Archive for January, 2010

“ICU_DATA is not set” Error message in Actuate 9

14 Jan 2010 at 11:35

Terry Moore

How To, Technical

6 Comments

A customer of mine was getting an error message when trying to start his Acuate 9 iServer service.  The service would respond with the error message “The service did not respond in a timely fashion.”  Which doest mean anything to you or me.  So I copied the path to executable statement that the service was trying to start in to a command prompt windows so that I could see any output from the command. Here is the output:

C:\>"d:\PROGRA~1\Actuate9\iServer\bin\pmd9.exe"
ICU_DATA is not set

So I checked my system environment variables and saw that the ICU_DATA variable was set to c:\windows\system32

c:\> Set
...
ICU_DATA=c:\windows\system32\
...

I attempted to Google the error message and only came up with a few pages and most didn’t help. I then searched the d:\program files\Actuate9\iServer folder looking for any file that contained the words ICU_DATA. It did have a hit but it was with a HTML help document that didn’t help.
I then decided to search the c:\windows\system32 directory, since this is where ICU_DATA is pointed, for any file that contains the letters “icu” in hopes to find something. I came up empty handed. I then decided to do the same searches on a test Actuate 9 server that I have. This time the search did find something. Two files in the system32 directory named acicudt18_71.dll and acicudt18_71w.dll. I then copied these two files to the c:\windows\system32 directory on my customers server and I was then able to start the Actaute 9 iServer service and they were very happy.

Here is a zip file containing these two dlls just in case you need them and don’t have a test server to copy them from.

Why were these files missing?  I am not sure and didnt have a chance to investigate.  I decide to write this post in hopes that it helps someone else that is having this issue since there is very little data about the ICU_DATA variable on Google

How to: Restore Outlook 2007 default enter key behavior from double space back to single space

12 Jan 2010 at 16:29

Terry Moore

How To, Technical

No Comment

Outlook 2007 has an annoying feature where it assumes that every time you hit the enter key in a new message that you automatically want it to be double spaced.  You can easily just hit SHIFT+Enter to invoke this single space return but that get annoying after a while.  Here is how to make you Enter key just do a single space return.

Step 1
In a new email message click on the Format Text Tab

Step 2
Click the Change Styles button

Step 3
In the drop down click Style Set then click Word 2003

Step 4
To make it the default for all messages click the Change Style button again and this time click Set As Default

Here is a screen shot of the icons that you are clicking on.

OutlookMsg1

How to: Configure Mediatomb/DLNA on Fedora 12 to work with a Samsung TV

05 Jan 2010 at 21:56

Terry Moore

Fedora, How To, Linux, Networking, Other, Technical

9 Comments

I just purchased a Samsung LN46B650 TV and decide to play with the DLNA capiblities of the TV.  The TV come with a CD containing a Windows DLNA server but because I am a geek, I dont have a Windows machine in my house.  I though that since DLNA is a standard that it would be easy to use any DLNA server to host content for my TV.  Well I was partly right.  After reading several forum post I have successfully got everything working on my Fedora 12 netbook.  I will most likely be doing this on a Ubuntu machine at some point at which time I will update this post.

Step 1:
Assuming that you have a working Fedora 12 system that is connected to the same network as your TV make sure that you have port 50500 open or just disable your firewall (your choice).  You can manage this by going to System > Administration > Firewall

Step 2:
Open a terminal and do a yum install mediatomb.

Step 3:
Login as root and using your favorite text editor, open the /etc/mediatomb.conf file and modify the following parameter:

Enter the correct network interface for mediatomb to communicate to. In my case I am using the wireless connection of wlan0

## Network interface on which the server will run, you need to edit this!
MT_INTERFACE="wlan0"

There are other options that you can configure in this file but the network interface is the only on the I had to modify.

Step 4:
As root open a terminal and run mediatomb. This will start the software and configure the sqlite database and setup the default config.xml file that we are going to need to modify. Once the software is running go ahead and hit ctrl-c to exit from the software because we need to modify that config.xml file

Step 5:
With out this step your TV will be able to browse the content but not be able to do anything with it.
Also as root, edit the file /root/.mediatomb/config.xml
Look for the section:

<!–
<custom-http-headers>
<add header=”X-User-Agent: redsonic” />
</custom-http-headers>
<manufacturerURL>redsonic.com</manufacturerURL>
<modelNumber>105</modelNumber>
–>

and change to to this

<custom-http-headers>
<add header=”X-User-Agent: redsonic”/>
<add header=”transferMode.dlna.org: Streaming”/>
<add header=”contentFeatures.dlna.org: DLNA.ORG_OP=01;DLNA.ORG_CI=0;DLNA.ORG_FLAGS=01700000000000000000000000000000?/>
</custom-http-headers>
<manufacturerURL>redsonic.com</manufacturerURL>
<modelNumber>105</modelNumber>

Now save the file.

Step 6:
In the terminal windows as root type mediatomb to start the application.

Now you should be able to connect to the Mediatomb webpage and start adding content to share via DLNA. Typically this is on port 49152 or 49153. You will be able to get this infomation from the lastline of output given when you run mediatomb from the command line.

Step 7:
To play videos you may have to re-tag the MIME information to video/mpeg. You can do this in the web interface. Once you have added a video to the database click on the notepad/edit button and change the mimetype to video/mpeg. There is also an option in the config.xml file where you may be able to do this globally for all media. I have not tried this yet and will update this post once I have.

Step 8:
Instead of having to start mediatomb manually each time you reboot there is also a daemon that you can start via /etc/init.d/mediatomb. If you plan on using this in daemon mode you will need to configure it by doing this:
Start the daemon so that it will install the default config files and sqlite database

root#  /etc/init.d/mediatomb start

Then go to /etc/mediatomb/config.xml and make the changes that you made above. Once you have made these changes restart the mediatomb daemon

root# /etc/init.d/mediatomb restart

Now you can go to the web interface and start adding content.

Please let me know if you have any other experiences connecting to your Samsung TV with mediatomb or any other DLNA server. Also please leave a comment if you have found this guide useful or if you see any correction that I need to make.

Also to give credit where it is due here is where I got some of the information above Cnet Forum Post