Windows 2003/XP Time Service

I've had problems in the past with the time service in windows not working correctly or the Internet Time tab grayed out on the Date and Time Properties menu. Here is the best solution I have cobbled together to make it work again. From a commend prompt:

net stop w32time
w32tm /unregister [you might get an error]
w32tm /unregister [do it again]
> reboot the machine
> open another command prompt
w32tm /register
net start w32time

If your Internet Time tab was grayed out before, it should be back to normal now. For either case, you should be able to click the Update Now button and get the correct time.

Disney PhotoPass Hack: Low-Res

This only gets you the low-res version of the image. Get 'em before they change the API:

1) Login to your Disney PhotoPass account.
2) Select the gallery you want to view
3) Click a photo you'd like to save
4) In the url, you'll see an argument passed called imageId=
5) Copy the imageId value and paste it into the url:
http://www.disneyphotopass.com/API/photostore/previewEdits.pix?ImageID=
Alternately, you can also use the URL:
http://www.disneyphotopass.com/API/photostore/Getlowresimage.pix?ImageID=
-or-
http://www.disneyphotopass.com/API/photostore/Getlowresimage.aspx?ImageID=

If you're feeling extra sassy, you can add an additional argument to the url to see a slightly larger version: aspectRatio=EightByTen

Only really useful for grabbing the 1 in 20 photos these trained monkeys with expensive cameras are capable of taking. Even a blind squirrel gets lucky sometimes and finds an acorn.

For more advanced users, there's a slightly easier way. Using the "Web Developer" plugin for FF, you can do the following:

1) From the gallery page: Tools » Web Developer » Images » View Image Information
2) When this loads, scroll until you find the small thumbs of your pictures.
3) Click the links and then remove the argument: &width=

Connecting Navicat to a GoDaddy MySQL Server

Why re-invent to the wheel?

http://blogs.navicat.com/?p=26

If Navicat ever changes their blog I'm screwed. I hope the way back machine can save my ass on this one.

Align Form Select with Image Submit Button Using CSS

I pulled my hair out over this one for about 45 minutes tonight. There's a trick out there for getting your form submit image to line up with your text input box, but it wasn't working when using a select form element. The process is the same, but rather than using the css:

• vertical-align: text-top;

Use one of these:

• vertical-align: top;
• vertical-align: bottom;

Code Sample:

<form action="pdfcall.cfm">
<select name="quarterly" style="vertical-align: top;">
<option value="0">-- Select a Quarter --</option>
<option value="#">Q1 2009</option>
<option value="#">Q4 2008</option>
<option value="#">Q3 2008</option>
<option value="#">Q2 2008</option>
</select>
<input type="image" src="images/submit.jpg" style="margin-left: 10px;" />
</form>

Dreamweaver Crashes in Vista

In my particular situation, I'm working in Dreamweaver CS3 in Vista Enterprise (x64). Every time I opened DW, it would crash with no warning. The DW screen would get washed out and an error would come up telling me that DW crashed and vista was trying to figure out why. The explanation vista crash adviser gave was something related to MS kb937491, but after researching the reg keys this addresses, it was not the issue. Some additional research indicated that this was (yet another) problem with DW's use of a WinFileCachexxxx.dat file. See my previous post about the solution to this problem. Interestingly, this happened right after DST took affect and some of the things I researched indicated that this switch has a tendancy to corrupt the WinFile files.

Windows Update Page is Blank in IE on XP SP3

Here's a new one I've never seen until last week. Latest and greatest IE8, XP SP3 with all the trimmings (all fixes) and when you visit http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com - you get a blank (white) page that doesn't appear to load anything. If you view the source, you'll see that there's a whole page there telling you that either your browser doesn't support active x or it is not allowing active x content. Smooth move there MS, way to test your shit!

If you visit http://update.microsoft.com/ - the page loads, but you see an error message telling you:

"Files required to use Windows Update are no longer registered or installed on your computer. To continue:

Click option 1: Register or reinstall the files for me now (Recommended)
Click option 2: Let me read about more steps that might be required to solve the problem."

Clicking option 1 may fix the problem, but this is doubtful. Ignore option 2 as it does not contain ANY relevant information for fixing the problem. The problem is that for some reason, a bunch of the DLL's required by windows to run windows update have become unregistered. What you'll need to do:

1) Start -> Run -> cmd (to open a command window)
2) type: regsvr32 wuapi.dll [enter]
3) type: regsvr32 wups.dll [enter]
4) type: regsvr32 wuaueng.dll [enter]
5) type: regsvr32 wucltui.dll [enter]
6) type: regsvr32 atl.dll [enter]
7) type: regsvr32 msxml3.dll [enter]

After every time you hit enter, you should see a window that pops up and tells you that the DLL has been successfully registered. When you're done with registering the last DLL, go back to the updates page in IE and click on option 1 - let windows do its thing. When it's done, you should be able to visit either updates.microcrosoft.com or windowsupdate.microsoft.com without a problem.

And now, a big round of applause to MS for creating an error message page that their browser won't display. Good work fellas! Way to test and maintain your products. Helluva job... really!

Thunderbird Error: Dovecot/Postfix

"The current command did not succeed. The mail server responded: error"

This is the error that Thunderbird 2 [2.0.0.23] reported when I tried to check my email this morning. Did some digging and found that the problem is with the mbox format on the server. Some tweaking yesterday for mail server migration must have messed this one up. I tailed /var/log/maillog on the mail server and watched for errors. I saw:

File isn't in mbox format: /var/mail/username

Edited /var/spool/mail/username and got rid of 2 garbage lines at the top of the file. Restarted postfix and dovecot for good measure and fired Thunderbird back up. No more errors and it looks like all my email is there.