Category: computers

I bought a FALK navigation system, the M8 2nd edition. The thing as such is excellent! It is very easy to use, has a good navigation, fits nicely into the car, excellent hardware.

My problems started with the software. They suggest you to also buy a map update to get updated maps every few months.

Done that, downloaded the new maps. To get the maps from the PC to the Navigation System, you need to install their “Falk Navi-Manager”. I wonder why, the bloody thing has a mini sd card reader and it could just read the maps from this. Anyway, installing the Navi-Manager includes installing the Microsoft ActiveSync client. Done that.

Now wanting to synchronize, on connecting, an ActiveSync problem pops up:
“cannot verify the version of activesync on your device. A program such as a firewall may be blocking a port ActiveSync uses to connect to the device, or you may need to upgrade to a more recent version of ActiveSync on the PC.”

• search for falk online support
• They have an falk online forum for support, which is useless because it does not allow you to post questions. Why the FUCK do you make a forum when I can’t post questions??? Better take the whole thing offline, if its just read-only thing labeled “forum”. I mean, if customers want to ask questions in a private forum which is controlled by you, and they can’t where will they ask questions? Right, on the web.
• I Called the hotline. The hotline is nice and professional and they walk you to the typical steps of “turn off firewall”, “turn off virus scanner”, try reinstalling X, …
• Someone from customer service said “ok, that may be because ActiveSync needs some port that is blocked. I had the same problem with another customer today and that guy found out. I can’t help you. Ask microsoft.”
• Ok, then I ask for the microsoft support number. They say: go to the microsoft homepage. Did that and looked for the German Microsoft online help on ActiveSync, which is “not found”, 404. ARGH. FUCKKKKK
• Ok, reinstalled ActiveSync to v4.5 (was there already). did not help
• Bugged the support hotline, begging for favors, they offered that I can send the thing in and they do the update. Thats cool.

Lesson learned: The telephone support was good and they offered to help me as far as they could (“ok, then send us the thing …. grml…”)

But if you fucking want to sell navis, you better NOT the fuck use ActiveSync as your technical base but provide something that works out of the box on all machines. And on MacOs. And on Linux. Something like USB, something like my Digital Camera does: plain simple USB drives. And you better provide your customers a real online forum or they will need to find help on the web, publicly sharing their agony of having wasted a lot of money in a piece of hardware that is obsoleted in a year without updates which are blocked because of Microsoft ActiveSync being a mess with fucking “go to hell” error messages.

Next thing I will try: get a new computer and update the navi there, if that does not work – send the thing to falk.

Argh, I hate computers. Thats why I bought this hardware the first place…

When you drill down far into Java reflection, you end up at the reflection class for generic types. This is, if you have

class Blah {
  T t;
  public T get() { return t; }
}
... Blah stringBlah = new Blah();

Then you can get the configured return type “String” by reflecting on the method “get”. The return type of that method is String. BUT if you need the generic variable T of Blah, you end up calling Blah.class.getTypeParameters(). And here the fun starts in the doc of TypeVariable:

The type parameter D represents the type of generic declaration that declared the underlying type variable.

wtf? this is as complex as playing braid.

When LaTeX tells you at 05:00 am that
\foonote is an un-defined control sequence

Did you know images have weight and can fall of websites? Yes, they can. Truth is, they are held in position by fixation, you can remove the fixation of images.

go to HTML Gravity to learn how.

Written by me, GPL license.

Your computer doesn’t start? Black screen, a cursor, nothing else? Well, you may be tempted to wipe & reinstall. Back at impact we had the company directive not to fumble around installing operating systems again and again, but to stick with the os the vendor has preinstalled and fix it. The reason behind this is that most vendors tune the installation and also that re-installing all software and data costs too much time = money.

So yesterday Ingrid’s compaq evo laptop got a black screen of nothingness after the bios logo and instead of windows, a cursor flashing once. Then reboot and infinite repeat. I used knoppix to check what happened, harddisk still there, files looked as usual. Next thought: master boot record (MBR) so I read there are two ways: using gentoo startup cd and ms-sys or windows xp install cd. I had only knoppix so I choose windows xp boot cd. But my boot CD didn’t have the “recovery console” menu when installing. Pressing F10 continously while it bootet finally brought up console (how intuitive). Later I found the windows xp cd shipped with the laptop, that had the “r” for recovery, so there is a difference between windows and windows.

fixing mbr and boot in the recovery console is easy, type fixmbr and fixboot and it should work. Not for me, I also thought that maybe all this is wrong and my floppy drive is broken (ha, that is the first in boot order), so I moved it down in bios list of boot devices. I also checked HP’s guide for fixing boot problems, and blindly entered commands like “fixmbr /device/harddisk0” in recovery console.

Ok, it bootet now. But then:
Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM

A thing I often heard from nightmare stories, it happened the registry was missing. Lucky me, the Microsoft Guide to recover the registry is on the first page when googling for the problem. The boot loader was right, half of the files of the registry were gone. I copied them from an automated backup which is done by windows every day (ha, you never know what useful things this os does when “being busy”).

Alas, after 3 hours the system was back. So, it took me three hours to get my system back, compared to the 2hours of installing an operating system and then endless days of updatefest and installing software, it pays off. I am quite slow with computers, others may have done this faster. Ingrid was quite happy to have her machine back, though. I don’t pick any OS better than the other, I have the same problems with all of them. But keeping one alive is always better than wiping, at least for me.