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I was just churning through my documents and discovered a short description of my first ever snowboarding holiday with snowtrex. It’s not complete but it makes an interesting prologue.

Day 1 – Set off at 5am from Exeter, having stayed the night at Reg’s flat. I was trying to convert his Navman S30 to run TomTom – However it took 5 hours, so I didn’t actually get any sleep at all. We set off and I managed a whole 30 mins before handing over to Reg. By 9am we had made good progress, scooting around the edge of London. Then, disaster, the low oil light came on in the car. We pulled in and bought some oil for a quick top up which seemed to fix the problem. In no time at all we were queuing for the ferry. We were way to early so had to wait about an hour and a half. We finally boarded the Norfolkline – cheap but very impressive inside. We left at 12pm, The sea was flat and the crossing was very smooth. Unloading the ferry took a while and we were soon getting used to driving on the right hand side. We forgot to fit the GB sticker and headlight adapters, and passed some police looking extremely uneasy. We pulled in as quick as possible to get the stuff fitted.

We soon settled in to doing about 80mph with the cruise control on. Then a bright flash, what on earth was that. It looked like a mobile speed camera! No! I’m sure I was sticking to the limit, and I had just been overtaken by a french car going faster than me. I don’t know what it was.

Arriving at the resort we were met with stunning views of the alps. There seemed to be a major lack of toilets so we stopped to make some yellow snow. About 15 mins and we were there. It was snowing and the roads were icy. We parked up and soon found the car became stuck. We had to fit the snow chains to make any progress at all.

Check-in took a long time but we paid the 300 euros deposit and picked up the key to the apartment and lift passed no problem. We also picked up the snowboards, and paid an additional 10 euros insurance for the week. We entered the apartment and wow, it was way above expectations.

Day 2 – Very keen to get on the slopes. We soon found some green slopes and went down for our first real run. Ouch, lots of falling over and high speed crashes. I fell off the drag lift. We went back for lunch and then went for a much larger green slope. This was impressive and took about 2 hours to complete, by the time we reached the bottom we were ready to call it a day. My leg was already hurting quite a lot. We returned to the apartment and soon went out for some drinks with the polish.

Day 3 – Keen once again, this time aiming a bit higher at the Jandri express. We met up with the polish and went up Jandri 1 and Jandri 2, right to the top. Then we took the underground train to the very top. The run down was amazing, but my leg was seriously hurting and walking was very painful. Jay realised the camera had gone missing, so he went back with Reg to look for it. I stayed at the 3600 cafe and shared a jug of wine and some potato thing with the polish – yum.

We took a chair lift back up, and Kasia was super scared having never been on one before. As we got off she managed to punch me in the face and I heard a nasty cracking noise in my face. Seems like I got away without a broken nose.

We made our way down to about 2600 and then it was getting late, so we took a big cart (technical term) down and then the tiny white lifts. Reg took his board in for repair after the binding broke.

Just noticed that all the computer clocks on a network were 5 minutes out. Went to the server (Windows Server 2008 Standard), to check the internet time synchronisation only to find that the usual Internet time tab on the clock/date control panel was completely missing. I didn’t bother investigating exactly why this is, but found the following solution.

w32tm /config /syncfromflags:MANUAL /manualpeerlist:time.nist.gov
w32tm /config /update

Obviously you can use your preferred time server instead of time.nist.gov, but run these two commands and wait a few minutes, and you should see your clock correct itself. The process will show ‘time-service’ events in the system event log to confirm your changes.

Let’s face it, graze.com is a wonderful idea (for those that don’t know, they basically post you a healthy lunch) and I love the novelty of not knowing what’s inside. However, £60 a month is a bit steep (£3 x 5 days x 4 weeks) and seeing as I’m going around the supermarket anyway, I could just pickup the ingreedients and make my own! I could even reuse my existing graze box to get the correct portions.

So what’s required? Well today’s box consisted of:

• Dried cranberries (small portion)
• Americas nut mix (almond, pecan & brazil nut) (medium portion)
• Fresh crunchy apple (large portion)

I’d welcome any more suggestions and I’ll create a list.

A teacher at a school we work for recently found the free Ikea Home Planner software. It looks like a great bit of software to help children learn about 2D measurements and design. We decided to install it on the school network, however, we came across one major problem. The software would not run unless the user was an administrator, instead quitting with the following error:

The application stops due to an unforeseen situation, for example an error in the database.

It turns out that the application tries to write to various files that are installed in Program Files, which of course normal users do not have access to. Obviously giving the entire userbase rights to modify things in this way was out of the question, so we decided to try some other methods. We have a ‘software’ share on one of the servers for software that can be run directly from an installation directory, so we tried that. The same problem existed, as users were still not able to write to the install directory.

In the end, our solution was to create a new share, to which users have write (update) access, as we did not want to compromise the existing software setup, when everything was running smoothly. Once we had shared the software in a user writable directory (and published it in the form of a shortcut on the default desktop), everything worked!

It would be nice to see an update to the software to allow it to run without administrator rights, as I am sure there are situtations where a solution like ours would not be feasible.

Update 24/03/2009:
We have found that although this solves the problem of running the software, it does not allow you to run more than one instance at a time – useless for a network application like this one. The software must be putting a lock on its files, very annoying!

It must be 3 weeks now since my beloved 2.5 V6 TDi Passat brokedown on me. Actually, that’s not entirely correct. The injection pump broke down on me, the Passat just happened to be cursed with the not so popular Bosch VP44 Injection pump.

My car was running great, freshly serviced by myself, I had no complaints – smooth and effortless, it was business as usual. Then, at the drop of a hat, it was crippled. The power rapidly faded away to nothing. It didn’t even have the guts to top 5mph.

“That’s it” I said. “The Passat is dead!”. Well, I was pretty much correct. The injection pump had pressurised its last atom of fuel before packing up for an extended holiday.

The gear indicator which usually displays the currently selected gear lit up red and the gearbox started shifting really violently. Initially I thought this could be a gearbox fault, but I later discovered this is simply a side effect of the car entering “limp mode”.

The car made quite a lot of smoke and the engine also sounded a lot more rough than usual. I noticed air in the fuel line too. A quick scan with Vagcom revealed 00550 – Start of Injection Regulation – Control Difference – Intermittent (also known as error code p1248).

I was genuinely hoping for a straightforward repair of the pump, but the reality was I needed a whole new one. I found a guy who really knew his stuff when it came to Bosch VP44 pumps, his name was Peter over at King’s Lynn Auto Diagnostics. He offered a prompt testing service for £70 and discovered the body (housing) of my pump was worn beyond repair, causing loss of fuel pressure. Wear in the pump housing means the pump is pretty much a write-off.

dieselbombers.com describes a similar problem:

The housings on the VP44 wear out due to low fuel pressure from weak lift pumps causing the diaphragm in the front of the VP44 pump to rupture. This causes the steel timing piston to vibrate in the aluminum bore of the housing and the result in a short time is the housing wears to the point that fuel bypasses the piston and full advance cannot be accomplished

Peter managed to source me a replacement pump, although he made sure I was sitting down before telling me the price, because it came in at an eye watering £762. He thought the damage to the housing was probably due to mileage more than anything.

I must admit, that was almost enough for me to seriously consider writing the car off. It has 180,000 on the clock and market value of the car is probably not more than £2000. But anyway, I decided I needed my car repaired. The exact model of the pump was 0470 506 002 – These seem rare and consequently expensive.
I’m still waiting for the pump to arrive (should be early next week). Peter assured me the new pump would be “virginised” so that it didn’t need to be coded to the car (watch out of this if you get one from a scrap heap)
It took the local garage about 3-4 hours to remove the pump, which just happened to be on a separate belt on the V6 TDI, so the cambelt did not have to be removed.

So the grand total for the pump failure comes in at about £1152 including fitting. I can only conclude this article by saying that under no circumstance buy a car with a Bosch VP44 injection pump, although if you’re reading this, the chances are it’s too late, you already did. Just take a quick look on the internet and there are pages and pages of people with similar problems. Good luck, you’ll need it.

I stumbled upon an annoying bit of IE7 behaviour recently. Whilst putting together an enquiry form, I used normal divs to contain my text input elements. The divs had a left-margin defined, but for some reason IE7 would render the left-margin correctly, but in addition to this it would then apply the same width as if it were a left-padding on the div, or as if it were a left-margin on the text input element.

The following example should show that no gap is present between the left of the text input field and the red border of the div (in browsers other than IE7 of course), this is the behaviour I expected.

http://blog.tanist.co.uk/files/iemargin.html

I found the fix to be to put a zero-width space before the start of the input tag, this makes IE7 behave as per the other browsers. I have tested the example in the IE8 beta, and it does perform as per everyone else.

Has anyone else had the same problem?

PhotoScape is a really nice, simple, easy to use bit of FREE photo editing software. It offers a lot of basic features without ever complicating matters – ideal for people just learning to play with their photos, or anyone who just doesn’t want the hassle of having to learn a more complex piece of software.

To deploy this via group policy, you will need to use a startup script, as it is not possible to extract an MSI to use with the usual method. However it’s a really simple script so should be no problem to get it up and running.

Just share the installer executable somewhere on your server (we usually have a shared software directory for this purpose), and add the following to a startup script (replacing the path with the correct one for your situation, of course)…

“\\SVR\Software\PhotoScapeInstall\setup.exe” /S

Note the upper-case S in the switch – it will not function with a lower-case S. This will install desktop and quick-launch shortcuts, which unfortunately there seems to be no way around. However, a good point is that it does not install Google Toolbar, which is an option selected by default if you use the wizard install.

Have fun!

I’ve had my Nokia 7610 a long time now (about 4 years) – I seem to remember it set me back about £200. In fact I’ve had it so long that Nokia have gone full circle and produced a new Nokia 7610 called the Nokia 7610 Supernova. Unfortunately I would never buy one because it runs the inferior S40 OS, unlike the old phone which runs the brilliant S60 OS. Besides, the old one looks better.

Anyway, todays tutorial is going to focus on fixing the 7610 keypad. My keypad became almost impossible to use and I’d never bothered to investigate the the problem. The keys had to be pressed with an almighty force to produce a keypress. I’d almost comitted the phone to bin, but it was worth a look first.

First I removed the battery, front fascia and plastic keypad. From here on a T6 Torx Screwdriver is required. There are 6 torx screws, but only the bottom 4 need to be removed to get the PCB keypad free.

Once you have these 4 torx screws out, the PCB keypad can be levered up at the bottom and gently slid downwards and removed. This is a delicate piece of kit so you need to take care. The keypad consists of a PCB with a white sticky label (membrane) on top, which holds the bubble contacts in place. Gently peel back the white sticky label, but don’t remove it from the PCB entirely (otherwise you’ll have to realign it later).

This is where I noticed the contacts on the membrane side were badly corroded. The contacts should be nice and shiny but mine had black spots dotted around. I used a mixture of Brasso metal polish and a small screwdriver and cotton bud to remove the dirt and polish the contacts. I also cleaned the PCB contacts before sticking the membrane back on to the PCB.

Having refitted the torx scews I fired up the phone and the origional keypress feel was restored. Result!

We had this problem on our Vista machines in the office whereby they would get stuck during the logon process. We couldn’t for the life of us pinpoint the problem, as the logon information is very vague. Then I remembered a neat feature from XP which is also available in Vista. The key was to enabled Verbose logon information to find out what exactly was going on:

If you are using a stand-alone computer or if you want to enable verbose status messages on only one computer, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, and then click Run.
2. In the Open box, type gpedit.msc, and then click OK.
3. Expand Computer Configuration, expand Administrative Templates, and then click System.
4. In the right pane, double-click Verbose vs normal status messages.
5. Click Enabled, and then click OK.
6. Close Group Policy Object Editor, and then click OK.

Run a gpupdate /force if you can. After doing this, we noticed our machines were hanging at the printers group policy. After disabling the offending printer policy, logon worked fine again. As techies we decided to leave Verbose Status Messages switched on, as it can actually be very useful. Check out Chris’s previous post for more on our printer issues.

A few weeks back I was working on setting up an ASP application which I knew very little about. Having setup IIS I encountered the follow error message:

Server Error in ‘/’ Application.

Configuration Error

Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: Unrecognized configuration section ‘connectionStrings’

Source Error:

Line 20: Line 21: </appSettings> Line 22: <connectionStrings>

Source File: D:\home\Default\website.com\htdocs\web.config Line: 22

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:1.1.4322.2379; ASP.NET Version:1.1.4322.2379

Well, it turns out this is what happens if you try and run an ASP.NET 2.0 application using ASP.NET 1.1. So just follow these quick steps to cure the problem:

1. Click Start
2. Click Run
3. Type inetmgr (or open the IIS manager from the admin tools)
4. Expand the server object
5. Expand Default Websites
6. Select your website, eg website.com
7. Right click and go to Properties
8. Select ASP.Net Tab
9. ASP.Net version select version 2

If this option isn’t available make sure you have the dotnet framework 2.0 installed. Problem solved!