Microsoft Hotfix Request Form

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/CUHotFix_LandingPage_Request

I learned today that there is a web page you can use to request Microsoft hotfixes that are not available for public download. You supply your email address and the KB article number and a representative will contact you within eight hours.

Associating FreeMind mind map files with FreeMind in KDE

FreeMind is a fantastic cross-platform mind map application. If you haven't used it, I highly recommend it as it is a revolutionary way of taking notes, organizing thoughts, and planning.

On Windows, the FreeMind installer offers to associate its .mm files with the application in Windows Explorer. On KDE however, you have to do this yourself. I happened to put the missing pieces together on how to do this when looking over Beagle index logs that revealed the FreeMind MIME type to me. The steps are:

1. Run kcontrol (KDE Control Center).
2. Under KDE Components, choose File Associations.
3. Click Add. Change the group to text, and enter x-troff-mm for the type name.
4. Under Filename Patterns, enter *.mm. Fill in the description as FreeMind Mind Map.
5. Under Application Preference Order, click Add, and browse to the FreeMind application (on mine, it installed under Office; you can probably just enter /usr/bin/freemind).
6. Click Apply and you're all done.

If you want to associate the FreeMind icon while you are here, you'll have to download it from the source tree. In the 0.8.0 source zip file, it's at freemind/images/FreeMindWindowIcon.png. I copied this to /usr/share/icons and then made the association in kcontrol.

Visual Studio Extensions for WF conflict with Office Live Meeting 2005

Not sure if this is related to me trying to develop on Vista, but when I run the installer for Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation (EN), it tries to repair or reinstall Office Live Meeting 2005 and never actually installs the WF extensions. I had to let it remove Live Meeting (repair didn't work) before it would actually install the extensions.

Good CSS reference guide for MOSS

http://www.heathersolomon.com/content/sp07cssreference.htm

This site has a good guide to the MOSS CSS classes, useful for when you are trying to override certain styles to customize the portal.

Missing telnet client in Vista

I needed to check if an SMTP server would respond on the correct port and DNS name. I fired up telnet from a command prompt... and discovered that there was no telnet client. This post indicates it's disabled by default and contains instructions for enabling it again.

Vista RTM and its networking "tuning"

I was having some maddening issues with Vista Business RTM:

• MSN Messenger was constantly getting disconnected, but Google Talk stayed rock solid.
• LiveMeeting (the Windows version) would not stay connected.
• Firefox would halfway load a web page and then freeze.

It seems that Vista was automatically tuning my networking settings. Since declining this assistance, the above programs started running normally. The fix for me was to disable network auto tuning:

1. Click Start and type cmd.
   
2. When cmd.exe appears, right click and select Run as Administrator.
3. Enter the following command: netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
4. Reboot after getting the OK message.

SQL Server 2005 Developer and AdventureWorks on Vista

I had a problem getting the AdventureWorks sample database that I installed to run under Vista RC1. SQL Server Management Studio kept reporting an error when I tried to access either the AdventureWorks or AdventureWorksDW databases. To get around this, I discovered that I needed to add my Windows user account to the sysadmin server role. After doing this, I was able to access both databases.

On a side note, I can't get SQL Server 2005 SP1 to install. It keeps prompting with a dialog box reading "Error performing inpage operation" regardless of whether or not I run the installer as administrator. Looks like I'm stuck waiting for SQL Server 2005 SP2 for this to work right.