Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

I guess I have a soft spot for the v1 of Gallery (website) over the newer fancier v2. I've installed, hosted, configured, and maintained a lot of Gallery installation for friends as favors, and Gallery v1 is simply less of a system hog overall. I still follow v2 development closely but I have my primary gallery on version 1.

You can read about the new version of Gallery here.

The detailed list of changes is located here.

Due to the massive CSS and layout changes, it is highly recommended that you backup up your gallery before upgrading. Of course, anytime you do a software upgrade, you should always have a known good backup beforehand.

Apparently over 200 bugs and suggestions have been submitted to the VS 2005 SP1 beta since it opened up. Although I have had limited time to install and test it, so far VS 2005 SP1 seems a lot more stable, especially in the IDE, than VS 2005 RTM. I know a lot of people thought VS 2005 RTM was a bit rushed and it showed with the amount of strange bugs people ran into.

Keep an eye on this blog for ongoing VS 2005 SP1 news.

If you are wondering what Windows Live Mail Desktop is, it is essentially the "Windows Mail" program for Vista, but installable on XP. You could also consider it an updated Outlook Express.

Over 150 bug fixes since the last build was publicly available.

You can read more about the new build here.

You can download the new build from here.

Google Code Search has a lot of legit uses but sometimes I kick back and look for funny things in code comments or code itself.

For instance:
"0xc0edbabe"
"0xdeadbeef"
"0xdeadc0de"
"Hack the Gibson"
"haxx0r"
"pwned"

Yes, I'm easily amused.

Subject line says it all. If you have an invalid copy and have a valid license to apply to a currently installed OS, go to this website and download KeyUpdateTool.exe.

Previously you had to do some scripting and/or use 3rd party applications to re-register Product Keys.

There are some gotchas overall with the converters but it makes life bearable when going back and forth between Office versions. It is current up to Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh.

Download the add-on/converters here:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/converter.mspx

Originally spotted on Eileen's blog

No need to add in Google's ping entry manually into the Announce plug-in. I submitted a patch earlier today that was accepted into the tree.

More info about it here:
My post to the forums about the patch

Finally, I can beta test OneCare under Vista.

You can join the beta here:
Windows Live OneCare version 1.5

Just point your blogging software to:
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

You can do it easily with Serendipity by adding Google to the custom field of the 'Announce entries' event plug-in.

Looks like more work is being done to get the XML-RPC interface a bit more fleshed out in Serendipity:

Added handling of dateCreated in metaWeblog_newPost

Add backend_delete_entry, xmlrpc_deleteEntry, xmlrpc_updertEntry, and xmlrpc_fetchEntry hooks

Fix faulty header output in bundled XML-RPC Server.php.

Here is the link to the download:
Office 2007 PDF support

IE7 will be coming down the WSUS and Windows Update pipeline soon as a Critical Update. Whether or not it really is a critical update, is still up for debate. If you are in an organization that must block the installation of IE 7, use this toolkit.

Block IE7

See also:
Direct download link to IE7 blocker

Update: Kevin Severud pointed out that it only affects the Automatic Update process.

This is a bit of a strange problem. If you have a group policy set that gives users elevated rights to Windows Installer, the JRE 5.0 installer, when run from an update prompt in the tray, will complain that the administrator has disabled installation.

In fact, the opposite is true, the Group Policy in question gives elevated rights, not a denial of rights.

Another strange fact about this error - JRE 6.0 Beta 2 doesn't seem to have this bug with regards to group policies. If you have the group policy applied for elevated rights, JRE 6.0 will install just fine.

Just curious if anyone else has run into the same bug or not - it looks like it was/is a known issue because JRE 6 doesn't have the logic reversed.

It's not perfect yet, but it is usable. You can either tell WLW that you are using MetaWeblog API or MovableType API.

When you initially add your blog to the software, it will post a 'Style Detection' post which you can safely delete.

WLW will complain that it can't figure out your editing styles and default to generic settings. I'm hoping a future version of WLW will have enhanced support for Serendipity and/or Serendipity puts in some workarounds so there isn't any errors thrown.



I'm VERY tempted to download the Windows Live Writer SDK and see if I can make a s9y (serendipity) specific plug-in.

Assuming that this actually gets posted, I'll write up a brief howto.

 

Essentially, if you are using the trunk builds of Serendipity, you will want to make sure you are sync'd up past October 4th's build because a few of the XML-RPC headers were throwing errors in Windows Live Writer.