After several years of trouble-free use, my Vonage modem stopped working a couple of days ago. The green light wouldn’t stop blinking. After searching the Net for answers, I finally screwed up my courage and called Vonage phone support, about which I had heard horror stories. Well, this isn’t one of them. They answered quickly and put me in touch with the right person within a minute. The support person walked me through the steps—a little too slowly—and now I know how to reset my Vonage Motorola VT1005V modem. Let me save you the phone call:

Connect your PC to the Vonage modem by plugging a cable into your PC’s ethernet port and plugging the other end into the PC port on the modem.

Browse to http://192.168.102.1/admin.html. This will bring up the Motorola admin screen. Click the “restore factory defaults” button. Just to be sure, then click the “reboot” button.

Now unplug the power to the modem and wait ten seconds. Plug it back in. The modem’s green power light will blink for a minute or two. Once it’s on steady, you should be back in business. (If not, check to make sure you have a telephone plugged into the modem. In fact, that’s the first thing you should have done.) [Tags: vonage reboot reset factory_defaults]

5 Comments »

Polar Rose is doing what it can to identify people in photos on the Web. Unlike the previous generation of face recognition software, it turns a photo’s 2D array of dots into what it hopes is an accurate 3D rendering of the face depicted. This gets past the problem of not recognizing yor Aunt Sally’s profile because it only knows what she looks from the front, and maybe of confusing your Aunt Sally with Adolph Hitler because the sun is above her, casting a shadow across her upper lip.

Polar Rose —currently in beta—is going to be available as a browser plug in and it’s opening up its API’s, trying to to increase the Web’s IQ when it comes to the stuff that doesn’t form into letters. And because Nikolaj Nyholm is involved, I’m confident that they’ll get the privacy and ethical issues right. [Tags: polar_rose face_recognition photos nikolaj_nyholm everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy]

1 Comment »

I’m trying yet again to install Linux to use as a desktop machine. Ubuntu won’t install because it tells me there’s “no RNG,” which apparently is a random number generator.

Any way around this? (I’m trying to install Ubuntu 6.10, desktop edition, on a pretty new Intel machine.

I can’t say that Kubuntu handled this error very gracefully: No explanation, no hints, no joy :( [Tags: ubuntu linux]

6 Comments »

I’m sure I’m heading for a D’oh! moment, but, much as I enjoy the ambiguity of the URL www.lumberjacksexchange.com, why aren’t spaces allowed in Web addresses? URLs are already delimited by quotation marks in HTML markup, as in <a href=“http://www.lumberjacksexchange.com“>. In fact, couldn’t we make a rule that whatever is the first character after the “href=” is the delimiter, a tactic I learned about when I worked at Interleaf? That way, you could even include quotation marks in the address, as in <a href=|http://www.lumberjacks exchange.com/call me “Carla”.html|>.

Allowing spaces and flexible delimiters would let us express URL’s in ways humans can more easily understand. After all, should Web pathnames be harder to read than Windows pathnames?

In fact, when we need to make it clear that we’re expressing a path and not a space-delimited series, we could learn from Windows’ conventions: Use quotes as delimiters for paths such as “C:\My Programs\Whirligig Anti Virus Pro\read me.txt.” Having to use explicit delimiters on paths on occasion seems to me a small price for being able to use spaces as delimiters between words.

Now, what is the big point I’m missing that’s so obvious that I’m about to go D’oh! ? [Tags: html markup a href=”http://www.technorati.com/tags/everything+is+miscellaneous” rel=”tag”> html everything_is_miscellaneous]

9 Comments »

David Isenberg has three reasons to be hopeful that cellphones are going to be opened up, maybe sometime soon. [Tags: cellphones networks david_isenberg ]

4 Comments »

If you, like me, have been getting an error message from Google Docs telling you to enable Javascript, but Javascript is already enabled, a Google discussion board has come up with an answer: Turn off Google Accelerator and reload Google Docs. [Tags: google javascript google_docs]

2 Comments »

Ethan Zuckerman discovers that Google Coop’s roll your own search engine has high precision but poor recall, i.e., it gives few irrelevant returns, but misses stuff it should find.

A little poking solves the mystery pretty quickly. Google Coop Search works by searching against the main Google search catalog, retrieving 1000 results and filtering them against the sites you’ve included in your catalog. This makes sense, computationally – these searches are fast, almost as fast as normal Google searches. Rather than conducting 3000 “site:” searches and collating and reranking the results, Google is sacrificing recall, getting 1000 results and discarding those not in your set of chosen sites, which requires one call to the index and a really big regular expression match.

…

…In other words, the little engine I’ve built is useful only if the sites I’ve chosen are relatively high ranking and authoritative sites on the topics I’m searching on.

Be the first to comment »

Firefox 2.0 is running on my laptop invisibly. In the Windows Task Manager, there’s no entry in the Applications tab, but the Processes tab shows “firefox.exe” running.

Here’s how I fixed it, thanks to googling around for help.

First, end the firefox.exe process. Control-Alt-Delete and open the Processes tab. Select the “firefox.exe” process, and right click to get the menu for ending the process.

Now start Firefox in safe mode. To do this, create a shortcut to the firefox.exe program you just installed. Select the shortcut, choose Properties, and add “-safe-mode” to the command, so that it looks something like:

Double click on the shortcut and you should see the Firefox “safe mode” dialog box. If you don’t, go find some other blogger to help you because I’m all out of tips.

Click on “Disable all add-ons” and press the “Make Changes and continue” button. Firefox should start. If it doesn’t, try relaunching it from the shortcut and click every box in the “safe mode” dialog.

In Firefox, go to Tools > Add-ons. All of them are disabled. Enable one. Close Firefox. Start it up, but not using the safe mode icon. You want to start it in full mode to see if it opens. If it does, you know that the add-on (nee extension) you just enabled is not the culprit. Repeat until you find the culprit.

Now do control-alt-delete and kill the Firefox process. Start it up in safe mode again. Turn off the add-ons. Enable them all except the culprit(s).

Good luck.

BTW, the culprit in my case was McAfee SiteAdvisor (disclosure). [Tags: firefox siteadvisor]

5 Comments »

I am slowly being driven nuts. Thunderbird today decided not to display html-based messages as html. I know it recognizes them as html because I set Options > Display to give html mesages a distinctive background. But it ignores all the formatting stuff, including tables, and just shows a string of text.

I didn’t intentionally make any changes. Nor can I find info on how to change it back to the way it was. Any suggestions? TIA.

3 Comments »

About 10-15 minutes into graphics intensive games, my machine is crashing and crashing hard: No blue screen of death, just the blackness of heavy blow to the head.

Windows Event Viewer gives me an error #1 for Disk 1. That error message indicates a problem with the disk controller or the cable. But here’s the fun part. I disabled Disk 1 via Windows disk manager (i.e., I did it through software, not by changing the hardware), and not only does the system still crash, it gives me the exact same error for the new Disk 1. So, I’m thinking it’s not really a disk problem.

I ran Mem86 overnight and it reported no RAM problems..

There are oceans of unused disk space, so that’s not the problem. And I have 2 gigs of RAM, so I’m not running out of space.

I ran AVG virus checker and CounterSpy spyware checker. No problems.

The temperature monitors don’t indicate overheating. Of course, I don’t see the monitors when I have a full-screen, graphics-intensive game going.

My guess is that the culprit is the graphics card. I have an ATI Radeon 9800xt. I’ve set AGP to off instead of its usual 8x, but it made no difference.

What’s your guess?

[Unless Mac hardware never fails, please do not tell me to get a Mac. Thank you.] [Tags: bugs]

15 Comments »