I am having an unusual executable issue whenever I start up my Mac. The program is labelled "com.install4j.runtime.launcher". I assume it is related to this site but I am not sure if this is part of a system update or a third party application that requires this "4J launcher". Either way it has been bugging me for weeks now and I am not sure how to get rid of it!
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Okay I employed some help from a colleague to understand this. It turned out to be a simple and slightly embarrassing solution. Somewhere down the line I must have installed this 4J executable and for some reason it was set to open on start-up (not sure if this was a fault of my own or the Mac's).
For anyone else who has an issue with unwanted applications starting up upon log in, you can solve them fairly easily by hitting:
Apple icon (Top left) -> System Preferences -> Users & Groups -> Login Items
Then simply hit minus (-) to be rid of them! You may find some more unwanted applications on there like iTunes Helper or (in my instance) Flu.x which was being loaded 4 times... A nice way to speed up the mac on start up as well.
Hope this helps anyone who has similar problems.
Related
Recently installed AutoHotKey to remap some keys in order to play a video game. It seemed simple/attractive enough at first. Was not really sure of how it worked but found the .chm file in the download which states in the first line of Usage & Syntax/Using the program:
AutoHotkey doesn't do anything on its own; it needs a script to tell it what to do.
Sounds 'secure' enough to me. Seems like mature software. Maybe overkill (now I know it certainly was overkill) but let's just see how it works.
My remapping was simple enough: change the AWSD keys for the LEFT-UP-DOWN-RIGHT keys. Script syntax is simple enough, just used an example that comes with the install files. Works essentially as expected. Got an annoying pop up after playing the game for a bit from AutoHotKey saying "you've pressed mapped keys 600 times" or something like that. Which was only a little annoying, so I ignored it the first few times. The game I play is real time so getting a even a 5 second interruption while in a match would mean certain loss, so I decided to just disable the script and uninstall.
Lo and behold: when I stop the script, the keys continue to be remapped. Was there some background process running? Maybe. I rebooted only to find that on my Windows login screen my keys continue to be remapped. Huh? Did AHK mess with some registry bindings or something?
I do not know that much about how Windows works, but my vague recollection is that registry bindings is something is active once the OS is active. I search on the web for say 1 hour before I give up for the time being and I end up activating the script again in order to write normally. This works as expected and I literally forget about it until any time I have to reboot.
Honestly a minor annoyance, but due to the world changing very quickly I lately have very few precious minutes that I can actually sit down on my desktop, whereas I used to be able to spend hours on this type of computer issue in order to get to the bottom of it. In other words, my current solution felt good enough. But not anymore. I think something more serious and possibly nefarious may have occurred. I don't want to seem dramatic but I just discovered something else a few minutes ago.
I have a Linux installation on another drive and I just happened to want to load it up after my last Windows blue screen (have gotten a couple of those lately, literally 2 in the space of 2 days and this had maybe only ever happened once before, like 2 years ago, so I am a already concerned about a possible deeper issue). My firmware/bios has a password and guess what I found when I tried inputting it: the keys were still remapped.
At this point I am at a complete loss. I didn't even think this sort of thing was possible. Some OS level software caused a change that was able to be reflected on the bios? Did it affect the keyboard driver? A driver that both windows and the motherboard bios use?
What else have I tried or looked at:
Device Manager claims my Keyboard has 3 instances of "HID Keyboard device". Not entirely sure why it shows 3. Properties show it has 2 driver files: kbdclass.sys and kbdhid.sys, which I suppose are some standard drivers. Not sure how to proceed.
My keyboard is inland (cheapest i could find at microcenter) i am not sure why I cannot find the website for that company. Found some drivers on reddit but they are on some sysadmin's google drive. I will download that exe when i am desperate...
UPDATE
I 'solved' the issue bye getting another keyboard (an old IBM KB-0225) and everything is now in order. I tried disconnecting the Inland keyboard and reconnecting, but after reconnecting I was still experiencing the same issue.
I don't know if I should close this question as there is no longer an issue, but I would like to see if anyone has any other additional theory as to why some software/driver changed occurred inside a keyboard device. As far as I knew, these devices have not internal memory other than possibly some logic gates.
There must be a background process running.
to check that:
note : For windows 10
On your taskbar, click on the ^ button (skip this step if there is no such button)
right-click on the sign.
click on "exit"
If the above steps do not work, try keeping a watch all the time, to see if you notice something uncommon.
Not a programming problem per se, but rather a programming environment problem that I have been unable to find a solution to.
The problem relates to Adobe's Extendscript Toolkit (both 3.5 and 4), but so far I haven't been able to solve the problem, so here I am...
The error I get has appeared more or less over night. I didn't experience this problem yesterday, nor this morning. But exactly WHAT has happened is beyond me. I have removed preferences, I have uninstalled, reinstalled, created a new user, restored old preferences from Time Machine and I'm now pretty much lost for options.
Basically, nothing works in ESTK anymore. Just opening ESTK and entering alert('Hello') won't work. Neither will $.writeln(). Everything running from within ESTK seems to give the same error;
Cannot execute script in target engine 'main'
With details:
Cannot execute script in target engine 'main'!
(#1116) Can't start debug session.
Below is a screenshot taken from the new user I created to test, same problem.
The "funny" thing is that all the scripts (InDesign CS5, still hanging on to it for reasons) still work perfectly in the applications' script panels. So there is nothing wrong with the scripts (heck, they haven't changed one bit, and still refuses to run in ESTK).
As mentioned, I've tried installing the ESTK CC (version 4) as well, but the very same problem occurs there. Which leads me to think the problem lies somewhere else, but I do not know where, and why.
So, if anyone can shed any light on this issue, at all, I would be very happy. Debugging is basically the only thing ESTK is good for in my book, but now that even that functionality is gone, I don't know how to efficiently debug the scripts which is kind of hampering the workflow.
For reference, I'm running InDesign CS5 (from the old Creative Suite) on a 2008 Mac Pro with 10.11.6 (El Capitan) installed. Well aware that it's pretty out of date, but that is beside the point here.
In the above mentioned forum, Adobe has published a stable workaround!You just have to correct a setting inside the estk application:
Open the file(Mac): “/Applications/Adobe ExtendScript Toolkit CC/ExtendScript Toolkit.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Required/cdic/11BTBackend.jsx”
Search for the value: 604800000 (line reads bt.timeout = 604800000)
Replace that value with 604800 and save
Quit ExtendScript Toolkit and relaunch.
I can confirm that it works.
From the adobe Forum :
"we have found a first workaround: just change your date to any date before 20-nov-2018"
https://forums.adobe.com/message/10761440#10761440
Seems like a date issue :(
I just published a quick update about this on the Adobe Tech Blog.
For the time being, if you dismiss the dialog, you can still run your script via ESTK and step through code as usual.
Alternatively, if you really want to avoid the dialogs, and you don’t mind setting your clock back, you can sidestep the issue by setting your system clock back to November 19, 2018 or before. On most systems, changing the system time can have unintended side effects, so this isn’t recommended unless you’re really certain about it.
We've got a fairly mature cross-platform game engine which we've had running on OSX for several years now without a hitch; we recently upgraded the game from SDL 1.2.15 to 2.0, and at some point in the conversion, I goofed something up and now we have a bizarre problem where the app launches just fine from the terminal, but when you launch the app from a double-click in the Finder, it just bounces once in the dock and just goes away.
We're baffled because insofar as I can tell, there's only a one-liner being printed in Console.app: Exited with code: 255 (naturally running from the terminal doesn't help here because we can't reproduce the problem there; the app runs fine when launched in a terminal).
So the only thing we can figure is it's either something we're goofing up in our main.cpp, or something we've hosed in how I set up the dylibs/frameworks. It's also possible that it's something to do with the working directory not being set right, but to the best of my abilities, I believe we're doing it right (regardless of your current working directory; the app attempts to forcibly set said directory to be in the Resources folder - this was necessary to get the game to launch, but I don't know if we're doing it wrong). This feels like a somewhat awkward fit for stackoverflow, for which I apologize, since it's not a simple "paste this code and ask what's wrong" job. I have two ways for you to reproduce it; firstly we are an open-source project, and you can get our source code (complete with a mac project file and all dependencies included in the repo, set up and ready-to-go exactly as I've perhaps erroneously created them), at our github page. The one change you'll need to do is open a file at the root level, named master-config.cfg, and remove the // comments from it (so the engine knows you want to launch a simple demo game shipped with the engine).
Alternately, I have a stripped down (~15mb zipped) binary you can directly download and try to run, if that's sufficient to diagnose the problem.
As said before, we're open-source, so we welcome any pull-requests for fixes!
You need to write a minimal Cocoa wrapper so that OS X will not SIGKILL you for not launching properly. I will give you a pull request with that wrapper.
We just released a new version of one of our applications, and are hearing early reports that it won't run on a few customer's computers. This is a 32-bit Win32/MFC application that we have been shipping for about 5 or 6 years, so there is a history that the thing works. The problem I have is trying to get it running on the two computers. I can't reproduce the problem in-house, nor do I have any real access to the two computers in question. This much I do know - the InitInstance method is never called. I've checked it out in dependencywalker and everything looks OK (except for missing IEShims and wer.dll - but this is common, even in-house). What other tools do I have at my disposal to diagnose this problem?
Thanks for your help.
When a program crashes during initialization, it will usually leave an entry in the windows application error log. (Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer)
There should be something along the lines to "AppCrash" or perhaps "SideBySide"
How can I find what's hanging all new installations on a Windows box?
While testing an installation script on Windows (XP Pro, if it matters) I've run into a situation wherein any and all attempts to install anything on the system hang waiting on who knows what. When the system is restarted, all queued up attempts at installation then go through their exit paths with pop-ups that report the installation is being aborted due to system shutdown having been requested. Of course, reboots do not cure the problem. The system otherwise runs fine.
So... How can I determine what part of the OS I've wedged? (Something in the registry, I suppose, but I'm a real greenhorn when it comes to Windows.) Most likely, something from a preceding install attempt went awry and is now blocking even though I saw no errors reported. Once I figure this out, I want to put in a check for this sort of thing, possibly at both ends of my install scripts, if that seems reasonable.
Thanks for your input.
UPDATE:
Unfortunately for me, rebuilding from scratch to get to the point the system's in now is about 9 hours. I'd like to unwedge it from where it is now rather than reload (again). Procmon seems great but I haven't got SP2 installed, only SP1! -frown- So, other ideas are welcome.
I assume you've tried logging the install to see where things go wrong?
Try rolling back to before things went wrong using "System Restore", if that doesn't solve it and the MSI log files show nothing useful then I'd take the plunge and reload before wasting any more time on it.
That said, if you're developing installers then taking an image of this PC in it's crappy state could be a worthwhile exercise. Some point in the future when you have more time to debug you can try and figure out what the problem is.
P.S. I'm assuming you're asking this question from the point of view of someone developing an installer and not as a tech-support question... otherwise this question should probably be closed as not-programming-related ;)
Try using Procmon to figure out where the installer is having problems, if you set a filter it will report all file and registry activity for that process.