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Up until a few moments ago, I was unable to preview PDF files in emails in Outlook using Windows 7 64bit.
The problem is that Adobe have not updated their installer of Adobe PDF reader to allow the correct values to be set in the registry.
However, there is a fix.
I came across this:
http://www.pretentiousname.com/adobe_pdf_x64_fix/index.html
It worked great!
Tags: outlook, windows 7I’m sure anyone that’s searched for solutions in Google, has fallen victim to the search engine reuslt pollution Experts Exchange employs…
They always seem to title their results, with EXACTLY what you are looking for.
When you click on it, you’re told that to view the solution, you need to sign up. Which costs money…
Sure, there is a free trial available… but who really wants that?
Well… the answers are indeed, freely available.
This is a condition of appearing in Google search results.
However, a slight black-hat trick is, that they’re not visible to Joe Public. Only to search engines…
You can fool the site into thinking you are a search engine, by simply copying the full experts-exchange URL from your browser, for example:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Microsoft/Development/MS-SQL-Server/Q_22634999.html
And pasting that into the Google search box:
The first search result, will be a link to that URL, via Google.
Click that, and it will show you the answers! Nothing illegal, just exposing Experts Exchange black hat techniques 
I ran into a problem with a Transactional Publication today.
I’d moved the database from old hardware, to newer hardware, and in the process, restored the SQL 2000 database onto SQL 2008 (running in SQL 2000 compatibility mode)
I’d re-created the publication, and initialized it.
After about half an hour, I checked the Replication Monitor, and noticed that it said:
Performance : Critical
Unfortunately, I don’t have a screenshot 
Latency was also somewhere in the mid 40’s
I noticed that my recovery mode was FULL.
I changed this to BULK LOGGED, re-initialized replication, and this dramatically reduced the latency – down to 0.0 in fact!
Tags: SQL replicationAfter creating a new Windows XP Virtual Machine, on VMWare Server, I noticed it had no network adapter.
It was an “unknown device” in Device Manager!
I installed VMWare tools, to no avail.
After painstaikingly thrashing about with my settings in VMWare Server, I took a look at my vmx file (located in the same directory as my virtual hard disks etc…)
It appears I had set the guest OS as Windows XP x64, when in actual fact, I had installed x32 version.
I changed this in my vmx file, and after reading this forum thread, deleted the following line:
ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000″
Voila! It worked!
Tags: vmwareAfter creating a new Windows XP Virtual Machine, on VMWare Server, I noticed it had no network adapter.
It was an “unknown device” in Device Manager!
I installed VMWare tools, to no avail.
After painstaikingly thrashing about with my settings in VMWare Server, I took a look at my vmx file (located in the same directory as my virtual hard disks etc…)
It appears I had set the guest OS as Windows XP x64, when in actual fact, I had installed x32 version.
I changed this in my vmx file, and after reading this forum thread, deleted the following line:
ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"
Voila! It worked!
Tags: vmwareI was trying to install Windows Server 2008 Standard x64 on one of our servers, intended to be an internal SQL database server.
It’s equipped with a 3Ware 9650SE 8LPML RAID controller. It has 8x 250gb hard drives.
I’d set up 2 units:
I downloaded the drivers from the 3Ware website, and put them on a USB flash drive.
I should point out at this point, that the download is circa 50mb – the actual drivers are only about 150kb… the rest is a .exe file used for upgrading drivers on an existing system.
You then go through the setup screens, and clicked Load Drivers where you are supposed to select a drive to install on. It finds the USB drive, select the drive… all seems ok so far.
Upon selecting the smaller of the 2 units (my RAID 0 stripe) and pressing next, I got a screen saying:
Windows Could not determine if this computer contains a valid system volume
Uh oh!
After much Googling, I found the problem was in the BIOS – and that the USB drive should be de-selected as a boot device.
I restarted, pressed F2 to get into the BIOS setting, and de-activated the USB drive.
However – this did not work! I still had the same error!
Here are the steps that I used to finally get it to work:
I think the key is point #5 – You MUST make the RAID controller the first in the boot sequence.
What effect using the floppy drive had, I’m unsure. Probably nothing.
Tags: Error, Windows Server 2008Recently, I have been receiving a large amount of a different kind of comment spam on my Wordpress blog.
In an effort to get around the Akismet spam protection, they have created several variations of the same kind of poor English, brown nosing comments… that effectively mean nothing.
The whole point of them, is to allow their URL to be posted in the “Website” field of the comment.
I recently had one on this post, to which I approved the comment, and later realised it was actually spam – so simply edited the comment, removed the URL, and left a reply underneath.
Here are the kind of comments (complete with spelling errors and bad English)
I’ll edit this post when I come across some more…
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Tags: Blogging spamComfortably, the post is really the sweetest on this noteworthy topic. I fit in with your conclusions and will eagerly look forward to your approaching updates. Just saying thanks will not just be adequate, for the wonderful lucidity in your writing. I will at once grab your rss feed to stay informed of any updates. De lightful work and much success in your business efforts!
At 23:00, Jo Combs (twitter.com/underdog100) had just 37 followers
5 minutes later, Graham Norton had featured her tweets on his show, albeit poking fun at them, but, now, her followers had swelled to 110!
Every time I hit F5, her number of followers increases
By 23:10 the count had grown to 130… around a 300% increase in 10 minutes!
I got bored at about 23:20, but by then, the follower count had grown to 140!
Not bad!
I recently had the misfortune of losing my whilst in Amsterdam.
My bank, Lloyds TSB provide me with phone insurance as part of my gold account benefits, crucially for me, is international loss insurance.
I always follow the rules.
My policy states that I must start the claim within 48 hours of me discovering the phone was lost, so that’s what I attempted to do.
A little background…
I was in a taxi (phoned for me by the hotel – CitizenM Amsterdam City) about 11pm. I showed the taxi driver (who must of been the only Dutch person I met who did not speak a word of English!!) a map of my destination on my iPhone.
That was the last time I definitely know that I had my phone.
Some time after I had arrived, I went to get my phone, and realised it was gone. Naturally, I assumed it had been stolen, perhaps I’d been the victim of the notorious Amsterdam pick pockets… So I asked the venue I was at to call it. It was still turned on!
I asked them to call my hotel, and explain to them that perhaps it had been left in the taxi, and could they call the company and ask.
When I returned to the hotel later that evening, the phone had not turned up, and the taxi company said nothing had been found in the taxi.
I asked the hotel to call the phone again in the morning – still turned on.
So where it had gone, is anybody’s guess.
Perhaps it had been stolen, but the thief (for some odd reason) had not turned it off immediately… Or maybe it fell out, and straight down a drain as I got out of the taxi… Who knows!
Later the next day, I admitted defeat, and made contact with O2, and blocked the handset. Also, as per the instructions on my insurance, I made a report to the police (which wasn’t easy – surprisingly, the level of English wasn’t great, and making them understand that the phone was lost, was pretty difficult)
So there we have it. I’m in Amsterdam, with no phone.
When I got back to the hotel, I logged on to Lloyds TSB’s phone insurance portal:
http://www.lifestylegroup.co.uk/lloydstsb/
Since I wanted to get my claim in as soon as possible, I clicked the “make claim online” button:
Next, it asked me for my policy id, which, luckily, I had as part of my documentation I always take on holiday with me. (Obviously, in the below picture I have obscured it)
But then…. password. No idea!
Not a problem I thought, I’ll click the “Forgotten your password?” link
Then…. the biggest problem.
Please enter your Policy ID number and mobile phone number. We will then send you a text message containing your newly generated password.
Are you joking?!
Why would I be logging in to this site, if I was still in possession of my phone… the phone that the new password would be sent to?
This left me completely unable to make the claim within the allotted time – Their offices were shut after 8pm, and I had no time before I was due to check out and meet some friends the next day, before heading to the airport for my flight home.
My plane got into London at 7:30 pm, which still didn’t leave me any time to make contact with their offices!
I made a point of phoning at exactly 8am on Tuesday (about 8 hours after the 48 hour deadline) and explained my problems (including the glaring accessibility / functionality problems highlighted above)
The customer service agent explained to me that as I was abroad, they do take this into account, so fingers crossed they understand the problems I had!
Tags: accessibility, finance, insurance, usabilityA few people have recently been asking how the NewPost method works within JoeBlogs
First, you need to create an instance of Post.
Then, set the following properties:
dateCreated
Fairly self explanatory, but you should set this to today’s date (or whatever date you wish the post to be set as published)
title
The title of the post
description
The body of the post.
This can of course contain HTML
categories
This is a string array of categories to associate with the post
mt_keywords
Another string array, representing the tags for the post
Then, using your presumably already instantiated Wrapper class, you can call the NewPost method, which takes the above Post object as a parameter, and a boolean – indicating if the post is to be set as published. Note – if this is set to false, the post is set in draft mode.
Here’s some sample code:
//create a new post var post = new Post(); //since this is a struct, we can't have a constructor that does this! post.dateCreated=DateTime.Now; post.title="This is a title"; post.description="this is the body of the post. it <strong>could</strong> be html."; //create the post! wp.NewPost(post,true);
Hope this helps!
Tags: c#, JoeBlogs, wordpress
