January 31, 2010

Compatibility Woes

My laptop came with a Windows 7. So far I liked it for its visual effects. But now, as I started downloading games and applications, win 7 gives me headaches. Most of the older applications,especially the games refuse to work with this version.

I downloaded around 10gb of content, just to be put aside as they won't start at all.I even tried quite a bit of googling. But it didn't give much useful info. The OS being 64bit also hurts some applications badly.
Anyway,I found out that patches are coming up for many apps which might fix the compatibility issues. So, i just have to wait and download them when they are available.

If those woes hadn't come up,I might now be stuck up with some game. Instead, I am blogging and listening to some good ol' strings. Anyway I am off to download more development and networking tools,hoping they are not affected seriously by the compatibility issues.

January 22, 2010

Personas

Firefox 3.6 is out and it comes with a new feature called "Personas". Its an awesome feature with which you can make your firefox more personal than it used to be.

I am loving it. Wish I could do that in my office pc as well..sigh..

There is a bundle of cool personas to choose from at Personas

Enjoy

January 13, 2010

Phone purchase

I had mentioned in my other blog that I had bought a new phone.It was done after I did some extensive search online.
Mobile is one field where finding the accurate information that is relevant,is difficult. I had gone through countless forums comparing models,technologies etc. Also there were many portals involved. Some of them were pure crap,and some were exceptionally useful.

One among them is this site called Consumer Mate. They provide solutions for four categories:Laptops, Mobile, Cameras and LCD/Plasma. The very home page seems different from the other sites you get to see out there. It has options to let us select various features that we expect,using sliders and checkboxes( far more user-friendly than drop down lists ) for the mobile phone prices.

That helped me play with the options I wanted. The search threw up quite a number of respectable models. The review and information I got for each model was pretty satisfactory. This is not the case with most of the other sites where information is only partial or half-cooked :)

They also provide an online store facility. That would make it easy for someone to buy immediately. I was fairly impressed by their overall design and layout. But the most interesting business strategy they have adopted is the ASK US section. You can post your queries or purchase interest in that and you get a call from a local vendor within two days. I filled it up for fun and got a call from a dealer here. Now that is quite some business model.
Though I went for a Nokia phone,a friend of mine who lost his Samsung phone to "Tea-logging" went for a brand new one from this site. His comments about the prompt service reminded me to blog about this. The site mentions they provide the best deals for Samsung mobile phones in India

I found it good for laptop prices and reviews as well..
Check out and see how good it is for you.

January 08, 2010

Framework Corruption

"BC32400: Class 'CLSID_CorSymWriter' could not be created: Access is denied."

This is the error we get while trying to run our .NET application.
The application is a ASP.net/VB.net website running on MS SQL Server DB. It runs a host of windows services like MS Excel and MS Project.
This error has been occurring since yesterday evening 7 pm and so far a lot of diagnostics have gone into it,with us doing overtime late into night :)

As far as obtained from the internet, the .net framework requires reinstallation. Based on logs,we have been able to find the service which might have caused a registry corruption leading to this.
We have already run various tests and diagnostics to isolate and fix the issue without opting for tough solutions like re-formatting.

After spending many hours in front of our server in the closed and otherwise inaccessible server room, the decision has been taken to format the server. This is due to application's criticality to the day-to-day working of the organization.
But I have asked the team to record all logs and keep for further study. Hopefully we can make a learning out of it for future cases.