Saturday, March 19, 2011

Windows Vista: Pings But No Browsing -- Solved

Before a friend asked me to help a friend of hers with a PC problem, I never knew so many people are suffering from the same issue: Here is a proof. And the problem does not seem to stop with Vista. It seems to be epidemic in the Windows world. Many seem to suffer from the same problem or with a slight twist one way or another.

The problem was initially communicated to me simply as: She couldn't get on the Internet, which I thought was simple. However, a little big of digging around revealed something different: The laptop (an Acer Exensa 5420-5687, running Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit OS) connects to the network fine, either wired or wireless. The problem is that the browsers don't work, although nslookup returns DNS name lookup results fine and pinging IP addresses or host names responds normally.

So far, I have tried running netsh winsock reset, netsh int ipv4 reset, etc. Nothing has changed. Disabling all third party services in msconfig didn't help. I have removed Symantec anti-virus, there is no Norton on the machine.

Under wireshark, I can see DNS packets going out of the network interface when connected on wireless. No action in a browser has generated any outgoing packets. That seems to tell me that there is something gone bad somewhere in the Windows TCP/IP stack that completely blocked traffic from any browser application. That may sound bizarre, but this is Windows! Anything could happen.

Rebuilding the OS may be much easier than trying to figure out what is wrong, however trivial the problem may be in the end. But the owner says she has lost the discs, maybe the machine never came with one. So that may leave me with no choice but to become a pirate.

[2011-03-19] -- The removal of expired Symantec stuff may not have been as clean as it should/could have been. Anyway, the problem is resolved using the Norton Removal Tool. Also worth noting is this thread of discussion about this exact problem, which contains a posting with a compiled list of different things that may have something to do with the problem.

Every time I encounter a problem like this, I thank Linus Torvalds for Linux.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Gizmo5 关张

当年,The Gizmo Project 是 Linux 系统上最早做互联网话音服务和软件的几个项目之一。两三年前,忘了具体的日子,登录 Gizmo5.com 的时候,网站的首页上写着,公司已经被 Google 收购了,暂不再接受新用户。Gizmo5 Closing其后静候佳音,却一直没有消息。前几天,突然收到邮件,说 Gizmo5 将于四月三日停止提供服务。

Gizmo5 的这个决定,或者说,Google 的这个决定,也不算很意外。毕竟 Gmail 里面整合的电话功能推出已有一段时间,而且应该说,Gmail 整合电子邮件和电话这两个常用的功能做得还是挺成功的。再加上与 Google Contacts 的整合,让使用者在一个界面之下能够同时做两件经常要做的事,共用一个通讯录,是个很合理的组合。

唯一失去的可能就是一个能够独立使用的客户端,不仅可以使用 Gizmo5 自有的网络电话技术,还兼容 SIP 标准,以及多种短信通讯技术。不过这些功能都有其他可以替代的软件,如 Pidgin、Empathy 等等。另外一个需要用户自己做的,是向 Google Voice 转移,以前在 Gizmo5 购买的话费可以一并转账,或者退款。通过 Gmail,Google Talk 和 Google Voice 这样的组合,用户现在到 2011 年的年底还可以免费在美国境内打电话。

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

JavaScript 纠错

jQuery 有一段时间了,一直是用 Firefox 做开发环境,一个重要的原因就是因为 Firebug 这个好工具。但是有时候 JavaScript 在 IE 里面会出现一些奇妙的错误,有些时候这些错误还不是很容易重复。或许还是我太懒,一直用 Firefox 顺手,所以有成见。不过有这种成见的似乎不只我一个

言归正传,今天有遇到一位只用 IE 的同事 -- 因为在医院做技术支持,机器上一般都只有 IE -- 用我的 portman 工具时遇到问题。于是就搜了一下 "Firebug IE7",找到这篇文章《Firebug in IE for *any* web site》,顺藤摸瓜回到 Firebug Lite,文中的主意似乎已经被吸纳到“正版”里了,现在只要直接在 IE 里面加一个书签就行。

这么现成的工具,以前居然一无所知。