Auxiliary Memory

I am eagerly awaiting a fix for the Windows 7 bug that causes the Windows Explorer tree view to jump after you expand a node in the tree. Very irritating. The bug has been there since the first release of Win 7.

I had hoped the fix would be in SP1, but no. Let’s annoy Microsoft right back by voting to get this bug fixed.

Update:

I am cautiously optimistic that the workaround from Michael Noxfeld on 1-18-2012 may actually have fixed this problem!  It could just reappear on the next reboot, but I can always hope…

Click on the link to go to the bug page, then click on the Workarounds tab and scroll down a ways to find it.

I still prefer the command line for many tasks. Sometimes it’s just faster. It can be a deterrent if you want to run some commands in a deeply nested folder, however. So I like the “Open Command Prompt Here” feature, which can be made available in Windows Explorer’s folder context menus.

In Windows 7 it is there, but hidden. Hold the Shift key and right mouse on a folder to see the context menu entry. In Windows Vista it is half there. Holding Shift while displaying the context menu only shows the hidden entry in the righthand pane of the Explorer Window. Prior to Vista, you need to use PowerToys or edit the registry to add the context menu item.

There is more information here.

Recently I needed a Python fix, Monty Python that is. I tried to watch the Spanish Inquisition on Netflix. Firefox (3.6) kept saying the Silverlight plug-in has crashed. Reinstalling Silverlight did not help. Luckily, someone else had already solved this one.  Silverlight would not run because the Windows Tablet PC Input Service was disabled.  I figured I did not have a tablet PC and was not using pen input.  Silly me.

I re-enabled the service and started it.  Silverlight ran fine after that.

Today I upgraded my laptop, which dual boots Ubuntu and Windows 7, to Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.4).  Towards the end of the upgrade it said it was upgrading Grub (the multi-OS boot loader) to Grub2.  It then asked me some questions about which partitions to modify.

Apparently I answered wrong, because when the upgrade finished and I rebooted, I got an error message from Grub: “Error 4: Symbol ‘grub_puts_’ not found“.  I ended up at a prompt that said “grub-rescue>” where very few commands worked.  Even “help” was not recognized.

Thankfully, others had blazed the trail.  A little web searching turned up a procedure for repairing the Grub install.  (Note:   the first command should be “sudo fdisk -l” with a space dash lower-case L).  I just booted from the Ubuntu LiveCD and followed the procedure.  That resurrected Grub and allowed me to boot successfully into Linux.

Well, as you might have guessed, my Windows 7 boot had also been clobbered.  To fix that, I had to boot from the Windows 7 CD and follow these instructions.

Finally, here are a couple of other informational references for Grub 2:

• Grub 2 Basics
• Grub 2

Many thanks to those who went before, battled the dragons, lived to tell the tale, and took the time to tell it.