CHRISdotTODD

Steve Wozniak takes one for the (geek) team as he puts himself out there to be ridiculed by the judges for his lack of rhythm. It's this type of attitude that led Steve to innovate -- take risks, even though you might fail.

On February 26, 2009 I wrote about problems with XP and my CD/DVD drives . After a fix to the Registry, the last step was to re-install any software that I use to burn CDs and DVDs. It seemed all was good, but I apparently hadn't tried iTunes. The next time I launched iTunes, I was greeted with the following message: Warning! The registry settings used by the iTunes drivers for importing and burning CDs & DVDs are missing. This can happen as a result of installing other CD burning software. Please reinstall iTunes. With prior experience using iTunes, I was not about to uninstall iTunes. Instead I just tried a Repair through the Add/Remove Software interface. That failed. I then tried installing iTunes over my current install, and that failed too. Finally I went fishing on Apple's site. I found an entry that looked promising. Apple recommends I remove a Registry key, add an new one, and then re-install all CD/DVD burning software. Sounded a bit like a loop, so I tried just

I recently added a new email account to my Thunderbird client, and it failed in sending email (SMTP), though it did receive (pop3). I double and triple checked my configuration; I deleted and recreated the account; nothing seemed to work. I had two other SMTP accounts defined, and they never had the problem. Finally I found a reference (sorry I don't remember what website) that suggested trying to delete all my saved passwords. Sure enough, that did it. Even though when I had recreated the account I was challenged for password input on the first time, it had still failed. Also, I had copied and pasted the password from an alternate source, so I didn't make a typo. Some how the storage for passwords, just for the single account, was corrupt. If you use Thunderbird on Windows, to delete your passwords go to: Tools >> Options Click Privacy Click the Password tab Click Edit Saved Password Either click Remove All OR select the ones you want to delete and click Remove Click Clo

My previous post had a table that the browser pushed outside the defined dimensions, making half of it un-viewable. Beside the rather narrow body for the blog, which by-the-way makes it easier to read, most browsers just don't know how to break text strings that do not have white space. Turns out there is some CSS code that can be used that will correct this in most browsers. Use the following two CSS properties in your table definition (adjust width to meet your need). table-layout: fixed; width: 425px; Surprisingly, if you use Firefox, it shortens the width correctly but it still has trouble wrapping some lines, while IE and Safari seems to render the entire table correctly. Visit the W3C site to get details on other table options .

I've been using Verizon FIOS for about a year, and up until recently I've been happy. Unfortunately, recently my ip address (which Verizon assigns to my router) changed and now it appears I'm coming from Toronto, Canada. In fact if I run a Trace Route, it says I'm coming from Toronto, Canada as it's taking 21 hops and traveling over 2100 miles within the Verizon network before they release me onto the Internet. Hop Time Host IP Location 1 1.183 xo-gateway 140.239.191.1 Rowland Heights, CA, United States 2 7.517 ip65-47-242-9.z242-47-65.customer.algx.net 65.47.242.9 Culver City, CA, United States 3 7.119 ge6-3-0d0.mar1.santaana-ca.us.xo.net 207.88.81.193 , , United States 4 8.589 p5-1-0-3d0.rar1.la-ca.us.xo.net 65.106.5.81 , , United States 5 9.406 te-4-1-0.rar3.la-ca.us.xo.net 207.88.12.153 , , United States 6 22.022 207.88.12.154.ptr.us.xo.net 207.88.12.154 , , United States 7 9.234 205.158.79.122.ptr.us.xo.net 205.158.79.122 , , United States 8 12.424 0.so-2-2-0

When developing locally on IIS, with the addition of AJAX, I found myself running out of connections -- the default is 10. Turns out you can bump the connections up to 40. Here's what you need to do: Open the command prompt Navigate to \inetpub\adminscripts Enter the following command: cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/MaxConnections 40 Restart IIS ( you can use iisreset at the same command prompt) That's all there is to it.

Recently I experienced several little problems with my Windows XP desktop. It started with losing the sound and the inability for Skype to answer. After trying various things, I rebooted, which brought back the audio and seemed to have corrected Skype. Unfortunately, I then lost my 2 CD/DVD drives plus one virtual CD/DVD drive. Losing the virtual drive should have been the clue, which I initially missed. They all displayed in the Systems hardware window, but with error 31 messages. After looking for and installing new or replacement drivers, I still had the same problem. I finally ran across a knowledge base article from Microsoft . You can no longer access the CD drive or the DVD drive, or you receive an error message after you remove a CD recording program or a DVD recording program in Windows XP: "error code 31" The solution was to delete two apparently corrupt Registry entries and then re-install all software that have a burn CD and/or DVD feature. A pain to go through th