I had a machine today where IE8 would consistently crash if it attempted to install the Adobe Flash Browser by visiting http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/. As soon as the yellow bar appeared to ask the user if they wanted to install the component then Windows would pop up a crash dialogue complaining about some memory issue.
I spent a long time trying to resolve this before I found a solution.
I tried following Adobe’s instructions for uninstalling the player and attempted to re-install it. I tried disabling various IE Add-Ons from the Tools | Manage Add-ons menu. No joy – same problem every time. I even tried the Reset button on the Tools | Internet Options -> Advanced tab (careful as this can wipe important settings, make sure you know what this does). All to no avail.
I searched for a long time to find a downloadable up to date offline installer from Adobe and couldn’t find one.
Then I eventually found my solution….there is one – an offline installer that is and it’s available if you visit http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ and then click on ‘Different operating system or browser’ and follow the instructions.
It’s also available here.
As for why IE8 was crashing – I never got to the bottom of that. I did contact Microsoft but was told that they would not provide support for IE8 if the machine is connected to a domain. Not sure if that is the official line or not.
I just experienced something new – multi threading on a 2 cpu system causing an issue with an application using a serial modem on COM1.
The application threw an error along the lines of ‘noise on line’ which I didn’t quite believe and when I spoke to the software support for this app the solution was to set the process affinity to just one of the two processors in Task Manager.
A more permanent solution is to use affinity.exe which will set the process affinity as it’s launched I think – I never bothered to find out as I just moved the app to a single processor machine.
Interesting though.
I’m currently doing some work for a food manufacturing company. During various discussions we’ve been having regarding BOMs for their products it’s become evident that the food industry has to overcome various challenges that are atypical of manufacturing as a whole.
These issues centre around the following observations:
the fact that BOMs are likely made up of formula recipes rather than discrete components
that recipes tend to have yields when ingredients are cooked together.
there is a lot of added complexity regarding use by dates, food perishing, ingredient traceability, ingredient readiness (by which I’m referring to if an ingredient is frozen but needs thawing for it’s next stage of production or something similar).
Anyway – I found this short whitepaper to be extremely useful in claryfying some of these ideas and will likely refer to it again – hence it being on my blog.
After somebody asked me recently if I knew of any software to recover images from a corrupt usb drive I knew that I did but couldn’t quite remember the name of said software – well after searching my hdd I found what I used last time and it’s certainly very good as well as being Open Source. It’s available here http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
It actually works on many different file types – I used it to recover some images from a friends corrupt USB stick recently and it proved extremely useful.
I’ve just been researching the market for remote desktop support software. There’s so much out there now it’s difficult to know where to look. I like to go Open Source and found a useful list of free options here: http://www.wareprise.com/2008/11/28/list-of-free-remote-desktop-software-for-telecommuters/