Explorer.exe, the shell we spend most of our lives using. Normally (remember this qualifier) it tends to be quite stable, but yesterday a colleague of mine started to have strange problems with it on his XP SP2 machine.

If you clicked on Start -> Run and started to type in the UNC path to a server (as you do 100 times a day) after the two slashes ‘\\’ explorer would inexplicably crash and restart. As is the case with such thing, there didn’t seem to be a logical explanation as to what was going on.

The only new software that we had been recently messing about with was from http://portableapps.com and as that gets installed onto a portable drive (thats kind of its point) we are pretty sure it wasn’t that.

When I got back in the following day, it was working again. What was the solution? Well, clearing up the History and Cache on the machine. That was it. There must have been something the the most recently used list of run, that was causing the problem. As it only occurred after typing in the leading slashes, it must have been a computer name. Unfortunately as the list was cleared we have no idea what the hell caused it.

This what what was logged into the event log on the pc:

We had a Google around for the error but didn’t really come up with anything, so if all else fails, delete your history and clear your cache!

As Microsoft are trying to still push the world onto Vista, most of use continue to use Windows XP. I hadn’t really heard much about it, but XP service pack 3 is now at the release candidate stage. You can download it and read more about it here

As you’d expect, it’s not got very much new functionality (you need vista for that). It seams mainly to be a roll up of all the fixes since SP2, there are however a couple of new bits that might be useful in the enterprise:

• Black Hole Router detection (routers that are silently dropping packets)
• Network Access protection (NAP) support (quite a cool idea, never heard of it before)
• Ability to run a Windows install without entering the product key. It will prompt later as part of the genuine advantage stuff (you would have to be installing of an image with SP3 on it to do this)

I’ve not downloaded it yet, so I don’t know personally how well it works, but if you have a look on http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2007/11/update-re-testing-vista-w2gb-ram-office.html there is a suggestion that it might actually make things run a bit faster, but ill believe this when I see it.

If you are not part of the Microsoft universe, on Friday (the 11th) there is a new version of the KDE desktop manager being released. It will be version 4 and has some cool new features, check out http://www.kde.org/ for more info.

There is a rather nifty piece of open source software called Ghostscript, that allows you to do various cool things with postscript files.

Working at a newspaper we use postscript files a lot, so I have used Ghostscript for various purposes in the past, along with the printer port redirection application Redmon. Redmon lets you create a new printer port, then re-directs the output of the printer to where ever you want. Using this you can call Ghostscript and create a PDF printer. There’s a good how to of this at http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~henrik/GSWriter/GSWriter.html

If you follow this walk through, it will work fine for most situations. The only problem is it prompts for a file name after every file is printed, so if you have a process that generates a lot of print files one after each other, you want it to name the files on its own. This was the situation I was in.

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I went on Holiday to the German Beer festival, Oktoberfest and wanted to be able to upload photos from my camera phone onto Flickr, so I can put them onto a website I run. I also wanted to put the pictures onto a Google map. There were quite a few things that would allow me to do this, but none met my criteria:

• Most of the scrips i found were PHP or .net, I needed an classic asp one
• I needed to be able to tag the GPS co-ords into a tag on the photo. My camera phone did not have GPS built in, so I wanted to add two tags to them containing the info, called geo:lat=[xxx] and geo:lon=[xxx]

So, I came up with this script, you can see it in action at http://www.oldmanales.co.uk/feat_OktoberFest07.asp

In order to use the script, you will need a couple of things:

• An account on Flickr with some pictures tagged with valid geo:lat= and geo:lon= values. These are used to display the picys on the map
• A Flickr API key (mine is in the example file but please use your own) get it at http://flickr.com/services/api/keys/apply
• A Google maps API key (again, mine is in the script but please use yours) get it at http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html
• Your Flickr ID. This is not the same as your username, find it at http://idgettr.com

Once you have these, change the API key values to yours in the script, then upload it to your server. Now, call the script something like this:

FlickrTags2Google.asp?lat=11.511955&long=48.129893&tags=Oktoberfest_07&flickrID=7389734@N03

The lat and long parts of the string are where in the world the map will be placed when the pages loads, the tags are a comma separate list of tags to show on the map, in this case everything I have tagged as Oktoberfest_07. The last parameter is your flickrID.

Hopefully, when your call the page now you should get something like the screen shots below, the photos are indicated by the little camera icon, when you click on them you should get a popup preview of the image along with some info on the photo:

Hopefully when I get time I will document the code a bit better. If you find problems with it, or have any good ideas for enhancements let me know.