M-A's

technology blog

Thursday 26 April 2007

Random Rant about Canon (again)

I wanted to scan some documents in MP Navigator 3.0 and generate a PDF. I typed a longer than usual name for the file name. Here's the message box I received:

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MP Navigator
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Le nom de fichier est trop long.La longueur maximale est de 32 caractères d’un octet.
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OK
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It roughly means: « The file name is too long. The maximum length is 32 characters of one byte. » (!?!)

Hummm welcome in 2007!

And I still haven't talked about my problem with the intelligent chipset on the color inkjet cartridge that stops working and that force you to buy a new cartridge even if yours is still almost full!

And forget about Canon's support. I tried. The only thing I received from them is *2* surveys to know if I'd buy Canon branded hardware again.

How to make MP Navigator 3.0 work with a MP800 on a x64 OS

Well, sometime it worked, sometime not. I found the solution on a forum. (sorry no reference) The fix is really simple. Add « C:\WINDOWS\twain_32\MP800 » to your %PATH% environment variable. That fixed the problem for MP Navigator 2 and 3 instantantly.

Keywords: W2K3, XP, Windows Server 2003, Vista

Wednesday 11 April 2007

ALPC

It means "Advanced Local Procedure Call". It seems like a light-weight RPC or if you prefer a heavy-weight LPC.

You won't find a lot of documentation on this one. Mark quickly refered to it in Inside the Windows Vista Kernel: Part 3. Microsoft has been granted a patent which infers to look for UMDF documentation. (I have to admit I still haven't read it) But the WDK is silent about this subject. It seems to be implemented in msrpc.sys (and not in the kernel like LPC). Microsoft documented references to ALPC for Event Tracing and for their new Wait Chain Traversal (which seems great).

More on this later.