service fuse does not support chkconfig
error: %preun(fuse-2.7.4-3.fc11.x86_64) scriptlet failed, exit status 1

Trying to manually remove the fuse package with yum gets you nowhere fast:

Running Transaction
service fuse does not support chkconfig
Error in PREUN scriptlet in rpm package fuse
fuse-2.7.4-3.fc11.x86_64 was supposed to be removed but is not!

Using `rpm -e` produces the exact same error as package-cleanup (which is because package-cleanup was merely passing through the error message it received from rpm). Fortunately the –noscripts paramter to rpm can be used to force the uninstall.

rpm -e –noscripts fuse-2.7.4-3.fc11.x86_64 fuse-2.8.1-1.fc11.x86_64

After the rpm command was executed in this manner, package-cleanup also would run to completion with out any errors. But it has a funny idea about what completion is; there are still 433  .fc11 rpms lying about. Most of these packages are from third party repos such as RPM fusion. A yum update ought to fix it and indeed the applying 684MB of updates resulted in all but 68 of the fedora 11 rpms disappearing from the system. Some of these are old kernels/kernels headers which can be removed with `package-cleanup –oldkernels` that still leaves around 60 rpms that you might have to manually uninstall and re install. You might also right the following simple command to remove them all en mass:

yum remove `rpm -qa | grep fc11`

The only catch is that it might remove some other important packages but putting those back in might be easier than removing 60 rpms one at a time. BTW why are these rpms tagged as FC11 or FC12, with FC standing for Fedora Core when the OS itself is no longer called Fedora Core? That name hasn’t been used for ages. Now it’s just Fedora

Every Fedora upgrade introduces more problems than it solves which makes you wonder if this is any different from Windows. The new features are usually not even worthy of a blog post and an upgrade never goes smoothly. So why bother? Well each time I install a new version, I sweart that I will skip the next upgrade but after six months of using a buggy OS, you get tired of it and want to get those problems fixed the new version will usually do that but introduce a new set of problems.

The major issue with the current version F11 is that X server keeps crashing for no apparent reason. Ctrl-Alt-backspace (annoyingly disabled in most new xorg versions, you need to enable it by editing the key mappings) will not kill the server. Ctrl-Alt F2 , F3 etc will not get you a console. Yet the machine is not dead. You can very easily SSH into it from another computer. You can even kill x from the shell but X refuses to die. Well it does die but the screen does not change. It remains steadfastly stuck on the last screen that you worked on. Even those annoying Ajax spinners are frozen for once. The only fix is to go all the way down to runlevel one and then do an init 5 from there. But who has the patience of all that stuff? I usually just hit the reboot button.

So my desktop, which once upon a long ago would run continuously for weeks at a time, now needs to be restarted several times a day. One sad day, X crashed thrice. Surely even m$ can do better than that?

If that’s not bad enough the update makes things worse. X wouldn’t start at all. There is absolutely nothing in the Xorg.log file either but it would start up when you type startx from the shell! explain that!!

I suspect the reason has lots to do with F11 and F12 RPMS getting mixed up. Each Fedora installation leaves an unbelievable number of packages from the previous version lying around. This version has left 581 F11 rpms behind. The worst was when the first 64bit version came out. There were so many 32bit RPMs left behind that almost nothing would  run, even the boot process got stuck.

In the past I got so fed up with fedora that I even tried Ubuntu and Debian only to find that they are even more annoying.

After successfully copying her old files the first thing she tried was to start Thunderbird to check mail. Where the heck is Thunderbird on this thing? Well it’s not there. Ezy Slim Top ships with a customized version of Ubuntu. I have never been a fan of Ubuntu but surely the Thunderbird package is included in the Ubuntu DVD? why couldn’t those Moron’s install it? I told my friend all she needed to do was to download the tarball, expand it, look for a file called thunderbird or mozilla-thunderbird or something similar and just click on it, it will run. No dice. She says nothing happens! She was adamant that she did everything right. I was getting rather irritated with her but finally asked her to send it over for me to have a look. What happens when I click on the thunderbird binary? nothing!

Thunderbired fails silently but when your run it from the command line a set of errors about missing stdc++ libraries show up. The obvious thing to do is to install Thunderbird with apt-get. That will result in all the dependencies being installed. But for that you need the root password. Or do you? Well on Ubuntu you can do without the root password. They encourage using sudo instead of a root login. Sudo will prompt you for a password but what you need to enter is your own password. Right so what is the default user’s password? no one knows!

This Slim Top is configured to login automatically with the default user account (named ezy) and that default user’s password is not included anywhere you cannot look it up from the website cause they don’t have a website. The day the product was launched, their site just said ‘coming soon…’ and that’s all you can still find on the it more than a month later.

Any password can be reset by booting up in single user mode. When I tried it, I was sent a weird recovery console with an even weirder keyboard mapping. So rebooted giving bash as the init script (of course you can use any other shell too (append init=/bin/bash in the grub bootup line)). I reset the password for both the accounts and rebooted. Yet, no matter how I try, it refuses to accept the passwords that I just chose!

I rebooted again and reset the passwords again, still sudo and su both refuse my password. I tried for a third time, This time, I checked the /etc/shadow file before and after the reset to make sure that the changes have taken place. They haven’t, the hash is exactly the same. It was then that it occurred to me that the file system might be mounted in read only mode. It is. So I remounted in R/W mode and reset the passwords one more time. This time it worked but why didn’t the passwd program produce an error when the file system was mounted in read only mode? All this hassle could have been avoided if they had included the password in the booklet (well handbill more likely) that comes with the computer.

The next day, I returned the computer to the owner but only to receive another complaint; the printer doesn’t work. Shouldn’t they be complaining to the vendor? well the vendor doesn’t have a clue. Wearily I asked her to send it back (by this time, I had forgotten the password so had to go through the reset process one more time). The printer is an HP 1020, it has a driver for linux (name foo2zjs). On their site, they say in bold letters: “DON’T USE the foo2zjs package from: Ubuntu, SUSE, Mandrake/Manrivia, Debian, RedHat, …”. Now if easy Slim Top ships with a customized version of Ubuntu, why can’t they replace the bad driver from the install DVD and replace it with the direct download from the site?

These are two issues that any ordinary user will not be able to solve on their own. Others encountering these sort of problems probably format the machine and install XP or Vista on it. Vista would crawl and XP wouldn’t be much better and it would most likely be a pirate copy of windows as well. So by this half baked approach to linux, Browns is harming both linux and themselves.

I don’t quite see the need to convert the applets in the applet cache in this manner. What the heck is the conversion anyway? any applet compiled with java 1.4+ will run on Java 6 (though the reverse is not true).

Sri Lanka supposedly has three authorized agents for Apple products but I seriously doubt if Apple Inc is even aware of their existence. Come to think of it, Steve Jobs and other blokes at Apple might be vaguely aware of a place call Mexico and another called Canada but they are blissfully unaware of the world outside (still trying to figure out how macs ended up being manufactured in China). So it’s no surprise that we don’t have an official apple store for Sri Lanka. I ordered from the US one giving the address of a friend in New York. That was on the 26th of August. My friend re posted it when he got his hands on it and it arrived in Colombo yesterday. Today I tried to upgrade my system and now I am beginning to regret it.

After backing up, changing the boot device and going through the first few steps of the installer, I was presented with this very annoying message:

That’s right, the installer doesn’t like the partition system. Less than a month ago, the drive on my macbook pulled a hamstring when I replaced it, I created three partitions, intending to restore the existing tiger installation on one of them, I planned to put Fedora on the second (but didn’t because the Fedora DVD wouldn’t boot on the macbook (more on that later)) and third was kept aside to install Leopard or Snow Leopard. Apparently the partition table type cannot now be changed without losing all the data on the drive. Very annoying but I decided to go ahead with it cause I have bakups.

The bakup was created with rsync (yeah I am a linux man), in hindsight, it would have been much better to use superduper instead cause at the ‘migrate your old stuff’ stage, the installer didn’t detect the contents of the external drive on which the bakups were placed. I said never mind and skipped it. It was only after booting up that I realized what a fool I’ve been. iPhoto, one of the most usefull products on OS X is missing. Yeah right iPhoto, which is part of iLife is bundled with all new Macs but if you lose your copy you need to cough up another USD 79 for it.

I am switching to Adobe Air because JavaFX as a failed technology. Air impressed at first look. It felt as though I could take to Air like a duck taking to water – that’s the way it should have been with JavaF(ailed)X but it wasn’t. After playing with Air/Aptana for a while, I put it on the back burner and returned to it today. Now my first weak attempt at creating an air application seems to have fallen into a black hole. Soon as you hit the run button, Aptana blinks but nothing happens. The application doesn’t run and there is nothing in the console. Other than the rather unhelpfull message that the application has terminated. After hitting the run button another half a dozen times, I decided to run it manually using ADL. Lo and Behold there is a more informative message:

Application crashed with an unhandled SIGSEGV
Crashlog has been dumped in /tmp/airCrashLogs/0720_1545_U87bom

It was then that I looked into the /tmp/airCrashlogs folder and found it full of them. While the log is human readable, there wasn’t anything in it that this human could understand. At the top there is a list of libraries that have been loaded as long as your arm:

00110000-0013e000 r-xp 00000000 08:02 161955                             /lib/libssl3.so
0013e000-00140000 rw-p 0002d000 08:02 161955                             /lib/libssl3.so
00140000-00142000 r-xp 00000000 08:02 108463                             /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libpk-gtk-module.so
00142000-00143000 rw-p 00001000 08:02 108463                             /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libpk-gtk-module.so
00143000-00220000 r-xp 00000000 08:02 14617                              /lib/libglib-2.0.so.0.2000.3
00220000-00221000 rw-p 000dd000 08:02 14617                              /lib/libglib-2.0.so.0.2000.3
00223000-00226000 r-xp 00000000 08:02 5004                               /lib/libgmodule-2.0.so.0.2000.3
00226000-00227000 rw-p 00002000 08:02 5004                               /lib/libgmodule-2.0.so.0.2000.3
00229000-0022d000 r-xp 00000000 08:02 161964                             /lib/libgthread-2.0.so.0.2000.3
0022d000-0022e000 rw-p 00003000 08:02 161964                             /lib/libgthread-2.0.so.0.2000.3
0022e000-00232000 r-xp 00000000 08:02 103228                             /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libcanberra-gtk-module.so
00232000-00233000 rw-p 00003000 08:02 103228                             /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libcanberra-gtk-module.so
00233000-002c2000 r-xp 00000000 08:02 102488                             /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6.3.20
002c2000-002c6000 rw-p 0008e000 08:02 102488                             /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6.3.20

Right at the bottom is the business end of the crashlog. There it has this bit of information:

/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xe7c082]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xe70572]
[0x161410]

/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xca37cb]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xca3811]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xca4a19]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xd8499e]
[0xf48f6714]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xf5b638]
[0xf450bf66]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xfaee1c]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xf5b638]
[0xf45089c8]

/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xfaee1c]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xf5cea1]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xf7546c]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xdc771d]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xdc789e]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xc045fa]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xc1704f]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so(ADLEntryMain+0xd8) [0xc17366]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/adl(__gxx_personality_v0+0x3ab) [0x8048bf3]
/lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe6) [0x8e8a66]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/adl(__gxx_personality_v0+0x49) [0x8048891]

Again this is nothing that I could make use of. So I tried running the application from the command line using adl only to run into the same error. Next up I tried running it as root and it worked! Now this app is nothing more than a simple hello world. It worked perfectly the last time I ran it but today it will not run. Same goes with TweetDeck, one time it was working fine but now it also causes a core dump. Of course the culprit here is the Air runtime rather than TweetDeck or Aptana or even my own hello world. Wish they would fix it soon or at least provide a less verbose but more usefull error message so that I can figure it out.

Note: An internal error has occurred in the OpenJFX compiler. Please file a bug at the
Openjfx-compiler issues home (https://openjfx-compiler.dev.java.net/Issues)
after checking for duplicates. Include in your report:
- the following diagnostics
- file /tmp/javafx_err_532302993941075447.txt
- and if possible, the source file which triggered this problem.
Thank you.
/home/raditha/jbproject/FX/f1/src/FileTest.fx:19: VFLGS$0 is not public in FileTest.PGNGame; cannot be accessed from outside package
class PGNGame {
1 error
ERROR: javafxc execution failed, exit code: 1
/home/raditha/jbproject/FX/f1/nbproject/build-impl.xml:143: exec returned: 255
BUILD FAILED (total time: 3 seconds)

Well, I am going to file a bug report as they suggest? Most definitely not. For one thing, I don’t have the time to search for duplicates and file a report with hundreds of gory details including steps to reproduce the bug only to hear an idiotic developer say, it’s not a bug report but something we have done wrong. Then 23 other people have to file the same report and 7 of them have to argue with the said developer before they finally agree to look into it and then release an update four months down the line.

I hate M$ but I will be delighted to see SilverLight just bury JavaFX.

It’s a good thing the seats have to be comfortable because you have to wait. You have to get a token and wait for them to call your number. I waited for nearly half and hour before finally calling it quits the number progressed by only 4 during that time and there was two more to go before my number was to be called. All that waiting is just to hand over the phone to the agent  at the counter. He will then look at it, ask a few questions and send it to the backroom. You have to wait again until the backroom boys take a look and get back with their comments. All in all the process seems to take about two hours. To make matters worse, there are eight counters but only six of them were staffed. This sort of thing has become a standard practice in Sri Lanka no one seems to realize that time is money.

Later, the phone was sent back to Nokia Care with someone who was prepared to spend two hours there. Now it’s in their hands let’s see how it goes. As a footnote, it must be mentioned that Amazon really is a customer-centric company. They readily agreed to refund the money but we chose to get the phone fixed instead of sending it back because sending it back wasn’t practical.

As fate would have it the faulty drive was the very drive that had the ‘/’ partition. All the files in it were rsynced onto the new drive after booting with the DVD in rescue mode. The /etc/fstab file was edited, taking care to use the UUID instead of the drive name. That’s necessary because plugging / un-plugging drives causes their drive letters to change. I kept the old drive in but booted off the new drive and used it for a couple of days before unplugging it. That’s when I started getting a blank screen on bootup.

It was time to reboot with the DVD and to try to update grub. Yet grub installed refused to do it’s task:

Could not find device for

Now that message appears to be truncated. There should be a device name at the end but it’s simply not there. I had very foolishly formatted the drive as ext4 I am beginning to think that Fedora 11 isn’t quite ready for it yet. Even so the /boot partition is ext2 (the Fedora installer refused to format it as ext4)

Then I found a post which explains how to manually installed grub. Even after following those steps, all i got was just another blank screen on boot up. I tried once more and installed the boot loader into all three of the drives I have. Then toggling through the boot sequence, I finally managed to get a grub menu on bootup instead of blank screen. I suppose you can call that progress. By manually entering the kernel and initrd parameters, I could now get the machine to progress into the next step, only to see it freeze up just before the services are started.

Fedora 11 official release is just a few days away. The easiest thing at this stage would probably be to just wait for it, But I decided to take the plunge and reinstall with the preview DVD.  Even then the installer bailed out several times apparently it’s a time zone problem (more on that later). Once I sorted that out the installer proceeded very quickly probably because it recognized the RPMs that were already installed.

I have a working machine once again, even though it still refuses to run VLC or tweetdeck and crashes when you try to use Mplayer.

While denying it’s a known issue, they are happy to fix it but the only catch is they want the phone to be sent to the US. Why is that? well my father bought it for me while in the US a little over a month ago. The prices charged by the local agents are atrocious and the E71 like many other Nokias costs about 40% more over here.

Unfortunately neither me nor my father have any immediate plans of a US visit. Claiming warranties from any Sri Lankan company is like pulling teeth so I am not keeping my fingers cross about being able to get this fixed free of charge from the local agents.

This is not my first bad experience with Nokia phones. A 6151 I had sometime ago just fell apart. It’s keyboard broke, the power button wore out and ringer stopped working. After that I had a lot of trouble with an E51 as well.

This is in stark contrast to Siemens phones that I used long ago. They were virtually indestructible. I had an M55 which I dropped at least 40 times. I used to throw it up in the air and catch it like a ball. It was supposed to be shock proof. It really was.

VLC media player 1.0.0-rc1 Goldeneye
Bus error

Tried to do a yum update hoping that this is a bug that has been fixed.

Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
Setting up Update Process
Resolving Dependencies
–> Running transaction check
—> Package rpmfusion-free-release.noarch 0:11-1 set to be updated
—> Package x264.x86_64 0:0.65-9_20090117.2245.fc10_92 set to be updated
–> Processing Dependency: libx264.so.67()(64bit) for package: vlc-core
–> Finished Dependency Resolution
vlc-core-1.0.0-0.5rc1.fc11.x86_64 from installed has depsolving problems
–> Missing Dependency: libx264.so.67()(64bit) is needed by package vlc-core-1.0.0-0.5rc1.fc11.x86_64 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: libx264.so.67()(64bit) is needed by package vlc-core-1.0.0-0.5rc1.fc11.x86_64 (installed)
You could try using –skip-broken to work around the problem
You could try running: package-cleanup –problems
package-cleanup –dupes
rpm -Va –nofiles –nodigest

At the end of the error message it provides some suggestions unfortunately none of them worked. I did a yum whatprovides to find out what the missing RPM might be. There are several possible candidates and most of them appear to be for Fedora 10. I picked one almost by random and tried to install it and got the exact same error produced above. Hello! The very reason I am trying to install this RPM because the shared object is not there so don’t tell me that it’s not there!

I tried removing VLC and trying to put it back in again. That resulted in the above yum error going away, but it failed to make the vlc error go away.

Then I found the installed 264 libraries and yum removed them

yum remove x264-libs-0.0.0-0.24.20090319gitc109c8.fc11.x86_64 libx264_65-0.65-9_20090117.2245.fc10_92.x86_64

There were  a lot of dependencies and nearly all of them were F10 rpms. These were also removed by yum. Then I re installed vlc one more time. This time a lot of dependencies were installed which had the .f11 tag in their filenames. The installation wasn’t successful.

Transaction Check Error:
file /usr/lib64/libfaad.so.2.0.0 from install of faad2-libs-1:2.7-1.fc11.x86_64 conflicts with file from package libfaad2-1:2.7-16.fc10_92.x86_64
file /usr/lib64/libavutil.so.49.15.0 from install of ffmpeg-libs-0.5-2.fc11.x86_64 conflicts with file from package libavutil49-0.5-30.fc10_92.x86_64
file /usr/lib64/libswscale.so.0.7.1 from install of ffmpeg-libs-0.5-2.fc11.x86_64 conflicts with file from package libswscale0-0.5-30.fc10_92.x86_64
file /usr/lib64/libpostproc.so.51.2.0 from install of ffmpeg-libs-0.5-2.fc11.x86_64 conflicts with file from package libpostproc51-0.5-30.fc10_92.x86_64

Error Summary

Removed these offending RPMs and trying installing VLC one more time. The installation was successful but vlc still refuses to start. Time to give up on this.

[root@localhost ~]# /home/raditha/Download/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
Error loading the runtime (libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)

[root@localhost ~]# yum install libgtk-x11

No package libgtk-x11 available

this is because adobe air needs 32bit libraries (lame or what? ). In the past I have had trouble mixing 32 and 64 bit libraries but I decided to risk is and installed the 32 bit version manually with yum install gtk2-2.16.1-4.fc11.i586 even then  the installer still fails.

Error loading the runtime (libxml2.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)

I tried to fix it with:

yum whatprovides “*/libxml2.so.2″

yum install libxml2-2.7.3-2.fc11.i586

Only to run into another error or rather a series of errors.

All this lead to another round of yum install commands which resulted in about 60 MB of additional downloads.

yum install libcanberra-gtk2-0.12-1.fc11.i586.rpm
yum install PackageKit-gtk-module-0.4.6-8.fc11.i586
yum install bug-buddy-2.26.0-2.fc11.i586

and this leads to another inevitable series of error messages

Is it any wonder that ordinary people don’t use linux? This error had to be overcome by manually installing gweather using the rpm command and the –nodeps and –force flags. That had to be followed by installing the 32 bit version of the GTK engine. After doing all this what do I get? Another error of course.

Please contact your administrator. What I am supposed to do give myself a call? After a lot of googling I discovered that the air installer will put more detailed error messages into a log file but only if a file by the name of ~/.airinstall exists on your system! how lame is that? JavaFX is bad enough but this is ridiculous. The error message was certainly detailed but not very useful.

Performing runtime install
UI SWF load is complete
UI initialized
starting user confirmation
runtime install entering error state: [ErrorEvent type="error" bubbles=false cancelable=false eventPhase=2 text="Unhandled e
xception TypeError: Error #1009" errorID=1009]
begin quitting

Now it’s the time for me to begin quitting too – there is nothing about this error on google or even on the adobe site.

The Nokia E71 is a feature rich smart phone but it also happens to be a lemon. Mine is barely a month old and already the camera has stopped working. A few days ago, when I clicked the camera button, it responded by producing a blank screen I assumed this was because the battery was too low (in other phones, I have seen the phone refuse to switch the camera on, with a low battery). I connected it to the charger and left it for a couple of hours to find that the battery had completely run down and the phone had switched off. Yes it switched off on it’s own, while being plugged in. Then it refused to switch back on.

Apparently the E71 refusing to switch on is a known issue. There are plenty of google entries for it and plenty of posts in the Nokia forums. I had seen this behavior with my old E51 as well but that phone fell into a water tank, so I blamed all it’s problems on being soaked. It now seems more likely to have been inherent problems – problems common to all E series phones.

The ‘E71 refuses to switch on’ issue can be solved by taking out the battery, putting it back and then leaving it to be charged for a couple of hours again. A day passed before I needed to use the camera again now instead of a blank screen I get an error message ‘Camera: feature not supported’.

Apparently this is not something new either. There are plenty of Google entry and Nokia forum posts on it. The E71 is not the only phone effected either. Other E series phones are effected too ( example the e66 ). If you dig deeper you find that it’s not just an E Series issue but lots of other models have this problem too!!!  It’s irresponsible for Nokia to sell phones with this known issue which has been reported as far back to early 2008

This domain (raditha.com stopped resolving all of a sudden. After some investigation, I tracked this down to a problem at godaddy. The dns record had apparently been deleted (as indicated by dig and nslookup).

; <<>> DiG 9.2.1 <<>> raditha.com
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 6742
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;raditha.com.                   IN      A

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
com.                    7270    IN      SOA     a.gtld-servers.net. nstld.verisign-grs.com. 1141087291 1800 900 604800 900

;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 67.131.250.9#53(67.131.250.9)
;; WHEN: Tue Feb 28 09:20:25 2006
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 102

After being put on hold for more than 5 minutes the customer support representative who answered the phone, insisted the problem was with the DNS server. I had to explain to him (name is Don, he refused to give his last name, I can understand why) what these dig and nslookup results mean.

Obviously you will exepct that a customer support staffer at an organization such as goaddy should be aware of these things. I can't make up my mind what's worse, godaddy or google adwords support.

After being on hold for another five minutes the same person informs me that the problem has been identified and fixed. Yet he would not tell me what the problem was. After inisisting that he explain the problem I was placed on hold for another five minutes. This time he came back with an explaination which he claimed he himself did not understand. Obviously he could not explain things clearly to me.

All in all I had to spend about 30 minutes on the phone. Even after all that it took another 18 hours for the domain to be fully active. Needless to say, I am extremely disapointed with their service and now I am transferring my domains one by one to Webquarry

Then on Thursday, the third hard disk on my computer decided to follow in the footsteps of her two siblings and started to complain about DriveReady SeekComplete Errors. A whole day was wasted switching hard drives.

In the midst of all this my hosting company recieved a DMCA takedown notice for one of the pages on this blog. The post certainly does not violate any copyright or trademark law. It was merely a rant about another hosting company that claims to do things prompto but does the exact opposite. I could have easily goto courts and win but my only gain would have been a lighter purse after the lawyers have been paid off. So I decided to take down the page pronto.

Then it was the turn of the raditha.com domain. This site was inaccessible for more than 36 hours due to a bungling by godaddy. Initially I thought the problem was with the DNS server but it wasn’t. I ended up virtually explaining how the domain name syste works to a support staffer at godaddy who finally admitted there was a problem.

Finally I was looking forward to getting back to work with a vengence today after all these distractions but that was not to be. There was an eight hour power cut.

Recently we found that the number of clicks reported in the google adwords reporting area for the content network and the number of entries in our log file for pagead2.googlesyndication.com did not tally. Further investigations revealed a large number of entries from a certain website. On visiting their site our ad was being shown. We do not wish to advertise on this site and promptly added it to the site filters for all our campaigns.

The ads continued to be diaplayed on that site and we continue to get clicks from that site. So I decided to contact google and tell them about it. We recieved a canned response about how we should add the site to our filters!! Naturally I was annoyed and retorted that this has already been done. The same moron then replied that we should add the site to all our campaigns.

That message can be excused since this particular googl employee is so obviously a moron. What cannot be excused is this statement:

1) I never mentioned anything about blogs in my own mails.

2) The support staffer is clueless about google’s systm and he is blissfully unaware that it is not always possible for a advertiser to see his own ad.

Google is either becoming arrogant, complacent or both. Either way this is not the end of the story.