Preventing Chrome hijacks from coming back

It's easy enough to remove extensions in Chrome, but to prevent the really obnoxious ones from coming back again, look at paths in entries under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Google\Chrome\Extensions\
Basically anything in C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\CRE or C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Temp
can go.  My thanks to Mike for the helpful advice.

Java Installer Error 135

So I was having problems installing jdk-8u11.  I kept getting

Error 1335: The cabinet file ss180110.cab required
for this installation is corrupt and cannot be used.

For some reason, which I still don't understand, downloading the installer with Firefox instead of Chrome resulted in the error going away.  Thanks Dox Starz for suggesting this idea in a comment.

Skype Error 1603

So I had issues trying to upgrade Skype (on Windows 7).  It said there was a new version to download (6.0.something), and so I clicked the upgrade button as usual, but the upgrade install failed with code 1603, and no failure message.  The problem was after that the uninstaller .msi was deleted by the upgrade process so I couldn't actually remove the old install, but the new install wasn't complete either and wouldn't complete with pieces from the old version still left around.  If you're thinking of upgrading to Skype 6 (and I haven't seen any reason not to), it'd probably be a good idea to uninstall 5 first.  (Edit: Actually the default uninstaller doesn't seem to remove enough to make the new installer succeed, so use Revo even for this step.)  But if you're reading this, it's probably too late for that.  Here's how to fix this.

1. Install an old version of Skype, like from here
2. Uninstall the old version of Skype, removing everything (like with the free version of Revo Uninstaller)
3. Download and install the latest version of Skype

It looks like this Microsoft FixIt package will correct the issue: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/886549.

Do note that 1603 seems to be a general error code for any Windows installer failure (for example, I got this error code when another instance of msiexec.exe was running), so this may not actually be your issue.  Check the error message to be sure you're fighting the right battle.

Speaking of Skype fail, when Skype updated for Windows 7 (which was a while ago), they took away the ability to minimize to the clock and instead always pinned to the taskbar.  I despise having something pinned to the taskbar AND being down by the clock (makes no sense to me to have something taking up 2 spots).  You can get around this by right clicking on the Skype icon in your start menu, hit properties, then under the compatibility tab run it in compatibility mode for Windows Vista.

Edit (5/26/2016): as of now, they at some point added the "keep skype in the taskbar while I'm signed in" option that fixes my last complaint.

Ubuntu 12.04 & Eclipse

I use Ubuntu at work for development, mostly with Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA these days, I was surprised when I tried to fire up Eclipse for the first time in a while that I couldn't do so.  The error I was getting was

An error has occurred. See the log file /home/wittk/.eclipse/org.eclipse.platform_3.7.0_155965261/configuration/1338578313816.log

Here's an excerpt from the log mentioned in the message:

java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: Could not load SWT library. Reasons: 
 no swt-gtk-3740 in java.library.path
 no swt-gtk in java.library.path
 Can't load library: /home/wittk/.swt/lib/linux/x86/libswt-gtk-3740.so
 Can't load library: /home/wittk/.swt/lib/linux/x86/libswt-gtk.so

The solution is to link the swt library files to the location it is looking.  This solution was mentioned here.  Just run the commands below.

cd ~/.swt/lib/linux/x86*
for file in /usr/lib/jni/libswt-*3740.so; do ln -s ${file}; done

Greasemonkey and local files

I'm a big fan of the Javadoc Search Frame userscript. Today's apperent outage of the Javadoc page has forced me to use a local copy of the documentation. I did some poking around on the Greasemonkey mailing list and found that if you still want to run this userscript (or any other userscript) on local files, you will need to edit your about:config. An update changed the default greasemonkey.fileIsGreaseable in about:config from true to false for security reasons. If you want to run Greasemonkey on local files, simply change that value to true.

Also, if you're using the shiny new Scriptish, the value to set to true is extensions.scriptish.fileIsGreaseable.

Cheers!

Workaround for JRA-19248: 401 on Jira Gadgets

Here is a workaround for JRA-19248: Dashboard widgets fail with HTTP 401 malformed security token, when left unattended for some time. Set the 'Refresh Interval' on the gadgets to 1hr (or less).  It's worked for me so far.
Edit: Well, it worked for several days, but apperently 1hr wasn't quite often enough. I'm trying with 30min, someone else reported having to use 15min. One more thing to note is that this issue is fixed with Jira 4.1.

Windows Profile Woes

After struggling for months with folders magically changing ownership (first noticed when iTunes couldn't save podcasts) and messages saying the roaming profile did not synchronize completely, I believe I've found the problem. Apparently, Windows profiles changed (though I don't understand how this affects me since although I did an upgrade install of Win7 from Vista, my machine never ran XP or earlier). The migration was failing because there wasn't enough hard drive space to copy all my music, documents, everything twice to do the migration. Though even once I resolved the issues preventing the sync (by moving to a temporary folder in C), it still didn't perform the sync. What I ended up having to do is create a new user, then copy everything over, take ownership, then delete the old user. This problem was also the cause of the mysterious S-{A bunch of meaningless numbers} user and the messages saying I wasn't the owner even though the username of the owner was my username. This was my user account's SID, which it apparently uses as part of the migration.

 

I also learned that there is no Windows equivalent of Linux's usermod (let alone a GUI like Gnome and KDE have) when it comes to renaming accounts and their homes. My plan was to create a new account named Keegan2 then delete the original and rename the new to the old name after I was sure everything was moved over. While you can rename accounts in Windows, it doesn't change the profile path as part of the renaming. There is a registry hack that can be done, but this method gave me issues (all kinds of software installed for all users was still looking in the old place). When I tested this with XP, when I removed the renamed user it didn't remove the files. It would seem like it should be possible to run a script similar to the initialization Windows does the first time a user logs in before migrating to the new name.  This explains the laptop that was re-purposed a few times, but still had all the old usernames in 'Documents and Settings'.

It's a Windows world, but I find the longer I live in it, the more I suffer. Vive Linux!

Aero and LogMeIn

I've had the problem on Vista and Win7 of having Aero disabled after a remote LogMeIn session, even after changing themes to an aero theme and rebooting (the only thing that worked was uninstalling and reinstalling LogMeIn). After having no luck searching the LogMeIn community forums, I finally stumbled across a tip from the folks at Windows 7 Forums:

1. Uncheck the 'Disable wallpaper and user interface effects on the host computer' in the LogMeIn preferences.
   
2. Uncheck the 'Use display accelerator' setting in LogMeIn preferences.
3. Disable the mirror display device in device manager.

That should do the trick! (Note that this will probably significantly reduce the responsiveness).

Prevent OpenDNS From Redirecting Google Searches – Fix for Firefox & IE Address Bar

For those of us who enjoy the protection of OpenDNS, but don't want to use the OpenDNS guide, change the value of keyword.url in your about.config to http://www.google.com/search?q=. Thanks to digital inspiration for the tip.

How to fix Pidgin issue connecting to AIM, ICQ – receiving ‘unexpected response’ - TechSpot Blog

I've been experiencing this issue with Pidgin 2.6.5, this seemed to do the trick.
How to fix Pidgin issue connecting to AIM, ICQ – receiving ‘unexpected response’ - TechSpot Blog

-- Edit --
This must have been some problem on AOL's side. It no longer seems to be occurring.

VirtualBox Tips

I've been experimenting a bit with Sun's VirtualBox over the last few days. For the most part, its been pretty smooth. I now use this instead of VMware. I thought I'd pass along a few snags I ran into to save someone else some trouble. When upgrading, uninstall the previous version first (they claim it can be installed over the old version, but its given me problems both times I've tried to upgrade that way). It won't delete your VMs. Also, for those running Vista/Win7, when installing, run the installer in administrator mode otherwise it seems to fail when trying to install the virtual network devices. I'm not sure why they don't have their installer set to require these permissions, and it doesn't seem to write a log either when it fails, making debugging difficult.

GoogleMonkeyR and SkipScreen Incompatibility

I'm a user of the GoogleMonkeyR userscript, and for a few months I had been thinking that Google had changed something that caused the script to have the first result right-aligned instead of left-aligned. It turns out, the problem is actually because I'm also a user of SkipScreen. The problem lies in the 'search refinements' setting, it must be disabled for GoogleMonkeyR to work properly, either do this from the GUI SkipScreen options dialog, or change the value extensions.skipscreen.searchrefinementsactive to false. Hopefully, this saves someone else some confusion.

Launching a GroovyConsole Without a cmd window

I run Groovy 1.7 from the .zip files (which doesn't yet have the native launchers built for it), and I love the line numbering, and many other things about it. The one thing that was irritating is that a new cmd window would have to be opened every time I launched the groovyConsole.bat. I now have a workaround. Create a new .vbs file in the bin folder of your groovy with the following contents:

Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
obj = WshShell.Run("groovyconsole.bat", 0)
set WshShell = Nothing

You can then put a shortcut to this wherever, and even make it pretty by setting the icon to this. Oh, and make sure you have your GROOVY_HOME set up.

Actually, this can be used to run any batch script in the background, as long as you don't need to be able to let the user pass in arguments. My thanks to Koushik Biswas from Yahoo Answers for the tip.

Using Groovy from the .zip file

I had always had trouble launching groovysh or groovyConsole from the .zip releases of groovy, and always waited until they released the installer for Windows, never knowing why. There is a simple fix, but one that didn't occur to me right away. The cause is that the GROOVY_HOME variable needs set before startGroovy.bat tries to add it to the classpath, so just add

set GROOVY_HOME=..\

to startGroovy.bat (anywhere before the classpath gets set), and let the good times roll...
This also, of course, overrides whatever you have set as system or user variables, so you can safely play with other versions from the .zips without needing to change anything (or needing admin rights).

AHCI in Windows

A recent discovery I made because of my mobo's odd controller:
While its true that AHCI works out of the box with Vista/Windows 7 (that is, there is no need for third party drivers) -- If you did not have it enabled when you first install Windows, it will be disabled to save some boot time. Makes sense. What's odd is what you have to do to enable it. You have to change HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci\Start from 0x3 to 0x0. Otherwise, you get a blue screen when you try to boot. The fancy startup repair that comes with Vista/Windows 7 will be launched the next boot (if you let it), but won't be able to figure this out for you.

So yea, I tried moving the cables around on the inside (thinking it might be a bad sata port), and changed to AHCI, and my cd drive was still the one that disappeared, not the drive in that port.  I thought it might be some incompatibility with the firmware, but the updater fails to run. :'( I suppose it's also possible it's a bad cable.

iTunes Pains (Again)

This time the upgrade to iTunes 9 broke my beloved MediaMonkey. I really should just use something else to get my podcasts and blow away iTunes. I don't even have an iPod anymore and have no plans of getting an iPhone -- there's really no reason to keep this piece of trash on my hard drive.
A work around was posted here: http://www.thebitguru.com/blog/view/310-MediaMonkey%20and%20iTunes%209
Granted, its not iTunes' fault per se, and I'm sure MediaMonkey will get it fixed soon, just damned irritating. I didn't follow his instructions exactly...what I did was rename d_iPhone.dll to d_iPhone.dll.disabled in the MediaMonkey plugins folder in program files.

EDIT:
MediaMonkey has pushed out a beta release (a bit earlier than they were planning) that fixes compatibility with iTunes 9, only 1 day after it came out: http://www.mediamonkey.com/beta/MediaMonkey_3.1.2.1267.exe.  It might be better to delete the file rather than rename it (if you're comfortable with that), then it will be replaced when the new installer is run.

iTunes Blows

iTunes blows, but we all knew that. The latest chapter in the suckage occurred when I deleted UppperFilters from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} in an attempt to solve my problem of the disappearing cd drive (it didn't). Instead iTunes lost the ability to write CDs, not something I really care about since I only use iTunes for podcasts now anyway, but the stupid error was kinda annoying. The message said to reinstall iTunes, yet neither a repair install nor uninstalling then reinstalling fixed the issue, even after I manually created the key. Apperantly there are some magic drivers in use by iTunes that their support site will tell you nothing about. I finally got it fixed. My thanks to Ralph and Google.

Why My GroovyConsole Wouldn't Open

For a few weeks now, I've been wondering why I couldn't launch the pretty version of GroovyConsole on my home computer, but could on my work computer. It turns out this is a bug: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GROOVY-3655. Groovy needs the 32 bit JDK to launch. Nore more batch hack, I can now launch the GroovyConsole.exe directly. (Though they still haven't built this for the updated versions -- I assume they're holding off for the 1.7 release).

Problem was, at work I need to use HermesJMS which needs JAVA_HOME to be the 64 bit version (doesn't make sense, but it works). What to do? Fortunately, HermesJMS uses a batch file for its invocation, so just add

JAVA_HOME=C:\Progra~2\Java\jdk1.6.0_16

to line 23 (or anywhere in the beginning, really). Done.