If like me, you have a 64-bit Windows box, but a Cisco VT II camera, you’ll have found Cisco in their infinite wisdom have decided to not bother writing drivers. However, there is a way around it:
Windows 7 x64 VT camera II drivers – Cisco Support Community
OK, so it’s horribly hacky, but it DOES work. My camera is working quite happily now!
YouTube – simonscat’s Channel.
A really great little series of animations. Wonderful stuff!
I’ve been wrestling with the Cisco Telephony Service Provider (TSP) today. We’re doing an install of ARC console, and having set everything else up, it wouldn’t start. I traced back and found that the issue lay in the TSP module itself. ARC tell you to try a utility called TAPI Soft Phone. Every time I ran it I got a vague error about not being able to connect.
I found the TSP was actually dropping logs into C:\Temp. I found these lines:
CiscoTSP001.tsp| CSelsiusTSPWaveList::GetAvailWave() *ERROR* No wave available|<LVL::Error><MASK::0001>
CiscoTSP001.tsp| CSelsiusTSPDevice::OpenDevice() [ARC-SrvQueue3] *ERROR* GetAvailWave() returned WAVELIST_NOT_ASSIGNED|<LVL::Error><MASK::0001>
I was aware there was a Wave driver in there, but it supposedly gets installed when the TSP installed.
Right?
Well, it would seem not. Whether it’s meant to or not, I don’t know. I could find plenty of reference to reinstalling it, but not a lot of mention of how to install it in the first place (or reinstall it for that matter). A bit more digging, and I found this Cisco document which tells you how to install.
It mentions Windows 2000, but it’s roughly the same for 2003, which I’m using. I selected Add New Device, Game and Audio controllers, and just pointed it at the driver.
One thing that struck me is that Windows claims the driver is unsigned. I’m wondering if the TSP installer is trying to shoe-horn the unsigned driver in, failing, and just silently giving up. Like I say, that’s assuming it actually does it in the first place.
Anyway it now works. A simple thing, but it took me a while to find the root cause and fix it.
I’ve been running Windows 7 on my main PC all this week, and I’ve very quickly found myself getting used to it. Even the new Start Bar is growing on me daily.
I decided today to see if my little HP 2133 netbook could take it. The HP has no optical drive, and I have no external USB drives. I had a IDE-USB converter thingy I’d used with an IDE CD drive in the past, but I’d blown the PSU on it. I needed another solution.
I’ve installed Linux from USB drives in the past, and I knew it was possible to install Windows onto HP Proliant servers using Smartstart and a USB drive. I was vaguely aware any PC could do it, you just needed a method.
A quick google turned up this blog entry:
HOWTO: Install Windows Vista from a high speed USB 2.0 Flash Drive – Windows Live.
I reasoned that Windows 7 is basically Vista so the theory was probably the same. I got my 4GB SanDisk USB drive, downloaded the Windows 7 Home Premium ISO from Technet, and started setting up the disk.
After plugging it into the netbook, I powered up, and selected it from the boot menu. Imagine my surprise when it worked! Not only that, but it booted, and installed perfectly fine. I wondered if it had done something stupid like installed the boot loader on the USB drive (had that happen before) or messed up the drive letters, but no, everything is where it should be.
What impressed me the most was that during the setup, it found my wireless controller, and set up my connection to the AP. Next it activated with Microsoft (although oddly told me it had expired, and must be activated), and I was in. Windows Update was already showing activity so I had a look and found all the other drivers waiting to be installed. Once they had installed and rebooted, I have a fully set up Netbook!
The start bar looks like it could be very useable on the netbook, and it seems pretty nippy. I’d run XP on it before as I decided Vista was a pointless excercise. Don’t get me wrong, I rather like Vista, and had been running it for some time, but it really doesn’t get on well with low-end hardware. This little machine seems to be OK with Windows 7 however, so I’ll have to see how it goes.
Not that you’d notice.
If you’re reading this, then you’re seeing the newly hosted site. Nothing has changed, I’ve just moved to a virtual private server, where I can host all my domains, and do all my own setup and control of the hosting.
I’ve had years of excellent hosting from UK Web Solutions Direct, so I was a little sad to leave them. But if you’re looking for a basic host, I can’t recommend them highly enough, so if you’re looking for a good host, give them a go!
Random hobby number 2,435 – Model Railways!
Yes, I’ve decided to get back into playing with trains. Why? Well, I wandered down to a model rail exhibition the other week, and came home full of ideas adamant I’d try my hand at it again.
Anyway, because I’m a web 2.0 kind of guy, there’s an obligatory blog, all about it too:
http://www.returntomodelrailways.co.uk/
So there you go!
YouTube – T-Mobile SING-FULL SONG.
OK, now this is pretty cool. Made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up!
The power of music! Ahhhhhhh.
This is why you should ALWAYS wear the wrist strap when using your Wiimote.
If the Wii came out about10 years ago, when most people had CRTs still, they’d probably just bounce off, no harm done, but LCD and Plasma screens are made of very thin, fragile sheets of glass and plastic. Doesn’t take much to bust one.
As you can see from the widget on the right, I’m using Twitter these days to spout all sorts of random nonsense. Twitter is a wonderful thing, and I’ve found it useful, and quite entertaining.
Thing is, I see something of a major flaw with it, and it extends outside of Twitter. Due to the fact ‘tweets’ have to be 140 characters long, if you want to post a URL (link) to something, people will often shorten them using one of the many services such as TinyUrl, Tr.im, Bit.ly, or Is.gd. The end result being that your original URL, turns from this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8026736.stm
to this:
We now have a considerably shorter URL to post, which saves a lot of space in the tweet.
My problem with it, is that the URL could link to anything! In this instance, it does link to the article above. But it could go anywhere! Any how else would I know until I click it.
TinyURL thought of that particular problem and introduced a preview feature, so the URL http://preview.tinyurl.com/cakpdn actually takes you to a TinyURL page which tells you where the link goes to. You can turn on a cookie to always make it go there, then you choose to click through if you trust the domain. But not all the providers do that. Bit.ly don’t seem to and besides, it relies on the person posting the link using the preview URL, or the person visiting the link having the cookie enabled, both of which rarely happen.
We also end up with URL blindness, and people will just click on them regardless, and end up at a plethora of sites. Most of the links I see go past in my Twitter feed are shortened somehow, and without the context of the tweet are mostly meaningless. How long before they are accepted entirely, and start appearing in Phishing emails and the like? We could end up with shortened URLs firing people off to all sorts of sites.
There have been suggestions by some for the domains hosting the content to provide their own URLs. Personally, I think this is by far the best method, as it means you can instantly see which domain the link goes to and know with a better level of certainty that you’re going to end up where you expect to. Trouble is, it relies on the domain owners implementing something themselves, which they might be reluctant to do, seeing services like twitter as a flash in the pan (I don’t think it is).
A short-term solution might be for the short-URL providers to send short URLs to a landing page, so you can see where the link goes, and if it is malicious or not what it said, flag it as such (although they could be open to abuse as well).
It’s a tricky subject really. Just click carefully!
YouTube – T-Mobile Sing-a-long in Trafalgar Square.
T-Mobile did another flashmob event and organised a sing-along in Trafalgar Square yesterday evening.
You know, like you do…
