Twitter Followers for Heifer International

I debated doing this last year, and this year I decided to go ahead with it. The concept is simple: Follow me on Twitter, and I'll donate $0.50 to Heifer International. On Dec 31, 2008, I'll make a donation for $0.50 x # followers up to a maximum of $2500.00.

Why am I doing this? Two reasons. One is to share my semi-coherent ramblings with the world a little more. When I ask twitter a question, I rarely get a good answer - that's because I'm only followed by about 150 people. (Probably less than that in terms of people that regularly check twitter.) The second is to raise money for Heifer. If this raises Heifer International in the collective consciousness then I'll have done a lot.

I'm not into social media. I'm not into marketing. I'm not looking to use my twitter followers for any grand plan. I'm just looking to connect with some more folks out there and raise money for a good cause.

Meme

Copy this sentence into your blog if you’re in a heterosexual marriage, and you don’t want it “protected” by the bigots who think that gay marriage hurts it somehow.

Erie Insurance vs. AquaLogic

I had the pleasure of serving on a jury in Fairfax County district court on April 14/15 2008 in the case of Erie Insurance vs. AquaLogic, Inc. It related to a fire which occurred at a residence in Ashburn, VA in September 2004.

The plaintiff (Erie) alleged that the fire was caused by a faulty reef (fish) tank water chiller manufactured by the defendant. They further alleged that if other unsafe conditions existed, and caused the fire, they should have been warned about in the operations manual. The defense provided an alternate theory that salt creep, possibly caused by improper ventilation of the aquarium installation and components, caused a short across the plug face of the chiller, which caused the fire.

We were asked to rule in favor of the plaintiff if

• the defendant was negligent, meaning:
• they produced an unsafe product
• their manuals fail to provide adequate warning of potentially dangerous conditions
• the product violates any implied or explicit warranties
• AND the defendant's negligence was a proximate cause of the fire

The most important point to the jury was that multiple theories as to the cause of the fire were presented, and nobody was convinced of an absolute cause. Both sides produced a believable expert witness who was quite certain of their own theory as to the cause of the fire. We couldn't discern that one was any more an expert than another. Without knowing what the cause of the fire was, it is then impossible to know that the defendant's negligence caused the fire.

Even placing that aside, we all had doubts about all three possibilities of the defendant's negligence. None of the jurors thought the defendant produced an unsafe product, or a product which violated any warranties. Two of the seven jurors thought that the manuals should perhaps include warnings about salt creep and the fact that water and electricity don't mix. If we had decided to deliberate this further I'm confident all seven would have also agreed that the missing things in the manuals were "obvious" and/or "readily discoverable" and therefore did not result in negligence on the part of the defendant.

Overall I was very pleased to have been selected and to have participated in this great civic duty. It was an interesting experience and I would do it again, although things would get dicey if I was asked to serve on a trial that would take longer than this one - two full days.

03-08-2008 Marie for Easter

03-08-2008 Marie for Easter
Originally uploaded by pmhesse

Marie drew this as a present for me. It's her with an Easter basket, and there are more Easter eggs hidden in the grass. The detail is amazing.

The back of the photo had a bunch of black scribbles, with a red circle and slash through it. It says "NODrK" which was her attempt to spell "Not Dark". The circle-with-slash is pretty universal, I guess.

Nerd Test

How to fix Vista driver cache

I've installed Vista on 3 machines now, and on all 3 something I've done has caused the Vista driver cache to become corrupt. So, when plugging in a USB device which it should recognize automatically, it instead says "Driver not found" and gives me options to repair it. While you can tell it to browse for a location manually, and choose c:\windows to get around this, I have created a batch file which will allow you to force Vista to rebuild the driver cache. You have to be an administrator on your system to use it, and it works with UAC enabled.

Create a batch file with the following content and execute it as an administrator (Right click it, choose Run as Administrator). It will create a directory labeled \windows\inf\infbk-XXXX (where the XXXX is replaced with a random number), set the relevant files to be owned by "Administrators", give "Administrators" full control over the files, and move them to the backup folder. After running this you should be able to just plug in a new device, although you might want to reboot first.

Here is the content of the batch file:
@echo off
TITLE Repairing Inf Cache
rem change to drive where windows runs
%SystemDrive%
rem change to the \windows\inf folder
cd %SystemRoot%\inf

rem create random directory for backup
set FOLDERNAME=infbk-%RANDOM%
mkdir %FOLDERNAME%

rem list of files which need to be removed
set FILE1=INFPUB.DAT
set FILE2=INFSTOR.DAT
set FILE3=INFSTRNG.DAT
set FILE4=INFCACHE.*
set FILE5=SETUPAPI.*

rem take ownership of the first file
takeown /f %FILE1%
rem grant full control to 'administrators'
icacls %FILE1% /grant administrators:F /t
rem move it to the backup folder
move %FILE1% %FOLDERNAME%

rem same for the other files
takeown /f %FILE2%
icacls %FILE2% /grant administrators:F /t
move %FILE2% %FOLDERNAME%

takeown /f %FILE3%
icacls %FILE3% /grant administrators:F /t
move %FILE3% %FOLDERNAME%

takeown /f %FILE4%
icacls %FILE4% /grant administrators:F /t
move %FILE4% %FOLDERNAME%

takeown /f %FILE5%
icacls %FILE5% /grant administrators:F /t
move %FILE5% %FOLDERNAME%

echo Successfully moved all infcache related files to %FOLDERNAME%
pause

Pandora Bookmarklet

OK, so after attempted posts elsewhere, below is my bookmarklet which launches the Pandora mini player in a separate window. To use, drag the link at the bottom of this post up into your bookmarks bar of your browser. I've tested it with IE6 and Firefox 1.5. Comment if you have suggestions or changes!

Launch Pandora

Radeon 9100 IGP and "INF error, Video driver not found"

I have to share this tremendous saga of what I went through when I tried to upgrade the video driver on my wife's home computer. I ended up reinstalling Windows 4 times (mostly due to lack of sleep on my part) before I figured out a key fact:

The Radeon 9100 IGP is only supported up until Catalyst 6.5. And, the "Motherboards with integrated graphics" page on ATI's site only includes Catalyst 6.4, and makes absolutely no mention of this fact. So, when you try to install Catalyst 6.8 on a machine with a Radeon 9100 IGP, you get the descriptive errors:

INF Error Video driver not found

Setup was unable to complete the installation. Try to setup your display adapter with a standard VGA driver before running setup

The news is, if the current version of Catalyst gives you this error, try and install Catalyst 6.4 or 6.5 before you try screwing up your computer. Read on for the many mis-steps I took when I saw this error.

I then made it my mission to get down to a standard VGA driver before I continued. So, I uninstalled all ATI software as outlined here and rebooted. Same error. After browsing around, I found that a lot of people use Driver Cleaner Pro to uninstall the ATI drivers. So, I dutifully downloaded it, installed it, and used it to remove all things ATI, ATI Radeon, and ATI IGP from my system.

Upon rebooting, my computer would start booting up, then reboot. This happened a couple of times before I realized I was good and well hosed.

It turns out that my motherboard has not only integrated ATI video, but also integrated ATI GART and ATI IDE drivers. So, when I did Driver Cleaner's full on uninstall, it blew away some important stuff that kept Windows from booting. Other people had the same problem.

Eventually, I did a Windows repair/reinstall, and got those files copied over. (It really would have been nice to do it in recovery console, saving me the 1.5 hours of downloading and installing the 60+ security patches to Windows XP since SP2) Now, everything's back to normal, except for the stress I underwent during the process.

I used to be a master at fixing computers, now I feel like I'm losing my edge!

Firefox, bookmarklets, and hidden windows

Firefox, bookmarklets, and hidden windows - The JavaScript Weblog: "javascript:setTimeout('x99.focus()',100);x99=window.open…"

for my pandora bookmarklet -- which I need to fix and post here later.

Configuring Outlook with IMAP

Configuring Outlook with IMAP: For whenever i have to recreate my Outlook shortcuts... The secret is "Outlook://Account.name.of.imap.server/Inbox"

Start regedit, and go to the key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\Mail\Microsoft Outlook\shell\open\command

Then, Modify the default key. It should be something like:

"C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~2\Office10\OUTLOOK.EXE" Outlook:Inbox /recycle

You should already see how to do it, but here's what you do. Change it to

"C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~2\Office10\OUTLOOK.EXE" Outlook://Account.name.of.imap.server/Inbox /recycle