Problems to Solve Welcome Guest | Login or Register

I’ve been getting this error more and more on my XP machines lately.

Runtime Error!
Program: C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.exe

This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.
Please contact the application's support team for more information.

Apple’s software in particular has been giving me this problem. I found this thread which simply states to update itunes with software update:
http://forums.techguy.org/multimedia/581031-itunes-runtime-error.html

That’s good for the constant itunes crash, which was happening every time I opened the application. One thing that sucks is that this FORCES you to upgrade iTunes, and ‘upgrades’ have been generally more and more restrictive downgrades with iTunes lately. (Wonder if this was partly intentional on Apple’s part.)

What this doesn’t solve though is why it keeps happening with other applications. What library is getting corrupted I wonder? Why does it happen sporadically with firefox and safari as well on two of my different XP machines?

Ok now I think it’s flash that’s bogging down my system, still trying to figure it out…

I was wrong! Weeks after uninstalling Adblock Plus I was still getting system unresponsiveness and firefox at 50% CPU. I uninstalled google toolbar after reading a post elsewhere and my computer seems to bee snappy again. I reinstalled Adblock Plus and it’s working great.
Too bad I miss google toolbar. My firefox search box uses google for most things, but I miss pagerank and the single word buttons that appear generated by your searches for instant finds. Anyone have another plugin for that I can use?

I love Adblock Plus, and I miss it. There was such a feeling of power when I right clicked on an ad and blocked it forever. And the pre-installed list of hideous ads were great.
But my computer became unusable. Firefox was taking up 50% CPU any time I simply refocused a window or loaded a page. Other elements of Windows stopped responding. I could hardly get any work done.
I tried deleting my pluginreg.dat file, reinstalling firefox, all sorts of things. Sometimes when watching my memory watcher, StatusbarEx, the used memory would increase, meg by meg, by about one meg a second. Finally disabling Adblock Plus solved my woes.
RIP Adblock plus!

Myspace spam and wordpress spam have always been a minor annoyance, but has anyone else noticed a dramatic increase in April?

MySpace Friend Request Clarice would like to be added as one of your friends! Mon Apr 02, 2007 3k
MySpace Friend Request Ida would like to be added as one of your friends! Mon Apr 02, 2007 3k
MySpace Friend Request Shannon would like to be added as one of your friends! Mon Apr 02, 2007 3k
New MySpace Message New message from Chickeee on MySpace sent on 4/1/2007 11:35 PM Sun Apr 01, 2007 3k
New MySpace Message New message from Gurleee on MySpace sent on 4/1/2007 6:27 PM Sun Apr 01, 2007 3k
New MySpace Message New message from SeXXXie on MySpace sent on 4/1/2007 6:00 PM Sun Apr 01, 2007 3k
New MySpace Message New message from SeXXXie on MySpace sent on 4/1/2007 5:05 PM Sun Apr 01, 2007 3k
MySpace Friend Request Connor would like to be added as one of your friends! Sun Apr 01, 2007 3k
New MySpace Message New message from HunnyBunzz on MySpace sent on 4/1/2007 2:16 PM Sun Apr 01, 2007 3k

There are wordpress hacks you can do to cut down on wordpress spam, but I don’t know of any techniques on cutting down myspace spam. Anyone have any suggestions? This looks like something myspace will have to fix, not something the user can do much about.

I know you can disable email notifications, but I would like to get the occasional alert when I actually do get a message or friend request on myspace.

–edit–

I finally cracked down and installed some anti-spam software for my wordpress blogs. Spam Karma 2.3 and Bad Behavior together work great! Spam Karma was especially helpful in quickly sorting and bulk deleting my 279 spam comments in moderation.

Note: Google recently changed their google local page and this link doesn’t work anymore. The local page exists but seems to be based on the type of query you have now (which sucks). Working on a new solution.

Props to google for their improvements on google mobile. Now it saves your location, which makes life a heck of a lot easier to find “pizza” in your neighborhood, or “ice cream” near work.

I’ve been meaning to post my google mobile hack for a while which does the same thing, but it’s still useful for its instant directions feature. Note: this is for users who don’t have the google local program (my phone doesn’t support it), but do have internet access. You’ll also need to know how to type in characters like + on your phone.

First, write down your address, and define it in your head as [your address]. Like, [your address] = 123 main street, chicago il 60626.
Next, any place there’s a space, replace it with a +, and definte it in your head as [your+address]. Like, [your+address] = 123+main+street,+chicago+il+60626.

Finally, bookmark this address in your phone, replacing [your+address]:

http://www.google.com/m?output=xhtml&site=local&q=&near=[your+address]&daddr=&saddr=[your+address]

For instance:
http://www.google.com/m?output=xhtml&site=local&q=&near=123+main+street,
+chicago+il+60626&daddr=&saddr=123+main+street,+chicago+il+60626

What this does:
It gives you a page with two forms: A driving directions form with your start address already filled out, and a “find businesses near” form with your location already filled out. It’s super handy for the driving directions, because you just type in a destination address and hit submit. And it’s even handier for finding local businesses, because you can just type in a business name or category (like cafe) and it gives you a list of businesses ordered by proximity. The call link will actually call the business (most phones support this), and if you click on a business and then click on driving directions it will automatically give you directions to the destination because you already filled out your starting address.

How’d I do this? I figured out that this was the most useful page on google and bookmarked it, and then hacked the URL to always use my address. m?output=xhtml gives it in a format for your phone. site=local gives you the nice driving directions / what/where forms. q= is your query, I leave it blank so that it’s not always filled in. near= what you’re searching in, i.e. your address. daddr= is the destination address, which I leave blank as well. saddr is your start address, which is also filled in with your address. The &s in a URL just delimiate between different variables. And the +s just encode spaces into URLs.

I have this bookmark in my “goto” menu on my phone, so all I have to do is hit goto, up, send and I’m on this page for instant directions or business searches. I’ll use google’s main mobile page for business searches now that they save locations, but this is still useful for quick access.

On monday, my car broke down in a parking lot. I was able to call AAA, find a ford dealer near me, call the ford dealer to see if they’re open, and get directions to the ford dealer for the tow truck driver very quickly using this method. (I also called and emailed my friends about my change in plans. I love my phone and google!)

I’ve been really confused lately on digg when I would post a comment and it would show up in the middle of the page, or try to reply to a comment and have it show up at the end of the page instead of in the original commenter’s thread. It was really confusing until I went to my profile and saw that my comment sorting was defaulting to “Sort by most diggs” instead of “sort by date (-4 diggs or higher)”. Switching this fixed it, but I’m wondering, did digg switch this with their most recent UI tweak? ‘Cuz I didn’t change it.

Hey, I have some questions that would help me work faster.

In SQLyog, or MYSQL in general, is there any way to quickly view the last, say, hundred rows of a table automatically? You know, without having to select count(*) from the table (which gives me 2469207), then make a select * … LIMIT 2469107, 100; ?

Also, in PHP Eclipse, I like how I can paste in an SQL statement into a string, then hit enter and have Eclipse add end and start quotes and an append operator (.) at the end of the line automatically, to make my SQL statement pretty.

My question is, when I’m debugging, a lot of times I have to put that statement back into SQLyog (or MySQL Query Browser, or whatever). Is there a way to have one of these programs *remove* those quotes for you?

edit
Note: One trick I’ve been seeing programmers do lately is open double quotes, paste in the SQL as a paragraph on a new line, make another line break, and then close the quotes with a semicolon to make the code block easily copy and pastable. The problem is that I’ve seen the SQL query blow up in PHP every once in a while when the SQL query starts with a new line. It happens erratically so I’m still trying to replicate it. Meanwhile this sqlyog product enhancement would be sweet.
end edit

To make this post worth reading, here are two eclipse tricks I recently found out about:

If you’re using CVS, and you go to Team > Show Annotation, and use QuickDiff, you can see line by line who last edited that line. This would be great for project managers or for getting help from fellow coders!

And to indent a bunch of code, you can highlight it all and hit tab to indent it more, or shift-tab to indent it less.

Digital performer won’t recognize the MMC messages coming from the MPD 24′s transport. Anyone know how to get it to work? It’s not listed as a control surface option and doesn’t seem to listen to it via any MIDI inputs.

On the plus side, I got the MPD remote functionality working with Reason, the problem was I had to upgrade to Reason 3.0.5 for the luacodec to work. If I launch reason after DP then Reason can listen to the MPD via transport and control DP’s transport via rewire. Sweet.

My Windows XP Machine is acting fishy. I installed the google pack, a software package that includes google desktop, firefox, google earth, picasa, and norton antivirus, and things have started going wrong with norton antivirus.

I also installed google pack on a different PC and had the same thing happen. First Norton has an error like “Norton encountered an internal error and needs to close. Please reinstall norton antivirus.”

I also get the error when opening word documents or running the symantec autofix tool: “Norton Does not support the repair feature. Please reinstall norton antivirus.”

Then, programs will start to fail. After being left idle for about 15 minutes, the internet will fail. Launching programs will give you a file not found error. Rebooting fixes the problem.

On my main PC, I tried several times uninstalling norton antivirus and google pack. Norton still persists, giving me several errors including the amusing “this program was installed with [cobrandedpackagename]. Please uninstall [cobrandedpackagename] as well.” (Brackets included in the error message.) Now it says “The installation is missing the file instopts.dat. Setup will now exit. For more information, please visit wwww.symantec.com/install” [sic].

I’ve done an online virus scan with trendmicro housecall, which didn’t find much. Programs like mcaffee internet security and personal firewall are also not working now, and their uninstalls failed.

Certain run commands do not work anymore, such as cmd.exe and compmgmt.msc. Browsing to their location and double clicking does not work either. I get the error “Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the file.”
I read here that nconvert.exe can generate this error for cmd.exe if it does not have the right permissions. However, I can’t find this file.

My user accounts window was completely blank, until I read here that running “regsvr32 jscript.dll” will solve this issue.

However, now that I can access user accounts, it looks like my account is completely normal, administrator with all rights.

I guess my next step is to find my hard drive device driver and do a repair install of windows.

–Update-

I read that the sircam worm can corrupt rundll and .exe files, especially if you try to repair it with symantec norton, but their removal tool scaned my machine and couldn’t find it.
I didn’t want to run a system restore because I’d uninstalled antivirus programs and was afraid this would give me all sorts of errors (it has in the past). So I dug up my SCSI/ultra ATA hard drive drivers and did a repair install of windows.

47 updates later, it looks like I’m running smoothly again. I think I’ll try mcaffee instead of norton.

I may have had more luck fiddling with permissions before doing the reinstall. I didn’t try these but it looks as though there are some fixes on this page:

http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm

It also had a replacement cmd.exe that worked for me when my system was acting up. It’s a useful resource.

Even though my computer’s normal again I’ll leave this as unsolved because I don’t know what caused the problem.