Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
Windows XP is a picky beast. If you want to move it from one system to another, chances are that you’ll just get a BSOD upon boot. To get around this, you can do a repair install or “in-place upgrade” to convince it to take stock of all of the new hardware and then it will probably boot up fine. Of course, there’s other reasons to run a repair install, it might be able to save a system that isn’t working because of a strange configuration problem or a malware attack.
Anyway, here’s something that I’ve run into a few times now: After running a repair install using a Windows XP SP3 disc, after booting up and logging in, you’re given the message along the lines of: “You must activate Windows before you can log on. Would you like to activate Windows now?” If you select “Yes,” which is supposed to bring up the activation prompt, nothing happens. You get to stare at your desktop wallpaper until you decide to restart your computer manually. If you select “No,” you are immediately logged out. What to do?
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Tags: Windows XP
Posted in Software | No Comments »
Monday, February 22nd, 2010
When you start up Cygwin’s X.Org X11 server via startxwin.exe, it likes to leave an xterm window open on your desktop.
I suppose this is kind of handy if you were manually starting Cygwin/X, it’s pretty annoying if you have it set to start up when you log in to Windows. To keep this from happening, you just need to add an empty .startxwinrc file to your Cygwin home directory. That is, start the Cygwin bash shell, and use this command:
touch .startxwinrc
That’s it! No more xterm windows popping up.
Oh, if you’d rather have something besides xterm start up when you start Cygwin/X, you can just add a list of commands to .startxwinrc and it will execute them after starting the X.Org server.
Tags: Cygwin
Posted in Software | No Comments »
Sunday, February 21st, 2010
So, to combat spam, I recently deployed Postini at my workplace. We qualified for the K-12 promotion to it is awesome to have good spam handling for free. We currently use FirstClass as our mail server, and I’d rate it’s built in spam-handling mechanisms as “poor-to-none.” (We are eying Google Apps mail as a replacement in the next year or so.)
So, after finally getting Postini deployed and enabled for all accounts, the Postini stats report that just over 50% of incoming mail is being tossed out as “blatant spam,” with over 25% of the remaining mail being quarantined as “potential spam.” This is with Postini on the default lowest aggressiveness setting. So, assuming the worst case (“all incoming mail is spam”, which is almost true), our users are already receiving less than 37.5% as much spam as they used to. Once we’re satisfied that things are working fine, I’ll bump up the aggressiveness.
Anyways, I noticed that my FirstClass inbox was still being bombarded by spam messages (a few per hour), most of them obviously spam. Why weren’t these being blocked by Postini?
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Tags: E-mail, E-mail Security, Postini
Posted in Software | No Comments »
Thursday, February 18th, 2010
I ran into this problem with WordPress running on a Mac OS X server. I suppose that this may happen on other servers running Apache as well. Attempting to access the WordPress site threw this error at you:
Server error!
The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request. Either the server is overloaded or there was an error in a CGI script.
If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.
Error 500
Turned out that the .htaccess file in the root of the WordPress install had some gibberish in it. It looks like this gibberish replaced some of the actual contents of the file. I don’t know how it got there, but fixing the .htaccess file solved the problem. So, that’s something to check if you are having this problem as well!
Tags: Mac OS X Server, WordPress
Posted in Software | No Comments »
Monday, February 1st, 2010
…How’s that for good grammar?
Anyway, this error popped up for me in Windows 7 the other day. After the computer boots up, you click on your user icon, type in your password, and BAM! “The User Profile Service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded.” And then you are logged off, and stuck back at the user select screen.
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Tags: Windows 7, Windows Vista
Posted in Software | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
I’ve recently taken a liking to Gmail’s built-in web interface to Google Talk. However, since I started using it for most of my chatting activities, I’ve noticed an odd bug.
If you hover over a contact and then click on the “Video and More” button, you get a nifty menu like this:
What I’m interested in is the option to “Always show” or “Never show” a contact. If I have a contact that I don’t talk to very often, or if a contact has several accounts but only uses one of them most of the time, I may want to hide some of them from my list. Additionally, there are some people that I might want to have on my list all the time, and not have them hidden at Google’s whim if I don’t talk to them very often.
Well, for some contacts, this setting seemed to be stuck on “Auto.” You could make a selection, and a confirmation message would appear at the top of the screen, but the behavior of the contact on the list would not change, and if you pull up the menu again, it’s still there on “Auto.”
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Tags: Gmail, Google Apps, Google Talk
Posted in Software | No Comments »
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
Trying to set up a JSP application on Ubuntu 9.10, using Tomcat 6 and MySQL 5.1 (both from the Ubuntu repositories). I was getting a curious error when trying to get a connection to the MySQL database from the JDBC DriverManager:
SQLException: Communications link failure
The last packet sent successfully to the server was 0 milliseconds ago. The driver has not received any packets from the server.
SQLState: 08S01
VendorError: 0
After searching for a while and going through some solutions that didn’t work for me, I found the answer here. I’m re-posting it because that answer is posted in Spanish. 
All you have to do is open /etc/init.d/tomcat6 in your favorite text editor (as root), find the line that looks like TOMCAT6_SECURITY=yes, and change it to TOMCAT6_SECURITY=no. Then, restart the Tomcat server (sudo service tomcat6 restart). Ta da!! MySQL connections are now working.
Now, there’s probably a better way to do this that doesn’t involve completely turning off “TOMCAT6_SECURITY,” but this seems fine for a small test project which is what I’m working on (it will eventually be deployed on the JBoss server). I’ll be sure to update this post if I find it… or if you know anything, leave a note in the comments below.
Tags: Java, MySQL, Ubuntu
Posted in Software | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
Three tab tricks in Firefox 3.6:
Open tabs on the right.
In Firefox 3.6, the default behavior is that when you open a new tab from a link on the page, it appears just to the right of the active tab. The old behavior was to have it appear at the very end of your list of tabs. To get the old behavior back, go to >about:config and set the value browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent to false.
Ctrl+tab previews.
To get an about:config and set browser.ctrlTab.previews to true. Note, you can press Ctrl+Shift+Tab to show the expanded list of tabs, Ctrl+Tab just shows your most recent ones.
Windows 7 taskbar previews of all tabs.
If you are using Windows 7, you can go to about:config and set browser.taskbar.previews.enable to true. Now, the Windows 7 taskbar will have a preview for each tab, rather than just one for each Firefox window. (Note that this feature works off-and-on for me, I think that it’s probably not completely finished which is why it is not yet on by default.)
Tags: Mozilla Firefox
Posted in Software | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
In earlier versions of Windows, if you had files or folders with NTFS permissions assigned to the “Administrators” group (i.e., “Administrators” are allowed to edit the files but other users are not), they applied to all users in the Administrators group like you would expect. In Windows Vista and Windows 7 (with UAC enabled), a process must be elevated and be running as a user in the Administrators group to be given these permissions. This is fine when you’re dealing with stuff on your local machine… when you try to do something with a file that you need administrative permission to do, Windows just prompts you to elevate, and you may get a UAC prompt depending on your system settings.
But if you are dealing with stuff on a different machine, perhaps by Windows file sharing, there’s no way to elevate yourself. So, if you are trying to access a shared folder that only “Administrators” are allowed to access, even if you are a member of the “Administrators” group, you will not be able to access it.
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Tags: Windows 7, Windows Vista
Posted in Software | No Comments »
Monday, January 4th, 2010
One of the cool things about Windows Vista is that, if you have an installation DVD for Vista Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, or Ultimate, you can use it to install any of those editions — which one you get just depends on which product key you enter at the beginning of the installation. For some reason, Microsoft took this cool tidbit away from Windows 7. The disc you get only lets you install one edition.
However, there’s an easy way to turn such a “locked” disc into a disc that will install any edition again, just like with Windows Vista.
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Tags: Windows 7
Posted in Software | 8 Comments »
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