I hadn't bothered connecting my speakers since having to disconnect them to remove the boxes of pog stuff from behind a cupboard a few months ago, since I figured that it would be pointless to reconnect them, and then have to disconnect them again when I moved the boxes back behind the cupboard. Obviously, I didn't realise it would take me a few months until I moved the boxes back behind the cupboard.
After getting everything plugged in again, I went on my comp and finished writing Saturday's blog post, and wrote yesterday's blog post, and today's blog post so far.
I found out that the surround sound wasn't working properly - it seemed that only the center speaker was working okay, so I ran the Creative Software Update (since they're Creative speakers and a Creative soundcard) to download the latest updates.
After installing the updates and restarting my PC, I found that surround sound was now working, but the front left and right speakers were swapped with the rear ones. So I unplugged the 2 leads from the soundcard and swapped them over. But this froze my PC. I tried restarting, but nothing was output to the monitor.
After unplugging everything from the PC except the power and monitor, I found that the PC would start okay. I shut down and plugged in the cables for the Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Platinum Pro EX external breakout box, and now the PC wouldn't output anything to the screen again when I booted it up.
I unplugged the Audigy 2 breakout box, started up the PC again, and went into the BIOS. Here I found that the Motherboard's onboard sound had been enabled (causing a conflict with the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 soundcard). I also found that the extended memory setting allowing you to use more than 4GB of RAM had also been disabled, so it seemed like the BIOS had been reset somehow.
After disabling the motherboard's onboard sound, I shut down the PC, plugged in the Audigy 2 Platinum Pro EX external breakout box, and then started the PC again, which now started okay.
I shut down again, plugged everything else back into the PC, started up again, and found everything was working okay. I setup the surround sound, and that was working as well. But then I noticed that the time on the computer was wrong. Lately it's happened a few times that my computer clock has been an hour or two out.
So I did some googling, and as I thought, it seems this is likely due to the motherboard CMOS battery being run out, which would also be why the BIOS had reset and caused the problem with my soundcard.
So I shut the PC down again, unplugged everything again, and moved the PC to the floor where I could work on it easily. I went into the garage and found the box for the PC case, and found the Motherboard manual in there. I looked through the manual, but it didn't have anything about changing the CMOS battery other than showing its position on the Motherboard.
I had to remove the graphics card, as the end of the graphics card goes over the CMOS battery location. The battery seemed to have 4 clips around the edges holding it in place, so I couldn't really pull all 4 clips out of place to pop the battery out. I just put a flat head screwdriver under the battery (this is on an ASUS P5B Deluxe Wifi AP board) and levered it up until it popped out.
I then swapped it with a replacement CR2032 battery that was in the battery box, however, I don't know how much power the replacement battery has in it, as it isn't new.
I plugged the power and monitor back into the PC, then started it up and went into the BIOS. I disabled the onboard sound, set the SATA configuration to RAID, and enabled the extended memory again (the BIOS had reset due to not having power for a bit). The PC worked okay, so I shut down and plugged everything back in, then switched it on again.
I noticed the time was wrong again, but couldn't get the Windows Time to update from the Internet. I then had a message from Windows Update that it couldn't update. It said 'click here for more information', which just took me to the Windows Update screen. So I pressed the update button, and now it did actually give me more information, in that it had an error code 80072f8f.
Clicking on the link for information about the error code just brought up Windows help with general information about different problems with Windows Update, none of which were related to the problem I was having or the error code it had given.
Googling did bring up information - apparently the error code means that your computer time and the time on the Windows Update server are too out of sync. Why they don't just print that message with the error code, or include this information in Windows help, I don't know.
So I went into the time settings and manually selected the correct date (it was in 2002 before), this also had the added benefit that the Internet time update now also worked.
After lunch I checked my email. When I'd finally finished wading through them, I cut out some Pogs in Photoshop. When I'd done a few of them, I needed to upload them to my Ubuntu Virtual Machine. Since I can't run my VMWare Virtual Machine at the same time as Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, I thought I'd uninstall VMWare Server 2.0 and then re-install it, and see if this fixes the problem.
Initially I tried downloading the latest version of VMWare Server 2.0 using Firefox, but the download terminated partway through. This happened a few times yesterday when I was trying to download Adobe Flash Builder 4 Beta. Then I tried Chrome to download the file, which had no problem, so I tried the same thing today for downloading VMWare.
While I was waiting for VMWare Server 2.0 to download, I wrote a bit more of this blog post. It was very annoying though, as when I have an HTTP download going, it sometimes seems to make my PC really slow, so the mouse is really laggy. This time though, it seemed to really mess up the keyboard, it would take about 10 key presses on a key until the key press actually registered. Also, sometimes it would print a different letter to the one you were pressing, e.g. once when I was pressing 'p', a 'b' was printed to the screen.
Another strange thing was that Firefox would randomly launch itself (or new windows if it was already open). Luckily, everything went back to normal when the download was complete, but it took quite a long time for the download to complete.
When it was done I restarted my PC (to make sure the previous install of VMWare Server 2.0 had been cleaned up properly), and then installed VMWare Server 2.0. Execpt, that it didn't install, I just got a message
Cannot continue. The microsoft runtime dll installer failed for complete installation.After googling I found this thread. Following the advice given in the thread linked to from the first reply, I tried the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility, but there wasn't any entry for VMWare to remove.
I also tried
1. Open a CMD.EXE prompt.But that didn't work either.
2. Type msiexec /unregister and press Enter.
3. Type msiexec /regserver and press Enter.
The other replies in that thread weren't helpful to me either. So I went back to the original thread to see the other replies there, and found one that said to try installing vcredist manually. So I installed vcre 2008 x64 (vcredist_x64), but still VMWare wouldn't install.
So I carried on looking at the replies, and found the last reply where the OP said (how) they had fixed it. The answer was that when you try installing VMWare Server 2.0, you don't click 'ok' on the error message, but leave it open. You can then find the VMWare temp files that the installer has extracted, and install VMWare from the temp files.
The author of the thread/post was using Windows XP, so their VMWare temporary install files were extracted to
C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Temp{AF08C71F-F822-4416-87A9-2BBF5A8A5F12}
But I'm using Vista x64, so my VMWare Server 2.0 install files were extracted to
C:\Users\Rusty\AppData\Local\Temp\{AF08C71F-F822-4416-87A9-2BBF5A8A5F12}~setup
In that folder was a vcredist_x64.exe and a vcredist_x86.exe file, so I tried installing the x64 version. But I got a message that there was no free space on the D: to install it. D: is my CD/DVD drive, so not surprising it couldn't install. There didn't seem to be any way to correct it to install on the correct drive, so I just tried running the VMWare Server.msi, which was in the same folder. This ran and installed okay.
After restarting the PC (required by the VMWare Server 2.0 installer), I booted up the Ubuntu Virtual Machine, and it worked okay. I then shut it down and started up a MS Virtual PC 2007 Virtual Machine. I then tried to boot up the VMWare Ubuntu Virtual Machine again, but it still had the same problem that it wouldn't work when a MS Virtual PC VM was on.
So I tried posting to the VMWare Server forums, but they still had the same problem in that they had an endless redirect when you try to post a message. So I thought I'd try in IE, since before I'd only tried FF and Chrome. Amazingly, I could post a message to the VMWare forums in IE8.
Unfortunately the message posting system VMWare uses on their forums seems to be rather rubbish, after inserting a quote block, I clicked in the text box and pressed enter to make a line break, but instead it posted the message. There didn't seem to be any option to edit your post either, so I had to make a reply to my first message with the rest of the message.
In the evening I updated my Pog website and also the facebook group for it and the twitter for it, and then found that finally the facebook updates to twitter were working, so some things got put on twitter twice, by me and by facebook (since previously the facebook updates to twitter haven't been working, I also updated twitter manually).
I found I had had a reply to my question on the VMWare forums VMWare Server 2 conflict with Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, which said
It is likely that VPC 2007 leaves the CPU in VMX operation, which prevents VMware Server from switching between legacy mode and long mode. Unfortunately, that mode switch is required for the majority of host/guest configurations under VMware Server 2.Looking up 'VT-x support' to see what that was, I found that it was hardware virtualization support. In MS Virtual PC there is a per VM option to disable/enable hardware virtualization, so I disabled hardware virtualization on the VM, then started up one of the MS VPC VMs. When that had loaded, I started up my VMWare Virtual Machine, and it started okay! So that's got that problem fixed.
I don't know if it is possible to disable VT-x support in VPC 2007, but if it is, that may be a workaround for this issue.
I looked at the Adobe XMP File Info Panel SDK documentation to see how to edit my panel using Flex Builder (well actually, Flash Builder 4, but that wasn't around when the XMP File Info Panel SDK was released). I followed the instructions of copying a file to the Flash Builder plugins folder, but when I then started up Flash Builder, it said my evaluation period had ended, even though it's meant to be a 60 day evaluation copy (it's a beta), and I've only had it installed a couple of days.
So I uninstalled the Flash Builder 4 beta 2, restarted, and then installed it again, but it still said that the evaluation period had ended.
So I decided to try and build my panel in the same way that I was doing before. The first thing I had to do was to find the location of ant (it's bundled with Flash Builder 4), then add its location to the PATH environment variable.
After doing that I tried building my project, but got a message that java.exe couldn't be found.
'"java.exe"' is not recognized as an internal or external command,So I found the location of java.exe, and added that to the PATH environment variable. I tried building the project again, but now I got a message that it couldn't find tools.jar.
operable program or batch file.
The system cannot find the batch label specified - end
So I removed the Java location from the PATH environment variable, installed the JDK, and then tried again, but got the same message I did earlier about Java.exe not being found. So I added the JDK Java.exe location to the PATH environment variable, and tried again. Now I got the message
Buildfile: build.xmlSo I edited my build.xml file and found the line
[taskdef] Could not load definitions from resource flexTasks.tasks. It could n
ot be found.
BUILD FAILED
Target "build.xml" does not exist in the project "DKimageXMPPanel".
Total time: 0 seconds
The system cannot find the batch label specified - end
<taskdef resource="flexTasks.tasks" classpath="${FLEX_HOME}\ant\lib\flexTasks.jar"/>I tried changing the Flex SDK location in the build.xml file to point to the Flex 3.4.1 SDK instead of the Flex 4.0.0 SDK, but that gave me the following error when I tried to build the project:
Buildfile: build.xml
BUILD FAILED
Target "build.xml" does not exist in the project "DKimageXMPPanel".
Total time: 0 seconds
The system cannot find the batch label specified - end
I then tried building one the sample panels that comes with the File Info SDK, but that didn't work either:
Buildfile: build.xmlI tried with both the Flex 4 SDK and Flex 3.4.1 SDK, but got the same error message when using both.
[taskdef] Could not load definitions from resource flexTasks.tasks. It could n
ot be found.
BUILD FAILED
Target "build.xml" does not exist in the project "Flash Flex Panel".
Total time: 0 seconds
The system cannot find the batch label specified - end
I think what I will have to do, is not modify the XMP File Info Panel (since neither Flash Builder nor compiling the panel manually seems to work), but instead make different XMP templates for the different license types. Then I can just import the correct one from the XMP File Info Panel, and get the correct info written to the image's XMP.
Then I still need to do the work on the website so it will read this XMP and add it to the database.
The weather today was overcast all day.
Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Choco Moons Cereal; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Mature Cheddar Cheese with Crispy Salad Sandwich; Clementine; ½ Eccles Cake that me and L made yesterday; Tesco fake Caramel Rocky; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Slice of bacon quiche; Potatoes; Peas; Ground Black Pepper. Pudding was a Slice of Home-made Apricot Flapjack. Coffee; 2x Pieces of Sainsbury's Truffle Chocolate; 2x Pieces of Sainsbury's Soft Caramel Chocolate.
Supper: Chunky Choc Chip Cookie; Cup o' Tea.
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