Specifing the bridging network adapter in vmware player 4

For those of you using VMware Player 4 on linux hosts, if you’re not happy with the autobridging for the vmnet0 network, you can choose a specific network adapter to bridge to using vmware-netcfg.

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How TestDisk and the GParted LiveCD saved my deleted partitions

I was messing around with Vmware converter (in windows XP, running from a dual-boot partition), and then I kept getting the following message: “FAILED: Unable to find the system volume, reconfiguration is not possible” at 95% in the reconfiguration step. Apparently the windows ‘System’ drive was not marked as active. This was indeed true, because my linux ext3 boot partition was indicated as the active one in Windows Disk Management console. I didn’t want to use the ‘reconfigure machine’ option to change these properties as explained here, because I would then have to change the SID, Computer Name, etc. (more…)

Reset Forgotten Local Administrator Password on Windows

Background information: my department decided to limit the use of local administrator accounts on our systems, so a few of us had special ‘Enterprise Admin’ accounts created for them, to use whenever Windows 7 requests elevation. However,  the admin rights did not propagate to my own EA account for one reason or the other. I was told to remove the computer from the domain and re-join. Easy, right?

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ConvertEmptyStringToNull not working with ASP.NET SqlDataSource Parameters

The ConverEmptyStringToNull property of SqlDataSource Parameters does not work for asp.net 2.0 applications. You probably need this kind of setting when you have a stored procedure that can handle null as a valid parameter value, but the framework assumes nothing has been supplied and prevents the select/insert/update/delete statement from executing. (more…)

Sybase AseConnection Internal Error 30016

A windows service I developed – which uses Sybase ADO.NET drivers  to connect to a Sybase database – suddenly stopped working yesterday. The log files showed a sybase exception described as Internal error 30016.  We had a contingency server on which a copy of the main database is loaded daily, so I tried connecting to this one and the error did not show up. This led me to believe that something had been changed, and I asked the local Sybase DBA if something had changed. He was clueless.

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Using an SQL join in a SQL delete statement

I found this post by Ben Nadel when I was looking for a way to delete the rows in a table based on a foreign key column. I needed this to clear answers provided by a particular user in an online quiz I was developing. It was a real timesaver – the other options were to delete entries manually (ugh!) or write some long ugly code with nested select statements.

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Accessing Controls in a DIV with the runat=server attribute

When you use the runat=”server” attribute with a div tag in asp.net, any controls nested in the div will not be accessible directly via the page’s Controls collection. They will be in the Controls collection of the div.
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