Author: Walt Stoneburner

Updates, please don’t do that…

Using a MySQL DOT-Net Conncetor and getting these error messages? Shared Memory Provider: No Process is on the other end of the pipe. Error 0. Unable to find the request .NET Framework Data Provider. It may not be installed. Or your login not working, but your password is right? Try this solution.

Using Visual Studio 2010, it’s possible to use MySQL databases. The trick is to use the MySQL DotNET Connector.

Everything was going swimmingly until for what appeared to be no reason, until one day I went to work on my project and I started getting a strange error message for what appeared to be no reason.

Shared Memory Provider: No Process is on the other end of the pipe.
Error 0.
Unable to find the request .NET Framework Data Provider. It may not be installed.

Exploring the exception shows that a connection to the database is made, but the login has failed for the username. However, the username and password work when logging in using the MySQL client. No drivers have changed, and MySQL works with all other applications just fine, just not the Microsoft development IDE. The connection string validated in a test environment, as did a raw connection with the MySqlConnection. EntityFrameworks, not so much.

Attempting to use EntityFrameworks from VS2010 results in an error dialog box that when dismissed goes back to the database wizard that brings up the dialog box again; the only way out is using Task Manager and violently killing the IDE’s process.

Attempting to use the .MySQL .NET/Connector installer to repair the installation doesn’t help, either. Yes, it updates the .dll files, yes it tweaks the registry, but no, it doesn’t help.

Making a new project and creating a new ADO.NET Data Model reveals something interesting: the MySQL providers are not listed anymore in VS2010.

The solution is to UNINSTALL the DotConnector and then re-INSTALL the same MySQL .NET/Connector.

The full installer indicates that it updates the VS2008 and VS2010 development environments. Trying the IDE again works perfectly. The ADO.NET Data Model shows the MySQL Data Provider, the Entity Frameworks doesn’t get stuck in an endless loop, and my code worked again without change.

What happened to cause all this? Turns out I had installed a minor VS2010 hotfix service pack at the end of the weekend. The result? The update silently uninstalled all non-Microsoft data providers.

Updates, please don’t do that…

Clearly, I’m not happy about that. Especially since it did it silently. If it told me that it was going to, or if it asked me to reinstall after the fact, I could live with it.

Uninstalling Intego Software

I’d rather eat an orange then brush my teeth with peppermint toothpaste than deal with cleaning up my system after using Intego’s software. If anything can bring the Windows reboot experience, coupled with the leaving of software cruft, to the Mac platform, this software does it in my opinion. Here’s how I finally got rid of it all. I hope.

I recently purchased a Mac bundle with software and it included software from Intego, consisting of the Personal Antispam and Personal Backup applications. I installed them, and from that point forward it was an experience I’ve regretted and have been trying to undo. Only now do I think I’ve made some progress toward that goal.

Frankly, I didn’t get what the backup software did for me over many of the free solutions out there, and while the personal antispam look intriguing, it was intrusive as well and I decided to fall back to Apple’s spam filter included in Mail.

Even if a product doesn’t make it into my main line of recommendations, I often will keep it around in the event I suddenly have use for it. This, for example, is how TypeIt4Me eventually won me over.

Intego went out of their way to annoy me straight from the start. How so? Every time I went to install a package from them, they felt the need to do what appeared to be a gratuitous reboot. It was like being on frickin’ Windows. And they had to install their own update manager, which had to take a glory spot in the menu bar. And it had to do updates, which required even more reboots. I was done with them at that point, but don’t even get me started on the subscription scheme that rode on top of the atrocity.

So I wrote to them asking them how to uninstall their software. Here’s the reply I got:

Proper removal of the software package requires using the Installer package located in your software bundle or disc. If you have manually attempted to remove the software, you will need to first, reinstall the software again, then use the same Installer package to properly remove the applications.

If you need to, you can re-download the installer for Internet Security Barrier X6 using the link below:

http://www.integodownload.com/en/isbx6.html

Open the installer and select to uninstall all software. Restart your computer.

Great, another reboot. Lucky for me, I hadn’t tried to go off on my own path, plus I had the original installation utility. I tried it, and it appeared to work.

Notice I said appeared?

One week later, LittleSnitch pops up and reports my system is spontaneously trying to access Intego’s update service for the very set of applications that, for all evidence I could tell, I removed and forgot about. Apparently, no so.

LittleSnitch also reveals it’s TaskManagerDaemon who’s trying to deal with Intego’s NetUpdate buried in /Library/Intego. Thank you LittleSnitch, curse you Intego.

Intego leaves cruft. Running cruft. Seems this isn’t new of them, according to Apple archives.

Part of the Mac culture is being a good citizen. In my opinion, I feel they aren’t.

After uninstalling the software in exactly the manner they prescribe, enter this this command at your terminal:
sudo find / -name Intego -print

I suspect you’ll develop a similar facial tick as it starts returning output after scanning your disk.

Go grab a root shell, you’re gonna wanna also wipe out:

  • /Library/Intego and everything below it.
  • /Library/Application Support/Intego and everything below it.
  • /Library/Preferences/Intego and everything below it.
  • /Users/wls/Library/Application Support/Intego and everything below it.

Oh, and you’ll want to Reboot as well.

…it’s not like I had other applications up or was doing anything important.

After the reboot, you’ll notice tons of console messages from launchd. Now you need to do this.
$ launchctl
launchd% remove com.intego.task.manager.notifier
launchd% remove com.intego.netupdate.agent
launchd% exit

And, you’ll need to remove some .plist files:
$ sudo rm -v /Library/LaunchAgents/*intego*
$ sudo rm -v /Library/LaunchDaemons/*intego*

And preferences, frameworks, keychains, and widgets:
$ sudo rm -vrf /Library/PreferencePanes/NetUpdate.prefPane
$ sudo rm -vrf /Library/Frameworks/IntegoiCalFramework.framework/
$ sudo rm -v /Library/Keychains/Intego.keychain
$ sudo rm -vrf /Library/Widgets/Intego\ Status.wdgt/

Reboot again.

UPDATE (12-Dec-2010): I’ve been in contact with Intego Support, support@intego.com, and they were kind enough to provide this extra information:

If there is anything left on your computer, you can remove it manually.

Can you please go into the following areas on the computer and delete any traces of Intego or VirusBarrier:

/Macintosh HD/Library/Intego
/Macintosh HD/Library/LaunchDaemons
/Macintosh HD/Library/LaunchAgents
/Macintosh HD/Applications
/Macintosh HD/Library/Preferences
/Macintosh HD/Library/Logs
/Macintosh HD/Library/Receipts
/Macintosh HD/Library/Startupitems
/Macintosh HD/Library/Widgets

Home Folder:

~/Library/Application Support
~/Library/Preferences

They were right, there’s logs, too.
$ sudo rm -rf /Library/Logs/NetUpdate/

Review: Walt gives Intego software installation TWO thumbs down. The reasons are obvious.

Competitors?

An opinion piece: are Apple and Microsoft competitors? This line of reasoning says no.

Who made the spoon that you used to eat your breakfast cereal this morning?

Every once in a while I’ll hear people talking about how Microsoft and Apple are competitors. As someone who’s technology agnostic, I don’t see the world in such shades of black and white. Here’s my reasoning as an outsider comparing the two.

Apple is a hardware company, their goal is selling as many units of whatever as possible, whether it be computers or mp3 players. With a focus on design and user experience, backwards compatibility takes a back seat to form and functionality. They excel at elegance and minimalism. They aim sharply at the home user. Disposability is ok. The next big thing is the future.

Microsoft is an operating system and business application vendor, their goal is to put that software on to as many pieces of hardware as possible. They are an industry leader in office applications and software development environments. They aim sharply at business and government. Backwards compatibility is highly important. They’d run on toasters if they could.

Is there overlap between the two? Sure, some. Is it a make or break difference? Not really, much is a matter of preference and familiarity.

I twitch anytime I hear someone say OS X is more “intuitive” than Windows; the word they’re looking for is consistent. Coarse application design is more similar, meaning once you get over the learning curve, subsequent new challenges have a ring of familiarity.

But more importantly, are the two environments mutually exclusive? Not at all. That’s why platform agnostics run both systems. Some things are just easier to do in some environments than others.

The operating systems wars and the phone wars are about luring people toward purchasing something from that camp. But look closer. MS-Office runs on OS X, and quite nicely. Safari and QuickTime run on Windows, and quite nicely. Once you’ve made the purchase of their crown jewel, the fighting appears to stop.

Users, on the whole, don’t care (and often don’t understand) about the underlying system. They just have a problem they want to solve, learn how to do it once and without change, and any tool that gets the job done will do.

Just like my spoon.

Bang for Buck

Think that extended trial periods hurt sales? Think again.

There’s a wonderful application for the Mac called TypeIt4Me that does instant macro expansions as one types. I first learned about it at a No Fluff Just Stuff technical conference when some of the presenters were using it to give some slick presentations.

I’m a big believer in try-before-you-buy, and have long advocated using the 30/30/30 model for generating sales.

Here’s evidence that my bang-for-buck ratio was pretty low:

Bang for Buck FAIL

The problem? At the time, I just couldn’t find just the right need for it within my own workflow. But you can see, I kept it around.

However, because the software didn’t shutdown and lock me out, which would have gotten it deleted, it was there the moment I had need. And, Ettore Software got a sale.

Camera is in use by another application

Trying to video conference with Skype and getting a message saying the camera is in use by another application with no video feed sent out? Try this.

Blind SkypeRecently I was attempting to use Skype, but it reported that “Your camera is in use by another application” and I couldn’t get any video feed, though the camera turned on.

Then I found this post which suggested removing the file
/Library/QuickTime/CamCamX5.component from the system, although I found it’s possible just to move it out of that directory.

Restarting Skype, the video conference worked perfectly.

Yahoo concurs. Here’s more on CamCamX. And here’s another thread saying to remove it.

Operating System: OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

NTFS on OS X

Trying to write to an NTFS volume on OS X, and all you find are third party packages and complicated config file manipulations asking you to reboot? Do this….

Every once in a while someone brings over an external NTFS formatted drive and plugs it into my Mac to exchange some large data sets. While the Mac can easily read NTFS, it doesn’t appear to have the capability to write to that file system.

Appears is the operative phrase.

If you search for a solution in the open, you’ll find companies selling commercial products, drivers, and mounters. Some people have posted complicated looking instructions telling instructing you to mess with low level system files, that may or may not exist, ending in a full system reboot that typically solves the problem for that lone drive.

NTFS on OSXHere’s the generic no-software required solution.

First connect your NTFS drive to the Mac, it’ll mount with some name like “My Disk.”

Open a Terminal window and enter the command:
$ mount

The mount command will tell you what drives are listed. Find the one that has your drive name listed in it and copy the device name:
/dev/disk1s2 on /Volumes/My Disk (hfs, local, nodev, nosuid, journaled, noowners, mounted by me)

Now eject the drive, but don’t disconnect it from the machine.

Go manually create the directory (shown in bold above); this is where the mount point will be:
$ cd /Volumes
$ mkdir My\ Disk

NOTE: The backslash escapes the next character, in this case allowing a space in the directory name.

Now, mount the drive as read-write using this command:
$ sudo mount -o rw -t ntfs /dev/disk2s1 /Volumes/My\ Disk

Make sure that you’ve used the same device location you copied down the the prior steps.

At this point your drive should appear on the desktop, and you ought to be able to read and write to it just fine. No rebooting necessary!

Note that you can get to it from the Terminal as well:
$ cd /Volumes/My\ Disk
$ ls

Note that sometimes Finder may act a little wonky with timing problems and a huge file. Apparently the underlying Unix system has no problem. You can copy a big file to the drive:
$ rsync –progress SuperBigFile.zip /Volumes/My\ Disk

Or a whole directory:
$ rsync -r –progress LargeDeepDirectory /Volumes/My\ Disk

When done, make sure you are not running any programs that are accessing the drive or have their current directory set to the drive:
$ cd /Volumes

Then, eject the drive normally, or unmount it from the command line — your choice.
$ sudo umount /Volumes/My\ Disk

Full disclosure and warnings: This was tested on OS X 10.6.5, though support has been around to do this for a while. And, any time you’re doing something that deals with questionable file system access, make sure there’s nothing on the drive you don’t mind losing. Have a backup. There’s always a slight risk, but it’s very close to zero — why state all this? Because I assume no responsibility if something goes wrong.

C# Must Haves

Resources for quickly getting up to speed on C#.

This is the page of C# resources that I wish I had when I got started.

Visual Studio 2010Snag a copy of Visual Studio, whether it’s the free Express version, or one of the uber-featured ones.

Reactive Extensions
In addition to .NET, snag the Reactive Extensions (Rx) library.


Expression Blend 4If you’re able to, grab a copy of Expression Blend as well for graphical layouts. Not mandatory, but it helps.


And you’ll want these books:

C# 4.0 in a Nutshell: The Definitive ReferenceWPF 4 UnleasedLinq in ActionEntity Frameworks

MySQL Cascade Delete Problem

MySQL 5.1.51 introduced a nasty little bug that has the potential to really cause some production servers some ill — cascading delete and updates can sometimes fail if you’re dealing with “too much” data at once. Where “too much” is a relatively small amount. You may get bit if you have a one-to-many relationship.

A note of warning to MySQL users using 5.1.51, you may want to downgrade to 5.1.50 for a little bit.

There’s a problem with 5.1.51 in which cascading deletes or updates throw an error. Not good if you have constraints and one to many relationships.

ERROR 1030 (HY000): Got error -1 from storage engine

The mysql error log will say something like:

InnoDB: Cannot delete/update rows with cascading foreign key constraints that exceed max depth of 250

This is a confirmed bug in MySQL and is repeatable. The error will cause a transaction rollback. Not good news for people running production systems.

See MySQL Bug #357255.

While the problem was quickly identified and apparently resolved, as the defect report is closed, it does not look like the 06-Oct-2010 change has made it out to the production baseline as of the time of this writing.

Additionally, the MySQL pre-release snapshots on labs.mysql.com show there is a mysql-5.1.52 pending with a September date, and this hasn’t made it to general production yet.

That leaves one to speculate that the fix will appear in the 5.1.53 version, and we won’t be seeing that for a month or two. Yikes.

Reactive Framework conflict (SOLVED)

The type ‘System.IObservable exists in both ‘c:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETFramework\v4.0\mscorlib.dll’ and ‘c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Reactive Extensions\Redist\DesktopV2\System.Observable.dll’ (SOLVED)

During an upgrade of a C# WPF application that was using Reactive Extensions, I ran into this compile error:

The type ‘System.IObservable exists in both ‘c:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETFramework\v4.0\mscorlib.dll’ and ‘c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Reactive Extensions\Redist\DesktopV2\System.Observable.dll’

This is roughly the same kind of Defined in Multiple Assemblies problem as I faced before. (Solution provided.)

In this case, the System.Observable.dll was pinned to the 3.5 release of the Reactive Extensions.

The solution was to:

  1. Download the .NET 4.0 version of Reactive Extensions (Rx_Net4.msi).
  2. Install it.
  3. Remove System.Observable from the project.
  4. Re-add the System.Observable to the project, being super careful to select the latest version