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Recently I starting having problems burning DVDs, specifically DVD-Rs at my burner’s max speed in Nero Buring ROM 6.6. The exact error I was getting was:

“Power calibration error”

I didn’t change my buring process, or the type of stuff I was backing up, and I didn’t change the media I normally use. So I just thought my burner was dirty, or was failing. It was going on somewhere near 5 years and I use it a lot. Having it fail was a distinct possibility. So I started searching around the net and reading in forums to try to understand what could be causing the problem. It was looking more and more like hardware failure.

Then by chance I used ImgBurn, and I saw the following warning in the log:

“SPTD can have a detrimental effect on drive performance.”

So I decided to do some more digging and found out that SPTD stands for SCSI Pass-Through Direct. Which is a device driver developed by Duplex Secure Ltd which provides a new method of access to storage devices. It is something used by Daemon Tools, which I had installed not to long ago to do some work with ISO images, and then promptly forgot about.

So I uninstalled Daemon Tools and tried to burn another disc. I was surprised to find that the burn failed again with the same error. I took a look in my registry, in the drivers section to see that SPTD was still installed and there was no clear way to remove it.

So it was back to searching through forums. I found a few posts that described messy manual ways of removing the driver from the system. The best way I found was to download the driver installer from: www.duplexsecure.com and then when prompted, click the ‘uninstall’ button.

After a reboot, no more problems burning DVDs at any speed or media format. What a long and painful road…

Category: Tips, fixes | No Comments »

So I pretty much live on the command line in windows ( cmd.exe ), call me old fashioned, but I like the power and flexibility. One thing that irritated me is that, by default, my input prompt keeps shifting right with the length of my directory tree and I have less and less room to enter my commands. What I really want is something that looks like this:

[9:46]::[C:\temp]
:

Where the colon ‘:’ is my input prompt and takes up very little room.

This can easily be accomplished with the PROMPT command in the command shell:

PROMPT [$T$H$H$H$H$H$H]:$M:[$P]$_:

What the above example says is create a prompt with the time which looks like this:

11:19:15.24

Then use $H which is backspace to delete the last 6 characters, so we are left with:

11:19

the $M is just a nice to have feature that lists the name of the remote drive you are on, if that is the case, and the $P lists the current drive and path.

The last thing is the $_ which adds a carriage return and line feed, which gives you the clean line to type your input on.

That’s all there is to it, you can use this page to add your own tweaks..

Category: Tips | No Comments »

While cleaning up my command line tools package DSToolBox I ran across a bug while upgrading to the latest release of TCLAP. Which is a header only template library for command line parsing.

One of the cooler aspects of the library is that it can handle all kinds of type conversions for you so you don’t have to worry about casting them yourself.

This feature is what caused the problem when compiling with the Zc:wchar_t- compiler switch in VC8.

The switch sets the ‘Treat wchar_t as Built-In type’ option to ‘No’.

This is all well and good until we have two templates that resemble the example below:

template<>
struct ArgTraits<wchar_t> {
typedef ValueLike ValueCategory;
};
 
template<>
struct ArgTraits<unsigned short> {
typedef ValueLike ValueCategory;
};

Since wchar_t is no longer treated as a built in type by the compiler, it falls back ( basically ) to:

typedef unsigned short wchar_t;

This causes the compiler to complain with:

error C2766: explicit specialization; ArgTraits<unsigned short>' has already been defined

Since we want to have the library support both types if wchar_t is a real type we can use built in defines to #ifdef it out:

#ifdef _MSC_VER
    #ifndef _NATIVE_WCHAR_T_DEFINED
        #define TCLAP_DONT_DECLARE_WCHAR_T_ARGTRAITS
    #endif
#endif
 
#ifndef TCLAP_DONT_DECLARE_WCHAR_T_ARGTRAITS
 
template<>
struct ArgTraits<wchar_t> {
typedef ValueLike ValueCategory;
};
 
#endif

This way if wchar_t is a built in type we get both template specializations, but if it isn’t we only get one.

Category: C++, fixes | No Comments »