Tuesday, November 3, 2009

U111-M testing results on Unix-like operating systems

U111-M USB to PCMCIA PC Card ATA Flash and SRAMEverythingHerePlus.com is now offering a Linux compatible USB reader for PCMCIA PC Card SRAM and ATA Flash memory devices just $155.00 USD. For full details check out U111-M USB to PCMCIA PC Card ATA Flash and SRAM.

In addition to testing the U111M with excellent results on the Windows XP platform, we were asked to test the U111-M with stable and secure Unix-like operating systems.

Here are the results.

Xubuntu Linux 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) amd64 edition
U111-M reader is recognized, both ATA Flash and SRAM worked without a hitch
OpenBSD 4.6 beta i386 edition
U111-M reader is recognized, kernel assigns sd0 dev on card inserts, but cannot mount cards using standard mount_msdos command line
OpenBSD UPDATE, this has been resolved -- please see this post for information on using the U111-M with OpenBSD
Mac OS X 10.4.11 PPC edition (iMac)
U111-M reader is recognized, but card inserts throw a "card not recognized" error dialog
Mac OS X 10.5.8 x86 edition (Mac Pro)
U111-M reader is recognized, but card inserts throw a "card not recognized" error dialog


The U111-M represents a low cost way to deploy both PCMCIA PC Card ATA Flash and SRAM on newer systems without existing PC Card slots. Its excellent compatibility with Linux is good news for users and the ability to deal with PCMCIA PC Card SRAM makes it unique in that regard. Xubuntu is the XFCE based Ubuntu distribution, and the U111-M really shined throughout the entire testing procedure.

Available at EverythingHerePlus.com at low prices with USPS Priority Mail shipping.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Error Message (-50) Syncing iPod 5G with iPhoto Solution

I was having this problem and searched on Apple's discussion boards, finding I wasn't alone. The following solved the problem, and is reproduced here since Apple's discussion boards require a login.

The problem was due to escaped unicode characters within the AlbumData.xml file. I first suspected it was the tilde-n combination within many of my photo comments. When using BBEdit to grep them out, I noticed an escape sequence for a unicode character in the search string. Unfortunately, replacing them in the AlbumData.xml file didn't work. On relaunch iPhoto would put the characters back, which meant manually removing a comment sequence from a series of about 120 photos. Finding a script on Apple's site called 'Speak Comments.scpt' and commenting out the lines for speaking the comment (lines 15-18) and adding the following line before them:

set the comment of this_photo to ""

allowed me to remove the problematic comments from just the set of offending photos without having to do them by hand. Upon completion, iTunes recognized iPhoto's libraries and synced them to the 5G iPod without a hitch. Script available from: http://images.apple.com/applescript/iphoto/archive.sit