stuartandnicola.com

After having had a fun (?) afternoon trying to rebuild my development environment for Drupal after installing Windows 7 I think I've finally cracked it. As a note to myself, and for anyone else who stumbles across this page, this is what I had to do to get it working...

1. Make sure to install Xampp 1.7 as this has PHP 5.2. The Zend debugger binaries don't yet work with PHP 5.3 which is used in later versions of Xampp. Packages are available from SourceForge.

I tried to log on to Vista this evening and got this message for no obvious reason. Nikki's profile was fine, it was just mine that was broken.

I followed the fix suggested in a post at technologyquestions.com that involved a fairly simple registry fix to re-instate my profile that for some reason had been turned in to a back-up.

I installed the new iTunes 9 update tonight, and started getting an error every time iTunes then started. The error was in a window titled QuickTime Handler Window, and the error said that the application could not start because "d3dx9_36.dll was not found".

The error seems to be that a component of DirectX is not present, or up to date, and the fix is to download and reinstall the DirectX components. There's a walkthrough on about.com that explains what to do.

I've been doing some work on the SWF Tools project to enhance its support for CCK. Specifically, turning multiple filefield uploads in to a playlist.

In principle it seemed easy, create a theme function but rather than assign the multiple value formatter as CONTENT_HANDLE_CORE set it to CONTENT_HANDLE_MODULE.

As part of the ongoing development of my SWF Tools project I needed to get a streaming media server up and running to try things out.

I started out with Red5, an open source server, which pretty much worked out the box (or off the download!)

I then discovered you can get the offical Adobe Flash Media Server for free in a "development" edition that limits you to ten streams. Perfect for local development I thought.

I discovered that the reliability index on our laptop hadn't been updating since July, and I couldn't get the index to start updating again. After some trial and error I discovered that the main system event log had also stopped updating and was telling me that the log was corrupted. When I cleared the main event log the performance index started updating again too. I've described more details about the problem, and the solution, below.

I noticed recently that I was getting lots of errors when I opened Outlook, and it kept reporting that there were errors in my data file and that it had to be checked.

I did some investigation and found that when I closed Outlook the Outlook process in task manager continued to run. If I then shutdown the PC, and rebooted later, Outlook warned me that the data file wasn't closed properly.

I noticed recently that I was getting lots of errors when I opened Outlook, and it kept reporting that there were errors in my data file and that it had to be checked.

I did some investigation and found that when I closed Outlook the Outlook process in task manager continued to run. If I then shutdown the PC, and rebooted later, Outlook warned me that the data file wasn't closed properly.

I did some research and it seemed to suggest that a faulty Outlook add-in might be the issue, so I tried disabling various ones but with no improvement.

Our new PC had (and still has!) Vista on it, and the newest Office with the weird ribbon system. At work we both use Office 2003, so we were keeping our old XP machine just to run the older office. But that machine is really playing up and is incredibly slow, plus it takes up a lot of space.

When developing modules it can be useful to increase the level of error reporting within Drupal. To do this (in D6) edit common.inc and change the line

to

This will report all errors, including notices, whereas normally they are suppressed.