Recently, I was looking around for a mellotron simulation that I could use as a VST Instrument. It turns out there is a free one available at Tweakbench. The instrument, Tapeworm. It features flute, strings, choir and brass based on remasters of original mellotron sounds.
The original sounds themselves are available from this site.
If you’ve been trying to update using LiveUpdate, you may have received the dreaded LU1812 errors when attempting to download Norton Antivirus and Symantec Common Client upgrades. I say dreaded as Symantec’s bogus solution to this problem is to uninstall and reinstall the software. This takes too long for my tastes (although I tried it three times unsucessfully.) And since the automatons in Symantec support were consitutionally incapable of offering any real assistance, I decided to fix it myself.
My first attempts were to decompose the update packages that LiveUpdate downloads. They are in RAR format. Each one contains a batch file with the extension .DIS. If you look inside one, you see that most of the update packages do something like the following:
Since this looked simple enough, I tried extracting the update package to a temporary directory and running each command line manually. It seemed to work, as checking the Common Client dlls and exes showed that the version numbers had changed. Unfortunately, LiveUpdate didn’t seem to recognize that the update had already run and continues to unsucessfully run the the same update.
So, the manual solution doesn’t seem to to work too well for my purposes. Then I remembered reading something about uninstalling the software, turning on dos-style 8.3 names, and reinstalling. The problem with this is that it doesn’t really work, as if any path needed by LiveUpdate is pre-existing, it won’t be assigned an 8.3 name in the process of reinstalling. For example, if “Documents and Settings” doesn’t already have an 8.3 name, the turning on 8.3 names in the registry isn’t going to set an 8.3 name for you – the setting only applies to new files and directories, all the existing stuff is unchanged
However XP has a way to set an 8.3 name to a file or directory after the fact. To do it, you use a program called ‘fsutil.exe’ It should already be installed on your system. Running it opens a variety of disk and file operations. The utility is very easy to use as it always explains itself. Running fsutil alone gets you the following:
behavior         Control file system behaviorÂ
dirty            Manage volume dirty bit
file             File specific commands
fsinfo           File system information
hardlink         Hardlink management
objectid         Object ID management
quota            Quota management
reparsepoint     Reparse point management
sparse           Sparse file control
usn              USN management
volume           Volume management
Running ‘fsutil file:’
findbysid          Find a file by security identifier
queryallocranges     Query the allocated ranges for a file
setshortname         Set the short name for a file
setvaliddata        Set the valid data length for a file
setzerodata         Set the zero data for a file
createnew            Creates a new file of a specified size
Notice the option in italics, ‘setshortname.’ This option allows you to set an 8.3 short name to an existing file or directory. The complete command is ‘fsutil file setshortname [LongFileName] [ShortFileName]
The issue with LiveUpdate is that it doesn’t deal with long file names. So, if you set every directory it might need with an 8.3 file name, it will be able to construct a working path to the update package and will update sucessfully. This means that every directory in the path “c:\Document and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\Live Update” will need an 8.3 name. So, the fix is to run the fsutil command described above on each directory in the path. You will also need to do this for all the Norton stuff in you ‘Program Files’ directories. For each directory, do a listing using ‘dir /x’ to show you whether 8.3 names are already set, if they aren’t, use the fsutil utility to set a name.
Once you do this, LiveUpdate will run sucessfully.
In response to the craziness over the Danish cartoons, an Israeli artist and comic publisher has sponsored an Anti-Semitic Cartoon Contest. As a Jewish friend of mine put it “anything you can do, we can do better.” Clearly the whole thing is thoroughly tounge-in-cheek:
“Sandy is now in the process of arranging sponsorships of large organizations, and promises lucrative prizes for the winners, including of course the famous Matzo-bread baked with the blood of Christian children.”
The New York Times reports that the 24 year-old college dropout George Deutsch has resigned from NASA. As the Scientific Activist for uncovering this story and putting an end to this.
Madehow.com has a series of excellent entries about how various products are manufactured.
The Geman magazine Spiegel has an excellent piece by Ibn Warraq about why the West must not back down.
Inhabitat.com has a fascinating entry on dimming the American night. The entry includes some very beautiful and almost other-worldly photographs by David Allee.
The Scientific Activist reports that George Deutsch did not graduate from Texas A&M. If you haven’t been following the story – a NASA climate scientist revealed last week in the New York Times that the Bush regime was attempting to silence him. In this case, the alleged perpetrator is George Deutsch, an 24-year old who was appointed by Bush to a plum-job in NASA’s public affairs department.
Of course this wouldn’t be the first Bush appointee to fudge a resume.
Christopher Hitchens posts a spot on response to the cartoon controversy. He 100% hits the nail on the head in my opinion.
As I mentioned in the previous post, one way to combat the Islamic fascists is to fight fire with fire, hence, the Illustrated Koran project idea. A similarly inspired post over at Infinite Monkeys suggests putting images of Mohammed all over cyberspace.
Reading up on wikipedia about the controversy, I came across the following “Section 140 of the Criminal Code prohibits any person from publicly ridiculing or insulting the dogmas of worship of any lawfully existing religious community in Denmark.” I am thankful that I live in a country that doesn’t prevent the “ridiculing” of religious dogmas (at least not overtly and through legal means.) I can’t think of a more ridicule-worthy law myself than this Dutch statute. Many relgious dogmas are idiotic and deserving of mass open ridicule and this incident indicates just how ridiculous things can get.
A timeline of the events is available at the Financial Times.
Religious Freaks has some pictures of the muslim response. Most chilling: A photo of a woman with a sign saying “Get Ready for the Real Holocaust.”
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