I’ve been trying to work it out, but what is so important about the number 1122334567895 anyway?
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If you get the following error while trying to update the firmware on a Nokia Phone…

Nokia Software Updater has attempted to connect to the internet but has failed three times. This could be because of a poor-quality, slow or intermitent internet connection, or restrictions due to a firewall.

If requested by your firewall, Nokia Software updater needs the following applications to gain access to the internet:
nsl_host_process.exe
nsu_ui_client.exe

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Microsoft just upgraded Live Messenger.

If you happen to use Windows Server 2003 as your operating system of choice – As a lot of web developers do, you are now out of luck using Windows Live Messenger.

As of yesterday, you are forced to upgrade Live Messenger to the latest and greatest version, which um, er, doesn’t support Windows Server 2003. You’ll either need to upgrade to Server 2008, or downgrade to an older version Windows Messenger instead of Live.

Yes, we understand, Server is meant to be used as a server, but a lot of people use it as their main OS.

Microsoft really overlooked this one…

For those of you that use twitter, I’m going to be tweeting the Moon Landing Live (Well, 40 years late).

You can find the twitter feed at www.twitter.com/ApolloEcho.
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By default, Microsoft IIS only supports a small number of files. This is what you need to support KML and KMZ files in IIS.

The MIME type details are:

Extension: .kml
MIME type: application/vnd.google-earth.kml+xml

Extension: .kmz
MIME type: application/vnd.google-earth.kmz

If you need to know what to do with these mime types, I have a step by step guide for setting up RSS files at http://www.john.geek.nz/index.php/2009/06/supporting-rss-files-in-iis/ – Just use the different extensions and mime types.

I just brought an 8GB Sandisk Cruzer USB stick. Unfortunately whenever you plug it in, it comes up as both an emulated CD-ROM drive and the removable disk. the emulated disk comes up as “U3 System” and it tries to run backup/sync software called U3 Launchpad.

Some people enjoy these extra “benefits”, but I’m not a big fan of the bundled software and just want 8GB of storage space I can call home.

If you want to remove the built in software and just use it as a memory stick, you’ll want to use the U3 LaunchPad Remover from Sandisks’ Website. The link to it is: http://www.sandisk.com/driverdownload/download.asp?driverId=2

I had to do some maintenance on my server over the weekend as one of the hard drives in the RAID array failed. It should have been a simple and straightforward task however it turned out to be the complete opposite.
Although only one of the drives had failed, I replaced both of them with newer, faster and larger capacity drives. I replaced them one at a time and synchronised the array in between each swap out.

Within 6 hours, the two drives were replaced and the server was technically ready to go, but the virtual disk was still the size of the older, smaller drives. No problem, I’ll just select the option to grow its capacity…. hmm, no option for that. No worries, I’ll add a second virtual disk which will use up the space capacity, hmm, nothing there either.

It turns out, as far as I (and google) could work out, there is no way to increase the capacity of the virtual disk.

I proceeded to spend the next 7-8 hours (until 5am Sunday) deleting the virtual disk, creating a new one and cloning the data across. First attempt at cloning the entire disk ended in failure as it must have deleted identification information telling the RAID controller that the disk was part of a RAID array. I decided the best option was to clone the individual partitions across. This also didn’t work.

I ended up spending the rest of Sunday morning reinstalling the operating system from scratch, just in the name of doing things properly and doubling the total storage capacity of the server.

I’m hoping these drives will continue running for another 3-4 years.

In the meantime, if you encounter any issues accessing this website, please contact me as I may have missed a setting somewhere.

I was recently using stackoverflow.com to solve a technical problem. On the site, if you make too many edits or changes in a set amount of time, the site decides you could be a robot. If this happens, you’re asked to complete a CAPTCHA (typing out the text from an image) to confirm that yes, you are human.

Here’s a screengrab of the page:

If you’re not sure why this was worth posting. Perhaps you should check out these links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bgY8lQMFy4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_of_the_Conchords_(TV_series)

If you are perfoming regular automated backups (like you should), You’ll soon find you are running out of space and need to start deleting old backups.

Here is a really simple way to delete files that are more than x days old.

It can easily be worked into a batch file to be run at the same time as an automated backup.


Forfiles -p c:\path -s -m *.* -d -14 -c "cmd /c del /q @path"


Change the *.* to a more specific file mask (eg: backup*.zip). The 14 specifies files older than 14 days, so change this to suit your purposes.

If you want to check what files will be deleted, this will display them:

Forfiles -p c:\path -s -m *.* -d -14 -c "Cmd /C Echo 0x22@Path\@File0x22"


Like a lot of other computer users, I seem to have a lot of data which is irreplaceable. Not including music and video (since I have the originals on disk anyway) I’m still pushing almost 1TB (1000GB). This data is made up of 13 years of email history, 10 years worth of digital photos, source code and incremental server backups.

At the end of the day, this data is priceless. I can’t go back and take all my photos, it’d be near impossible to rewrite source code from scratch and a loss server backups would result in a loss of income.

I’ve tended to keep important copies of data at home and on servers but even this isn’t ideal.
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