Pixeldown

Something happened when I was sending a newsletter recently... the test messages were not arriving at their destinations as they normally would. After a little research, I discovered my IP address had been blacklisted as a spam source, and my test mails were being returned.

A machine behind the firewall been compromised and was participating in a botnet - it has since been fixed.

I found a useful web site that reports the lists where my IP address existed as a spam source. The site is My IP (whatismyipaddress.com) It appears to have other IP tools and related articles that might be useful.

I previously used dnsstuff.com to do these lookups, however they require a membership now (free) and it's just one more user/pass I need to remember. No user/pass is faster.

According to the lists my IP address has been blacklisted on, the record should expire from between 3 and 7 days. Some lists offered removal requests, which I took advantage of, some even offered immediate removal for a fee. I will not be sending a message to my list subscribers until this blows over because changing will be a huge hassle.

The pixel was down today!

Adobe Illustrator 11 would lock up Initializing plug-ins...Illustrator.exe - but really it was mostly random lockups when starting, it wasn't always at illustrator.exe

FYI: Windows XP Pro

What worked for me was removing the 60,000 ACR*.tmp files in "C:\Documents and Settings\[USER]\Local Settings\Temp" Update: 2008-02-04 if you have a large number of temp files, it's faster and easier to remove them via command line.

Other things I tried were

Renaming C:\Documents and Settings\[USER]\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe

Renaming C:\Program Files\Adobe

Re-installing Illustrator, then the entire CS1 Suite

Trimming fonts down under 1,000 fonts.

But that stuff didn't work - removing the temp files fixed things up.

Hopefully if you have problems starting or running Illustrator, this will help you.

Leave a comment if this helps you.

Cheers

I know. OK. I know.

But I use photoshop, and lightroom. That's it, really. Therefore, a Mac would do the same thing I would do with a PC, but it's prettier, unharmed by the gazillion windows viruses, and the OS is extremely well designed. Plus it's pretty and client demonstrations start as soon as the computer boots.

But they're twice the price.

In true pixel down fashion, pixeldown.net was down for an extended period of time. There are very good reasons for this

The server changed
The SQL password was wrong
I didn't look into it
I didn't look into it
I didn't look into it

I maintain a rather large mailing list for the company I work for. Recently we've been using an open source mailer system with manual list maintenance. The reply-to address and the message envelope address are different, and they have never been published publicly on the Internet.

But man... do these unpublished addresses get a lot of spam.

I think, probably, the biggest source of this spam is mailing list subscribers who's computers have been compromised by some flavor of malware, spyware or virus. The rouge software is harvesting email addresses from address books and visited web sites. The program runs in the background and sends out a whack of spam for as long as your computer is on and connected to the Internet.

The spam these compromised computers are sending is getting hard and harder to filter increasingly stealing bandwidth to carry it's payload. Most recently, PDF attachments.

Do yourself, and the rest of the world a favor; be sure your computer isn't part of the problem by installing a trusted anti virus program such as Avast (http://www.avast.com). Avast is free for personal home use. There's no good reason (other than Linux or Apple OS) to have a personal computer unprotected.

Amazon.ca wishlist update...

Sorted by priority.

Ugh... I bought a new DVD drive with LightScribe capabilities about a month ago. I needed a faster drive to help me do more frequent backups of my photos.

The drive worked flawlessly for DVD and CD writing. Today I bought LightScribe CD's (at an outrageous cost of more than $2 per disc) and tried to burn my first label.

During the print preview, I was presented with an error similar to this:

A communication error occurred with the LightScribe Drive (or device)

After a couple of hours downloading updates, installing firmware, uninstalling and reinstalling I finally found the culprit.

It appears that the Intel Application Accelerator causes problems with LightScribe software. Stupid as that may sound. I discovered this by downloading and running the LightsScribe diaganostics software from http://www.lightscribe.com .

After uninstalling, I'm successfully labeling my first $2 disc. Four minutes until I get to witness the monochromatic supreme-ness that is LightScribe.

yay.

I ran into a problem while working on a computer with a suspected system file corruption. When running sfc.exe /scannow the system would prompt me for the XP Professional CD. This was an installation of XP home. I made the changes in the appropriate inf file to fix the Home asking for Professional CD, but no joy.

So I followed a couple of other suggests to fix this problem... one was to copy the I386 files to C: and then update the "SourcePath" in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup to C:\.

That didn't work. However, I did notice that the values that already existed in for that key pointed to D:. The computer had second drive intalled changing the CD-ROM to E:\.

To fix the problem, I changed
SourcePath to E:\
ServicePackSourcePath to E:\
and updated any drive in the Installation Sources key to to E:. Seems to be working as I type this.

Hopefully this will fix the original problem I am trying to diagnose, which is unrelated.

Perhaps this belongs in tech, but my point is not technical.

Say hello to my new laser printer. It is a LaserJet 1018 by Hewlett Packard. If I take the toner cartridge out of it, the carcus is worth four bucks.



I bought it on sale at Futureshop for only $89.99 before taxes. It comes with a year warranty, and an HP 12A toner cartridge worth $85.99.

Is that incentive to buy consumables instead of upgrading to the next $90 printer?

This is so environmentally wrong it's sickening. But you can help. Take your cartridge(s) to be recycled and buy a recycled toner cartridge from datarite when it comes time.

Insane.

I'm already getting trackback spam on archived entries. Shitty.

Wahoo!!! All updated and fresh. I had to take things down for a while because I was super old versions of serendipity, the blogging software, and gallery, my photo album software.

I just finished updating serendipity in two steps, and gallery in just one. Fantastic.

So... enjoy... I guess!

At work, I send out newsletter to a rather large mailing list. Naturally, the subscribers list contains a number of hotmail email addresses.

Each time I prepare to send out a message, I first send it to a list of email my own email addresses, hotmail, gmail, yahoo mail, outlook express and Thunderbird.

When viewing the last message with Firefox it displayed strangely in the full version of Windows Live Mail. When scrolling the html message, every 'click' of the scroll mouse would leave a white line across the message about 1 pixel in height; full width of the message. It seems to mostly fall between text lines. Every few lines of text would get walked on by this mysterious white line. Images would display all of the white lines.

This doesn't happen when viewing the message in Internet Explorer 6/7 using full version WLM.

I've stripped the html code down to something quite simple and yet the white line persists.

So. In conclusion, it appears something changed in WLM that causes firefox to add a 1px white line with every scroll down.



update: problem still exists in Firefox 2.0.0.4, and I have verified that it also happens under Linux (Ubuntu 5.x). This does not appear to be OS dependant.

The day is what you make it.

I no longer need

**
MANFROTTO 055 PRO BLACK TRIPOD 210-PROB @ carsand.com
Manfrotto 322RC2 Ball Head @ Vistek.ca
BK-5 VH Flip Bracket with Tilt Bar and Bag
Off-Camera Shoe Cord 2 II
Translucent Diffuser ; Thank you, Amber.
**


I still need:
**
Lowepro Stealth Reporter D650AW @ Vistek.ca
Amazon.ca wish list

For Windows XP.

I have a backup task that runs daily and another backup that runs monthly. I needed to replicate this backup procedure on a windows server in Alberta. The easiest method was to cut/paste the tasks from scheduled tasks to a directory, zip it up and email it to myself. Once I unzipped the content, I simply pasted the .job files into task scheduler on the Alberta server. You will need to update the user/password for the user that the task runs under. Because of the -3 difference in time zones, I also needed to modify the run times as well.

Quick and easy.