Salient Soft

On login to Sage Instant, you may get the following error:-

username is in use - the program cannot connect you at this time

Sage then exits and will not let you log in.

 To fix this problem, open the ACCDATA subdirectory under the Sage Instant installation directory, and delete the file QUEUE.DTA. You should then be able to log in correctly.

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Update 4/4/2010

Whilst hot detection has been working, I was unable to run a backup as Acronis gave errors. A disk check with windows failed to complete intermittently on one of my drives. When I disk checked the same drive afterwards via USB, it checked out with no problem.

I’ve finally taken the decision to dump the internal eSATA on the P6T. Whilst my PC is an Arbico one under return to base warranty, I will not be returning it. I may have a hardware fault, but so many other people are reporting problems with the P6T and eSATA that it is impossible to be sure. I do not wish to be without my PC for a week or 2 only to have it returned with the problem still present.

I have disabled the JMicron controller in the Bios, and installed a StarTech 2 Port PCI Express eSATA card (Silicon Image 3132 chip).  I bough mine from CCL Computers for £20-78 including VAT and postage, so not much more than it would have cost me to courier my PC back to have it looked at under warranty, and it took me 10 minutes to install. So far this is performing flawlessly. When installing on Windows 7, Windows Update found the driver and auto installed it – the bios on the card was 7.4.05, and Windows installed version 1.0.15.3 of the driver. This version did not appear to be available when I searched the Silicon Image Site – the CD with the card, and Startech’s site, both had version 1.0.15.0 of the driver, so I stuck with what Windows did and had no issues with it.

Having already used a card with a Silicon Image Chip, I immediately installed HotSwap! as this allows safe removal of the drive. As installed, the driver does not enable safe removal in windows, but does enable write caching on the drive, so HotSwap! is recommended. After installing HotSwap!, remember to ctrl/click the systray icon – this will allow you to specify those devices which are to be excluded from hotswapping, such as your fixed hard drives. HotSwap! is designed for Silicon Image chipsets and is able to optionally spin down an eSATA drive on removal. It can also scan for hardware changes if you have hot detection problems (I did not). The only slight issue with it is that it will not autostart in the tray under Windows 7 as it gets a UAC prompt to continue when it starts. You can get around this by making it start as a scheduled task with high privilege, but I just leave it on the quick launch bar or superbar and start it manually when I need it, and put up with the extra click.

Update 10/3/2010

After reverting the Bios back to 1004 as at the end of this post, a couple of reboots later the pc failed to detect a hot insertion again. I reverted the JMicron driver back to 1.17.53.0, the version used by the poster referred to below, as this was cited as stable, but still no joy. I tweaked the Bios to disable the floppy drive (on by default) as I don’t have one, resaved and booted, and then it all worked again. After 5-10 more warm and cold boots, it is still hot detecting fine. I don’t think the floppy controller was the issue, but the fact that I went in and changed and resaved the Bios settings, as this has kicked it into life in the past.

My final conclusion – it does run stable now, but I wouldn’t call it rock solid – it still won’t detect an eSATA drive present at boot time, and I’ll need to keep an eye on things to see if the detection problem resurfaces. If it does, I suspect just entering Bios setup and resaving the Bios settings after a small change (or even no change) will sort it!

Original Post 9/3/2010

My P6T was delivered with bios revision 0904, and as delivered would not hot-recognise or safely remove an eSATA drive (safe removal was off, and write caching was off which obviously impacted performance).  I installed the latest JMicron jmb36x Controller driver (1.17.55.0, 27/01/2010) , and this enabled write caching and safe removal via the system tray. Note that whilst the P6T has both jmb363 and jmb322 controllers listed in the spec, the controller under windows lists as a jmb363, and this driver appears to handle both the above chips, therefore the jmb36x driver is the correct one. Upgrading the driver in my case affected eSATA hotswapping/safe removal etc. using both the rear eSATA port on the P6T (jmb363), and my front port connected to SATA_E1 (jmb322).  However, hot recognition was very intermittent (even with a device rescan) and the only way to consistently recognise the drive was to have it plugged in at boot time, enter the bios, exit the bios and boot. It would then recognise the drive at boot time once only, and could be safely removed (but would need booting to recognise it again).

This post states that bios version 1004, plus the JMicron driver I was using, sorted the problem. As there was now also a later bios version, 1201, I reflashed the P6T to this version. I used the flash utility in the Bios itself as this was convenient, and it would recognise USB flash drives to read the new bios. There is also a recovery process if it crashes during flashing, which involves booting with the target Bios in the root of  a usb flash drive in which case it auto flashes (see manual).  However, this recovery process only  works with small FAT32/FAT16 flash drives of less than 8GB, so I prepared a 2GB flash drive especially in case this was needed. Note also that the Bios flash utility does not do long filenames and so converts them to DOS 8.3 format – if you have multiple Bios file versions on the drive this may mean you won’t be able to tell which is which, so rename the files to sensible short names before you start, and save yourself another reboot! Also be sure to unzip them.

It turned out that version 1201 did not work at all with eSATA, so it appears that Asus fixed this in version 1004 and then broke it again in 1201 – doh! I even tried a CMOS reset with 1201 just to be sure, but it still did not work. With the drive present at boot time, it just froze during the JMicron controller drive recognition phase, just prior to starting windows.

I reflashed back to 1004 and hotswapping all worked fined, both recognition and safe removal, including multiple times. However, the drive would not be recognised at boot time if present, and would still freeze as before. As my real goal was true hotswapping, I was happy to live with this issue as hotwapping was fine – I just plugged the drive in later after booting.

Prior to clearing the CMOS, I took shots of all the Bios screens with the old settings in, to be sure I did not miss any custom settings, as the PC had been built by a custom builder, Arbico. Whilst there is a Bios feature to allow saving and restoring of CMOS settings to a flash drive, there was the concern that reloading old settings could introduce old data which did not match the new Bios, so I wanted to be sure to load default settings and tweak from there.

The screen shots of my old settings may be downloaded in this zip file. Afterwards, I manually made the following changes after clearing the CMOS and loading new defaults :-

Menu: AI Tweaker, Setting: Ai Overclock Tuner, Value: X.M.P.

Menu: Power options, Setting: boot via keyboard, Value: set to Ctrl/esc

Menu: Power options, Setting: Power On via PCIE devices, Value: enabled
(This setting was needed to allow Wake On Lan to work correctly)

Menu: Boot/Boot Device Priority :-
1 SATA: PM-SAMSUNG HD
2 CDROM:SM-Optiarc D]
3 DISABLED

Menu: Boot/Boot Configuration settings, Setting: Full Screen Logo, Value: disabled

Menu: Advanced/On Board Devices Configuration, Setting: High Definition Audio: Value: disabled
(Onboard audio was disabled as I was using a separate sound card)

Menu: Advanced/USB Configuration, Setting: Legacy USB Support, Value: Enabled

Menu: Tools, Setting: Asus Express Gate, Value: Disabled

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This problem affected a laptop running Windows XP Home on our workgroup. It could browse shares by IP address e.g. \\10.0.0.2, but could not see computers by name. Removing it from the workgroup/rerunning the network setup wizard to rejoin the workgroup and rebooting had no effect.

This fix from Microsoft solved the problem, details of the manual version of the fix are as follows:-

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\NetBt\Parameters
3. In the right pane of Registry Editor, delete the following values if they are present:
     –  NodeType
     –  DhcpNodeType
   Note If the NodeType value is present, this value will override the DhcpNodeType value. If neither subkey is present and if no WINS servers are configured for the client, the computer uses b-node mode. If at least one WINS server is configured, the computer uses h-node mode.
4. Quit Registry Editor.
5. Restart the computer.
6. Try to view workgroup computers on the network again.

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While running the setup wizard, it auto discovers the print servers on the LAN.
They all have to be on to be seen.

Sometimes, the wizard does not discover one even if the server is on.
This is a problem as you cannot do the discovery manually by entering settings.

In my case, either the Windows Firewall or Kaspersky Antivirus was blocking the auto discovery.
I temporarily disabled both, and discovery worked ok.
Afterwards, I re-enabled them, and was still able to print a test page successfully.
Therefore, this appears to be only a setup issue.

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e.g. Moved the Public Music and Videos folders correctly using the move button. To do this I had to temporarily disable User Account Control via control panel, as per Microsoft Instructions.
The old folders under c:\Users\Public remained there and were inaccessible even as administrator – could not list the owner, could not delete etc.

This  forum post describes the problem, but their solution did not work for me.

In the end, after a logout/reboot they seemed to be ‘magically’ accessible again – I managed to rename one of the old ones, then found I could delete them all, even after having restored UAC back to default.

This is a bit of a weird area – needed some tinkering to sort it, info on the net not fully clear. Only some of the public folders were affected, documents were not. The user folders were not affected. All very strange!

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Symptoms as follows :-

1/ LED on front edge not lit, no wireless networks seen

2/ switch on front edge toggles bluetooth but wireless stays off

3/ Tried all drivers available on Lenovo site – no joy

4/ Broadcom wireless utility has an enable box – does not work

5/ Broadcom wireless utility has a diagnostic. This runs ok AND LIGHTS THE LIGHT ON THE FRONT –
   it says all hardware working no problems (which I believe)
   However, still can’t see wireless networks afterwards

6/ Googled all the forums – lots of people with same issue, no real solution.
   Possibly a patch/update has shafted the driver, but don’t know which patch.

7/ I found another driver on Softpedia here:-
   http://drivers.softpedia.com/get/NETWORK-CARD/OTHER-NETWORK-CARDS/BROADCOM-Wireless-802-11b-and-802-11g.shtml

   This is an HP Driver, but it WORKS! Installed it and wireless working fine now!

Comments Off on Lenovo 3000 N100 – cannot enable wireless Card

I had an Eclipse Galileo workspace containing several projects, and for some reason some of the projects did not show a full palette of components when opening a jspx file using the Web Page Editor. The main culprit was the ICEfaces components set which was missing. The workspace as a whole was clearly OK, but some projects had become broken. I now believe that some changes I made to user library locations may have caused the problem, but not sure on this.

Firstly, I visited the JSF project facets screen by right clicking the project in the explorer and selecting Properties to open the project properties page, then opening the  Project Facets entry in the left hand pane. I removed (unticked) support for ICEfaces and saved the changes. Then I added it back and saved again. This did not fix the problem.

I looked at the JSF Tag Registry view which lists all the Tag libraries registered for a project. This can be displayed by clicking menu option Window/Show View/Other and then entering Tag in the search box at the top. Select Tag Registry under JSF and the view will open. You must select the desired project in the view as it does not default to the current project. You can then expand the entries to see the Tag libraries registered. If you select one of the top level nodes on the registry tree (in my case these were labelled Facelet Tag Registry and JSP Tag registry) you can click the refresh button adjacent to the project selection button. This refreshes the entries, and you can elect whether or not to flush the cache in the resulting dialog. Unfortunately it was of no help to me in fixing the above problem, and refreshing/clearing the cache did not clear the issue. However, this view could be useful to browse Tag Library registrations.

I was aware that the palette entries are driven by the available Tag libraries on the project Build path, so still felt that it was library related. I then revisited the project properties page, and this time expanded the Project Facets entry in the left pane rather than clicking on it. I then selected Java Server Faces. This listed the user libraries for the project in the right hand pane, including all of the ICEfaces and JSF ones. I deselected all but one of them (you cannot deselect all of them), leaving the JSF 1.2 (Sun RI) library selected. I then applied/saved the changes and closed the screen. I then re-opened it, selected all the originally selected libraries and applied/saved again. This time, when I opened a jspx file in the project with the Web Page Editor, the ICEfaces components were present on the palette.

One last glitch was that after doing this, the palette entries for ICEfaces only had icons present, no descriptions. I then  closed the web page editor window, and closed Eclipse down normally, and re-opened the same workspace in Eclipse again. I then re-opened the same jspx in the Web Page Editor, and this time the ICEfaces components were all present with both the Icons and the descriptions. Problem solved!

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The ice:form tag renders a stateSavingMarker div which declares a couple of hidden fields for use by ICEfaces.

In IE7, (or IE8 in IE& compatibility mode), this div has its margin to auto which can cause an extra 10px or so margin to be added in between any elements outside the form and those inside.

This can be eliminated by adding a style to the form, either by adding a StyleClass attribute to refer to a CSS class, or by using the Style attribute to code an inline style. As this is a ‘one off’ just to clear a margin, the following example uses an inline style :-

<ice:form style=”margin:0″>

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By default when you create a new ICEfaces Facelets project with a sample page, it codes the DOCTYPE directive directly. Unfortunately, this is stripped out during processing/rendering and does not  appear in the final HTML for the page. When running IE without a suitable DOCTYPE directive, it switches into Quirks Mode and is not fully standards compliant, which may cause pages to display incorrectly.

the DOCTYPE can be added back by using the <ice:outputDeclaration> tag. To do this, you also need to add an <f:view> tag as you would in JSP mode, as in the following example :-

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<f:view xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
 xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"
 xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"
 xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
 xmlns:ice="http://www.icesoft.com/icefaces/component">
 <ice:outputDeclaration
  doctypeRoot="HTML" doctypePublic="-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
  doctypeSystem="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd" />
 <html>
    <head>
    ...
    </head>
    <body>
    ...
    </body>
 </html>
</f:view>

The issue is discussed and solved in this ICEfaces forum post. Interestingly, a page created by ICEfaces for a  JSP (non-facelet) project also uses the <ice:outputDeclaration> tag, presumably for the same reason.

Note that you cannot omit the <f:view> tag and add the xmlns namespace declarations to the <ice:outputDeclaration> tag as this fails – the <f:view> tag needs to be present.

Another post about Quirks mode and DOCTYPE switching, which also contains a useful Bookmarklet (Javascript link) which will tell you directly what mode a page is running in, may be found here.

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I have run in to an issue with Eclipse (Galileo 3.5.1) when opening a jsf page with the web page editor – I get the error:-

“Could not open the editor: null argument:”

I tried the -clean flag on startup as per this post but this did not fix the problem. I also tried deleting this metadata file but this had no effect in this case

This appeared to be due to Eclipse disliking the syntax of some sections of the code I had commented out. In one case, adding the following comment:-

<!–  value=”#{appRoles.selected}” –>

caused the error to occur, and removing it caused the error to disappear. The cause was not always consistent – in another copy of this same page I had to delete a commented out table column to fix the problem:-

In general, I think that certain usage of commented out sections can trip Eclipse up and cause the editor to fail. removing these causes the problem to disappear.

Note that the error does not occur with the JSP editor, so this can be used instead or to edit the sections causing the problem.

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