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A couple of weeks ago v1.0 of my ICanHasCheezburger Windows Sidebar Gadget for Vista stopped working. The reason is that ICanHasCheezburger changed the URL of their RSS feed which the gadet uses to get its data. v1.0.1 uses the new URL and normal service is......

Had a bitch of a day today in work, with an application I was playing with refusing to play with Active Directory (largely because I’ve never used LDAP before and couldn’t figure out the weird bloody syntax). So I’d really like to offer a quick thank you to Jarek Gawor for developing (and releasing) his LDAP Browser/Editor which let me double check that I was connecting to the right server/port and play with the settings enough that I eventually got it sussed. Great wee Java tool....

O hai! I hart lolcatz. I hart lolcatz so much dat wun dai I thoughted “I can has lolcatz wen I makes teh pooter turn on?” So I maded a Vista gadjit an now I has new lolcatz every dai. If u hart lolcatz liek mee an wants lolcatz in ur pooter makin u laff, downlodes mah gadjit. I has tested it 4 liek rly long time. It rly works, srsly. An evry1 needses moar lolcatz. Kthxbai. * If you think that was hard to read, you should see the lolcat......

Some time ago I published a blog describing the use of a command line tool called aspnet_regiis.exe to overcome a “Server Application Unavailable” message when I was trying to get ASP.NET working on IIS 6 on Windows XP. Just now I’ve used the same tool to fix a similar (I think) problem on IIS7 on Vista. I was trying to get some practice with ASP.NET. I’ve already got IIS7 and I’ve already got the .NET Framework 2.0 installed. However it seemed, again, that IIS wasn’t aware of the Framework’s existence. When I tried to browse to a simple Hello World page I was greeted with an HTTP 404 (404.3 to be precise) informing me that: “The page you are requesting cannot be served because of the extension configuration. If the page is a script, add...

I was getting the above error message when I recently tried to set up and try out Windows Live Writer to let me publish to a blog from my desktop without logging into the Admin section of the site. I was felled at the first hurdle when, after entering my b2evolution blog’s details, I was presented with a message informing me that: The server reported an error with the following URL: http://www.blog-domain.com/b2evo-path/xmlsrv/xmlrpc.php 403 Forbidden Thinking it might be a problem with b2evolution, I tried with a Wordpress blog. A different message appeared, both on this blog and another:......

Installing Microsoft’s Virtual Earth 3D plugin for Firefox (yes, they wrote something that works in Firefox) I was reminded of one more reason why I hate Microsoft. You’d think with all the anti-competitive suits being filed against them they’d get over this, but apparently not. Have a look at what’s presented to you when you install the Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D plugin. Yes, that’s right, when you install Virtual Earth 3D, Microsoft try to take over your home page and default search engine: two completely unrelated services. If they must give us the option then fine, but they have the boxes ticked by default and that is where I believe they cross the line from opportunistic cross-selling to scummy, underhanded manipulation. Not that it’s a big...

I recently encountered a problem with Microsoft’s ACT (part of Visual Studio 2003) when testing a web service by emulating a browser-based client. For posterity’s sake, here’s an overview of the problem and, more importantly, the solution. Background Using Application Center Test (ACT) to help automate performance testing designed to compare the performance of a web service running on ASP .NET 1.1 with ASP .NET 2.0. Problem Originally .NET 2.0 seemed to be performing many times better than .NET 1.1, but it was soon discovered that when running .NET 2.0, ATC was receiving a lot of 302 errors on 2.0 which it wasn’t on 1.0. On further investigation the Web Service wasn’t actually making all the correct database calls and on installing HTTP Monitor, it became apparent...

Tonight I was attempting to rip a DVD to an AVI-XviD file thinking it would be easy - unfortunately not. It’s not a copy-protected DVD or anything, just a plain old DVD-R. First I tried VirtualDub MPEG or whatever it’s called. It seemed to be either taking ages or not responding so I gave up and ended it. Next I downloaded DVDx and tried to use it to rip the files from the DVD. Still painstakingly slow (to the point I wasn’t sure it was still doing anything) and eventually gave up with a message about a CRC error. So, I decided to copy the VOB files (actually the whole TS_VIDEO directory) to hard drive and work from there. It was then I realised the problem wasn’t with the aforementioned programs but with Vista itself. There were two 1 GB VOB files and the...

I recently noticed that my CPU fan on my Acer Aspire 5002 WLMi notebook was running at full speed much more than it normally should and the system itself was running more slowly than usual. When I opened task manager I was finding a process called Monitor.exe was hogging anything up to 99% of the CPU. I terminated the process and that solved everything - usually until I rebooted. But what to stop this happening again? It turns out that monitor.exe was related to Acer eRecovery - a tool that helps recover your laptop from a major crash. However after a bit of googling I found out that it needs the D: partition that comes with the laptop (apparently it needs to be in FAT32 as well, but I don’t think this is true because mine had been NTFS for months and I hadn’t noticed any...

Inspired by Tech Chick (aka Gabrielle Atticus), I’ve decided to start listing some interesting if well-hidden sites on the internet so this will be the first in a series of nerd. links. This one resolves a long-standing issue with Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client, ie the way it forwards messages.  Whereas Outlook, Outlook Express etc. forward some headers (to, from, subject, date etc) all you ever get in Thunderbird is “Sendername said:”.  It’s pretty pathetic really, especially the fact that there’s no date. Luckily someone has made an add-on with the descriptive but not exactly ‘roll-off-the-tongue’ name “Change quote and reply format” to fix this problem. Now the quote header is much more useful: —- Original message...

Following my earlier rant about the trial that is installing Vista with a Netgear wireless card, I thought I’d offer an update on that story. Firstly, my new Linksys wireless card is working fine. Thanks Amazon. Secondly, I updated the Windows Experience Index score just now. Still the same graphics card in the machine, so I don’t know how but suddenly my desktop graphics rating jumped from showing 2.1 to 4.1, pretty sweet! On viewing the details I also noticed that the graphics card apparently has 334MB of system memory available on top of the 256MB of dedicated RAM. I don’t know if this was the case before or not so can’t say if that influenced the change in score. Anyway, this brings my overall Windows Experience Index up from 2.1 to 3.0, now based on the...

I feel so dirty, but for a project I’m working on at the moment I have to use ASP.NET instead of PHP; “why?” is a question for another day. Anyway, I’ve installed IIS before so that wasn’t a big problem… or so I thought. I already had the .NET 2.0 framework on my XP machine so went straight to installing IIS (5.1 comes with XP Pro). It installed easily enough and my hello world html file was served without any major problems (actually that’s not true, before I copied my own files across I tried to check the IIS default pages served ok only to discover, through more googling, that if I used IE instead of Firefox that annoying box asking me for a password would go away). Now my ASP.NET issue. I got a Server application unavailable error message in...

Back in October/November time I got myself a new laptop for university and general showyness.  I didn’t want to spend too much money and, following a recommendation from a friend, decided to check out LaptopsDirect.co.uk.  Soon enough I’d plumped for the Acer Aspire 5003 wlmi - a 64-bit AMD-based laptop with 512MB of RAM.  Having taken note of the 64-BIT Turion mobile processor, I initially found it highly strange that the laptop shipped with a 32-bit version of Windows XP Home, rendering the 64-bit processor about as much use as a chocolate teapot (OK, as much use as a 32-bit processor anyway).  Then again, this is the same machine which for some reason has a hard drive partitioned into two 40GB volumes, both formatted using the FAT32 file system. Honest to God. I...

I managed to get a copy of the 32-bit Windows Vista Business from the MSDN Academic Alliance program through university and, after a RAM and graphics card upgrade, and a lot of moving of files to clear a partition for it, I was ready to install Vista.  The installation itself went reasonably quickly. After about half an hour I was choosing desktops and playing with the control panel. I was disappointed to notice that my initial Windows Experience Index (Microsoft’s measure of how pimped your PC is) was disappointing at 2.2, let down by poor graphics performance, considering I’d just spent about £40 on a new 256MB card from Dabs. Maybe it’s because I’m only running AGP4x, I don’t know.  Anyway, Vista told me my system was rated as follows: Processor (AMD...

Microsoft tell you that it’s not possible to run IIS, the Windows Web Server, on Windows XP Home Edition (see note 1). In previous versions of Windows, the home versions (Windows 98, ME etc) included something called Personal Web Server, which was a bit like a cut down version of IIS. Imagine my horror when I had to create a website using ASP (not my choice, I’m a PHP kinda nerd.) only to find that my shiny new operating system couldn’t even do something my mum and dad’s old Windows 98 box could do.  Having paid seventy odd pounds for this ‘upgrade’ I was a bit miffed that Microsoft had discontinued PWS.  Then, after a bit of Googling, I discovered Win XP Home could run a web server after all - and IIS at that.  As a bit of a bonus, you can...