Enable verbose mode on Vista

OK sometimes you want to see what the heck is going on when Vista is loading up and the 'Please wait' doesn't cut the mustard. Well in that case you can add a registry entry that will show abit more information about the procedures running on the background.

Copy and paste this into a new text file with the extention .reg and double click on it.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
"verbosestatus"=dword:00000001

That should add the new entry. One quick reboot and you are done.

TCP Tuning off for Vista

Well sometimes Vista in a network environment misbehave. It has a new function that tries to Auto-Tune the connection. That can cause poor intermittent network performance. So what can we do to turn this option off? Easy. Type:

netsh interface tcp set global rss=disabled
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

as an administrator and that was it.

You have new unopened items missing in the taskbar

People asking me all the time about the small yellow envelope, in outlook, that appears in the taskbar when a new email comes in. They keep on loosing it! Where is it? Where did it go?

Relax, it's not that bad. To get it back do the following:
Click Tools
Click Options
Click E-mail Options
Click Advanced E-mail Options
Tick the "Show an envelope icon in the notification area"
Click OK 3 times.

And that's that! Easy.

Vista loses network connection. AGAIN!

Argg!! It happened again. I lost connection to the Internet thanks to a drop of the TCP/IP stack!! I thought that I had fixed this problem so I typed in

Netsh winsock reset

And I though everything would be OK. WRONG! My previous fix didn’t work!! What the heck? After lot of questions and searching I found this command too

Netsh Int IP reset resetlog.txt

Which resets the IP address or something. And in an instance the connection was up and running again. I’m telling you, Vista has A LOT of way to go before it’s a OS that stands out. Wait! Isn’t that what Windows 7 suppose to be? Hmmmmmm!

Chkdsk runs at boot time

And here we are again. I had another problem lately. Something that, again, haven’t seen before. Yes I know, I have LOTS of things not seen before. Why you telling me YOU have seen all of them??

Well, anyways, I had a computer that was constantly doing scandisk at start up. I ran scandisk. Nothing. I ran defrag. Nothing. I downloaded a freeware to scan the disk. Nothing. Oh by the way the program is called Active Hard Disk Monitor from LSoft Technologies Inc. (www.ntfs.com).

I didn’t know what the heck was going on! I read in one webpage that there must be a “dirt” thingy in the drive that causes this problem. “OK”, I said, “let me give a try the following command”.

I opened a command prompt window (with cmd) and typed in “fsutil dirty query d:”, without the brackets, where d: was the drive with the problems. I got an answer that the drive was dirty. “OK”, I said again, “I’ll bring the cleaners to clean it up. No? Won’t work? Something else you say?”.

After erasing that thought from my mind I tried the following command:

chkdsk d: /f /x

It said that the check disk can’t run because the drive can’t be unmounted due to a program using it! What the heck??? Which bloody program? The antivirus was off, no visible activity there! What’s going on?

I remembered then that each drive may have VIRTUAL MEMORY assigned to it. By default only the C drive has, well in mine at least! So I right clicked My Computer, Properties, Advanced, Performance Settings, Advance, Change and voila, the D drive has virtual memory assigned to it. One second after the option for the drive to have virtual memory was unchecked.

Ran the chkdsk command and, you guessed it, no complaints. The procedure ended very quickly. Ran again the fsutil dirty query d: command and the drive was NOT DIRTY ANYMORE! And that was it. Hope this will help you too, o traveler of the weird place called internet.

iPod touch 16 GB review. A real world investigation.

Yes! Finally! I got it. I bought my first Apple hardware. Although I have seen, and worked, with Apples since I can remember (ahhh the simplicity of the green-colored monitor. Still brings tears to my eyes. It was that tiring to look at!), it's the first time that I had an urge to go an buy it. I am not sure what made me to make my mind up.

Maybe it's the wonderful touch screen or the bright colors or my need to impress everybody around me (so I can fit in as a cool-hip-kinda-of-guy). Never the less my new toy is a beauty to behold. After a couple of days playing around with it I saw a few things that I like and some that I don't like.

1.) My iPod was the version 1-point-something. So I couldn't use all those nice applications that everybody is raving about, and jailbreaking right-left and centre to make it work. I didn't want to stuff-up my iPod so I decided to pay and download the new update 2.0. So far so good. The update costs about 10 USD and you can buy with credit card or a iTunes voucher. The size of the download was about 225 MB! I had to wait about 2 hours to download. AND IT CRASHED ! TWICE! I'm not sure if it was my connection or not, but the Apple server was timing out.

2.) Installing the update. IT CRASHED WITH A GENERIC ERROR! I was petrified from fear that my new toy was destroyed. But thankfully every time you connect to iTunes, a backup is been performed automatically. So I was able to revert back and try again. Second time lucky. But Apple should have been more careful about things like that. A generic error report is absolutely no help what so ever.

3.) After the update to version 2 I was able to download and install some applications. To tell you the truth there are some gems out there, and others, well let say they need some more polish. Installation was easy and quick. Most of the files are less than 5 MB (The free ones. The ones you buy they might be that size). No problems here.

4.) Itunes. Well it's a piece of software that you will love to hate. I really do not like it. Yes OK it's sync very easy with your iPod, backs it up etc, but you can use your iPod only with 5 authenticated computers. Each time you connected to one you need to authenticate that computer if you want to do something meaningful with your toy. And if you are one of the people that reformat their hard drives quite often, then remember this: UN-AUTHANTICATE BEFORE REFORMAT. That way you retain the “tokens” to use again. LAME! Why is that? Are Apple getting a leaf out of M$ book how to be obnoxious and idiotic? What they don't listen to any of the news? I hate to break the news but people, they want FREEDOM (Que a very famous blue painted actor barging in with a long sword) when it comes to their computers. And if you have two computers and connect the iPod in both, only one of the two will sync at any time with it. One will overwrite the contents of it at any sync. From the other point of view its back up facility did save my iPod.......

5.) NO BLUETOOTH? N-O B-L-U-E-T-O-O-T-H???? WTH? ARE YOU INSANE? ARE YOU LIVING IN A CAVE? WOKE UP ONE MORNING AND YOU HEAD WAS THE OTHER WAY? WHAT'S GOING ON? Well yes iPod touch does not have bluetooth. My last PDA from HP had it. My previous from Pilot had at least infrared. The iPod doesn't have it? That, to my humble opinion is crap! Why? Wifi is NOT always something you want to use. I am missing out in all those things that my PDA was allowing me to do. Foldable keyboard, wireless headphones, BLUETOOTH PRINTNG god damn it! We can't ALL have a wireless network that includes a printer too. And that means you can't exchange ANYTHING with friends. Nope! Forget it son, you are alone. Even the Zune was doing that. (The ony good thing I guess). Shame. Oh well maybe NEXT model? Hmmmmm I see a re-occuring pattern here. The apple looks like more and more with a half-opened window........Hmmmm.

6.) Battery. Well in the tradition of Apple, the battery is NOT user replaceable. And it will cost you extra to take it for a replacement. Well to some people that would be OK, if you don't want to bother, to others will not. If you live away from a dedicated Apple centre then good luck to you my friend. Enjoy your new toy. Oh and by the way. Good luck to me too! Battery life is descent, didn't actually measured it, but I did a recharge after three days while the player was going in sleep mode and playing mp3s and movies every few hours. I only once shut it down to see how that feels like. Having the wifi on lasted for about a day or so.

7.) Using Safari. It's a pleasure to surf with it. The screen renders so nice that I was able to see details in words ever with such small scale. But unfortunately no FLASH support. It's a pity because more and more sites are using flash to present information. Some site are just a big flash covering the whole screen. Maybe next version will support flash.

8.) After a restart I got something very funny. All of a sudden I got NO WIFI as a indication under the settings? WTH? Were is my bloody Wifi? I had to restart for the wifi to come on again! Talking about similarities with Windows. SCARY! The thought is still haunts me right now and I'm going to double check. (After a minute or so......) It's there. Pheeeeewwww. That's a relief.

9.) Design. It's top class. Very user friendly and the Aqua-like interface (that reminds me a song that I saw in YouTube. Go and see it. I think it's called Mac VS Pc. Lots of fun.) is very crisp and clear. That's why I transformed my Linux interface to look like the leopard. LOL. Seriously it's a very lovely thing to look at. Silver backing with glass top. Excellent.

10.) Extras. Can you spell “We-will-grab-your-backside-and squeeze-out-of-you-the-last-nickel-you've-got”? Yep nothing but the basics comes with it. Even the recharger you have to buy. I really hate to turn on the computer to recharge it. And NO I WILL NOT spend more money for something that everybody else includes. Well I guess they have to make money from somewhere. I mean the price of the iPod it's a steal.(For those you don't get me by now, I'M BEEN SARCASTIC!). On the other hand they have a truck-load of accessories, some ugly as hell, some very good (especially from top companies like Bose and Altec Lansing).

11.) Push email. Well it does that too. Just as long as you are in a free Wifi area. If you are not then WHAT PUSH EMAIL? Go and buy the iPhone then, and leave us alone. I tried with a gmail account and it worked excellent. You can even connect with an Exchange account. Haven't try that yet. Ohh and a small secret. If you have problems syncing your Outlook contacts, as I did, upgrade you iTunes software to the latest version. It will fix the problem.

12.) Audio. Video. Well I'm not a audio Engineer, so I can say that the sound, emmm well for a lack of a better word, sounds nice. Same for the video too. Crisp and clear, just as long you have done a good encoding of your video. Supplied earphone are OK nothing great here. Oh and something that was puzzling me for a bit. The iPod DOESN'T have speakers. It has one just for the beeps and blips of system sounds. Nothing else. No external audio at all. If you need something to listen your music, buy one of the over-priced docks available. Most of them will recharge your iPod too.

All and all the iPod touch is a great new toy to enjoy your music, video and, ahem, portable lifestyle. Don't get fooled though. It's over hyped for it's abilities. For it to be 100% as the marketing department says you need your own wireless network connected to your body AT ALL TIMES. It's not definite 100% value but, if Apple listens (here to hope I guess) it will. Just like my EeePC I would buy one more if I had the money.

Connecting to an Access database and retrieving values

When I first started programming one thing that I needed to do was to be able to connect to a Access database. Yes sure there are other free databases but I was experienced on that so it was a very easy decision to make.

BUT, for the life of me all the programming books that we were given at school, college etc (substitute with your tertiary institute of choice) were plain to say the list. The Internet wasn’t helping a lot to some point that I needed clarification. Some times it was taking me weeks to find something.

Other times the explanation and the ways to do it where, although the “proper ones” too difficult for me as a newbie to understand. (Yes thick as a brick, I know!)

And at the end I was able to put all the pieces together and I had a working model easy to implement. And very proudly I can presented it here for everyone wanting to copy it. I would like to thank all the people that posted messages in all the technical forums. This is my way to giving back. Thank you.

Reading some values from the database

Include needed:
Imports System
Imports System.Data
Imports System.Data.OleDb

Controls needed:
OleDbConnection1
OleDbCommand1

ConnectionString for OleBdConnection1:

Jet OLEDB:Global Partial Bulk Ops=2;Jet OLEDB:Registry Path=;Jet OLEDB:Database Locking Mode=1;Data Source="c:\databaseName.mdb";Mode=Share Deny None;Jet OLEDB:Engine Type=5;Provider="Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0";Jet OLEDB:System database=;Jet OLEDB:SFP=False;persist security info=False;Extended Properties=;Jet OLEDB:Compact Without Replica Repair=False;Jet OLEDB:Encrypt Database=False;Jet OLEDB:Create System Database=False;Jet OLEDB:Don't Copy Locale on Compact=False;User ID=Admin;Jet OLEDB:Global Bulk Transactions=1

C:\databaseName.mdb The name of the file containing the database.

The connection DOESN’T use any password protection or other security measures and everybody can write or delete from it.

Legend:
TblInfo: The name of the table in the database.
SQLString: The string that will contain the SQL command.

The following code takes data from a database with 6 columns (0 to 5) and reads ONLY the values 0 (column 1) and 5 (column 5), being the name of a user (the former) and the date of employment (the later).

Code

Dim dateOfEmpl As String
Dim userName, SQLString As String
Dim dateOfEmpl As Date

‘set up the connection data
Dim strConnection As String = OleDbConnection1.ConnectionString
Dim connect As New OleDbConnection(strConnection)
‘ Select ALL VALUES from the Database in the ConnectionString, from the table TblInfo and sort them out by Name in asceenting orderSQLString = "SELECT * FROM TblInfo ORDER BY Name ASC"
Dim cmd As New OleDbCommand(SQLString, connect)

‘open the connection
connect.Open()
Try
Dim reader As OleDbDataReader = cmd.ExecuteReader
‘read the data
Do While reader.Read()
userName = reader(0)
dateOfEmpl = reader(5)
Loop
'close the connection when there is nothing else to read reader.Close()
connect.Close()
Catch MyError As Exception
MsgBox(MyError.Message, MsgBoxStyle.Critical, "Error")
End Try

With this code it’s easy after to expand to further usage. For example you can add the data into a list box as follows:

While reader.Read()
ListBox1.Items.Add(reader.GetString(0))
ListBox1.Items.Add(reader.GetString(1))
ListBox1.Items.Add(reader.GetString(2))
ListBox1.Items.Add(reader.GetString(3))
ListBox1.Items.Add(reader.GetString(4))
ListBox1.Items.Add(reader.GetString(5))
ListBox1.Items.Add(reader.GetString(6))
ListBox1.Items.Add(reader.GetString(7))
End While

And that’s it. Hope you find it helpful.