Tag Archives: error

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

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

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

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.

Steam Mac: Proxy error when accepting gifts

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…