Ever wanted to run Visual Studio 2003 on Windows Vista? No? Me neither but apparently at least one person has wanted since there is an article on MSDN about how to do it and the problems you should expect to run into.

Just from skimming the list of problems it makes me wonder why on earth anyone would want to do this? Perhaps they enjoy self-inflicted torture? They are using Vista after-all.

Yes I know, they need to support existing .Net 1.1 applications but surely there are better options!?!

a) Upgrade the application.
b) If upgrading is just not feasible then maintain a seperate Windows XP machine and avoid the headaches in the first place.
c) Don’t want to spend a dime? Install a Virtual Machine (VMWare or Virtula PC) with XP on it on the local Vista machine and the problem goes away.

You can get a brand new PC downgraded to XP in the $300 ballpark and I am sure there are still ways to get your hands on XP if you don’t already have a copy. Although, I can’t imagine someone upgrading from Windows 2000 to Vista. I guess there must be some.

I just thought the whole idea of the article was humerous and thought I’d share my thoughts.

I have shared my personal troubles when working with a server that is not on a proper backup routine. I also talked about another blogger who had similar problems not too long ago. Today, however, I read a truly sad story of how things can go really wrong when you don’t take backups seriously.

It started out pleasantly enough. I was just catching up on John Chow’s trip to China. Now I don’t read John’s blog regularly but I like to scim his RSS feed for interesting headlines. Well I found one today, “Hunting Pandas At The Shanghai Zoo“. Turns out it was just a video of him and his family at the zoo but the real gold was in the link to the “true life account” of how John had a rock fight with Pandas.

That was a funny post to read. I’ll be laughing about that one for a while. What about the backup post you promised? Just hold on, I;m getting there. I promise.

I decided to check out Carl’s blog (the third guy from the Panda story). Alright, here you go. This is the point of my article. the first post I see on Carl’s blog is an explaination that the data recovery company he sent his hard drive (after a server crash) was not successful in recovering any data.

So what is the magnitude of this loss? HUGE! He says he has lost 5 years worth of data for his personal blog as well as 10 years worth of data for his Surreal-News forum. Ouch! Among other data lost was sites of friends and family. That is a tough loss to take.

What can we learn from this? Carl says it himself. “never really intended to run many important sites from my server. I really should have set up RAID regardless.” That’s how it usually goes. You don’t intend to store important data but eventually it creeps onto the server and before you know it you’ve lost important data.

I wish Carl the best of luck in the future and hope he does imlement RAID like he says. You should setup up some nightly backup (at least weekly) software onto a seperate harddrive. Doing a weekly or monthly offsite swap (take a copy off site) is always good when possible.

What is cPanel?

Wikipedia defines cPanel as “a graphical web-based web-hosting control panel, designed to make administration of websites easy. cPanel handles all aspects of website administration in its interface. The software, which is proprietary and distributed by cPanel Inc., is designed for use by commercial web hosting services, so the company does not offer a reduced-cost personal use license; however, owners of non-profit organizations such as educational institutions and charities can request a license at a reduced cost. Reduced prices are frequently available from dedicated-server companies, who install it along with the operating system.”

Basically cPanel is software you can access through a web browser to manage your website and hosting account. cPanel is a very common product used by hosting companies to make it easier for thier customers to manage their websites through a nice web interface that can be accessed from anywhere in the world.

What does it do?

Again to quote Wikipedia, “To the client, cPanel provides front-ends for a number of common operations, including the management of PGP keys, crontab tasks, mail and FTP accounts, and mailing lists.

Several add-ons exist for an additional fee, the most notable being Fantastico, a bundle of scripts which automate the installation of, but not the update of (see article), web applications such as SMF, phpBB, Drupal, Joomla, TikiWiki, Moodle and over 50 others.

Unlike some other web hosting control panels, cPanel manages some software packages separately from the underlying operating system, applying upgrades to Apache, PHP, MySQL, and related software packages automatically. This ensures that these packages are kept up-to-date and compatible with cPanel, but has become a cause for consternation to some, as it becomes difficult to easily install newer versions of these packages.”

That sums it up very nicely. With cPanel you can manage every aspect of your website and hosting account from the content to the database to the users that have access to the account. cPanel is a very impressive and easy to use system.

How do I get cPanel?

cPanel is not free, however a lot of webhosts provide cPanel to their customers at no extra cost. You have a lot of options when choosing hosting, so which company is the best cpanel web host? There are many good companies out there so it would be hard to say which is the best but if you are unsure of a company do a simple Google search for reviews of that company.

The following article shows an error in Excel 2007.

In a blog post, Microsoft employee David Gainer said that when computer users tried to get Excel 2007 to multiply some pairs of numbers and the result was 65,535, Excel would incorrectly display 100,000 as the answer.

Gainer said Excel makes mistakes multiplying 77.1 by 850, 10.2 by 6,425 and 20.4 by 3,212.5, but the program appears to be able to handle 16,383.75 times 4.

“Further testing showed a similar phenomenon with 65,536 as well,” Gainer wrote Tuesday.

He said Excel was actually performing the calculations correctly, but when it comes time to show the answer on the screen, it messes up.

Gainer said the bug is limited to six numbers from 65,534.99999999995 to 65,535, and six numbers from 65,535.99999999995 to 65,536 and that Microsoft is working hard to fix the problem.

I find myself eagerly awaiting the beginning of each new months to see how much browser share IE6 has lost. Sadly in August IE6 only fell 0.65%. It seems we have hit a threshold of IE7 adoption.

This is of concern to me as a web developer because as bad as IE6 is and the fact that IE7 only fixed a few glaring problems having to support both, each with it’s own unique challenges, is far, far worse. Personally I have desided to stop supporting IE6 once it drops to 5% of browser share. Sadly this could take a while as it is still sitting at 44.59% and dropping agonizingly slow.

I am considering going as far as displaying a noticable but unobtrusive message on the login screen of my applications encouraging upgrading to IE7, or even better yet, Firefox.

Anyone else care to share their opinion on this?

Nice spoof of Mac vs PC

Chinese police and the FBI worked together to take down two Chinese piracy groups recently, which they credit with being in possession of counterfeit software valued at half a billion dollars.

read more | digg story

We pulled together a desktop that can ably handle today’s average demands, built with easy-to-assemble, off-the-shelf components for a total cost of less than $250.

read more | digg story

This deserves as much exposure as possible. this exact situation happened to me. IIS died while I was working away. Thankfully this post was just the ticket to raise it from the dead!

The IIS Admin Service service terminated with service-specific error 2149648394 (0×8021080A).

IIS Admin Service goes away after restoring a VHD / VPC Server

I recently had the unexpected pleasure of losing my IIS Admin server - altogether!!! Translate - 150% !!!

Now, before this - everything was going great - except. During an upgrade of MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) I encounted an issue that forced me to restore a VPC image - essentially bringing over another copy of the VHD and firing the server back up.

Interstingly, during that reboot - which for all intents should have gone fine - I see a hoard of DSKCHK processes running. Invariably, something got out of wack on the NTFS volumn between my shutting the image down and bringing it back up. During the ‘fixing’ process - a number of files invaribly can become corrupt - and the Metabase.xml - the blood-life of your IIS Admin service - is no exception. SO

Check in C:\Windows\System32\Inetsrv and you’ll find a ‘History’ folder. Within here - hopefully - you’ll find fairly recent backups of the Metabase.XML and MBSchema.XML objects. Before doing the following - be sure to backup the existing Metabase.xml and MBSchema.xml from C:\Windows\System32\Inetsrv first.

Now, rename a recent backup from the ‘History’ folder - renaming a recently Metabase.XML object, and then a recent MBSchema.XML object. Copy / Paste each of these to the C:\Windows\System32\Inetsrv.

Ahh, not quite done.

Now do a IISRESET from a command prompt.

Hopefully this will get you back to where you need to be.

By: Tim Lee

The Windows Registry System

Basically, for all windows users, one of the most important things in a computer that needs backup is the windows registry.

In windows, the registry system stores all of your information in your computer. These are placed in a database system where certain data about the user profile, configuration settings, and installed programs are recorded.

However, there are times when the computer gets system-overload and can no longer accept data or misplaces the pieces of data stored in the computer. If this is the case, then it is high time that you fix registry on computer.

Backup Copies With Backup

The steps to fix registry on computer is not as easy as 1-2-3. But it is not as complicated as fixing cars either. To fix registry on computer is to simply change the registry information back to its default setting or to repair any errors incurred therein.

Whether it is complicated or relatively easy to fix registry on computer, the fact remains the same: you have to do backups.

Backups are extremely important so that you can still retrieve your date in case you have failed to fix registry on computer. Also, it enables you to always restore the default settings of the registry of your computer in case you were not able to fix it.

One way to fix registry on computer is to have a backup for your Registry Checker. This is where editing the registry comes in.

In reality, the registry of windows has an integrated Registry Editor. You can locate it at the Start menu, then Run, and then just type regedit.exe, and then hit OK.

Basically, RegEdit is one of the best registry fixes that is focused to fix registry on computer. You can change, edit, or modify your registry through this device.

But if all else fails, you still have to find ways how to be prepared when things like this happens.

Luckily, there are many things like these that are available in the market today. These items are specifically designed and exclusively operated to fix registry on computer.

There may be a lot of registry repair tools available in the market today but none of them guarantees a 100% solution and an error-free procedure.

The bottom line is that in order to prevent errors in your computer system, shun away from activities that may trigger your system to behave badly. As they say, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure to fix registry on computers.