Solo Technology

Something to Watch for with the Install in Windows Option

06.Jul.08  One Comment

Here are two true statements:

The funky error? A brief boot cycle and then I’m looking at something like:

(Hopefully that’s close, I scribbled it down the last time I saw it)

Not overly intuitive! I usually would try to boot Ubuntu a few different times and then give up and go to Vista instead. Next time I got around to trying Ubuntu things would seem to magically be better.

Today I finally realized that point 2 appears to be directly related to point 1. If, when I see that issue, I boot Vista then immediately reboot to Ubuntu everything works just fine.

It must be somehow related to something hibernate does to the boot sector?

Not a huge deal, I’m getting close to wiping this rig and going full time Linux… but glad I think I finally have a handle on that.

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Wordpress Image Uploader Challenge

05.Jul.08  Leave a Comment

Hmm… When using WordPress 2.5.2’s media uploads I can upload images from Firefox 3 when running Vista. But I can’t when running FF3 from Ubuntu. Last I checked they’re running the same extensions.

No luck from Opera/Linux either. With either case, I end up with an HTTP error.

Guess I have some research to do. Switching to Linux without Windows Live Writer is hard enough, but if I can’t upload images with the built-in editor it’ll sure get harder!

If I have to guess, I’ll guess Flash based on this support forum post… that’s where I’ll start, at any rate.

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Facelifts for Gmail and Google Calendar

05.Jul.08  Leave a Comment

There are quite a few different ways to get new looks for the plain old (blah) Gmail and Google Calendar pages. Not that blah is all bad, mind you. But sometimes it is nice to mix things up a bit, and that’s just what I’ve done on my home computer this holiday weekend.

For consistency’s sake, I’ve chosen styles that are both from the same designer(s) (Globex Designs). While darker than what I normally would go for, the change has been refreshing. For instance, here’s the new loading screen:

I’m using the Stylish extension for Firefox. I then grabbed Gmail Redesigned and Google Calendar Redesigned from userstyles.org and reloaded my mail and cals.

I have yet to decide if I’ll do this on all of my computers, but I’m enjoying the visual refresh at home. Only issue I have run into so far is that the weekly calendar view is not quite “right.” While I usually prefer the weekly view, I am going to try to adapt to another view temporarily

Side note: Explore userstyles a bit as there are tons of other cool and interesting options there for both sites and apps.

[via Lifehacker's Google Calendar Post]

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03.Jul.08

Had another lost afternoon today. Same problem. Different server. Previous solution didn’t work. Maddening!

Said “screw it” this time and convinced the developer to “strong name” it and it worked fine from the GAC.

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Lost Afternoon

01.Jul.08  One Comment

Lost most of the afternoon today wrestling with the deployment of one of our web applications. Some new “client-specific” code had been developed in our dev environment and it was now time to move it out to QA (quality assurance) and then, hopefully, production.

The dev environment web server is still running Windows 2000 Server. Yeah I know, I know… I haven’t had a chance to upgrade it yet! In fact, I actually have had the replacement (running Windows 2003 Web) ready to go for several months – just no time to switch.

The QA web server runs Windows 2003. The new code I was moving is a .NET assembly that is called by some Classic ASP pages.

Don’t Panic: This is not yet another “how to interface classic ASP and .NET†posts — I promise.

I grabbed the .NET assembly DLL file from the dev server and dropped it into c:\windows\system32 directory as normal. Slight wrinkle though: This one is, for whatever reason, not strongly named so doesn’t go into the GAC.

I ran regasm against it and then had it tested. No luck and we got an error indicating that the object wasn’t found. And from there we spun into a cycle of trying various regasm flags and restarting the IIS web server (ala iisreset /restart) for the next few hours. Dismal and frustrating trial and error.

Well, the key difference between the two servers is that one is Windows 2000 / IIS 5 and the other is Windows 2003 / IIS 6. A bit of research finally taught us that IIS 6 doesn’t look in all the directories for assemblies as one might have become accustomed to in IIS 5.

I unreg’d the assembly and moved it to c:\windows\system32\inetserv and now it works just fine. Just that simple. system32 isn’t part of the “CLR class search†path.

I can just about bet that six months from now I’ll be searching the web for the same issue. Next time, with luck, I’ll find this article and save a few hours.

[picture is Piece by Ice Sabre]

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