Today, support for Windows 2000 from Microsoft ends. Windows 2000 was released over ten years ago, on February 17, 2000. Although it may have had a shaky start as far as application compatibility goes, it is renowned as one of the most stable operating systems ever to come out of Microsoft, and it paved the way for Microsoft to merge the “home” (9x) and “business” (NT) lines of Windows with Windows XP, the following year.

Windows 2000 received its last service pack, Service Pack 4, on June 26, 2003. It has been in “extended support” since June 30, 2005, and since then it has only been receiving security updates from Microsoft. Now, all support for Windows 2000 is dropped, and security updates will no longer be issued.

Another Windows release passes on to the pile of Windows versions past. But this was a great one, so I wanted to post a small tribute to it.

If you were wondering, Windows ME was released after Windows 2000, on September 14, 2000. However, Microsoft dumped support for this operating system, the last of the “9x” line, back in 2006. The next operating system, Windows XP, is already in “extended support,” but will continue to receive security updates until April 8, 2014. By this time, Windows Vista will be in extended support (which happens in April, 2012). Only Vista Business and Vista Enterprise will be supported during the “extended support” phase, which will last until 2017, so support for the other editions (including Ultimate!) will end completely, before XP’s support runs out.

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?

Anyway, I discovered an easy solution to this problem today:  Just boot the machine in safe mode and install Internet Explorer 8.  (You’ll need to download it from Microsoft’s web site and put it on a flash drive or something to move to the troubled machine.)  After IE8 is installed, reboot again in normal mode and you should be able to activate.  Note that you still may have to wait a minute or so for the activation window to appear after you click “Yes.”

This condition may be dependent on having IE8 (or 7?) installed before you attempt the repair install, and it somehow gets messed up during the install.

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.

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?

Checking the headers on these spam messages, I noticed that they weren’t being routed through the Postini servers.  This means that the spammers are ignoring the MX records for our domain and delivering mail directly to the FirstClass server.  They must have cached the old MX record and kept using it after we switched it to point to a Postini server, because what spammer wants to send mail through Postini if they have the choice?  Anyway, yuck.

Turns out that this is not an unknown problem.  I find it pretty interesting, though.  I didn’t know that spammers did this since I had never bumped into this situation before; just another pretty smart thing that the spammers are doing to get around your efforts to stop them.

Anyway, the solution in this case is to set the mail server (the FirstClass server in this case) or a firewall in between your mail server and the Internet to only accept connections from where it should be coming from.  Seems simple enough?  We are actually routing the mail through Google Apps, so the answer was to only allow connections from addresses that Google’s SPF record says that mail should be coming from.

209.85.128.0/17
216.239.32.0/19
64.233.160.0/19
66.249.80.0/20
72.14.192.0/18
66.102.0.0/20
74.125.0.0/16
64.18.0.0/20
207.126.144.0/20
173.194.0.0/16

Anyway, I set these filters in our firewall and, presto, no spam messages all weekend.

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!

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 service failed the logon.  User profile cannot be loaded.”  And then you are logged off, and stuck back at the user select screen.

If you’re having this problem, hopefully you have another account on the computer that you can sign in to.  To fix it…

• Sign into another Windows account.
• Run the registry editor.
• Navigate to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList.
• Look at the sub-keys here in the form of S-1-5-21-XXXXXXXXXX-XXXXXXXXXX-XXXXXXXXXX-XXXX.
• One of them is probably duplicated with the extension “.bak.”  Remove (or backup) the one without the .bak, and then rename the remaining one, removing the .bak extension.
• Log out and try to log in as your troublesome user.  Should be fixed now!

Now, why did this happen in the first place?  I think it has something to do with Windows Backup creating a backup copy of the profile during the backup procedure, and then being interrupted or something and not restoring things to how they used to be.  Maybe there are other scenarios that can cause this problem as well.  In any case, I hope this helps someone!

By the way, while this happened to me on Windows 7, I understand that the error can occur on Windows Vista as well.

Update: April 26, 2010

Some commenters have noted that if you only have one account on your computer, you may still be able to use this trick to fix your problem.  Try booting in safe mode (press F8 at boot).  If you can log in using safe mode, fix the registry as described above, and then reboot into normal mode and you should be all set.

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.”

I’ve been following this thread (among others) in the Google Chat help forum.  A couple of solutions have been posted.

The first one, which will work for most Gmail users, is to just go to your iGoogle page, and use the chat contact list there to set your “Always show” and “Never show” preferences.  Somehow, this bug only affects the Gmail chat interface, and the one over at iGoogle works fine.

However, I’m a Google Apps user, and I don’t have a regular Gmail account.  As far as I know, there’s no way to use iGoogle with a Google Apps account.

So, this other solution, which was posted just yesterday by “zisvan” (thanks zisvan!), is a bit more tedious but it works fine with Google Apps accounts.

• Click “Contacts” in your Gmail account to bring up the Google contacts manager.  Locate the contact that you would like to “Always show” or “Never show.”
• Edit them, and remove the e-mail address associated with the contact you want to change on your chat list.  (Don’t delete the contact entry altogether, just remove the e-mail address and click “Save.”  If you have multiple e-mail addresses for the contact, just remove one of them.)  The contact will disappear from your chat list.
• Create a new contact with the same name as the contact you just edited.  Put the e-mail address on this new contact, with no other details.
• Now, the contact reappears on your chat list.  You can change the “Show in chat list” option and it will stick.
• Once you’re done, click on the “My Contacts” category in the contacts manager, and then click the “Find duplicates” button on the right.  It should find the duplicate contact that you just created, since you gave them the same name, and offer to merge them for you.  Go ahead and do this, and you’ll just have one contact again, with the e-mail address and whatever extra details you had stored with them before.
• Now, the contact is still in your chat list.  Furthermore, the “Show in contact list” option is stuck again, but instead of being stuck on “Auto,” it’s stuck on whatever you set it to.  If you ever want to change it again, you’ll have to repeat this process.

I’m not sure what causes this bug, but I found almost half of the contacts on my chat list to be affected by it.  Supposedly, Google is looking into it.  Hopefully, it will be fixed sooner or later!

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.

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.)

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.

The fix for this is to disable remote UAC processing.  With this disabled, users in the “Administrators” group will be able to do what they have permission to do without elevating, if they are accessing the machine over the network.  To do this, create the following DWORD registry value (if it does not exist already):

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy

Set the value data to 0 to disable remote UAC processing and to 1 to enable it.

The reason I wanted to disable remote UAC processing is so that I can access the contents of local backups created by Windows Backup on Windows 7 remotely.  Windows automatically restricts access to the backup folder it creates to the “Administrators” group.  Even if you change the permissions, they will be reset next time the backup runs.  But I imagine that there are a number of situations where this would be helpful.

For more information, see this MSDN article.