stuartandnicola.com

The scammers are busy at the moment. After the crazy call from 365helpdesk.co.uk (now seems to be closed down) we've had calls from thesparksupport.com and now Comantra.

The calls are scams. They claim to be associated with Microsoft. In the case of Comantra they really do seem to be a genuine Gold partner, but based on their phone call I think our daughter who's four has a better understanding of how a computer works.

The calls are nothing if not entertaining.

After my previous experience of a call from someone claiming to be in London (but I suspect based in India) [see earlier post) it was Nicola's turn.

They called while I was out, but they left a number so I could call them back. So I did. Except this time I remembered to play dumb and try to find out where this was going.

I tried to get the webcam to record the conversation, but it messed up. It's a real shame because it was one of the most bizarre and surreal conversations I've ever had.

I recently had to reset our PC and decided to install Roxio Media Creator 2010 as I use Sonic for creating DVDs. I'm using Windows 64 bit and it is supposed to be compataible, but when I tried to launch many of the applications I got an error saying "The certificate file is missing or has been corrupted. Please reinstall it."

I am pretty sure someone tried to scam me by phone, so I thought I better alert you in case you get a call too.

I got a call out the blue from someone claiming to be doing "market research and awareness" about malicious programs and viruses. At first I said I wasn't interested as I was computer literate and I asked what they wanted to sell me, and how they got my name.

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.