Knowledge Brings Fear

XP biometrics madness

I normally refrain from ranting about operating systems. I have made my choice years ago and have never had long periods of regret (you might have correctly guessed at this point that I am belonging to the Cult of Mac). Now from time to time I encounter problems that initially present themself as "can probably easiest be solved by booting up this Windows XP machine". This evening I wanted to play around with a fingerprint sensor that I got for cheap.

First, the URL that was supplied with the sensor instead of an CD with software (that I would have expected) led to a dead server. A bit of googling around brought up a not very encouraging message regarding CMCMedia . Anyway, a bit more searching led me to the server of Neurotechnologija which has an evaluation version of their VeriFinger software for download, that claims to support the ST Microelectronics Touchchip sensor, which is at the heart of the 15-Euro piece of biometrics technology I try to get running.

Dutifully I downloaded the software, also located and downloaded the freshest drivers from ST for the fingerprint-scanner. All this I did of course on my Mac. But now the fun was about to begin. To transfer the files to the PC, I copied them to my newly purchased and installed Linksys NSLU2 mini-fileserver (a small embedded Linux based device that exports USB-harddrives via SMB). The NSLU2 is worth a separate entry, but I will wait with that until I have the right distribution running on the thing. After some lengthy experimenting I discovered that "Microsoft Network" stuff had been disabled on the LAN configuration of the XP box, denying me access to the NSLU without any meaningful error message (a Mac in similar situation complains that Apple Talk is disabled, which might be the reason why your print job / file transfer does not work, saving you an hour of guessing what went wrong).

Now the ordeal began in earnest. Recognition of the device failed, driver installation aborted, "Install Shield" getting confused by some mysterious remaining body parts of earlier installations, the software (after I managed to install it by manually removing said body parts) not recognizing the scanner, crashing with loud belching noises. At this point, having wasted four hours, I decided to never repeat the same mistake again. Sony has a Mac-compatible fingerprint sensor that should be somewhere on sale for cheap, and this is what I will use for my experiments. Back to the dust-bin with the PC, where it belongs...