Scanner not working under Vista/Windows 7?

Recently I had cause to want to scan something with my old trusty CanoScan FB630U on my installation of Vista 64bit.

Turns out Canon haven't produced drivers for it, so it seemed I was out of luck.

A quick Google search turned up VueScan, which did actually work. However, I wasn't willing to spend the $40 price tag to get rid of the demo watermark.

I was thinking I would have to take it into work where we use Windows XP, which I know has drivers for this scanner.. but then I remembered I had VirtualBox with Ubuntu 10.04 installed in it.

I plugged in my scanner, told Windows to ignore the device and not to install drivers. Then I loaded up VirtualBox, went to the USB settings and added the scanner to the list of usb filters.

Loaded up the virtual machine, and instantly Ubuntu had detected the scanner and allowed me to use it to get my images into GIMP.

Another successful open source solution to corporate obsolescence.

Large address aware and games

Recently there was a huge outcry about how a recent patch to World of Warcraft caused it to use more than 2GB of address space when the maximum settings were used which led to a crash. One patch later, it was fixed.

One of the most common responses from the community was to ask Blizzard to enable the Large Address Aware flag to enable World of Warcraft to use more than 2GB of memory. Blizzard said no.

But, I was interested.. How many games have that flag enabled? 
I wrote a quick little program that parsed my games directory and came up with a list.

• Armed Assault 2
• Borderlands
• Modern Warfare 2
• Dawn of War 2
• Farcry 2 Server
• GTA4
• Mass Effect 2
• Stalker: Clear Sky
• Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl
• X3 Terran Conflict
• Eve Online
• Civ4 Beyond the Sword
• Guild Wars
• Sacred 2
• The Witcher
• Forged Alliance
• Rainbow Six Vegas 2
• Never Winter Nights 2

Firefox update problem

Tried to update Firefox and now it won't start and displays a very unhelpful error about XULRunner and versions that looks something like this?


XulRunner
Error: Platform version '1.9.2.3' is not compatible with
minVersion >= 1.9.2.4
maxVersion <= 1.9.2.4

1. Goto your installation directory for Firefox, probably something like C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox
2. Open the file "application.ini" file in something like notepad
3. Find the text MinVersion=1.9.2.4 and change the 4 to a 3 and save it.
4. Now Firefox will be able to run though it might complain about updates. Don't let it do an automatic update (it'll fail)
5. When you can, download and install the latest version of firefox from the Mozilla website

Cause:
From what i can tell, the Firefox.exe was the 1.9.2.3 version(as checked by right clicking and viewing version properties), but the application.ini (required for XULRunner) file specified it needed to be 1.9.2.4. Don't know why firefox.exe didn't update with the rest (maybe it was in use at the time?)

The latest version(3.6.6) is 1.9.2.6.