On some of my machines I noticed that I was having trouble upgrading to the latest service pack for some of the products I have installed (e.g. Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, etc.).  It wasn’t a critical problem and I didn’t have the time to spend on tracking it down at that time so [...]

I decided to try the Google Chrome web browser when it came out recently.  I’d been using Opera for a while and liked a number of things about.  Here’s a brief summary of my experiences with Chrome. It installed and configured itself very quickly. I really liked that it pulled all my favorites over from IE, including [...]

I’ve been using Microsoft’s latest version of Office (2007) for quite some time now, but I frequently run into people using the previous version (2003) that cannot read the files I produce. With 2007, Microsoft changed the default format of the file to be based on XML for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. I [...]

I’ve been using Sync Toy, a free download from Microsoft, to synchronize files.  It’s a fairly comprehensive synchronization tool that doesn’t deserve the term "toy" in its name.  You can create folder pairs that have one of the following relationships with each other: Synchronize - New and updated files are copied both ways.  Renames and deletes [...]

I’m in the process of moving to a two-machine development environment so my SQL Server processing will occur on one machine and my application will run on another machine.  I’m making this change since I’ve found that a single machine with 4GB can’t handle both processing 4 million records AND running an application that processes [...]

Based on the experience of a colleague, I decided to try out Firefox.  It was partially motivated by problems he was having viewing my blog in Firefox.  Installing it also gave me a way to verify what others see when they view my blog. Some of the add-ons are pretty cool as well.  Here are the [...]

The limitations of notepad in Windows are really quite annoying.  When I was at Microsoft working on Windows Vista, Jeff Miller spent some time adding some very nice improvements to notepad but had to remove them for some reason (I’m confident it was a good reason; I just don’t know what it was). The main feature [...]

In my previous post on this topic, I discussed the basics of extending Media Center to add entries to the menus, specifically Beyond TV from SnapStream Media.  Click here to see that post. Once I had that figured out and working, I figured I’d venture to another application used quite a bit by my family - [...]

I installed WordPress a little more than a week ago and already there is a new version with security fixes.  I’d like to install it, but before I do, I want to back everything up.  A WordPress web site has two repositories of data - a MySQL database and the files that make up the [...]

Table of contents for Installing WordPressInstalling WordPress (part 1)Installing WordPress (part 2)Installing WordPress (part 3)Configuring WordPress There are a number of things I do to just about every WordPress site I create.  You might ask how many do I create since I’ve just started with it.  Well, 6 so far and I’m seeing other uses [...]