Unto the pure, all things are pure

I installed 64-bit Windows Server 2003 (R2 with SP2) for the first time this week. Surprisingly, there is no option to enable ASP.NET on IIS even though I have all the .NET frameworks installed and updated. The Add/Remove Windows Component Wizard does not have ASP.NET as an option under Application Server. Neither does the Managing Your Server application.  In 32-bit Windows Server, it says Application Server (IIS, ASP.Net) but in 64-bit it is as follows: As it cannot be done through the GUI, I checked up the Help documentation. The documentation says my next task is to enable ASP.NET but I couldn't find any clues on how to do that. Finally I found the instructions hidden in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894435 , an article which really does not apply to my situation as I want a pure 64-bit server. The steps are: a.  Install and enable IIS first.  Do this through Manage Your Server or Add/Remove Windows Components. b.  Run: cscript %SYSTEMDRIVE%\inetp...

I guess you already know that ZhongGuanCun (中关村) in Peking (北京) is the largest collection of shoppping centers selling computers and electronics stuff. If you need something for your computer, I think you will find at least 1,000 shops/counters selling what you want. The hard part is getting what you want at the price you don't regret later. The trick is to buy only things you have researched thoroughly. Use a place like eBay to find out the lowest market price. Buying something on impulse will always end up with regrets, unless you are a trained negotiator. ZhongGuanCun is not one mall. It is a whole city of malls. I don't know how many there are. I went to only a couple of buildings. Basically they are all the same. I guess in lieu of marketing to differentiate, each just bank on fleecing one unsuspecting customer a day. I went to look for a notebook battery. Surprisingly this was one item that was not really that popular. If you need a battery and want to ...

It's very easy to plan a do-it-yourself tour of the Great Wall of China at BaDaLing (八达岭). And it costs only RMB12x2 (total USD4) for the journey there and back. The Internet is full of postings on how people signed up to tours only to be held at ransom to cough up more money after the bus has moved off. Do not be another victim. By the way, most of the victims are Chinese nationals from out of town or people who speak some Chinese. The swindlers, or enterprising businessmen depending on how you view them, tend to leave the non-Chinese speakers alone as sign language is harder, I guess. Follow these steps carefully for a low-cost and enjoyable tour. We just did it last week. 1. Make your way to DeShengMen (德胜门) . This is once a city gate of which only the archer's tower is now left standing. The archer's tower is a huge structure that cannot be missed once you are in the vicinity. There are a few bus terminals there. The one you must go to is north of the tower. Fro...

Remember CT2 or the initial incarnation of PCN?  They have gone the way of the dodo.  The technology is now used in DECT phones. Efforts to expand wifi to provide wide area coverage will meet the same fate. CT2 was marketed as a poor man's alternative to cell phones.  It is a neat engineering idea.  You get to use a wireless phone when you are in range of a base station.  But it is just that, a neat engineering idea. Using wi-fi as a poor man's wide area data network is in a similar situation.  The reason is not un-obvious. If only, say, 20% of the time that you need to use the Internet you find yourself outside wi-fi coverage, you would need to pay for a data subscription from your cell-phone company.  And, if you already have paid for wide-area data why would you still pay or need wi-fi? Wi-fi has its uses, just like DECT phones.  You use it at home or in the office, when you are pretty stationary and there is no point expending power...

One of the fundamental principles of communications is that the amount of planning is inversely proportional to the efficiency of communications available.  The better communications you have the less planning you have to do.  The more planning you do, you are less dependent on the need to communicate. To illustrate: a family hits the shopping mall.  In the old days, a detailed plan would have to be worked out, something like: "Everybody, it's free and easy for the next 30 minutes.  Then we meet at this water fountain.  If by 35 minutes, Johnny doesn't show up, this is what we will do,......"  Lots and lots of if's then else's to cover all conceivable contingencies.  Today, when a family reaches the mall, everyone takes out his or her cell phone, does a battery check, and everyone do whatever he or she likes.  When someone feels it's time to go, the phones start ringing. This similar scenario occurs everywhere.  When an army wants to conduc...

Everyone must have received lots of such messages where at the end they say "Please do not reply to this email". This is idiotic on many accounts. I won't even bother to explain them. I do the exact opposite. In all emails that are generated by applications, I always include a line which says something like " Please reply to this email if you meet any problems. " And of course I use a sender email address that is always monitored.

Introduction The modern cellular phone is very powerful computer with fantastic capabilities. The technology, from the user point of view, is not that complex. However, the lack of information on implementation specifics prevents lots of wonderful things from being done. For example, Nokia documentation such as (on page 57 of my E-71 manual) " To use a specific positioning method, select Positioning methods " is not helpful. The bewildering number of terms used for the same thing, and the same term to mean totally different things add to the confusion. The Nokia phone has lots of powerful features for data. For example, your laptop computer can have full Internet access by "dialing" out through the phone in your pocket. This is something I have been doing for the past ten years, since CSD days, and that iPhone users still cannot enjoy. Data on the move There are two distinctively different types of data networks the modern Nokia phone such as the E-71 supports...

[Superceded by Super OLED .] Bought my second Nokia E-71 today, for US$140 on a US$30 plan contracted for two years. I could have traded-in my one-year old one for US$140 but I didn't as the new phone is for my daughter. This phone is still the best considering all factors. The GPS receiver alone is worth the price. What I like about the phone (all equally important to me except infrared): a. Tethering without issues b. Slimmer than an iPhone c. Exchange client d. Full QWERTY keypad, albeit a bit small e. Reasonably good camera for all the emergency situations f. Two cameras g. Video recording h. HSDPA, Wifi, Bluetooth with A2DP i. Expandable storage through MicroSD j. GPS k. VOIP according to standards l. FM radio m. Browser that can see most web sites n. Plays MP3 and WMA o. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF viewers p. Live Messenger client q. It's hardy. Have dropped it from height quite a few times and none the worse. r. It can stand upright on its bot...

I am wondering why people still need a mouse, especially on a notebook. A quite common scenario I see is someone brings a laptop into the meeting, and then spends the next five minutes plugging in the charger and the mouse and then booting up. With all those cables, the laptop is no more a mobile computer!! I have not used a mouse for the last thirteen years , that is, since I got my first notebook, a Compaq Armada 4100. It has a touch-pad. Between 2000 and 2004 I was using the Compaq M700 and that has the stick. The stick was tough on the finger due to the force required. Even the stick is better than the mouse. For the very simple reason that it takes less than one-tenth the time for your hand to leave the keyboard to reach for it. So I can do things ten times faster than a mouse user. The touch-pad is still the best pointing device as it requires the least effort for a lazy person like me. A well-tuned touch-pad would allow me to move the cursor across a 1600-pixel wid...

The only time I have used an anti-virus software for myself was in 1987 (yes, more than 20 years ago) when I checked out a version from an Israeli company. I disassembled it, examined the machine instructions, and promptly uninstalled it as I could not relish the idea that every int 21 call must go through a third party. Since then I have not installed AV software on any of my computers. If you have problems updating the MSE anti-virus files due to a proxy server, you may want to skip the long story and jump to the last paragraph below. My daughter started using Windows 95 at age 5 and went through the peak of virus mania circa post-2000. My wife uses the computer daily to check mail and browse the Internet but she belongs to the group of the most elementary and novice type of user you can find. So within my family you can find the full range of computer users. All our computers are running Microsoft Windows and none of them has AV software installed. It's 10 years later and ...

If you are a .NET developer, Assembly and File version would be familiar to you. They can be set in the Designer UI (project Properties page, Application tab, Assembly I nformation button...) which basically updates appropriate attributes in AssemblyInfo.cs. Now, there is a less well known number - the Product version . It is not well documented and most developers ignore it altogether with no side-effects most of the time. However, it is an important number and it seems that, of the three, Product version is the most widely used. The three version numbers simply take the values you give them or: a. If Assembly version is not explictly specified, it takes the value of 0.0.0.0. b. If File version is not explicitly specified, it takes the value of Assembly version. c. If Product version is not explicitly specified, it takes the value of File version. In Windows Explorer of Windows XP and Server 2003, you can see from the properties of a file all three version numbers. In W...

I thought it would be neat to have Hyper-V Server on a notebook, with Windows 2008 SBS as a guest OS, and then load some more legacy OS'es to test a piece of software I was developing. I have a 1.5-year old Compaq Presario (Core 2 Duo) lying around and I used it. I chose to install the Hyper-V Server clean before installing any guest OS'es. That went fine and trouble free. Not a squeak that the CPU was or was not suitable. T Then searched around and found that Hyper-V Manager was needed. I downloaded the version for Vista 32-bit. It installed fine. But it won't connect. Complained with the famous error: You do not have the required permission to complete this task. Contact the administrator of the authorization policy for the computer XXX Did some tedious preparatory steps as indicated in John Howard's blog . But I just did: 1) create the common user, 2) netsh advfirewall ... 3) DCOMCNFG on the client. Hyper-V Manager now connects fine and I can instal...

Now we all know that Bill Gates uses three screens . I have been using Extended Desktop in Windows for coming up to ten years now. I think it's one of the great things that Microsoft has done by making it easy for display adapter drivers to be developed to work in such a manner. My current set up is the 17" 1440x900 built-in of my notebook and a 1680x1050 standalone running off my notebook VGA port, with the external display positioned directly on top of the built-in display. I populate all the places I frequent with the second monitor (same specs), so that I can just plug in when I reach there, just like the power charger. I am not using three displays because: a. I don't know of any notebook that can drive two external displays, not even with the additional video port on a HP docking unit. Using a video adpater reduces the mobility of my notebook. b. I tried using three monitors but find that I spend much time moving my mouse to where I want to go (even though m...

Sending mail is an activity required in many applications. The SMTP protocol is clearly defined in RFC 821 in the last century. It is a beautiful piece of work and this can be acknowledged by the fact that it has remained largely unchanged since. Microsoft's .NET has all the classes in the System.Net.Mail namespace to make sending mail a breeze. You can read through the documentation and Google for the many examples and tutorials if you are new to this subject. What I would like to share today is that sending mail in .NET can be made even easier by configuration. The following two lines of code are all that are needed to send out a mail: MailMessage msg = new MailMessage("x@gmail.com","bgates@microsoft.com", "Test","This is a test"); new SmtpClient().Send(msg); There is no need to embed in your code SMTP server names or passwords. That is bad practice because when you deploy your...

There are times when a user does not have a mailbox in the Exchange server itself. The place to configure forwarding is in ADUC and not System Server. First, in the External Contacts folder in your domain tree, create the destination forwarding address. Then, in the user's Properties, go to the Exchange General tab and select Delivery Options. Check the F orward to option and select the destination address from the list of External Contacts.

Here are the steps: Create a certificate request (CSR). There're lots of documentation for this, mail me if you need help. Basically you do it from the IIS management console. (IIS 7 is different from previous versions by trying to make it "easier" but it assumes the user is illiterate - has lots of pictorial icons.) This will generate a Base64 encoded file, and it will also remember that there is a pending request. If you use a commercial provider, then just copy and paste the contents of the file in your application. If you want to use Windows Server 2003's certificate services, go to the server's website: /certsrv. Either of the above will give you a .cer or .crt file. Go back to the IIS management console server certificate option and use the "Process pending request" option. Das ist alles.

1. A SLR construction does not make a camera better Digital camera marketing has been very successful. Lots of buyers are "monkey see monkey do" paying lots of money without knowing how their cameras work. I can bet that majority of SLR owners do not know what SLR means. Today's SLR digital cameras can produce better pictures because most of them have a larger sensor compared to point-and-shoot cameras. Camera manufacturers would like to keep things this way to avoid fighting on price alone. The ability to change lens does not require an SLR. Thankfully Panasonic has broken this mental block with their latest model. A digital SLR is worse than a point-and-shoot when it comes to having a video viewfinder. Yes, some of us prefer to use the optical viewfinder up close with the camera touching our face. But there are situations where an indirect display is necessary, eg when holding the camera high to shoot over people blocking your view. The SLR was invented ...