Category Archives: troubleshooting

Half Life 2: "Failed to load the launcher DLL"

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All of a sudden, without touching anything (in fact, without booting Windows during last few days) I got this upon trying to launch Half Life 2:

Failed to load the launcher DLL: 


The specified procedure could not be found. 




Verifying files did not help me. The solution (for me)? I went to:


C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\ivucica\half-life 2\bin


and I moved all the .dll files away. Then I relaunched the game. Steam happily recreated all .dlls, and the game now works. I safely removed old copies of the DLLs.


Since I didn’t think of making a screenshot, image from http://www.hl2world.com/bbs/-vp666240.html

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Apache 403 — one cause on Mac (and other Unixes)

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Things suddenly broke, without installing web-server-related stuff, without touching apache config?

It’s probably permissions.
No really, you checked out permissions, and it looks ok. Really, “Sites” (or “public_html”) looks ok. However, the entire path needs to be fixed.

Check if each directory in full path to the file you want to serve contains at least executable permission for the web group, or “other” group. That is, on Mac this helped me:

chmod o+x /Users
chmod o+x /Users/ivucica
chmod 755 /Users/ivucica/Sites

What went wrong for me? I suspect Mac OS X 10.6’s disk check, or perhaps one other disk utility I recently used, messed up the executable permission flag of /Users/ivucica. I have no other explanation.

This tip would probably help under GNU/Linux too.

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Steam Mac: Proxy error when accepting gifts

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Getting the following error on Steam Mac when attempting to accept gift by clicking on link in the email?

Unable to connect to HTTP Proxy. Your proxy may be misconfigured or offline. -336

Unable to connect to HTTP Proxy. Your proxy may be misconfigured or offline.

Woah! But you don’t use a proxy, do you? Solution is simple. For all your Internet connections (just to be safe), in System Preferences, disable Auto Proxy Discovery. Click on screenshots to enlarge.

This worked for me, but your mileage may vary. Now, let’s report this on the Steam Mac forum…

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iPhone development: Bits/c++config.h: No such file or directory

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Developing for iPhone with some C++ code? Suddenly getting this error after installing a beta SDK?

/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS3.1.2.sdk/usr/include/c++/4.2.1/bits/stl_algobase.h:65:0 Bits/c++config.h: No such file or directory in /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS3.1.2.sdk/usr/include/c++/4.2.1/bits/stl_algobase.h

Note the bolded folder. Change into it and make a symlink from arm-apple-darwin9 to arm-apple-darwin10. Please note that Apple has fixed this already at one upgrade of beta SDK (I had this error before too, but I still didn’t get 4.0 beta 2 so I didn’t check) so it’s reasonable to assume they will do this again.

cd Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS3.1.2.sdk/usr/include/c++/4.2.1/
ln -s arm-apple-darwin9 arm-apple-darwin10

PS I don’t think posting this violates any NDA. Especially since origin for this solution is also public.

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iTunes: Cannot combine songs into an album?

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If you cannot merge songs into a single album, first check that their album name, artist name, and other properties match.

If these are already the same, note that sometimes “foreign symbols” may cause issues. For example, try renaming album “Mačak u vreći” to “Macak u vreci”. If this successfully combines the songs, you can try renaming the album back into its original name.

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Slow logoff in Windows XP – hang on "Saving your settings"

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If you have problems with Windows XP logging off — that is, the system inexplicably decides to wait for about a minute before it proceeds with log off or shutdown — you may want to give Microsoft’s UPHclean – User Profile Hive Cleanup Service a spin. It just helped me with this problem that was harassing me for the past full calendar year.

It installs as a service so it’ll keep working.
Now, I wonder why this service is not included in Windows themselves, or at least in a service pack – why ship a broken OS?