I recently had an employee whose AutoCAD was playing up. Clicking file open didn’t load the usual windows file browser, the command was asking you to type the file name you wanted, not exactly the most productive way to open a file.

Fortunately there is a very quick and simple fix, you just need to change the filedia flag from 0 to 1.

To do that press escape so you are back at the normal command prompt in AutoCAD and then type:

filedia (when you press space afterwards it should prompt you with “Enter new value for FILEDIA <0>:)
then type the number “1″ and hit <return>

That should be it, when you go to file open, the file browser should now show again.

I’m not sure why this happened, my employee came to me with this problem and they definitely hadn’t entered filedia in the command prompt before and then 0 to turn it off so it must have been from an earlier crash or system fault?

I noticed TomTome HOME software had a “Backup my device” option which is meant to just take a complete snapshot of your device to allow for a full restore at a later date.

After clicking to run the backup I was presented with a progress bar:

and then after a few mintutes I was told the backup had failed “An error occurred. Unable to create the files required to copy this item to your computer”

with the option to click to view further details, which look like:

ERROR: DesktopLib/FileCopy/Error: An error occurred. Unable to create the files required to copy this item to your computer.
@ .\controller\FileCopyThread.cpp(161)
An error occurred while reading this file: “F:\autorun.inf”
An error occurred while writing to this file: “C:\Documents and Settings\\My Documents\TomTom\HOME\Backup\ONE\Backup01\InternalMemory\autorun.inf”
Access is denied.

in .\controller\FileCopyThread.cpp:161
Stack:
0. chrome://tthome/content/ui/bindings/commit.js:82
error(textOrException);
1. chrome://tthome/content/ui/bindings/ttwizard.xml:1061
this._commitFailed(i, commitPage);
2. chrome://tthome/content/logic/util.js:79
return func.apply(obj, arguments);
3. chrome://tthome/content/logic/dllUtils.js:77
this._errorCallback(e);
4. chrome://tthome/content/logic/dllUtils.js:69
this._errorFatal(error);

Time: Wed, 20 Jul 2011 10:15:29 GMT

Straight away I knew what the problem would be, my anti-virus and anti-malware software. The first error occurred reading a file called “autorun.inf” and it seems trying to copy this to my local disk. Auto-copying an autorun.inf file will almost certainly set alarm bells ringing in most good anti-virus software.

After disabling the anti-virus software

and running the backup option again it all went through without an error.

Versions:
TomTom Home v 2.8.2.2264
Windows XP SP3
TomTom One IQ Routes Edition
Trend Micro Worry Free Business Edition

Username is in use – the program cannot connect you at this time

Your only option is to click OK which isn’t very helpful. Even after a full system reboot the same thing happens. Note that I use Sage 50 Accounts Plus 2011 (v17) but I’ve had the same thing happen before in Sage 2010, 2007 etc and the principal behind the fix hasn’t changed so give it a try.

After half an hour on the phone to Sage support, there is a very simple solution:

1. Click on Start–>My Computer
2. Double click on the C:\ drive or which ever drive letter has your \Documents and Settings\ folder on and double click to go into the \Documents and Settings\ folder
3. Double click to go into the \All Users\ folder
4. Double click to go into the \Application Data\ folder
   [if you can't see an \Application Data\ folder and the first in the list alphabetically is \Desktop\ then you need to click on Tools in the menu bar, the Folder Options, then click on the View tab and look in the list for "Show hidden files and folders" and select this option, then you should be able to see the \Application Data\ folder although it might look feint or greyed out.
5. Once in the C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\ folder scroll down and then double click on \Sage\ folder
6. Double click to go into the \Accounts\ folder
7. Then depending on when you first setup the account click to go into that year, in my case I have a \2010\ and a \2011\ folder but my data is in the \2010\ folder so double click to go into the year.
8. You should then see a \Company.000\ folder, I assume that if you have a license for multiple company accounts there may be several of these, one for each company accounts but in my instance I have a single user and single company licence so I just have one \Company.000\ so click to go into that
9. Once in \Company.000\ click on the \ACCDATA\ folder
10. Nearly there.... I am now in the following directory:
    C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Sage\Accounts\2010\Company.000\ACCDATA\
11. There will be lots of files with a .dta file extension in here, simply scroll down to until you see QUEUE.DTA and select it.
12. At this point you could (but don't)  just delete QUEUE.DTA as this is the file that is locking you out from Sage and will be recreated when you next login and no company information will be lost at all. But rather than just deleting the file, it is better practice to rename this file to something different so that if it does break something, you can rename it back to the original and no harm is done.
13. Right click on QUEUE.DTA and choose rename.
    
14. Type in a new filename, in this case I'll rename it to QUEUE.DTA.OLD and hit enter.
15. Now try logging into Sage Account again and you should be all fixed.

Further to an early post whereby my iPhone 2G had issues connecting to wi-fi networks after a firmware update, a similar thing happened to my iPhone 3G last week for no apparent reason.

My iPhone 3G wouldn’t connect to my Time Capsule wi-fi. I rebooted the Time Capsule and the iPhone but it still gave an error. I then tried with my 2nd home wi-fi network (Netgear DG834GT) and the same “unable to join the network” error message popped up. In case it was an issue with channel interference or WEP password mistakes I switched channels and turned all security off temporarily. This still didn’t solve anything, my MBook Pro, Air, Apple TV, Xbox etc could still connect perfectly as did my old iPhone 2G. I backed up my iPhone and then carried out a full restore but even the virginal factory fresh restored software refused to connect. Once a friend with another 3G came round and connected without a problem I had little choice but to book an appointment at Apple’s Genius bar.

The Genius tried to connect to the stores wi-fi and it failed, he checked the phone had the latest version, did a force reboot (I’d already done several) and then simply said “I’ll go and get you a new one”.

After checking for liquid damage using an otoscope to view the liquid damage indicators in the headphone socket and bottom port he gave me a new iPhone 3G and I was on my way.

Since I use MobileMe & Exchange PUSH, when I set up the accounts quickly on store on the new iPhone my contacts were pulled down onto the iPhone in under a minute which is useful since my iPhone backup was on my home machine a few hours away.

I opened up Activity Monitor to see if it was a RAM shortage when I noticed my CPU history was almost maxed out, but NOT by the photoshop process. My cpu cycles were getting chewed up by a system process called ATSServer .

My hard disk activity was high considering I wasn’t actively doing anything at the time.

A little research on the web indicated that ATSServer was OS X Spotlight’s indexing process. Others having this problem had recently copied a large number of PDF’s to their machine and that’s exactly what I had done too.

Spotlight doesn’t just index the filenames, where possible it indexes the entire contents of PDFs, emails, etc and the process seemed to be stuck trying to index the PDF’s I had recently added.

Activity Monitor showed that the process had a full 24hrs+ of cpu time so I don’t think it was simply a case of waiting longer for it to complete. Instead I went into Preferences->Spotlight and added the folder that had all the newly added PDF’s to the privacy folder settings. This, however, did not stop the runaway process nor the thrashing of the hard drive, so i took the decision to Force Quit the ATSServer process and all is well again.

I’m obviously going to have to reboot to start the service running and hopefully things will be back to normal.

I left them all downloading and updating but one, the Safari update, refused to work. It said I had insufficient access rights but considering I’m the only user and I’ve always been setup as an administrator this was strange.

I tried repairing disk permissions but that didn’t work. Then I thought perhaps it just needs to be restarted having just installed all the other updates so I dutifully rebooted and the same thing happened when I rebooted.

The Update Safari can’t be saved. You do not have appropriate access privileges. The installer package has been moved to the Trash. To try again, open the package from the Finder.

I checked the Trash and there was nothing in there so I had a root around and found an easy solution…using Finder to browse my hard drive I navigated to /Library/Updates/

and then deleted the Safari folder that was in there:

and then tried to install the Safari update again from the Software Update window and it downloaded and installed the update without a problem.

I knew I was typing my password 100% correctly so I thought it might be a strange cookie or cached file problem so I cleared Safari’s history, quit and restarted Safari but the same thing kept happening.

I thought Facebook might be having an few glitches but I opened up Firefox and it logged me in straight away.

After lot’s of hair pulling I finally found the reason I couldn’t log in to Facebook using Safari and I’ve been kicking myself for not realising sooner….I noticed Private Browsing was activated in Safari. My computer gets used by a variety of people during the day so when I come to do any online banking I sometimes turn on Private Browsing and am normally very good at remembering to turn it back off. However, on this occasion I had forgotten to turn off Private Browsing and that was the cause of Facebook failing to login and constantly cycling me back to the login page.

I know this seems obvious once it’s pointed out, and other sites sometimes pop up warnings stating Cookies are not enabled, etc which would normally prompt you to check Private Browsing options but Facebook give’s no warnings or errors in a pop-up or on the re-loaded login page.

I have since turned on Private Browsing and tried to log in to Facebook and it worked fine, so I’m not sure why it wasn’t working before but turning off Private Browsing was definitely the cure.

Warning: Compilation failed: characters with values > 255 are not yet supported in classes at offset 16 in /vhost/vhost6/s/c/o/scoopz.com/blog/wp-includes/shortcodes.php on line 213

This only appeared on 1 or 2 posts the rest remained unaffected. I realised that most of the posts affected were those which had galleries inserted using WordPress Media Manager and the

tag.

After some research it appears to be a known issue with older versions of PHP. My site is hosted with Easyspace who unfortunately won’t upgrade me from PHP Version 4.3.2 unless I pay extra for a new hosting plan.

Somebody pointed out that if you try adding a test post with new images and insert a gallery, the error doesn’t appear unless you add ALT tags to the images (Image Caption).

For now I’ve simply removed the gallery from the affected posts until I either get my PHP upgraded or the next update from WordPress.

UPDATE (20th August) – I’ve updated my web hosting so I’ve now gone from PHP4.3.2 to PHP5.1.6 and inserting a [ gallery ] still causes the same error at the top of my posts. I’ve noticed there is another update out for wordpress (2.6.1) so I’ll try updating to that and see if that fixes anything.

UPDATE (20th August) - Just finished updating to 2.6.1 and the problem has now disappeared, so if you are experiencing this issue I’d highly recommend upgrading to WordPress 2.6.1