I just installed and am almost using TrueCrypt 5.1 on my laptop. Highly recommended. I have it on my work laptop as well. I say almost, because it stopped at 95.229% into encrypting with a data error (CRC). It will not proceed past this so I'm only mostly encrypted. Needless to say, I'm a bit worried about this, but I plan on trying out SpinRite. I'll report on that in the future.

[Update: Worked well enough to fix that problem but I'm not totally satisfied with it.]

Just uninstalled Windows Live Photo Gallery. Patches, failed patches, reliance on SQL Server compact edition and hanging wlxquicktimecontrolhost.exe and limited usefulness meant it just wasn't even good enough to ignore. Ouch.

I noticed this problem while downloading sessions from the mix08 site (visitmix.com) in iPod format so I can play them on my iPhone.

One of the sessions I watched was on the history of the ribbon (UX09). I've blasted the ribbon in the past, and I still don't like it, but after watching that session and considering the problem they were trying to solve, I have to admit that I'm pretty impressed with the level of thought that went into it.

My wife and boy are out of town for a couple of weeks so I thought I'd give the bus a try. Why now? So I can have a vehicle that I leave at home and another that I leave at work. I really have to have a vehicle available at work in case I need to get to a client site, although I could probably get away with a nano car like the Smart.

Phoenix has a pretty nice public transportation site (http://valleymetro.org) which includes a trip planner. Unfortunately, the way the schedules work out, I have a fair chance of missing my connection and if I do, it will be a half an hour before the next bus. Actually, Monday it was 45 minutes! Grrr.

What would make the bus workable would be:

• a spare car I could leave at work
• enough busses to where I don't have to time my trip - one every fifteen minutes would do.
• all stops lit and covered for shade and rain
• if I organized my stuff so I could work on either my work laptop or my personal one for anything so I wouldn't have to lug either one around but I could still reach across to get stuff off of either one

What would make the bus cool would be:

• an easier payment system, like a card that is connected to a credit card - the new all day card is nice, but having to pay $2.50 in cash is kinda clumsy. At minimum, $5 cash should get you an all day and another all day card that can be spent later.
• a way to associate a preferred route into your card which will automatically signal for stop - probably difficult to make this foolproof, but having it there mainly to prevent you from forgetting and overshooting your destination.
• a way to text you ahead of time if there are problems with your route.
• walk tunnels or bridges at connectioning points
• real time bus location

I can't believe a type cool on the same line as bus. Al Gore should give me a ride for that.

Got a new iPhone yesterday.

Tried several times to download the new iPhone SDK -- can't get it.

Running IE8 - I love what they did to the zoom feature, but other than that it pretty much barfs on every web page anywhere.

For the third time my iPhone bricked. I figured enough is enough and I went to get a new unit. Fortunately, I live in a city with an Apple Store so I thought this would be easy. No, not so much. You need to make an appointment with the genius bar to get support apparently. I asked what my other options were. None. Really, so if I lived, say, 400 miles away from an Apple store, that means I have to drive all that way to swap it out? Really?

apple.com/support wasn't any help. I found the online support repair thingy but it was apparenltly only for replacing your sync cable, dock, headphones and TTY adapter.

What made me really nervous this time was that my phone just happened to brick while running 1.1.3, but now there's 1.1.4. I mentioned in a past post that you cannot travel without your laptop when you are an iPhone user. Well, you also must have access to a high-speed Internet connection as well. I could not get the restore operation to work until I was connected and downloading a 162MB file. How well is this restore operation going to work on a backup from 1.1.3? Well, it seems okay so far. We'll see.

I mentioned before that it bricked twice under very specific conditions. This time it bricked while I was sending a text message at low battery (20%). My theory is that when the battery is low, flash writes are failing.

For the second time in a month, my iPhone went to "Repair Needed" mode.

I'm running 1.1.3 with no jailbreak or any other shenanigans.

For others that read this, the solution is to reset and restore.

Run iTunes, plug in, press and hold both the sleep/wake and home buttons for 10 seconds, then let go of just the sleep/wake button and continue holding the home button for 10 more seconds, then when iPhone shows up in iTunes, restore the iPhone which takes it to the factory state, then select restore from your last backup, wait a long time for all your junk to sync back and you should be good to go.

This is not good -- while it is hosed, the iPhone can only make emergency calls -- so, basically, I cannot travel without my laptop now. Good thing I sync to a laptop!

I think the commonality is that both times the error occurred as I was plugging in my iPhone into a non-Apple charger while I was using it.

I blogged about replacing the hinge on my laptop. Now I get to do it again for my wife's identical laptop. Stay tuned, by next week you should see a very nice blog post about how to do this with pictures. Also, I'm working on my mom's laptop (an old Fujitsu LifeBook C-7631). I'm pretty sure that either the LCD inverter is hosed or it might just be a loose connector. We might just get her a new one.

[Here it is: http://freachable.net/2008/03/24/SonyVaioVGNA190DisassemblyReassemblyAdviceWithPictures.aspx]

I mentioned (http://freachable.net/2007/11/01/CertificationMode.aspx) that I had tried to get MCPD certification. I registered for second shot on the exam (70-551) and realized that I needed to use it before it expired. I crammed for it this weekend.

Result? PASS! 3 hours and a weekend well spent.

Again, the test is an amalgam of three tests and again it appears that the score is the lowest of the three sections.

Again I had the 60+ second stall in the middle of the 70-547 part of the exam. Annoying.

I recently built a webpart that, among other things, displays an image, but the webpart really only generates the html to reference an image and it could not easily guarantee that the image would be available and I wanted to show something better than a red x.

By using a little script on the 'onerror' attribute for the img tag, I was able to reference a "image not available" picture in case the image failed to load.

Here's an example:

<img src="maybethisworks.jpg" onerror="this.src='/notavailable.gif';" />

That's it. It works on Opera9.5, Firefox2, IE7, Navigator9, and Safari3.

Edit: I felt panic when I noticed that all my images where coming up with the not available picture. After some flail I finally realized what was going on. The images were in a checked-out state which means that if I was authenticated they would appear, but if I was anonymous, they wouldn't and I would get the onerror behavior.

BTW: For anyone needing to perform check-in on many files (which is what you get after you upload a directory of images to a image library) you can use the "Manage Site Content and Structure" feature of MOSS which will allow you to do a mass check in.

In SharePoint, you can create custom properties for User Profiles. Additionally, you can have search index those, but be aware that a search crawl must occur after you add the user profile property for search to even be aware of it. This explains why after adding a custom property in User Profiles, you cannot see it in search's metadata property mapping.

Regarding http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946486

Yesterday, Microsoft released an update to Windows Live Photo Gallery. I went to install it and it failed. I wasn't too worried about it since I really don't use it, but then Automatic Updates kept pestering me about it, so I figured I needed to fix it.

I looked in the event log and found the following failures:

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    MsiInstaller
Event Category:    None
Event ID:    1024
Date:        1/23/2008
Time:        12:32:06 PM
User:        HS5\HS
Computer:    HS5
Description:
Product: Windows Live Photo Gallery - Update 'Windows Live Photo Gallery [12.0.1321.0110]' could not be installed. Error code 1603. Windows Installer can create logs to help troubleshoot issues with installing software packages. Use the following link for instructions on turning on logging support: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=23127

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 7b 32 35 37 45 34 34 30   {257E440
0008: 46 2d 37 38 31 46 2d 34   F-781F-4
0010: 35 39 42 2d 39 41 36 38   59B-9A68
0018: 2d 41 30 38 37 32 42 38   -A0872B8
0020: 30 43 31 44 36 7d 20 7b   0C1D6} {
0028: 34 43 31 45 38 46 32 44   4C1E8F2D
0030: 2d 41 39 36 39 2d 34 38   -A969-48
0038: 32 41 2d 42 42 35 31 2d   2A-BB51-
0040: 33 33 45 37 43 43 43 31   33E7CCC1
0048: 41 39 45 39 7d 20 31 36   A9E9} 16
0050: 30 33                     03     

and...

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    MsiInstaller
Event Category:    None
Event ID:    11721
Date:        1/23/2008
Time:        12:31:44 PM
User:        HS5\HS
Computer:    HS5
Description:
Product: Windows Live Photo Gallery -- Error 1721. There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program required for this install to complete could not be run. Contact your support personnel or package vendor. Action: CA_InstallD3DX, location: C:\DOCUME~1\HS\LOCALS~1\Temp\WLXPL_DX\dxsetup.exe, command: /silent

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 7b 32 35 37 45 34 34 30   {257E440
0008: 46 2d 37 38 31 46 2d 34   F-781F-4
0010: 35 39 42 2d 39 41 36 38   59B-9A68
0018: 2d 41 30 38 37 32 42 38   -A0872B8
0020: 30 43 31 44 36 7d         0C1D6} 

Apparently the update was relying on being able to reexec DirectX setup from the temp directory install. Well, I clean my temp directories, so that didn't work. I simply went to download.microsoft.com, searched for DirectX, found the redistributable version (not the web install) downloaded it and extracted it to the directory it was expecting "C:\DOCUME~1\HS\LOCALS~1\Temp\WLXPL_DX\" in this case. I then let the update run again and it worked just fine.

Hope this helps someone.