How To Fix A Broken Installation File

By | November 22, 2011
51 Comments

This is another public service announcement of interest only to a few people, but if you experience a problem under Win2K/WinXP installing a driver, with the folllowing error message:

The required section was not found in the INF

this might save you hours of fiddling around. In this case it happened with my vodafone/Globe Trotter 3G PCM card but I’ve seen people with scanners, printers etc experience the same problem. Basically the drivers won’t install, and that’s that.

I couldn’t find any solution on its own that fixed the problem, and I don’t know whether this works in all cases, but this is what I did, and it worked for me:

Open your C:WindowsSetupapi.log file, and look around for the “INF” reference. You should see something like

#E067 Could not locate section [ClassInstall32].
#E142 Class: {4D36E971-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}. Install failed. Error 0xe0000101: The required section was not found in the INF.

This tells you the section that is missing in the installation file. So now you need to find that file.

Go back up the log and see what INF file (a file with the last three letters, after the period, as inf, like c:windowsinfoem126.inf.

That’s the file that’s causing the problems. Open the file in notepad (in some cases you can do this simply by pasting the full path and file name into Start/Run. Sometimes this won’t work.

Save a backup of the file in question.

Then in the original, add a section with the name of the missing section. In my case, [ClassInstall32].

Save the INF file. Close it, remove the hardware and connect it again. Keep your fingers crossed. Now the installation should proceed normally.

At least it did for me. How dumb can installation software be that this basic problem cannot self-heal?

(Here’s where I got some information for this from.)

At The End of The Day, It’s All About Clichés

By | November 22, 2011
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We journalists are a boring, predictable lot. Whether we’re in the UK, US or Australia we all use the same clichés. Well, cliché, actually: ‘at the end of the day’. Knowing I was a sucker for monitoring the Internet cliché Factiva (co-owned by Dow Jones, who owns WSJ, the paper I write for) sent me their findings, based on their text mining technology, on clichés in the media for the first six months of this year. Their findings: “at the end of the day” (uttered both by writers and presumably the people they quote) dominates all English-speaking zones.

Cliche

The phrase was used more than 10,500 times in the U.S. media, more than double the next most used cliche (“in the black”). In Australia it was used 2,183 times, more than three times the next cliche (“in the red”, intriguingly, at 679 times) while the New Zealand media used it proportionally more than either of them, 639 times against 147 times for “in the red”. (Clearly Aussie and Kiwi companies not doing so well this half.)

UK media was in love with “at the end of the day” too, at 3,347 times, but that less than double “in the red” (1,877 times) and only around double “in the black” (1,628 times).

Here are the clichés monitored:

a laugh a minute
a question mark hangs over
about face
all in due time
all the way to the bank
at the end of the day
bated breath
bend over backwards
better late than never
blazing inferno
braindump
brutal reminder
burn the midnight oil
business at hand
call it a day
carnival atmosphere
chew the fat
clean bill of health concerned residents
dead cat bounce
dog eat dog
eat your own dog food
firing on all cylinders
fly by night
freak accident
full-scale search
gang busters
horror smash
hot pursuit
in the black
in the nick of time
in the red
last-ditch effort
leave no stone unturned
left at the altar
level playing field low hanging fruit
nose to the grindstone
outpouring of support
rushed to the scene
shrouded in mystery
split second
survival of the fittest
tense standoff
the eleventh hour
think outside the box
time after time
time and again
time heals all wounds
time is money
time is running out
unsung heroes
up the ante
wealth of experience
wipe the slate clean

Seems like a pretty good list to avoid. You’ve been warned!

How to Hold a Book

By | November 22, 2011
3 Comments

I did a piece a few weeks back for WSJ.com (subscription only, I’m afraid) and The Wall Street Journal Asia about bookholders. These are devices made to help folk read more easily. As one of my old bosses said: “neanderthal”. But I still love to hold a book and would definitely opt for paper over digital for most reading:

You’re more likely to find them advertised on the back pages of quirky British publications such as Private Eye and The Countryman than in glossy international fashion or gadget mags, but they grapple with one of the thorniest design issues since the invention of the printing press: how to read a book in the bath. Or on the beach. Or in bed. Or at dinner. Call it The Search for the Perfect Book Holder.

The problem is a simple one: Books have long mocked the naysayers who predicted their demise in the face of radio, television, audio books, the Internet, eBooks (books you read on a hand-held device), eReaders (devices you use to read eBooks) or whatever. But books do have one design flaw: You have to hold them open. While this may not sound like too much of a trial, it can be if you’re trying to eat/type/take notes/get an even tan/wash your back/sip cocoa at the same time, or if, for some reason — through repetitive strain injury or arthritis, say — you have a problem gripping things. Perhaps if we didn’t actually have to hold a book up while we read it, at least some of us might have read Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” to the end, and J.K. Rowling would have sold even more copies of her 672-page doorstop “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” if we hadn’t been afraid of dropping it in the bath.

Here are some links to the ones I reviewed. They’re all great, the products of minds both mad and brilliant at the same time. Who would spend so much time and money trying to make a book stand up?

  • PageStay: great for cooks
  • thumbthing: great for small paperbacks
  • The Gimble and Reader Cushion: great name, great in the bath
  • BookGem: Great for standing books up on flat surfaces
  • easy-read Great for standing things up on non-flat surfaces

There are some more I reviewed, or at least heard about, which I may post later.