I have had problems Activating and Updating Windows 7.
I have an Endian firewall appliance.
The main error I was getting was 0x80072EFD – unable to connect.
For me, the solution (after hours of heartache) was simple:
Go into Control Panel / Network and Internet / Internet Options / Connections tab / LAN Settings,
UNTICK “Automatically detect settings” and press OK.
Activation then works.
Updates then work perfectly.
Sorry – I’m not sure why this happens. I suspect it’s a bug in Endian version 2.2 which is fixed in later a version, probably relating to the internal Endian Proxy server which in my case is disabled anyway.
I hope this helps someone.
Many thanks to my son, Lachlan, who also had this problem, and figured out how to fix it after several days of heartache.
I took Steve and Harrison on a bike ride this morning, along the North Pine River, up to Lake Samsonvale, and then back along the North Pine Rover.
It was a hoot! A little bit slower than normal, because Harrison is only 9 and his bike is a bit worse for wear. But it was fun all the same.
And I got to try out a new program for my Nokia N95 mobile phone. Nokia Sports Tracker Uses the inbuilt GPS on the phone to record speed and height info. While you’re cycling, your N95 acts like a speedo, and odometer, showing you all the vital stats. But when you get home, you click the button, and upload the data to sports tracker.
The really cool thing is that if you take any photos with the phone on your journey, it will upload and geotag them.
So the map on the left here is where we went. You can drag and zoom it if you want more detail.
But the fun part is that the data is also uploaded to the Sportstracker community. Here’s a link to the data for our ride today. If you tick the “altitude” box, you can see every hill, and how fast we were going.
The thing I like most about this technology is that it adds to the fun of getting out and exercising. At times I’ve found it hard to overcome my inertia to regularly exercise. In regards to exercise, if it makes me think “Oh yeah! I want to do that again!” then I think it’s a great thing.
Oh – and you can use Sports Tracker for running, walking, skiing, rowing – whatever floats your boat.
P.S. I’ve ordered a mounting bracket to attach my phone to my handlebars. Till that arrives, I’m using some of Lilly’s hair ties 
In this article about using slideshows in wordpress I showed you how to embed slideshows in WordPress blog posts and sidebars using the Google Ajax Feed API.
I prefer to use this facility to pull in Image feeds from Flickr.
The problem with the images in these feeds is that they’re either too large or too small.
The MediaRSS specification has a <media:thumbnail> tag which lets you have a thumbnail image in your feed. That’s great, but the image size of the thumbnail is 75×75 pixels, which is useless for a nice looking slideshow. It ends up looking terribly blurry with no detail.
The Google Ajax Feeds API tries to get around this by letting you specify a “thumbnailTag” in the slideshow options object. Basically, you set this to “content” to tell the API to look for the image in the “content” section of the feed, rather than the <media:thumnail> section. This is also great, but the problem is that Flickr uses the LARGE (or even worse, ORIGINAL) image size in this section. So you get nice large detailed images in the feed, but they’re so large that they take ages to load, and your slideshow sits there for ages saying “Loading….” while it grabs the huge images and chews up your audiences bandwidth.
So I wrote a simple PHP screen scraping utility which grabs the Flickr feed, and changes the ImageUrl…_L.jpg to ImageUrl….M.jpg – in other words, it modifies the feed to include the medium size image rather than the large size.
Medium sized images are fine for slideshows, and they load quite quickly.
Here’s the PHP code:
<?php
date_default_timezone_set('UTC');
$uri="";
$first_var = "1";
foreach($_GET as $variable => $value)
{
if ($variable == 'uri')
{
$uri = $uri . $value;
}
else
{
$uri = $uri . "&" . $variable . "=" . $value;
}
}
header("Content-Type: application/xml; charset=ISO-8859-1");
$ch = curl_init() or die(curl_error());
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$uri);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$data1=curl_exec($ch) or die(curl_error());
$data1=str_replace("_s.jpg","_m.jpg",$data1);
$data1=str_replace('height="75"', "",$data1);
$data1=str_replace('width="75"', "",$data1);
echo $data1;
echo curl_error($ch);
curl_close($ch);
?>
Just save this in a file named FlickrRSS.php in the top folder of your wordpress directory. Then instead of using your flickr RSS feed, pass the feed as a query parameter to the PHP utility.
You’ll need to change the < and > tags in the file to < and >.
So if your feed URL was this:
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=YourFlickrUserNumberlang=en-us&format=rss_200
Use this instead
http://YourBlogUrl/FlickrRSS.php?uri=http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=YourFlickrUserNumberlang=en-us&format=rss_200
This will change the <media:thumbnail> tag to point to the lager sized image, so your slideshows will load quickly, and look nicer
Sometimes when I received an email in Outlook with an embedded image, the image would not display, but I’d just see a white rectangle with a small red “X” in it instead.
This was nothing to do with the outlook security settings.
To fix the problem, I deleted the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Security\OutlookSecureTempFolder
After I deleted it, I restarted outlook, and my images now appear fine.
Technology is cool.
There is so much new cool stuff you can do these days.
Here’s just a few:
ShipWatcher – a new website I created that lets you look at the webcams of cruiseships, view their progress on a map, and take photos of ships you like. Every hour ShipWatcher picks webcams that it thinks are “interesting” and take a couple of photos, automatically uploading them to….
Flickr – a fantastic service, from Yahoo that lets you share photos with other people, place them on a map, group them into sets and collections, pool them into groups with other people, and even track the type of camera that took the photo – to help you choose your next camera. I even used Flickr to share some great looking Photo Mosaics that I generated with…
Andrea Mosaic – a clever little utility which lets you generate mosaic pictures like this one I did, from pools of photos that you might have. In fact, if you have large pools of photos, you might be interested in…
Photosynth – amazing new technology from Microsoft that pools photos, organizes them in relation to each other, and lets you view a 3-d model of the real world, by aggregating thousands of photos. This really has to be seen to be beleived. I have a copy of it on my main machine which runs….
VMWare -fantastic software that lets you build “virtual” computers. You can configure a number of different types of computers with different amounts of memory, diskspace, networking abilities, each of which can run a different operating system like Windows XP, Linux, Vista, DOS, and run them all at the same time. You can even get your virtual machine to take a snapshot of itself. Do some risky stuff, and then if you don’t like the result, rollback your machine to the state it was in when the snapshot was taken. Great for demos, when you want the demo to revert back to its previous incarnation when you’re finished. If you have a laptop, copy your virtual machine from your desktop to your laptop, and it’s ready to go. Everything on the laptop is the same as when you last used it on your desktop. So easy to backup too. Just copy the virtual disk (one file). I use VMWare to do all my software development, including a cool web development tool called…
Iron Speed Designer – easy to use software that lets you quickly generate websites based on any existing SQL, Oracle or Access database. I’ve never developed websites before, and Ironspeed made it easy to look like a pro. Great stuff.
It seems things just keep getting better. Life gets easier for us. We can do more, in less time.
BUT. Some things aren’t cool. They make life harder. They suck. Even some things that are cool can suck. For example….
Iron Speed Designer – although a great tool, decided that they didn’t like people using their software inside a virtual machine. Aparently some people were using the flexibility of virtual machine software such as VMWare to defeat the copy protection mechanism. So the folks at Ironspeed decided they’d put a limitation in version 5 of their software that makes it refuse to run on a virtual machine.
You may think “so what?”. But think about what this means. If you’ve got your entire development environment inside a virtual machine. And one of your development tools stops working in that machine. What do you do? Uninstall it and move it to a real machine I suppose.
But I use MS Visual Studio in conjunction with Ironspeed. So I suppose that would have to come out too.
Then, to make it consistent, I suppose all my Visual Studio projects would have to come outside the virtual machine.
And then – what happens if I want to go out of town for a week and take my laptop. How do I easily move all this stuff from desktop to laptop?
The Virtual machine becomes useless. All because Ironspeed doesn’t like you using their products in a virtual machine.
So one software supplier digs their heals in over technological innovation. Where will this end?
I predict one of two things will happen:
1. Ironspeed will see the error of their ways, repent, and their next version will run inside a virtual machine. Probably with some sort of licensing service that runs on a physical machine to police the licensing policy.
2. As more developers start using virtual machines, another software vendor will release an alternatuve web development utility, that does what Ironspeed does – except the new software will run inside a VM.
People who work in the technology industry can’t run away from technological innovation. Or they will end up being people who USED to work in the technology industry. Technology is all about innovation. Anyone who wants to stay in the technology industry needs to embrace innovation, not shun it.
So, here’s my message to Alan Fisher and the great guys at Ironspeed: You guys have a fantastic product. I love it. It’s brilliant and makes my life easier. It’s worth every cent that I paid for it. But if you want me to chose between Ironspeed and my Virtual Environment, then I’ll chose the latter. I want my technological life to be easier, not harder.
Please change your mind.
UPDATE December 2007. The folks at Ironspeed have responded to user requests, and removed the restriction on ISD running in a virtual environment. Fantastic decision, guys. A great product just got even better. Thanks for listening to us!
I have an ASP.NET web application that uses SSL.
The other day it stopped working on my development machine (Win XP Pro SP2). Whenever I tried to navigate to the SSL page my browser said it couldn’t find the page.
I spent hours trying to google an answer to this problem.
The thing that finally fixed it was…. (drum roll)… a reboot.
Now here’s the proof that I’ve taken leave of my senses. My colleague had the same problem a few days ago. I helped him resolve it, and even suggested the reboot solution. It worked for him. But today when this problem happened to me, I forgot all about that episode, and wasted time until I came up with the same solution. Again.
I must be getting old.
Incidentally, if you need an SSL certificate for testing purposes, try Microsofts SelfSSL utility. It creates the certificate and installs it for you.
It’s available at https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=56FC92EE-A71A-4C73-B628-ADE629C89499&displaylang=en or search for “Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 Resource Kit Tools”.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: Microsoft’s SelfSSL utility will cause MSDE to stop working. It tries to install certificates in the SQL Server which makes it impossible to connect to.
I’ve been growing increasingly frustrated with the amount of CPU time consumed by MS-Outlook 2003 on my laptop.
When Autoarchive runs every morning at 9am, the system grinds to a halt. There’s no way in Outlook you can change the TIME at which this process runs. So my solution to the problem is to disable Autoarchive, wait till midnight, enable it, and tell it to run every day. That way I won’t be around while it’s archiving. How stupid that I have to stay up till midnight because MS products don’t work properly. Does anyone know any better solutions to this?
The other contributing factor is my archive folders. I have them visible in the folder window that appears on the left hand side of outlook – so I can see “Mailbox – Me”, “Personal Folders”, “Archives” etc down the left hand side. I thought this might be slowing things down a bit, so I right-clicked on the Archove and Personal Folders, selected “Close”, and the folder disappeared from view. After I did this, Outlook seemed to consume less CPU time, so I think I’ve solved this problem.
One final thing that might be adding to the overall slowness is the fact that my main outlook mail folder connects through a VPN to my exchange server (i.e. its not local to me). I think the combination of VPN and Exchange might be using up a lot of CPU.
Surely there must be something better?
There are a lot of useful articles in the Microsoft Knowledgebase to help you resolve the problem where sharepoint won’t send out email alerts. Some of them are really complex.
BUT!!!! Before you spend hours (like I did) trying all the complex solutions to make it work, try the simplest solution first:
Make sure your mail server allows relays from itself. In exchange, go into the SMTP server properties (Start / Programs / Microsoft Exchange / System Manager / Servers / My Server / Protocols / Smtp / Default Server / Access / Relay / “Only the list below” – Granted to 127.0.0.1.
I downloaded Image for Windows (IFW) from http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/imagew.html
It lets me backup my entire hard drive to DVD or CD. Plus it makes the DVD or CD bootable. That means if my hard drive ever crashes, I just boot from the DVD, and it will automatically restore everything.
Amazing. Easy to use. Only $US 27.
My only gripes:
1. It doesn’t write to DVD-RW so you can’t re-use DVD’s.
2. Someone stupid like me could accidentally boot from a DVD and wipeout everything on the hard drive.
Both those gripes are solvable – just use cheap DVD-R disks, and (easier still) don’t be stupid.
I’ll email their tech dept and let you know if they have a solution for the DVD-RW’s.
Addendum (17-Aug-05)
IFW can handle DVD+RW disks without any problems. DVD-RW’s need to be fully blanked or brand-new before they will work. So I think I’ll buy some +RW’s and see how I go! The article is here: http://terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=215
Here’s how NOT to recover from a faulty hard drive.
I turned on my laptop and got an error while booting about a faulty NTLDR.SYS file – or some name like that. The error said to insert the Windows CD and select option “R” to recover.
My Acer laptop didn’t come with a Windows CD, it came with a “Recovery CD”. So I inserted that CD, booted from it, and the damned thing started formatting my hard drive. Yes there was some vague warnings in broken English about backing up data, but I was expecting to see a Windows message, and got something totally different.
“Ah!!!!” I screamed as I saw what was happening, and turned my machine off in the middle of the format.
Now the disk drive was partially formatted, and had no directory info on it.
So I plugged in my trusty USB drive backup, and went about getting the machine ready to Ghost the backup drive back to the original drive.
Getting a laptop to boot from a CD and run Ghost is an effort in itself and took me about 2 hours to figure out. If you want to try it yourself, get Ghost to burn a bootable floppy that does the same thing, and use something like UBCD to convert the floppy to a CD.
So I ghosted the backup drive back to the laptop, booted the laptop and…. NOTHING. The USB drive was faulty, and the backup drive was unreadable.
“Ah!!!!” I screamed again in a Homer Simpsonesque panic.
I ran Spinrite on the USB drive in a vain attempt to fix it. But the back up drive was faulty (remember, Neil?) and so it just made things worse – and I lost the partition table on the backup drive.
So I threw the USB drive caddy out the window, and connected te Backup drive to a spare IDE port on my desktop computer. Still no joy.
So I tried a thing called “Diskpatch” which is supposed to fix partition tables. It said a few encouraging words, and did absolutely nothing.
Finally, I tried a thing caled “iRecover”. It was able to see stuff on the drive. Most of it was scrambled, but I used it to pump as much corrupted data from the drive as I could.
It has been running for about 7 days, and has almost finished pumping everything from the 60GB backup drive. about 75% of the stuff is rubbish. I was able to recover one or two snippets that were some use to me.
Bottom line – I lost about 6 months worth of work – but was able to scrounge a lot of it back from other sources.
I NEVER EVER want to go through this again. It’s bad for my health, my marriage and my business. Here’s what I will do in future:
1. Backup more regularly to multiple locations.
2. Use something like NTI to create a bootable backup DVD of my drive.
3. Get a new Laptop – the Acer Travelmate is rubbish.
4. Never try to run windows repair on a faulty drive until I’ve pumped it for all the information I can.
5. Never trust a USB drive. Especially one that runs hot.
6. Backup more regularly to multiple locations.
7. Buy high quality equipment
The other thing with Laptops – don’t move them around until you’ve put the machine in standby mode. If you do, the diskdrive is still spinning, and there’s a good chance you’ll stuff the drive up.
You will have one of your disks crash on you sometime in the next few years. It’s happened to me 4 times in the last 12 months on 2 different machines. Make sure you can recover from it. Do something about it today.
iRecover is available from http://www.diydatarecovery.nl
It works, but it is damned slow.
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