Microsoft’s Windows 7, Outlook 2007 and Adobe’s Acrobat just do not play well together on 64-bit systems. After receiving a PDF document via email, Outlook usually cannot display the PDF.

When selection Preview File, you will simply get the message PDF Preview Handler for Vista (Vista!?) caused an error.

For now, the only way to view the PDF file is to open it in an external PDF reader. Leo Davidson provides a fix that finally solves this issue. Just get the fix, and run the Adobe Reader preview handler x64 fixer.exe which is included in the file.

After applying the fix, both, the 32-bit AppID as well as the 64-bit AppID will show the value as correct.

No reboot required, just go back to Outlook (worked even without restarting the application) and et voilà.

Thanks to Leo Davidson, who provides this outstanding fix. Well played.

If you experience issues with a USB device not being recognized under Windows 7, there might be a simple solution to solve this. For example the MSI USB 2.0 All IN 1 Card Reader aka MSI StarReader is recognized as eHome Infrared Receiver (USBCIR) using Windows 7. The device works great using Windows Vista or even the Windows 7 pre-release versions. Unfortunately, with the final Windows 7 the device just won’t work.

A quick look into the Device Manager will show that the device is recognized as eHome Infrared Receiver (USBCIR). When connecting the first time Windows 7 won’t give any notice that the installation of the driver failed or that the device is not ready to use. It will simply not work.

This seems to be known problem, however, there is no need to wait for a Software Update from Microsoft. The solution is to manually choose the device.

1. Start Device Manager
2. Right-click the eHome Infrared Receiver (USBCIR) entry
3. Select Update Driver Software
4. Choose Browse my computer for driver software
5. Choose Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer
6. Make sure the Show compatible hardware box is checked
7. Select the USB Composite Device and you are done

After a few seconds the driver should be installed and the device should be ready.

Doh, if you are going to use your Windows Server 2003 as a streaming server for your Xbox 360, you might be in trouble. For a while I went with a rather sophisticated solution, running a Windows XP Media Center within a Virtual Server on my Windows Server 2003. The solution is not the desired one and as Windows Media Center and the Media Center Extender within Xbox 360 have some trouble in streaming h.264 encoded movies files, I had to dig a bit deeper.

Before you go one, please be aware of the following disclaimer:

The following is given under a “works on my machine” premise. The proposed approach is based on my very personal attempts and comes a”as is”. If you try to attempt the following steps, you do it on your own risk. It is not supported by Microsoft, and hey, in case you brick your box don’t expect any support from Microsoft. Don’t blame it to me either as you did it on your own risk, but let me know as it could be fun, tough.

There are several ways to share media with your Xbox 360. The easiest ways is to check out http://www.xbox.com/pcsetup/. After determining your OS, you will be guided through the best way to share media. Bad luck if you work on a Windows Server 2003, though. Not supported, you will be told. 

The easiest way is to share media over Windows Media Player 11. Windows Server 2003 comes with Windows Media Player 10. But as we know the core of Windows Server 2003 is somehow Windows XP and therefore there must be away to install WMP 11 on Windows Server 2003. If you google for it, you will come along a dozen hacks and workarounds and most of them won’t work.  Recently, this guy called C:Amie posted some awesome hack to install Windows Media player 11 on Windows Server 2003. If you have time, go through it, if you are in a hurry, do it that way:

1. Make sure your box is fully patched and Service Pack 2 is installed.
   
2. Download Windows the Windows Media Player 11 installer for Windows XP. 
   
3. Download the automatic installer from C:Amie’s website.
   
4. Run the automatic installer and extract it to any folder on your Windows Server 2003 box.
   
5. Copy the previously downloaded wmp11-windowsxp-x86-enu.exe into the same directory.
   
6. Go to the folder and run the INSTALL.CMD file.
   
7. Follow the onscreen instructions.
   
   
   
   The script creates a temporary folder on your C: drive called C:\wmp11. There you have to change the compatibility mode of two files to Windows XP. Go to C:\wmp11\update\1\. and right click the update.exe file. Chose the Compatibility tab and check the Compatibility mode for Windows XP. Make the same for the update.exe file in c:\wmp11\update\2\.
   
   
   
8. Now go back to the command line window and press a key to continue and the simply wait.
   
9. The software updater wills start after some time and after some more time you will end up with the UPnP for Windows Server 2003 dialog.
   
   
   Check the Universal Plug and Play checkbox and select Next and then Finish.
   
10. If everything went well, you will end up with Windows Media Player 11 on a Windows Server 2003. Hurray.
    
    
    

But you remember that we want to stream h.264 encoded files to our Xbox 360, right? The good news is that Windows 7 will support h.264 natively. The bad news is that we work on a Windows Server 2003 right now.  With some work however, we can teach our Windows Server 2003 also to deal with h.264 encoded .mp4 files. All we have to do is to install some codecs and to apply some registry hacks.

1. For the sake of simplicity, I took the K-Lite Mega Codec pack. It took the mega pack instead of the standard pack because Dirty Harry is using a .44 and not a .375. This might be reason enough.
   
2. During installation select Profile 2. It’s the default profile without the players (you remember we want to stream anyway). Feel free to experiment with other profiles and custom settings.
   
   
   
3. When you come along the Select Additional Task step, don’t forget to scroll down and to check Make thumbnail generation possible for the following types. This will create the thumbnails in the Windows explorer and within the Windows Media Player 11.
   
   
   

At this point your Windows Media Player can play h.264 encoded files but your server is still not capable to share any kind of .mp4 files. They won’t show up in the folders monitored by Media Player until we apply some tweaks to the registry.

On my crusade I came along two registry patches. It seems that they did not work for everybody, however, nobody tried on Windows Server 2003. It worked for me after I installed both of them.

1. Download the first registry patch, rename to .reg and install it.
   
2. Download the second registry patch, rename to .reg and install it.
   
3. Reboot to apply the registry changes.

Now, out Windows Server 2003 is capable to stream h.264 encoded media files. The previous patches will now cause that Windows Media Player 11 will add all kinds of .mp4 or .m4a files within the monitored folders. Adding these folders to be streamed is straight forward.

1. Go to  Libary /Add to Library… 
   
   
   
2. Add all kinds of folders that should be streamed to your Xbox 360. The media types will be organized automatically, so movies, music files and images will be shown in the corresponding tabs in the NXE. 
   
   
    
3. In some rare cases (and I know what I am talking about as I encountered this rare case) all your mp4 files won’t show up in the movie folders. In this case select Library / Other and check if the files are shown there.
   
    
   
   If you find all your files here, something went terrible wrong with your media library. Calm down, there is a easy workaround (FWIW: if you already share media, stop sharing as the following won’t work).
   
   Go to C:\Documents and Settings\[YouProfileName]\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft and delete the Media Player folder. This will wipe out the whole media library for this computer. Restart from 1. and everything should be green now.
   
    

Now, where everything is nicely organized, indexed and monitored, we are ready to share our media with the Xbox 360.

1. Turn on your Xbox 360. 
   
   No kidding, you won’t be able to turn on sharing if the 360 is not on at that point of time.
   
2. Go to Library / Media Sharing…
   
    
   
3. Now it’s straight forward:
   
   a) Check Share my media to
   
   b) Select your Xbox 360
   
   c) Click Allow 
   
   
   
   
4. Finally, don’t forget to check out the Customize button which will open a dialog for some more fine tuning (what kinds of media to share, what ratings to share, etc.)

Now got to your Xbox 360 and enjoy your h.264 streamed media.

There are a few point’s I haven’t found out how to resolve, yet.

1. The registry hacks don’t include .mkv file extensions. Also both hacks could be combined into one. I simply haven’t spend time in this yet.
   
2. The 360 won’t show any thumbnails for the h.264 encoded files. Not sure if this is related to the XNE or the Media Player. This might worth some more investigation.
   
3. The 360 does not show the length of the media file. It does so for .avi files, so this might be automatically answered once 2. is answered.

It is finally done. After some exiting days I moved my web site, blog and domain to my own server. A few seconds I was informed about the succeeded the domain transfer. Now I am just waiting that all the DNS are updated. Since everything is already set up and prepared for the domain name, the master plan is accomplished.

1. Got root
2. Install VMware
3. Install a Windows Server 2008
4. Move my existing site to the new server

In to make sure such a relocation goes off without a hitch just follow a few simple rules

1. Terminate the contract with our current provider, best in written form or by fax
2. Inform your current provider about the domain transfer
3. Request the domain transfer with your new provider
4. Set up your Web applications on the new site - test it!
5. Make the site listening to the domain name to be moved.
6. Make sure you have some mail server set up already listening to the domain name being moved.

That's all.

Go and get some good webcam (I use the Microsoft LifeChat NX-6000), navigate to the Skype user settings (e.g. in to C:\Program Files\Users\[YourWindowsProfile]\AppData\Roaming\Skype\[YourSkypeProfile]\), open config.xml and follow the instruction by Phillip Torrone, seeking for the <Video> tag. I am using Skype version 3.6.0.248 and the configuration file looks quite different now. However, adding the <CaptureWidth> and <CaptureHeight> tag works fine as well with this version since it was especially introduced with version 3.6. At the end your configuration file should look similar to this one.

I re-started Skype and it looks like the other side can see me in 640x480 now.

After switching from WEP to WPA2 (shame on my it took so long), of course I had to update several XP and Vista machines. However, the 360 made most trouble since I used a D-Link 700AP before which was configured as a wireless bridge. Since I run a Linksys WRT54GS as gateway, it seemed to be the easiest way to get a second device of the same kind to be set up as wireless bridge being flashed with an alternative firmware. However, I realized that there is a endless number of devices in this series [1]. After getting the device I had to figure out, the new device is version 7. Due to an change in the manufacturer firmware, the ROM size of the device was continuously reduced. At this time I thought about the fact, getting a WRT54G (which is the old hardware factor and Linux based) might have been the better choice. Now I simply replaced the existing device with version 4 with the new one. and the old one providing 4 MB of RAM became the wireless gateway.

There are a couple of alternative firmware projects for the WRT54GS. After reading though a couple of posts in various forums, it seemed that OpenWrt [2] is the best choice. In addition, X-Wrt [3] seemed to be suitable for easy setup. During the setup of OpenWrt I encountered several problems ending up in my router being bricked. So I had to recover the device using TFTP [4] and the original firmware [5].

After several failures and digging a bit more I found more and much better documentation on DD-WRT [6] including documentation for setting up wireless bridges [7]. While v23 does only support WPA2-mixed mode, I switched over to v24 RC4 which finally supports WAP2 Personal.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrt54g
[2] http://openwrt.org/
[3] http://x-wrt.org/
[4] http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Recover_from_a_Bad_Flash
[5] http://www-de.linksys.com/...
[6] http://www.dd-wrt.com/
[7] http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Wireless_Bridge#WPA-Personal

While charging an iPod on a Windows Vista system without having iTunes installed, you might face the issue that the iPod is not willing to play any music as long as it is charging. Therefore, simply choose Safely Remove Hardware from the Vista task tray.

There you select Generic volume and click Stop. In the second dialog do the same, select Generic volume and click Stop.

After a few seconds your iPod will re-start and awaiting your commands while it is still charging.

SearchIndexer.exe does all the indexing stuff on your Vista machine. Not bad at all it is not possible to schedule when the indexer is running as it was able using MSN Desktop Search. E.g., there you have been able to send the indexer to sleep for a 10, 20 or 60 minutes or to avoid running the indexer whilst working on the machine. it looks like the only way to calm the machine down is by switching of the service at all. Another work around I am trying right now is to got to Control Panel / Power Options and choosing the High Performance Change power plan settings. There chose Change advanced power settings Search and Indexing values to Power Saver or Balanced. This should lower the indexing effort of the Vista Search significantly.

Looking for svnserve [1] I realized that the link is dead. Instead I found some hints that subversion from version 1.4 .x on supports to be started as a service out of the box. After running

sc create svn.local binpath= "\"c:\program files\subversion\bin\svnserve.exe\" --service --root c:\svn" displayname= "Subversion Repository" depend= Tcpip

I just had to change the service settings to be automatically started.

More information on this topic can be found at [2].

[1] http://blog.aheil.de/SVNService.aspx
[2] http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/tags/1.4.0/notes/windows-service.txt

It is time to hack something new. So, the AG SHP [1] appears to be fine for the next project. First step will be to retrieve as much as possible information about the system. I did already spent some hours in such a system - feels like next generation console games. As far as I know, the system is made by a UK company. Let's see what I can figure out about the system within the next three months. 

[1] http://www.rk-gammertingen.de/in_agshp.html

There has been a problem with FTP for a while. The Color Picker as well as the Image Browser did not wanted to work properly! The solution can be found there:

"Finally ...

Thanks to Kenneth Solberg (http://www.khix.net), the FTB Web Dialogs finally do work !

The Hack (noticed that I didnt use the word solution):

1) Save a copy of the web.config file from the dasBlog root to the ftb directory

2) Open up that web.config file from the ftb directory.

3) Edit the Authorization Config section to such:
<authorization>
 <allow users="*" />
 </authorization>

4) Remove the Authentication Elements from the config file.

5) Save the File.

6) Save a copy of the SiteConfig Folder and Contents from the dasBlog root to the ftb directory as well.

7) Refresh and Click on the Font-Fore Color, Font-Back Color and Insert Code Buttons of the FreeTextBox and watch the wonderful Web Dialog pop up successfully.

I would never have figured out why and how as there was absolutely no written documentation anywhere (that I could find anyways...)"

Source: gotdotnet Messageboard

Jetzt, da die echte Domain für sämtliche Request verwendet werden kann, habe ich begonnen einige kleine Probleme auf der Seite zu beheben. Ein Problem trat regelässig auf, wenn man im Kalender von dasBLog einen Tag ausgewählt hatte. dasBlog ruft darauf die Seite default.aspx?date= auf. Natürlich klappt das nicht, wenn die default.aspx Seite in blog.aspx umbenannt wurde. Wie fast alle in .NET kann das Problem mit einem Dreizeiler gelöst werden:

if (Request.QueryString["date"] != null)
{
    string query = "blog.aspx?date=" + Request.QueryString["date"];
    Server.Transfer(query);
}

Das reicht und jeder Request der auf der Startseite eingeht und vom Kalender stammt wird abgebochen und es wird anstelle dessen die Seite blog.aspx zurückgeliefert. Beliebig verfeinern lässt sich das Ganze, indem beispielweise noch auf die Referrer-Url abgefragt wird. Eine Bedingung in der Form

Request.UrlReferrer.ToString().Substring("blog.aspx") < 0

genügt da schon.

Hack The Planet!

TiE (01:57 PM) :
hax0r rulez
BtK (01:58 PM) :
exaktomundo

Auf einem Monitor fällt Testen schwer: Drum mussten gleich mal drei her. Erst so lässt sich die erforderliche Flut von offenen Browsern bewältigen. So halten auch die ALT und TAB Tasten wesentlich länger.  

Jetzt auch nochmal für meine liebe Bekannte, die denkt, man sitzt mit dem Laptop im Bett: NEIN! Das kann ich nicht mit ins Bett nehmen, auch wenn man sehr müde ist! Und diese Anlage klappt man auch nicht zu - das muss man herunterfahren - fast so wie einem Atomkraftwerk.  

Nachtrag: und eigentlich ist es das Beste man fährt die Maschinerie überhaupt nicht herunter - genauso wie bei einem Atomkraftwerk.

DAS kann man alles aus einem Windows XP mit Service Pack 2 herausholen! Und endlich kann ich der Welt auch einmal zeigen wie einfach das ganze geht. Natürlich hätte auch ich das nicht ohne Hilfe geschafft, aber einmal in die richtige Richtung gestupst ist es kein Problem mehr sein Desktop mehr und mehr zu tunen: Was AMG für Mercedes ist... ist mein Desktop für Windows!

Das Theme ist sogar ohne weitere Hilfsmittel auf dem System installiert worden, hierbei handelt es sich um das von Micrsooft erst vor kurzem veröffentlichten Energy Blue Theme Pack für die Tablet PC Edition 2005.