes ahead and tries to determine a folder type just by looking at how many (or if there are) files of a certain type (pictures, videos, songs, ...) are in the current folder, and then it adjusts the viewing settings accordingly. For example, if you open a folder that contains mainly video files, it would show those with big icons instead of my default, a detailed list. Pictures are displayed as thumbnails.
Disabling this behavior proved to be interestingly difficult. As with most things that have been declared a default setting by Microsoft, it luckily can be done - but only via registry.
First we need to delete our current folder type settings.
- Close all open Explorer windows.
- Open the registry editor with Start => Run => cmd and browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell.
- Delete and confirm the deletion of the keys BagMRU and Bags.
- Now create a Key (right-click on the current key in the left pane and select New => Key) called Bags.
- Create a subkey for Bags called AllFolders.
- Create a subkey for AllFolders called Shell.
- Create a String value (right-click in the right pane and select New => String Value) called FolderType and set the value to NotSpecified.
- That's it for Windows 7. Please read the note for Windows Vista x64 below. Otherwise, just reboot and your new settings should be applied.
That's it for Windows 7. If you're using Windows Vista x64, it might be possible that there is a copy of (or a similar) the Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell key in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Wow6432Node. I could not confirm this for Windows 7, though I am using the 64 bit version (it just had a CLSID subkey, nothing more). In that case, delete the Shell\Bags and Shell\BagMRU folders like I told you above before finishing your modifications with a reboot.
Warning: as always, playing around with the Windows registry can be dangerous when done incorrectly. If you do not feel safe about it, make sure to back up the keys you're about to modify via File => Export, or leave it altogether. I do not take any responsibility for any damage, nor do I give any guarantee that the steps I provided here will work for you. At least they worked for me.
Hopefully that was of help to you
I discovered the initial instructions on mydigitallife.info. Thank's so much Had a hard time finding a guide for that.
Compiling Exim and MySQL on a (CentOS) 64 bit Environment
Hey there!
I was recently trying to compile Exim with MySQL support on a CentOS 5.x 64 bit system. However, I had my dear share of trouble when it came to adjust the Local/Makefile for the 64 bit architecture.
The following error was what I got stuck on:
...
gcc dkim-exim.c
awk '{ print ($1+1) }' cnumber.h > cnumber.temp
rm -f cnumber.h; mv cnumber.temp cnumber.h
gcc version.c
rm -f exim
gcc -o exim
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lmysqlclient
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[1]: *** [exim] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/incoming/exim-4.69/build-Linux-x86_64'
make: *** [go] Error 2
Turns out it was easier to solve than I thought. The point was that it was looking for 32 bit libraries where it should have been looking for 64 bit ones. I adjusted the following lines in Local/Makefile:
LOOKUP_INCLUDE=-I /usr/include/mysql LOOKUP_LIBS=-L/usr/lib -lmysqlclient -lz -lm
to say this:
LOOKUP_INCLUDE=-I /usr/include/mysql LOOKUP_LIBS=-L/usr/lib64/mysql -lmysqlclient -lz -lm
And - hurray! - it works
Be careful though, it seems to need the /mysql after /usr/lib64.
Firefox Lags + Sysinternals
Hey!
I've recently found out about a majorly annoying phenomenon that can be experienced if you launch a performance-hungry application through Firefox, mostly through downloading a file and opening it directly from Firefox.
Why?
Speaking in terms of process trees, firefox.exe is the root process (or parent process) of the child process, say for example Azureus / Vuze. Vuze is known to be rather performance demanding and when it needs resources, it will take them not only from the system itself, but also noticably from the parent process. I don't know if it's common behavior, but usually that shows in Firefox experiencing the occasional couple-of-seconds lags.
The solution? Close Firefox and restart it. That way, all its child processes are raised to the same level firefox.exe was on and you can now browse without any more lags disturbing your streaming videos or anything else
I realized this when I was running Process Explorer by Sysinternals (a company that creates awesome tools for Windows. In fact so awesome they ended up being bought by Microsoft 
). It's a great tool to see not only Process IDs, CPU usage, RAM usage and executable names, you can also see dependencies (parent/child processes), CPU time, threads, etc. As a very nice feature it can also show little diagrams of resource usage (CPU and I/O ops) as task icons in your task bar next to the system clock! So much better than the built-in task manager!
Also check out the other tools by Sysinternals. I use Process Explorer and Process Monitor.
How To Migrate Your Live Windows System To VirtualBox
Hey!
Ever regret that Sun didn't include something like a migration assistant for your live Windows system in VirtualBox?
My method concentrates on these basic steps:
- Create a backup of your whole system partition
- Create a new VirtualBox Hard Disk
- Install Windows onto the VirtualBox Hard Disk to create a function MBR (Master Boot Record)
- Apply the backup onto your VirtualBox Hard Disk
Done!
What you need:
- Sun VirtualBox
- Acronis TrueImage Home 2009 (or an equivalent backup program)
- File-to-ISO converter (like a CD/DVD burning program, e.g. Ahead Nero or Alcohol 120%)
- The Windows installation disc
Process:
- Start Acronis TrueImage and create a backup of your whole system partition. For version 2009 doesn't mean System State but My Computer => Disk 1 => C:. Leave Back up sector-by-sector unchecked. Adjust the other settings to your liking and start the backup process.
- Go to Tools => Create Bootable Rescue Media and create the image as an ISO file.
- Use your File-to-ISO converter or burning software to convert your .tbi backup file to an ISO that you will be able to mount it as a CD/DVD later on. (Reason being that I had problems selecting the right partition to be replaced by the backup when I had two partitions mounted to the virtual machine - the other one included the backup file. Also you won't be able to install the Guest Additions, so you can't mount folders over the VirtualBox shared folders.)
- Start VirtualBox and create a new Machine. Choose your current OS and name it as you like.
- During the process create a new Boot Hard Disk and give it the same size as your current system partition (maybe less if you know the size will be enough).
- Adjust the settings of your new machine and start it.
- Mount the Windows installation disc and install Windows. This is so that a proper MBR (Master Boot Record) is created because we will need one in order to boot from the final system.
- After the Windows installation (as soon as you see the Windows Start Menu and stuff), mount the Acronis Bootable Rescue Media ISO as a CD/DVD and boot from it.
- Select Acronis True Image Home (Full Version) and you'll see the TrueImage program like you did in Windows.
- Dismount the current CD/DVD image.
- Mount your the ISO with your backup file.
- Click on Manage and Restore => Browse for backup... and open the CD/DVD Drive which should have the backup image file right there. If it doesn't, try unmounting and remounting it again.
- Right-click on the backup in the list and select Restore.
- Select the hard disk (partition) you just created and continue. Make sure that the Restore MBR (Master Boot Recover) / Track 0 checkbox is unchecked.
- Let it run through.
- Now reboot your machine.
- Congratulations! You should have a working copy of your live system in VirtualBox!
I guess there are a couple of kinks here and there because I didn't actually do it like that (I installed Windows on the virtual machine before I attempted to restore via Acronis Bootable Rescue Media ... yeah, silly me ) and it was about 3 days ago, so I'm writing off the top of my head.
Please give me feedback if it worked! (And also if it didn't!)
In the case of Windows XP (and probably Vista and 7) because of the major change of hardware (actual drivers replaced by virtual drivers) you will be required to re-activate your Windows copy. XP gives you a maximum of 3 days for that.
Just thought I'd mention it for clarity's sake
Good luck and have fun!
Compiling PHP 5 with IMAP support on SuSE / openSUSE Linux
If you get the following configure error:
configure: error: utf8_mime2text() has old signature, but U8T_CANONICAL is present. This should not happen. Check config.log for additional information.
It's probably because you're missing either the libc-client-devel package or imap-lib and imap-devel. Fire up yast and install those. You should be good to go now
(I have openSUSE 11.0 and it doesn't have the libc-client-devel package, but I read about it on another page and thought I'd add it, just to be safe )