Snow Leopard cat is growing and he needs to eat a lot. Just make sure you have your data backed up because he may eat all your data. CNET has a good article for how you might recover this data.
WARNING!
I just got off the phone with Microsoft support. After installing my patches and rebooting, my OCS 2007 R2 server would not start the “Front End” service internally or the Access Edge service externally. The error IEs in event log were 12299 and 12290, and it was saying that an evaluation copy had expired.
It turns out, KB974571 is causing the problem. At this time, DO NOT INSTALL KB974571 on any servers running OCS or LCS, Microsoft support informed me that both products are impacted.
J.Ja
Spiceworks, a company that I’ve been covering for a while, announced that their community has doubled its activity in supporting the application over the last six months. This includes articles, rating & reviews of products, support for each other, and extenions to the product. I think this is pretty cool to read, because I’ve always been a bit dubious about “crowdsourcing” myself.
J.Ja
Note: I am under contract to Spiceworks write articles for their site from time to time about various topics, such as backup technologies.
This article will show you how to build Qt, the popular C++ framework from Nokia, so that it is both small and, if you prefer, available for static linking. Your Qt applications will be smaller, possibly faster, and can be distributable as a single executable.
Also answered: How small can Intel’s C++ compiler make a large library? How does Microsoft fare? Three compilers (settings tuned for small file output) and their resulting code size is compared.
A few weeks ago I got very serious about my personal development environment. Part of that was getting proper version control in place. I’m working on “real projects” at home, I should be have a “real environment”, right? So, I decided to give Subversion a try. After all, it was free, I already had a FreeBSD server set up with Apache configured… why not? Plus, what other choices are out there? Visual Source Safe is ancient and pretty bad to boot. CVS was superceded by SVN. Team Foundation Server is… well… let’s just say that it took me a week to install it the first time I touched it. A lot of very smart folks I know use SVN. So I gave it a shot.
And you know what? SVN is pretty good, from what I saw of it. Is it a fully integrated, head-to-toe solution like TFS? Nope, but it doesn’t aim to be, either. The install process was smooth and easy, other than one “Doh!” mistake on my part (not granted the Apache user access to the repository). After less than a few days of using it, I decided to move on. And tonight, I just finished an TFS install, that same TFS install I didn’t want to make ever again.
What went wrong with my SVN experience had nothing to do with SVN itself, and everything to do with the tools to access SVN from a Windows box. You see, the initial install of TFS might have taken me a week the first time around and most of a night the second time. But once it is installed, that’s it, I’m done, and I can take off the “sys admin hat” and put on my “developer hat” and get to work. But with Tortoise SVN (which integrates SVN to Windows Explorer), and Ahnk SVN (which integrates SVN to Visual Studio), I did not have that experience. Every check in was downright painful, to the point where I was leaving stuff checked out longer than I liked, to avoid the headaches that SVN was giving me. Every check in would be this voodoo dance of trying to commit, then running “clean up”, then trying to commit only specific items and then only cleaning up specific items, and then being told that things were locked, and exiting Visual Studio, then running clean up again, and finally being able to get my work checked in.
After a few days of this rediculousness, I realized that a few nights of trying to install TFS more than offset a lifetime of misery. SVN, I hardly knew ye. Maybe when the Windows clients are of a higher quality I will give you another shot. But until then, I need to get work done, and TFS lets me do that without any hassle at all.
J.Ja
I put together a Windows Server 2008 R2 box over the weekend (my old Vista machine is now the server). I spent part of today working on trying to do a P2V conversion of my FreeBSD server to bring it onto the box in Hyper-V. At first, I tried using Acronis Home 2009 to clone the disk, then re-clone into the VM, like I’ve done before. For whatever reason, it did not like the RAID in the FreeBSD box, and wouldn’t read the data from it. Along the way, I decided to prep the new Hyper-V VM, and lo and behold, I discovered it’s super new feature: when creating a new virtual hard drive, you can copy an existing physical drive (not “file system”, the entire drive!) as the contents of the virtual drive. This means that you can take the disk out of the old system, hook it up to the new system, clone it into the VM really quick, and be on your merry way. The only real drawbacks are that you cannot do a dynamically expanding disk like this, so the new VHD is the same size as the physical disk it was clone from (although it will be fast), and that it takes forever because it does a sector-by-sector copy of the disk. While this is still not a proper substitute for a true P2V agent-based conversion, this is pretty darned close, especially for OS’s that are not mainstream enough to justify someone writing the conversion agent.
J.Ja
After doing a clean Subversion installation and basic Apache configuration, I tried tapping into it with AhnkSVN, only to receive this error: “You failed to authorize against the remote repository”. This was odd, it was authenticated enough to list the repository? The problem occured when I tried adding my solution to the repository. Packet captures did not reveal anything terribly useful. I then installed Tortoise SVN to give that a try. Still no dice. It was complaining about not being able to access a lock file on the server. That was the clue I needed! It turns out, I had created the SVN repository on the server as root (it’s a FreeBSD server), but the user that Apache ran as did not have access to that directory. After a quick chgrp -R and chown -R on the repository directory, all was well.
J.Ja
Microsoft Office Web Apps is looking pretty impressive. The real time collaboration is something you can’t even do on the native Windows applications. Having the conditional formating in Excel, all the other rich animations in PowerPoint, and native Office compatibility makes this look extremely usable. Microsoft already has had a usable Outlook Web application for a long time and this just seems to be the natural extension for the entire Office Suite.
Make your entire Qt application work entirely from a single file.
I was downloading Ubuntu Netbook Remix for my EeePC 900A and found that it’s installer is not a CD image, but a raw image meant to be written to a USB FLASH drive. After downloading their handy image writer, I found that this simple utility came with quite a few support files, including a surprising 13.5MB of .dlls.
This image writer tool was written using Nokia’s Qt software, which allows easy development and distribution for all the major platforms from a single C++ source base. This program was compiled in the same way most Windows software is today — with “dynamic linking”, requiring the Qt libraries, among others, be shipped with the program as separate files.
This is fine for large software projects, but it’s a little cumbersome for small tools like this one. Many programs can be distributed such that all necessary files are built into the executable in a process called static linking. Sometimes it is nice to be able to download just the program itself and not have to worry about making sure various DLLs are included (though setting up an installer largely eliminates this problem).
Static linking has its advantages and disadvantages, but when not done, running a program unaccompanied by even one support file will result in a cryptic error for the user:
These 4 steps are all you need to make your entire project result in a single, easy-to-distribute .EXE file:
There is a serious exploit against WordPress out in the wild that allows an attacker to reset your password. It works on every version of WordPress and there is no official patch yet which is pretty scary. There is a temporary workaround and it appears that WordPress.com has already applied this workaround. This workaround can be found here and I have already applied it to my site and you should too if you are running WordPress.
Basically, all you need to do is replace some text in your wp-login.php file. Just go in there and change:
if ( empty( $key ) )
to
if ( empty( $key ) || is_array( $key ) )
Now if someone tries to reset your password using this exploit, they will get slapped down with the message “Sorry, that key does not appear to be valid.” Now that’s music to my ears.
I have verified that this solution works by testing the exploit on my own site. Without this modification, I can nuke my admin password. My mail function was broken and the system wouldn’t even send me a new password via email, and I had to reset the password from my backup. With this modification, the exploit doesn’t work.
Update 8/12/2009 – WordPress.org has released WordPress 2.8.4. I think that patch only adds the modification above, but it might include other patches too. I hate these full upgrades, because you gotta backup first and hope nothing breaks or resets. I hate these full upgrades, because you have to backup first and hope nothing breaks or resets. I may skip this upgrade since I did the manual fix which is easier.