Pale Musings

Just the other day a co-worker of mine asked me if our Exchange Server was having problems. It was not so I asked why he was asking about that. It turned out that his To Do bar in Outlook was just a big gray box with the message “Loading” displayed. He had left it for literally hours, restarted Outlook and rebooted his machine all to no avail.

My previous experiences with Outlooks shortcuts and calendar lists disappearing popped to mind so I had him exit Outlook and rename his Outlook.XML file. Sure enough, it worked! When he restarted Outlook his To Do bar came back to life. He had to reset it to show the items he wanted, but everything has been fine since.

This is just another example of Outlook frequently corrupting a file it uses for UI settings. I still do not know why it seems to be so fragile. I have submitted my experiences to Microsoft but I do not know if there are any plans to make the process a little more robust. Given the importance of Outlook in today’s business world (for many companies at least) I hope that this issue will get the attention that it deserves. There are some in my company that are greatly affected by Outlook problems.

If you happen to see any weird Outlook UI issues, first thing to try, in my opinion, is renaming (and therefore rebuilding) the Outlook.XML. Good luck to all!

I have been an avid listener / reader of Scott Hanselman for quite a while now.  His weekly Hanselminutes podcast is one of my favorites on my Zune.

This week he strayed a bit from the standard development based subject to interview Aaron Hockley.  Aaron and Scott chat for a little more than 30 minutes discussing various aspects of digital photography.

Last year I purchased a Nikon D80, which I love, but I have no clue how to use it effectively.  I can use the auto settings and of course I like to “play” with the settings every so often to see if I can get some different effects, but it is 100% accidental if anything comes out nice.

Aaron goes into the basics which is helping me fill out the holes (many of them!) in my knowledge and I am looking forward to focusing on the concepts he talks about to take my photography to the next level (ok, so that’s probably just level 2).

Thanks Scott for sitting down with Aaron, and thank you Aaron for sharing!

OK, I’ve been through this twice now, so I figure it is time to write it down.  Yesterday I had to do a hard reset on my HTC 4300 running Windows Mobile 5.  I would LOVE to upgrade to 6, but I’m not holding my breath on that one.

I had previously had a version of the Gmail for Mobile application installed and working, but forgotten how I’d done it.  After a couple of hours repeatedly trying to install the current version 1.5.0.1191, upgrading my Java Intent MIDlet Manager, trying to install again, downloading the .jar directly and more, I had no luck.

I finally decided to try the 1.0 version of the applet.  Viola!  That worked!  If anyone from Google happens to read this, you may want to test the current version with WM 5 since there are a lot of phones out there waiting for their providers to upgrade.

Here is the direct link to the 1.0 jar file.

Good luck!

I suppose that I wasn’t looking that specifically after installing SP1 for Vista; however, it did seem like my disk space was dwindling faster than I thought it should have.

Just this morning I went through my installed programs list and removed some that I was no longer using.  It did free up some space.  Although I had plenty of space after this time I found an article from Greg’s Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day.  The title read “Don’t think you’ll need to uninstall Vista SP1? Want to recover up to a gig of drive space? Then check out the Vista SP1 File Removal Tool.“

At times I have to wonder what the odds are that the very thing I am doing or looking for shows up on someone’s blog post…but I digress.

Greg cited the post NicolBlog - “Window Vista SP1 File Removal Tool” AKA “how to recover disk space after Vista SP1 installation” . which described how to use the Windows Vista SP1 File Removal tool (Vsp1cln.exe).  After reading about the tool and running the instructions, I reclaimed almost 1GB of space as Greg suggested.  Thanks Greg!

OK, So I ran across this article describing exciting new technology that may get us a step or three closer to a treatment for cancer, or at least brain cancer.

Now, rewind a few weeks to my experience sitting in the theater watching Will Smith in I Am Legend staring as a post-apocalyptic scientists, all alone in a world devastated by a mutated virus designed buy humans to kill cancer.

Geez!  I know it’s “just a movie” but c’mon…..that’s just scary!  I had nightmares when I originally saw the story of Robert Neville played by Charlton Heston in The Omega Man.  My son had a reaction to I Am Legend almost the same as my original experience.  He’s a few years older so I suppose a slightly less memorable experience is to be expected.  Now I have to think about this?

Seriously, I am glad that scientists are making strides.  It’s just one of those coincidences that bring back a strong memory.

I had the notice this morning that there was an upgrade to Windows Live Messenger available so I decided to perform the update.  During the process I had the opportunity to install Windows Live Writer.  I’ve seen several other blogger’s talk about it; however, I’ve never felt the need to try it out.  This morning, it was just to easy to say “yes”.

This is my first post to my WordPress blog.  Initial impression is that it looks very nice and intuitive.  I will give it a try for a while and report back what I think about it in the end.

One thing I noticed that I do like is the ability to save a draft online rather than local.  With that functionality I can easily finish editing it somewhere else if I happen to be sans laptop.  Very nice!

I have also noticed that there is a portable version.  Hmm….that has potential!

A buddy of mine sent me a link to The Top 50 Proprietary Programs that Drive You Crazy — and Their Open Source Alternatives | WHDb recently.  It was an interesting list so I thought I’d share it with you all.

As I read Microsoft researchers make me cry « Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger this morning I got chills.  Robert Scoble talks a lot about new tech, some of which is great, some not so much.   He is always passionate about it.

This post about an upcoming unveiling from Microsoft makes me think that there’s something big coming to the way we live.  When Robert talks about past technology moments saying “It’s even rarer that I see software that I know will change the world my sons live in” referring to “The first time I saw an Apple II,” “Netscape running the WWW” and others as a preface for this current secret, I get excited.

“While watching the demo I realized the way I look at the world was about to change. While listening to Wong I noticed a tear running down my face.”

According to Robert, the cover comes off around February 27th.  I will be waiting anxiously!

First off, I’d like to get the joke out of the way that BITS is a bit of an oxymoron sort of like Army Intelligence….ba dah ba!

OK, now that I’ve got that out of my system, I have to say that this has been one heck of a problem to solve, and that the search-ability of this topic is fairly low.

My problem arose a while back when my Windows Automatic Updater stopped updating automatically. At first it was not a big deal, I would simply use my browser to go to the Microsoft Update site on a regular basis. While this is a fine solution for me, I realize that for a large majority it is not.

I recently decided to install the Google Pack since I wanted some of the Google Software it contained and did not feel like tracking down the stand alone installers. After installing the “Google Updater” the software would tell me that the “Background Intelligent Transfer Service failed to start”. Looking in the Event Viewer I was presented with this information from the System log.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7023
Date: 2/13/2008
Time: 7:21:39 AM
User: N/A
Computer: JOEL2
Description:
The Background Intelligent Transfer Service service terminated with the following error:
The system cannot find the file specified.

Not very informative and, unfortunately, searching for that event ID and other bits of information was not very fruitful.

I finally came across the post How To Fix Windows Update (BITS/AU) after quite a bit of searching. Reading through this fine article by Mike I quickly realized just how many things can go wrong with BITS.

I began going through the list of things to try, of course verifying first if I needed to do a particular step. In step 2 there is a registry file to down and merge to try to fix the problem. I opened the file and looked through each setting to see if I needed to do it. It turned out that there was 1 setting I was missing. Parameters key was missing completely. Here is the part of the registry file that I ended up merging which fixed my BITS problem.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\BITS\Parameters]
“ServiceDll”=hex(2):43,00,3a,00,5c,00,57,00,49,00,4e,00,44,00,4f,00,57,00,53,\
00,5c,00,73,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,33,00,32,00,5c,00,71,00,6d,00,\
67,00,72,00,2e,00,64,00,6c,00,6c,00,00,00

The ServiceDll value, converted to ASCII, is C:\WINDOWS\system32\qmgr.dll

After merging this my service started up and Google Updater worked great.  Thanks for the article, Mike!

I recently had to put up a blog running the WordPress system. There are a lot of things I like about WordPress and in general the difficulty in getting the site up and running was low.

The problem came about when an image was needed on the site. The software gave me the infamous “Is its parent directory writable by the server” message. After confirming the permissions where correct I began to dig deeper. It turned out that SELinux was causing an access denied message.

After much research on the matter, I learned a few things. First, most people simply turn off (example, example, example) SELinux. That was not an option for me. I want the extra contextual security provided. Second, it was not a WordPress problem, or even an SELinux problem. In reality, it’s simply a configuration setting put in place to make unauthorized uploads less likely.

It turns out that the security policy will only allow the httpd service to upload to the /tmp directory. Examination of that directory shows that the context includes tmp_t. That is the ticket that got things working for me. Here’s my solution to this issue:

1. Change directory to the wp-content directory of the WordPress software.
2. Made the uploads folder manually.
   mkdir uploads
3. Changed the owner of uploads to the appropriate user that apache runs as (as root).
   chown httpuser:httpuser uploads
4. Changed permissions to allow the apache user to write to the directory (as root).
   chmod 755 uploads
5. Changed the SE context of the directory to allow httpd to upload file (as root).
   chcon -t tmp_t uploads

That did it. Not terribly difficult, but there is not a lot of concise documentation to be found when looking for this problem. It is very possible that there is a better way to accomplish these results, and if you know that it is please let me know! I can say that my configuration is working today and, at least so far, everything seems to be working fine and as secure as it can be.

The final output of ls -Z for the uploads directory should look something like this:

drwxr-xr-x httpd httpd root:object_r:tmp_t uploads

Cheers.