Tag: Troubleshooting

Microsoft recently released the Service Pack 1 for Windows 7. When installing this through Windows Update it would keep failing and give me “code 80200053.” After looking around for a bit I found a solution that fixed this.

1. Go to the Start menu and type “services.msc” and press enter.
2. Find “Windows Update” service, right click on it and click “Restart.”
3. Go to the Start menu and type “Windows Update” and try installing the service pack.

My original patch possibly worked only with OS X 10.6.5. Last night I figured out a better way to apply the patch without relying on a pre-supplied diff. What this means is that starting with version 0.7 the patch should work with pretty much all versions.

If you are interested, check it out on the project page.

I just published a new patch for OS X, below is a description of the patch. Check it out.

This is a patch for removing the default OS X behavior of always starting iTunes when the play button on the keyboard is pressed. This feature can be useful for a lot of users, but it can also be annoying if you are using VLC or other similar programs that support the media keys.

The Patch script will patch the Remote Control Daemon to prevent it from starting iTunes whenever you press the play button on the keyboard or an external remote control. This will only prevent iTunes from starting, all other functions (like play/pause while iTunes is running) will continue to work as before.

Lastly, this program will backup the original file in case if you would like to restore the original functionality.

For more information please visit the Play Button iTunes Patch page.

Lately I have noticed that I kept getting a 400 bad request when doing django development (i.e. using runserver) and browsing through Google Chrome. It was only Chrome that was behaving this way because Firefox would browse without generating any of these errors on the server side.

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[09/Nov/2010 00:31:53] "GET /acq/ HTTP/1.1" 200 1393
[09/Nov/2010 00:31:53] code 400, message Bad request syntax ('\x16\x03\x00...')
?????????...." 400 -???8 .....?????
[09/Nov/2010 00:33:39] "GET /acq/ HTTP/1.1" 200 1393

I finally took a few minutes to debug. After clearing the cache and browsing data as suggested by many sites and having no luck I started disabling all of the extensions that I had installed. Guess what? The error disappeared.

This issue was being caused by the Secure Sites extension which lets you use secure versions of the site if one is available. In order to figure out whether a secure version is available it does an extra request, and it is this extra request that was causing the problem.

What’s the solution? I went into the options for this extension and added localhost to “Assumed no secure version exists” and the error disappeared.

I just finished upgrading my laptop to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). After the upgrade finished I noticed that for my wireless card the Network Manger applet in gnome claimed “device not managed.” A quick search revealed that this had happened in the past. I had to set managed=true in /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf. Doing this again and restarting the network service didn’t seem to fix the issue. After a few minutes of looking around in /etc/init.d I saw another service (network-manager!) that needed to be restarted. In summary is here is what you need to do.

1. Edit /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf and set managed=true

Specifically change the ‘managed’ under ifupdown…

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[ifupdown]
managed=false

…to true.

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[ifupdown]
managed=true

2. Restart networking and network-manager services.

You can always restart the computer, but where is the fun in that 🙂 To get things to work without restarting, run the following commands.

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sudo /etc/init.d/network-manager restart
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

3. Have fun!

I recently upgraded my main Windows Vista desktop to Windows 7 RTM. I chose to upgrade instead of doing a clean install because I had a lot of programs installed that I did not want to reinstall (too time consuming). The whole upgrade process wasn’t too bad, I had to uninstall a few programs and reinstall them after the upgrade. In addition to the uninstall/install, I encountered a few odd problems after the upgrade.

One of these problems was that my DVD drive disappeared. It wasn’t just the DVD drive, Daemon Tools’ virtual drive also wasn’t showing up. Looking at the devices in device manager I saw the following error.

Windows cannot verify the digital signature for the drivers required for this device. A recent hardware or software change might have installed a file that is signed incorrectly or damaged, or that might be malicious software from an unknown source. (Code 52)

After searching online I found out that this had to do with some drivers that iTunes, Zune (!) and a few other programs had installed. Most of these programs are compatible with Windows 7, but the upgrade process didn’t deal with this case very well.

Anyways, if you search online you will find several solutions that require you to play around with the registry or have you install some random driver. Some even suggest disabling driver signing check. I didn’t prefer doing any of these.

After a little more search I ended up on this Microsoft Help and Support article. It described the exact problem that I was having and it had an automated fix. When I downloaded and ran the fix, it complained that it doesn’t work with my version of Windows. Knowing that the fix was compatible with Windows Vista, the workaround was simple:

1. Right click on the MSI that you downloaded.
2. Go to the Compatibility tab.
3. Check “Run this program in compatibility mode for:”
4. Verify that the drop down says “Previous version of Windows”
5. Click OK to complete.

Now you should be able run the fix. Restart after the fix has installed and your drives should be back. Have fun!