Bookmarks for April 21st through April 23rd

These are my links for April 21st through April 23rd:

Bookmarks for March 29th through March 30th

These are my links for March 29th through March 30th:

Quickbooks 2006 on Windows Small Business Server 2003

This morning we had a problem and needed to get Quickbooks 2006 running on Windows Small Business Server 2003, after the install we kept getting the following error when you tried to launch Quickbooks.

Error: Quickbooks failed to load required file!

Error: Quickbooks failed to load required file!

A bit of searching online only turned up one forum entry where someone mentions that they got round the error by right clicking and choosing “Run As” and running it as there current user. Continue reading

Unmountable_Boot_Volume BSOD on Windows XP

A friend brought round her computer today that was constantly rebooting while Windows was trying to boot. After a bit of fiddling I got it so that I could see the error message which was a BSOD (blue screen of death) with the message “Unmountable_Boot_Volume” on it.

A littile googling found this post on MSGoodies with the following details:

Start the recovery console. If you do not have it installed – or when that version does not work – like in this case, boot from an installation CD and select R for repair. You can easily mix languages – I used an English CD on a Danish Windows

Run these command –
chkdsk c: /r /p
fixmbr
exit (to reboot)

And it worked great, saved me alot of fiddling. I’ve put the details up here in case I need it again in the future.

Synergy Rocks!

If you’ve never heard of Synergy its a pretty awesome application. Basically it allows multiple computers to share one set of Keyboard, Mouse and Clipboard. It’s cross platform so it works very nicely if you’re running a mixed environment.

I set it up today at home (had to work from home as our office ADSL went down.) between my desktop PC running Ubuntu Linux and my laptop running Windows Vista. You install the Synergy app on the various PC’s that you want to be clients, in my case thats my laptop, you then setup a machine as your “server” and point the clients to the server. On the Server machine you decide in which direction the various clients are and then hook everything up.

At the moment I have it if I move my mouse of the left hand side of my linux machine the cursor continues moving across onto my laptop screen and now my laptop has focus, so I can type and work on it using my desktop keyboard and mouse. I? can even copy something and then move right again onto my linux machine and paste it.

The laptops keyboard and touchpad continues working, but its much better than having another keyboard and mouse cluttering up the desk.

If you do plan on trying it out I would suggest you get QuickSynergy for your Linux/MacOSX machines as it makes configuring things much easier.

Windows Console Replacement

console2I spend a lot of time at the command line in both windows and Linux, I guess I feel more at home or perhaps more in control. On Linux I have Gnome-Terminal which is a perfectly adequate container for a command line. On windows though I only have the standard cmd.exe which is seriously annoying, you can’t have things like tabs etc.

Over the weekend I went in search of a replacement, something that more closely resembles gnome-terminal and I found console2, and so far I found it perfect. I’m not hardcore enough to install one of the many ports of bash to my windows machine and I haven’t tried power shell yet, it?s not so much script ability that I need as much as the ability to run my command line apps from a nicer looking window and consolidate all of them into one window.

Open Source/Free Utils and Applications

I thought I would list a bunch of Open Source / Free utils and applications that I use almost every day. I’m excluding the obvious ones like Linux (in my case Ubuntu).

The list below is what I use in my day to day job, normally on my laptop running Windows Vista, the order really doesn’t matter its just as I thought about them. Everything listed below is available for Windows and most are also available for Linux and other OS’s. I’m a programmer, web developer and computer geek so I’m sure the list of software below reflects that, but no matter what you do there is probably at least one application that might be handy.

If you have a favourite please add a comment and share it with us. Continue reading