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!

I’m a bit disappointed, but not surprised, that this initial launch of XMPP support comes without support for XMPP federation (“S2S”).  If we had S2S support for Facebook Chat, then Facebook users could talk with users on any XMPP/Jabber network, and vice versa.  This would also enable a particularly cool bridge between Facebook Chat and Google Talk, which are both based on XMPP, and it might even push AIM and WLM more towards supporting XMPP, so that we could have a truly universal IM network on the Internet.  (We have it for e-mail already… why not for IM?)

Of course, Facebook is still about connections to other Facebook users, and all of the group and privacy controls are based on this.  So, this is how I picture XMPP federation working with Facebook:

• A user, who we will call “Joe,” uses another XMPP network but wants to talk to Facebook Chat users.
• Joe must have a Facebook account.
• Joe goes to his Facebook account and registers his XMPP handle by adding it to his profile (just like you can add additional e-mail addresses).
• Now, Facebook sends authentication requests from all of the users that Joe can talk to on Facebook Chat to Joe’s XMPP account.  Joe can then add them to his other XMPP contact list.
• Now, Joe can talk to Facebook Chat users from his other XMPP account.  Facebook Chat users using the web interface will see Joe just like they see any other Facebook user, along with his picture and a link to his profile or whatever.  Privacy settings that they have applied to Joe apply to his extra XMPP account too.  Since he registered his XMPP handle in his profile, everyone knows who he is, and Facebook makes this connection between his XMPP account and his Facebook account obvious to Facebook Chat users.

There you have it.  Simple for Facebook Chat users using the web UI — in fact, the user experience for them doesn’t change at all.  And convenient for people who already use another XMPP account to chat (like Google Talk).

Launching XMPP support closed this long-standing bug, which was the highest-voted bug on Facebook’s Bugzilla bug tracker.  I’d love to see similar support for the XMPP federation bug!

Update, 10:34 PM:

Just for reference, you can check out Facebook Chat’s XMPP implementation status at IMTrends.  Once they support XMPP federation, we should see green checkmarks next to the server-to-server entries (like this one).

Update, February 12, 2010:

Someone actually beat me to filing a bug for XMPP federation support.  (Though I am sure I searched for “XMPP” before filing my bug and it didn’t show up.)  I’ve changed the link above to point to the earlier bug.

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.

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.

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.

Well, I tried to, anyway.  I used to have this game, but I don’t know what happened to the cartridge, so I was looking to get it replaced cheap-ish.

I’ve never received counterfeit merchandise from an eBay seller before, so I was a bit surprised when I received a non-genuine game.  But, there were a few warning signs that I should have seen before I ordered it (though I did make sure to buy from a U.S. seller, as I hear that this is often a problem with games coming from, say, China).  Here what happened to me; maybe this will help out people in similar situations if they stumble across this page while Googling for information.

Like I said, the game was Yoshi’s Island DS.  The eBay seller was jandjvariety, and the item number was 360215844783.  Here is a link to the eBay listing, and here is a link to a local mirror of the eBay listing (since the listing will expire and be removed from eBay in 90 days or so).

What are the warning signs in the eBay listing itself?

• The game is listed as “Yoshi’s Island 2,” which is the wrong title, at least here in the United States.  (Though the game was referred to by that title for some time before it was released.)
• They specifically state in the listing that the game is “not formatted for the DSi.”

I didn’t notice either of these until after I had the game in hand, and went back to look.  The second one is a particularly strong indicator that the game is non-genuine, though.  The Nintendo DSi has practically perfect backwards compatibility with all Nintendo DS titles.  The only games that I am aware of that cause any trouble are games that require you to stick something in the Nintendo DS’s Game Boy Advance cartridge slot (i.e. Guitar Hero: World Tour), which is missing on the Nintendo DSi.  However, the DSi is able to detect some counterfeit cartridges and will refuse to play them.  So, the eBay seller has to put up a notice that the game will not work in the DSi, otherwise they’ll have to deal with people wondering why the game does not work.

Oh, yeah, the game didn’t work in my DSi, which was the first sign of trouble for me.  It’s little icon showed up on the system menu, but when I tried to run it, my DSi told me this:

An error has occurred.  Press and hold the power button to turn the system off.  Please see the Nintendo DSi Operations Manual for help troubleshooting.

I was traveling at the time (I bought this game to keep me entertained during my travels!), so I couldn’t contact the seller right away, but when I got Internet access, I noticed the other discrepancies in the listing that I mentioned above.

I contacted the seller and asked for them to send a refund or a genuine copy of the game.  They sent me back a polite reply, offering a refund if I return the game, and pointing out that the listing said it wasn’t supposed to work in the DSi.  This was at least somewhat nice of them, since the listing also said that they don’t take returns.

I wasn’t happy with this, however.  I don’t see any reason to send the game back to them, as they will probably just list it again and sell it to some other unsuspecting eBayer.  (While I do not know for sure that the seller knew the game was counterfeit, the fact that they mentioned that the game does not work on the DSi means that they either knew this or they just plain don’t know that the Nintendo DSi is supposed to be backwards compatible.)

So, I sent another message with more details as to why I believed the game to be counterfeit, pointing out that there’s no reason for it not to work in the DSi, and again politely but firmly requesting a refund.  I also implied that I would take this to a higher level if I didn’t hear back from them.

Well, a few days go by and I don’t hear back, so I look into what I should do.  I opened a case at eBay and described the problem.  Opening a case first just prompts for a reply from the seller (eBay doesn’t want to get involved if the parties can just figure it out on their own).  The seller again offered to send me a refund if I return the item, and claimed that I was trying to scam them by getting my money back and keeping the game at the same time.  (They never admitted to the fact that the game was non-genuine, nor did they deny it; they just mentioned that I claimed that it was fake.)

Still unhappy, I now had the option to escalated the case to eBay customer support.  I did so, pointing out that I don’t want to keep the game, it doesn’t even work on my handheld, I just don’t want to send it back to them.  I mentioned that if eBay customer support directed me to return it, I would do so.

Afterwards, I threw together this document detailing all of the problems with the game.  It mentions the same things I have mentioned here, plus a few more things that can be noticed by inspecting the game cartridge itself, with links to online resources backing up my claims.  I sent this document to the seller, mentioning that I would provide it to eBay customer support if they asked for more details.  The seller never responded.

Finally, after about 3 weeks, eBay issued me a refund.  They never asked for more information.  While they had access to my communication with the seller (they mentioned that they might look at this communication when I opened the case), the document is hosted on my web server (you can’t send a document through eBay’s message system after all), and I can tell from the server logs that neither the seller or eBay customer support opened it.

So, where does this leave us?  I’m happy that I got my money back.  I was starting to give up on it, as it had been a while since I opened the case.  I’m disappointed that the seller didn’t own up to their mistake and offer a refund with an apology.  (But what can you expect from people who are making money off others’ work?)  And finally, while I am happy that eBay decided the case in my favor, I’m disappointed that they didn’t do much verification — the case seems to have been decided from just a couple messages that I left in the case and one message from the seller.  If I were a seller, I’d hate for a scamming buyer to make a similar case and run off with some money.  The refund was sent to my PayPal account  by claims-usd@ebay.com, I wonder if the seller was charged for the refund or if eBay covered it themselves?

Anyway, that’s the end of my article.  But I am going to post a complete record of the communication between the seller, myself, and eBay, if anyone would like to see how the timeline went or how things unfolded.  And, if you’re having similar trouble from an eBay seller, I wish you the best of luck in obtaining your refund!  Remember to be polite, even if you are not the person in the wrong.  We should all be more careful about our purchases next time.

Update: 6:00 PM, same day.

Well, I filed some reports with eBay and Nintendo Anti-Piracy and, lo and behold, jandjvariety is no longer a registered user.  (Seems he was selling counterfeit DVDs as well.)  Wonder if he got kicked off?  Wonder if he will just start selling games under a new eBay ID?  I’ll probably never know…

Received a shipment notice with USPS tracking number from PayPal on December 10, 2009.

Game arrived on December 15, 2009 and I had it in my possession on December 16, 2009.

On December 17, 2009 at 8:13 PM, I sent the following message to the seller via eBay’s message system:

Hi, the game that you sent me is counterfeit. It also does not work on the Nintendo DSi with the latest firmware. I don’t know if you were aware of this or not. However, I’m going to have to ask you to send a genuine copy or a refund. I will file the appropriate reports with eBay if I do not hear back from you. Thanks.

On December 18, 2009 at 10:17 AM, I received the following response:

In the add it stated clearly in red that this game was not formatted for DSI. We would be glad to refund your money on the game. Please send the game to:
JandJ Variety
25 Tucker Street
Buckhannon, WV 26201
Be sure to include a note in with the game with your ebay name on it. I will need your ebay name in order to issue you a refund through pay-pal. Once we receive the game back we will refund your money.If you have any questions just let us know.
Happy Holidays
JandJ Variety

I promptly replied with this message:

Hi,
There is no such thing as “not formatted for the DSi” — this can only mean that the cartridge is counterfit. The DSi has software measures in place to detect counterfeit software and refuse to run it.

Note that the fact that the DSi will not run the game is not the only evidence that I have that it is counterfeit. So please do not try to claim that it is not.

Like I said, I’m not sure if you were aware of this or not when you sold the item. If you knew that the game was counterfeit, then you knowingly sold me an illegal product. If you did not, then please be careful about selling DS games in the future. Counterfeit cartridges are not made with Nintendo’s quality standards, and while the games may work, there can be long-term issues (loss of save data, or even damage to the DS itself).

I will return the game if you like but I cannot do so until the 29th. Please go ahead and issue a refund. I do not want to take this issue any higher than I have to.

Didn’t hear back for a while.  On December 23, 2009 at 9:13 PM, I opened an eBay case with this message:

Seller shipped me a counterfeit Nintendo DS game. In a response to my eBay message, the seller did not acknowledge that the item is counterfeit. (I can provide detailed evidence on the counterfeit if you like.) Offered to send a refund after I return the item. Two problems: I can’t return the item for a while since I am traveling, and I don’t want to return the item only to have the seller dupe someone else with the fake game.

On December 24, 2009 at 7:24 AM, the seller responded with this message:

Buyer says the game is fake, but wants to keep the game and us refund his money. We told him to ship the game back to us and we would give his money back if he was dissatisified with his purchase. doesn’t seem right that he would want to keep the game and get his money back too

At 12:44 PM, I escalated the case with this message:

I am happy to ship the item to a neutral third party before my refund is processed.  I don’t want to keep it.  I am hesitant to return the item to the seller because it is an illegal product.  I’m afraid they’ll just sell it again to someone else.

If eBay Customer Support tells me that returning the product to the seller is what I should do, I will comply.

Again, I am happy to provide detailed evidence on why I believe this game to be counterfeit.  Just let me know how I should get it to you.

On December 27, 2009 at 10:59 AM, I sent this message to the seller:

In the interest of full disclosure, here is the document that I will be submitting to eBay customer support detailing why I believe this game is counterfeit. http://aaron-kelley.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/yi2.pdf

I received my refund from eBay at 1:00 PM on January 19, 2010.

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.)