Category Archives: Uncategorized

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Fixing Evernote’s “Could not add tray icon, error: An attempt was made to reference a token that does not exist.” message

I reinstalled Evernote a week or so back and every time I fired it up, a background window would also open containing the message “Could not add tray icon, error: An attempt was made to reference a token that does not exist.” Every time this happened, I’d dismiss the message and move on with what I was working on.

This routine got old pretty quickly so I did what any other geek would do and Googled for the message. Apparently the message has been around for a while, with the suggested fix being to reinstall Evernote. So I uninstalled Evernote, waited a few minutes, and then reinstalled it. Then I went back into the application and a background window opened with the same message.

This time, after closing both the pop-up and the main application window, I took a look in the system tray and discovered that Evernote’s “running in the background” icon was also missing. I also realized I’d never been prompted to run the installer as an administrator.

I run my computer differently than most people – the user account where I do my day-to-day work has reduced privileges. There’s a separate login for anything requiring elevated privileges, such as installing software. Most installers will either prompt you to either login as an administrator, or else they’ll install to an alternate location (generally somewhere in the %APPDATA% folder). I didn’t dig too deeply, but my best guess is that Evernote was doing the latter, but the system tray icon requires something to be installed with higher privileges.

In the end, I uninstalled Evernote again and this time made sure to re-install with admin privileges.

I haven’t seen the error message since.

(Public domain image, via pixabay)

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Geek Humor

One of my co-workers retired back in the Spring, but still stops by to visit on occasion. He understood the importance of software source control, but had a few struggles with it. As he was leaving after his most recent visit, we had this brief exchange

  • Co-Worker: You know, I left on March 15 and haven’t had any tree conflicts since then.
  • Me: That’s great! No branches falling in the back yard?
  • Co-Worker: Well… at least, they weren’t trying to merge.

It’s difficult to get much geekier than when you’re making source control puns.

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Problem: chmod is ignored in the Git Bash prompt

So here’s a strange one that had me baffled for a bit – the chmod command is pretty much a null operation from the Git Bash prompt (MingW64). This initially showed up on a script for launching a Docker container, but as nearly as I can tell, it happens for any shell script.

So, we have a simple script that prints out “Hello World!”.

blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test
$ cat foo
echo Hello World!

Simple enough. Now the thing is, I want to make this script executable. Now this particular Bash implementation will let me run ./foo and it’ll execute, but my real use case (running a Docker container) is going to have a somewhat longer name. Just as a matter of convenience, I’d like to to type just the first few characters, press tab, and have the filename expanded. And besides, your executable files should always be marked as executable.

blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test
$ ls -l
total 2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 blair 197121 28 Oct 18 00:20 bar*
-rw-r--r-- 1 blair 197121 18 Oct 18 00:10 foo

blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test
$

OK, this is an easy fix, I just need to run chmod and set the execute bit to on, right?

blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test
$ ls -l
total 2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 blair 197121 28 Oct 18 00:20 bar*
-rw-r--r-- 1 blair 197121 18 Oct 18 00:10 foo

blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test
$ chmod 744 foo
blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test
$ ls -l
total 2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 blair 197121 28 Oct 18 00:20 bar*
-rw-r--r-- 1 blair 197121 18 Oct 18 00:10 foo

The execute bit didn’t change. Maybe I need to use the u+x syntax instead?

$ chmod u+x foo
blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test
$ ls -l
total 2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 blair 197121 28 Oct 18 00:20 bar*
-rw-r--r-- 1 blair 197121 18 Oct 18 00:10 foo

Still no luck. So why is bar marked as executable? What’s the difference between these two scripts? The answer turns out to be one line of code:

blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test
$ chmod u+x foo
blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test
$ cat bar
#!/bin/sh
echo Hello World!

Do you see that first line, where it says “#!/bin/sh”. That’s how Bash knows what interpreter to pass the script to. It also turns out, in this particular implementation, that’s how Bash knows the file contains an executable script instead of just text.

So we modify foo, and get this result:

blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test$ cat foo
#!/bin/sh
echo Hello World!
blair@Squawk MINGW64 ~/test
$ ls -l
total 2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 blair 197121 28 Oct 18 00:20 bar*
-rwxr--r-- 1 blair 197121 18 Oct 18 00:10 foo*

(Image credit: Screenshot by ThatBlairGuy)

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git error: Permission to user-B/repo.git denied to user-A

I have two GitHub accounts: UserA and UserB. Over time I’ve been switching to working with UserB, but the switchover was a bit difficult.

I created a test repository on GitHub at https://github.com/UserB/test

On the local system, from the command prompt

cd \git
git clone https://UserB@github.com/UserB/test
cd test
# make some changes to README.md, add a new foo.txt
git add *
git commit -m "Banana!" # In real life, you'll probably want a more useful comment.

And that’s where the train went off the rails…

C:\git\test>git push
remote: Permission to UserB/test.git denied to UserA.
fatal: unable to access 'https://UserB@github.com/UserB/test/': The requested URL returned error: 403

So git’s saying that even though I expressly got this as UserB, it still thinks I’m UserA

Google came back with lots of stuff about making sure you have the right SSH key (apparently the cool kids do everything over SSH).

A few search results make reference to the Windows Credential Manager. Apparently the Windows version of Git hooks into that somehow. What’s the Windows Credential Manager? Well, from the name, it sounds like something that might be used for storing userids and passwords.

OK, so how do I invoke it? Dunno. Let’s try the search box on the START menu. Aha! Two entries. One for “Credential Manager” and one for “Manage Windows Credentials.”

So let’s try the first one. Hey! This looks promising:

About halfway down the list, there’s one labeled “git:https://github.com” Let’s expand that.

Oh, looky there! Username and password.

Now what I did was to remove the entry and then push again. I was prompted to enter a userid and password. I still had to type the password at the command prompt, but IT STUCK.

C:\git\test>git push
Counting objects: 3, done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 304 bytes | 0 bytes/s, done.
Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To https://github.com/UserB/test
5e74c47..cf2ca13 master -> master

I probably could have clicked “Edit” and changed the userid and password, and just kept going, but I didn’t notice the “Edit” right away.

It looks as though you might actually be able to have multiple entries for git:https://github.com, but I haven’t tried that yet.

(Public domain photo from PublicDomainPictures.net)

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What is an SDK vs. a JDK vs. a JRE?

The Content Management System we use at the office is written in Java, so on the development systems, we need to be careful to match the JDK version to the JRE version used by the CMS vendor. Periodically someone new will join the team, and they end up wondering what a JDK is and how is that different from a JRE?

So let’s break this down. Generally speaking, an SDK or Software Development Kit. Basically, it’s the set of compilers, debuggers, and other tools used for creating software on a given platform.

That’s basically what the JDK is.  The Java Development Kit contains compilers, debuggers and other tools for creating Java applications.

While a software (or Java) development kit allows you to create software, some software platforms also require a runtime environment. The JRE, or Java Runtime Environment is the support software that allows a Java application to execute.

(Photo from Pexels.com, used under Creative Commons Zero.)

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Dropbox

So, I woke up this morning to an email from Troy Hunt, or rather, a message from his Have I Been Pwned? service. It seems that my account was one of the 68,648,009 compromised in the Dropbox breach.

From the sound of things, there’s some mixed news. The bad news is, at the time of the breach, four years ago, many passwords were still being stored as SHA-1 (MD5) hashes. The good news is that they appear to have been salted hashes and the hash values weren’t included in the breach.

Dropbox did send out an alert a few days ago saying that they had reset passwords for anyone who hadn’t updated their password in the past four years (guilty!). The email said it was done as a precaution, but didn’t go into detail about what it was a precaution again. To find that out, you had to click through and read a blog post.

I’m probably OK. My password probably wasn’t as secure as it might have been, but thankfully, the lack of salt values for the SHA1 passwords should make them quite difficult to break. And perhaps most importantly, I’ve never used that same password anywhere else.

(But yes, I changed my password to something a bit more secure. It’s now 40 random characters generated by KeePass.)

Some important takeaways:

  1. Change your Dropbox password.
  2. Don’t use the same password in more than one place.
    • Consider a password manager. I’m mostly happy with KeePass, but also hear good things about LastPass.
  3. Consider turning on two-factor authentication.
  4. Consider also signing up with Have I Been Pwned?
  5. Why are you still reading this? Go change your Dropbox password!

(Photo from Pexels, free for non-commercial use.)

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Stopping Credit Card Offers

It seems like the mail includes a good number of credit card offers. Various companies seem to send offers for their special Visa or Mastercard affinity programs almost daily. It only takes a moment to run them through the shredder, and the fees for sending them help keep the lights on at the Post Office. Besides, figuring out how to stop them takes too long, right?

But Thursday’s daily email included something special! A credit card offer with the magic phrase, “You can choose to stop receiving “prescreened” offers of credit from this and other companies by calling toll-free 1-888-567-8688.” Now I’m suspicious of pretty much any offer that comes in as a spam email (These turkeys weren’t even supporting the Post Office!) but a Google search is pretty painless.

The second result was the US Federal Trade Commission’s “Prescreened Credit and Insurance Offers” page. So what do you know? That phone number’s legit.

So it turns out there are actually three options:

  1. Call 888-567-8688 and you can stop (most) credit card offers for five years.
  2. You can also stop (most) credit card offers by visiting https://www.optoutprescreen.com/, clicking the “Click Here to Opt-In or Opt-Out” button.
  3. Or you can go for the gold by visiting that same link, printing out the form at the end, and mailing it to 
    Opt­Out Department
P.O. Box 2033
Rock Island, IL 61204­-2033

    .

Total time spent: less than five minutes.

(Image via pixabay)

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Food Production

I’ve been listening to the .Net Rocks podcast for about eight months and one of the things I like is their willingness to discuss topics outside the Microsoft software platform. The monthly “Geek Out” where co-host Richard Campbell deeply researches and then discusses a technical topic is another interesting part, and always informative.

A few months ago, the geek outs turned into a series on food production, starting with the history of agriculture, and moving up to how food is beginning to be genetically modified.

If you have any interest in food (we all eat from time to time), the series provides a lot of interesting information, and delves into some of the more controversial topics while remaining neutral. Well worth a listen.

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Three Minutes of Fame

Today I was internet-famous for slightly more than three minutes; just long enough for Richard Cambell and Carl Franklin to read and reply to a comment on an episode of the .Net Rocks Podcast.

Back in January, I left a comment on their website, regarding StartSSL and Let’s Encrypt, two providers of SSL certificates they’d mentioned during the show. Today, show 1287 came out, covering the topic of “InfoSec for Developers” and they used my comment (right about the 5:40 mark) as the segue to the conversation with their guest, security professional Kim Carter. (Interestingly, he turns out to be using security certificates from one of the sources I’d commented on.)

So if you don’t know that’s all about, an “SSL certificate” is one of the things you need in order to setup a secure website using HTTPS. This is part of what triggers the lock icon to appear when you’re viewing a secure web site. (You do look for that when buying things online, right?)

Richard made a valid point that a paid-for certificate really doesn’t get a whole lot more validation than what the free ones get, so if you’re able to take advantage of the free ones, there’s not really a lot of incentive not to. (it does leave the question of what extra value you get with a paid SSL certificate.)

The self-signed certificates mentioned in my question don’t have anyone vouching for their authenticity, though it’s not clear that the free or even the paid for certificates have anyone vouching for them either. There is another kind of certificate though, the “Extended Validation” certificate (which is what your bank should be using) which does involve some in-depth checking of identity.

One thing that does distinguish third-party (i.e. “real”) certificates from the self-signed ones is that if something goes wrong (e.g. the private key is stolen), a third-party certificate can be revoked. Since the webmaster is the only one vouching for a self-signed certificate, there’s no way to tell whether the person saying the certificate is valid is who they say they are. The third party certificates come from a source which has been validated, and there’s a secure chain of connections for verifying that the certificate can be trusted.