Steve’s Blog

Well, I finally got my 16-bit wireless card, a Netgear MA401.  I plugged it into the laptap and prepared myself for a struggle to get in configured and running.  I needn’t have worried.  Linux detected and configured the card at boot time.  No problems at all.  Very nice.  Next I needed to set the encryption keys and so forth.  This was bit more of a challenge but only because the configuration utility (WLAN setup tool from the control panel) used slightly different terminology that I was used to from the Windows world.  The whole setup from start to finish took less than 10 minutes.  Sweet!

I have a number of ActiveX controls that I have written in Delphi 5.  These things have been stable for so long that when I had to make a change to one recently, I found that I had completely forgotten how to re-import the control into the Delphi IDE.  It’s not that this is difficult to do but it is a tad obscure.  So, just in case I forget how to do it again, I am going to document the procedure here.

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Once I got the basic operating system working it was time to see if I could use this for the intended purpose, that is, dumping photos from my digital camera and previewing them.  A minimum of poking around resulted in success.

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Once I got Damn Small Linux installed to my laptop I needed to get the network working.  I decided to use the DWL-650 wireless adapter that I was using for another laptop since it was readily available and it was listed as one of the adapters that worked with DSL “out of the box”.  So, I plugged it in and guess what?  It didn’t work.  Oh Joy!

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I recently had a need (OK not so much a need as a desire) to breath some life back into an old laptop.  I wanted to have an ultra cheap laptop that I could lug around to preview photos from my digital camera, browse the web, check my email, etc.  I wanted something cheap enough that if it got trashed or stolen while travelling that I wouldn’t care.  Since I had an old 233 MHz MMX AMD with a 2GB hard drive and 64MB RAM that was gathering dust in a closet because it couldn’t run any version of Windows newer that Win98 I decided to see what could be done with it.

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Every time I use the TTinyDB component I get bitten by the same bug (or feature depending on your view point).

When you create a TinyDB table, it automatically creates a primary index using the first autoincrement field that it finds in the table.  Any index that you may have defined in IndexDefs with the ixPrimary option set is ignored.  User defined indices with ixPrimay set are ignored even if there is no autoincrement field and hence no automatically generated primary index.  Every time I run across this bizarre behaviour I waste the better part of a day trying to figure out what the heck is going on.  So this time, I am writing it down in the hopes that next time I will remember.

In my last post on this topic, I stated that it appeared as though IIS was not switching to the internet guest account properly. After much aggravation we finally discovered that the problem had nothing to do with the internet guest account’s permissions. The actual problem was a faulty printer driver, believe it or not. One of the printer drivers had a memory leak that eventually caused the kernel non-paged pool to become exhausted. Once that happens, IIS stops processing web requests. We downloaded and installed the latest versions of all of the printer drivers and the problem seems to be gone. Fingers crossed.