Ishida Tech Solutions, Ltd.
The personal and professional home of Brad Ishida

I set up a single box to dual boot Windows 7 32 bit and Windows 7 64 bit. When booting up, the boot manager asks me which OS I want to start. The problem is that both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions have “Windows 7″ as the description. So… I get the choice of booting “Windows 7″ or “Windows 7″. This is even less useful than it sounds. To fix this, I boot up in to one of them and then open a command window running as administrator: start->all programs->accessories->right click “command prompt” and run as administrator. Next, I use a command called bcdedit. Run bcdedit with no arguments and it will list your bootable partitions. Each one will have an identifier inside curly brackets–something like {current} or {aa572c50-fa57-11de-9aae-9f4b2a2101ad}. To set the names you see in the boot menu, use bcdedit like this:

bcdedit /set {aa572c50-fa57-11de-9aae-9f4b2a2101ad} description “Windows 7 32 bit”

Just repeat the command and adjust for the other partition and you’re good to go.

My plans to install Windows 7 on an empty partition hit a snag when I got this error. I have a Promise RAID card and had just finished installing the drivers for it in order to proceed with the Windows 7 installation. This 0×80300001 error wouldn’t let me select ANY partition though. It turns out this is the Windows 7 way of saying “take the drivers CD-ROM out of the drive and put the Windows 7 installation DVD back in”.

Recently, nearly every page on the web was crashing both Firefox and Safari. It turns out the Flash plugin was the culprit–actually some bad permissions on the Flash plugin files. You can fix this problem by repairing the permissions on your hard drive using the Mac OSX disk utility. I’ll attach a screen shot that shows the problem.

I was doing some Access 2007 debugging for a client today and a search using a form was taking close to 10 minutes. Even with a half million records, this seemed horribly slow for Access. Changing the query from (year = 2007 or year = 2008 or year = 2009) to (year < 2006) made the 10 minute search turn into a 2 second search. Apparently testing for equality with Access is terribly expensive in terms of process time.

All is back to normal now, but on my first boot up after installing Mac OS X Snow Leopard, the screen of my Mac Book Pro was black. For some reason, the upgrade set my screen brightness all the way to zero and then the screen brightness keys (F1 and F2) would not respond for about 5 minutes after boot up. This seems to be a completely different quirk than a similar one I’ve seen with minor updates to 10.5. In that case, a black screen could generally be solved by powering down the Mac Book Pro and removing the battery for a few minutes–then booting back up.

If you want to set the Return-Path value in your mail header in a message sent using the Mail Mailer Perl module, here is one way to do it:

Declare your mailer object with the -t and -ba flags.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Mail::Mailer;

my $mailer = Mail::Mailer->new(’sendmail’, (’-t’,'-ba’));

The Return-Path value will become the address you specify in your “From” line.

I recently upgraded to iTunes 8 and all my music videos stopped playing in iTunes. Some files would produce a message “This computer is not authorized to play ’song’. Would you like to authorize it?” Authorizing the computer does not help–it just asks you to authorize over and over. Some music videos would play audio but not play video. Here is how I fixed it:

1) Quit iTunes
2) Move this file to your desktop: /Users/YOURNAME/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.iTunes.nnnnnn.plist
3) Restart iTunes

Note that you need to replace “YOURNAME” with the name of your user account. Also, you will have various letters and numbers replacing the nnnnn part of the file name above.

If it works, you can delete the file you copied to your desktop. If it doesn’t work, you might want to put it back where you got it.

Unless you’ve gone out of your way to prevent information about your server being shared in HTTP headers, it’s probably there. Here is a quick way to see what all those evil-doers out there can see about you.
telnet yourserver.com 80

GET / HTTP/1.1 [press ENTER key once]

Host: yourserver.com [press ENTER key twice]

At this point, the home page will display in your terminal window. You can press CTRL+] to get the telnet prompt and then type ‘close’. When you scroll back to the top of your window, you will see all the header information that is shared by your server. You may see your PHP installation, apache version, OpenSSL and anything else you have configured on your web server.

If you’re having the same problem I was, this is your lucky day because this solution is nowhere to be found as far as I can tell.

I recently had the following symptoms on a Windows XP box with multiple users.

1) The desktop icons for files would not appear for new files without manually refreshing the desktop by pressing F5 or by selecting “refresh” from the right-click menu.

2) When saving files from a web browser, the files don’t appear on the desktop without a manual refresh.

3) When moving files from the desktop to the recycle bin, the file icon remains on the desktop until there is a manual refresh.

4) The problem only occurred for one user and not everyone with an account.

The solution:

The registry value for the desktop for this user was incorrect. The value contained the variable %ALLUSERSPROFILE% instead of the correct variable %USERPROFILE%. I changed this value to %USERPROFILE%\Desktop

1) start->run->regedit

2) Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders and check the value for Desktop. If it looks wrong, you can fix it and this will most likely fix your desktop refresh problem.

I recently formatted some external drives in Vista and then moved them to an XP machine where they would not mount. When I went to reformat them in XP, I found that I could not format the disks at all. The disk management tool (control panel->administrative tools->computer management->disk management) listed them as “GPT protected” and would not allow me to erase them.

The solution was to use the command line tool “diskpart” to clean the disk so it could be formatted like normal in XP.

1) start->run->cmd

2) diskpart

3) list disk

4) select disk # (select disk 4 for example)

5) clean

6) exit

Now the disk will be available to format using the Disk Management tool.