Activation context Internet Explorer issue
I got this message when I triedto enter a web site addressin the internet explorer address bar: THE REQUEST LOOKUP KEY WAS NOT FOUND IN ANY ACTIVAITON CONTEXT which didn't makeany sense.Firefox worked fine. The initial home page worked fine, but I couldn't go to any of the links. Igoogled the issue and found that no one else seemed to have an answer either.After reading several posts, Inoticed that several people had tried to downgrade from IE7 or it appeared thatin an effortto correct the issue,...
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AVG issues
One of my issues with anti-virus software is their brute force removal of infected files regardless of that file's importance. In this situation, the cure is far worse that the illness. The computer I worked on today wouldn't start. It halted with a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) saying that windows shut down in order to prevent more damage to the system. AVG 9.0, found a virus in Explorer.exe and winlogon.exe and quarantined them without asking the user. I'll be the first to admit that most users...
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Clearwire Part 3
Before I returned the equipment I did one more test with the home-spot modem. I brought it to the area that I got a good 4G signal on my laptop and used it for the DSL service through a router. The modem got 5 full bars of service on a 4G connection, but the performance was dismal. The person on terminal services kept getting disconnected. My ping test showed 30% packet loss and radical latency. I had to swap out the modem with the DSL which is at the 5 mile mark and barely able to provide service,...
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Clearwire part 2
I have decided to return the equipment and cancel my account for Clearwire's internet service. Primarily because they don't know their coverage and are selling it where you can't use it.The second day I had the service, I discovered that they captured my internet activity and directed me toward their pages to agree to a contract (the term of which was most likely 2 years, but I was never told and the contract they wanted me to agree too didn't say either. It covered all terms, from 24 hours to...
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Blog modification
I didn't like the form for making a comment to display on the page unless the reader wanted to leave a comment. It made the page look way too busy and I'm of the opinion that not everyone is going to leave a comment. So, I decided to hide it and leave a link the user could click to get the comment form to display.I'm know you can hide information on a page using CSS styles and then use javascript to change the style characteristic to show the hidden information. For example the CSS style to hide...
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Server Crash NT4.0 and Restored
What a great way to start the holidays. Just as everyone was wrapping up to leave for the holidays, we discovered that the server drive had crashed. All the diagnostics pointed to the drive being the issue.The server is a Dell PowerEdge 2450 using the integrated RAID controller. The the indication to the user was that the file couldn't be read and programs aborted. However, on the server console the errors were write-behind cache issues. Mft$ couldn't to be written to, some data may have been...
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Solid State Drives
Investigating the deployment of Solid State Drives SSD HD to determine the benefit and cost.
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NTBKUP recovery details
Due to the corrupted bkf files, the headers did not properly contain the drive letter designation required to use the -p option with ntbkup. I also had problems using the -d option. I got the prompt message like this:DIR Tree warning, 1st node not a VOLUME! Force '?:'This prompt lead me to believe that it wanted some info to replace the drive letter, so I tried a drive letter or enter Y, but to no avail. However, as of this writing, I discovered that it was working in the background. I was...
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Clearwire
I have been attending the computer fair for several months and walked past the booth for Clearwire (also known as Clear) and ignored them because I thought it was just a gimick to sell cellular internet access, which I didn't need. Little did I know that they were also selling a fantastic alternative to DSL and Cable internet services for the home. Also over the cellular network. 4G has arrived!I finally discovered their offereings while installing a brand new laptop for a client and during the...
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Quickbooks PDF printing issue
One of the biggest issues in upgrading to Windows 7 that I've experienced is with 64bit drivers, old printers, all-in-one printers, scanning and Quickbooks pdf printing.This the reason from the QuickBooks support pages: The QuickBooks PDF Converter settings are not compatible with some settings on some 64-bit versions of Windows 7, Vista, or XP operating systems. (This linkalso has the link to the solution that I used today.)In a previous installation, the customer was using QuickBooks 2009 and...
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Telepacific
This is the first time I've ever seen a Telecommunications vendor ever come pick up their equipment. I've been with Verizon, UUNET, Qwest to name just a few and have worked with many others and I've never seen any of them come pick up their equipment. I have stacks of routers to prove it and most of my customers have units in the telephone closet that they don't know where it came from or what it's being used for indicating there's a huge graveyard of dead network appliances all over the country.However,...
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The Bing Experince
Well I feel foolish. I wrote this based on my frustrations from a couple of weeks ago. I decided after writing this that I'd go back and see how Bing was doing and they crawled my site yesterday. Perhaps their servers took a Christmas and New Year's break. Who knows. But on their forums, Site indexing is the subject with the most posts.Even though my site wasn't being indexed and the control panel summary profile wasn't showing that I was being indexed, the tab that showed sites that pointed to...
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Web master tools
Implemented Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster tools (The experience with Bing was less than satisfactory).
surrealcms
Implemented surrealcms on this web site and applying it to other web sites I designed.
Hard Drive Failure
Raid Drive Failure:The company had setup a junk raid server to handle bulk image storage for a document imaging service. The document imaging program was Docuware which used SQL as a database and allowed for storing the images on any attached storage device. However; we were told that certain options of the software we had purchased would not work unless the software was installed with the images on the same server with the SQL installation. The option that we were not able to use was the ability...
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Database conversion Postgresql
I've been working on a postgresql version of Blog 9.0. I'm in the testing phases now and will be looking at the other functions of this blog.
This has been an uphill course. I manually converted all of the all of the database table and field names to lower case. Postgresql is extremely case sensitive. I didn't get all of the fields and found that as long as all the names are in lower case in the actual database, apparently the code can have whatever case structure it wants. The ASP pages still find the correct tables and names.
I had a big issue with bigint and bigserial field types. bigint is a 8 byte integer which gives an outrageous range on index keys. I started out converting all of the field extractions from Int8 to cLng and that worked, but there was a lot of work to do to fix all of them. I instead discovered that you can specify in ODBC to treat int8 as int4 which is the same as the integer used by MS SQL and visual basic. After I made that change, I was able to view all of the screens with one exception. I did not have a layout picked. The database creation tool did not copy anything into that field and when I displayed the web pages, I got an error on invalid "/" or "" in query. It turns out that I was submitting a null and as soon as I selected one of the valid templates, those errors went alway also.