Reading mail from root@localhost.localdomain using Thunderbird (a quick note)

1. Create a Unix Mailspool (Movemail) account.

2. Run the following command:
  sudo chmod 777 /var/spool/mail

VMware, Ubuntu 6.10 & USB flash drives

Before Ubuntu 6.10, I had no problems to access USB flash drives from Windows running under VMware (guest system) with Ubuntu as a host system.

And then Ubuntu 6.10 came and the problems came, too. Sometimes, when I plugged the drive, Windows detected it and I could access the data on it (rarely) and sometimes Windows didn't detect it at all or did detect it but there was no access to the data (usually). And I could see no pattern in this behaviour.

After a few months I finally found this article 3862823 in the VMTN Knowledge Base - USB Devices Are Not Available on Some Linux hosts, the VM > Removable Devices > USB Devices Menu Is Empty.

Adding the following line:
  usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto 0 0
to the /etc/fstab file solved the problem.

HOWTO: Edit properties of DataGrid columns (.NET 1.1)

It's probably obvious for everyone working with Visual Studio 2003, but it doesn't work this way in VS 2005 (which I usually use) and as a result it recently took me a while to find this option.

Installing Ubuntu on ASUS A6RP-AP069 notebook (part 3 - WPA)

I don't know why, but WPA doesn't work on Ubuntu out-of-the-box. WEP does and we were using it for some time, but recently we finally decided to switch to WPA.

First we found these instructions, but for some reason they didn't work for us. And even if they did, this method is way too complicated.

After some further searching, we found this post. Really simple and it works! Although, after having followed the steps 1, 2 and 3 listed there, we also had to reboot the machine and add ifup eth1 to /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh file.

Reading data from a sorted view (Microsoft SQL Server)

If you read data from a sorted view (a view that contains an ORDER BY clause in its SELECT statement) into a DataTable (ADO.NET) or a ADODB.Recordset ('old' Visual Basic 6 ADO), it will not sorted in the DataTable/Recordset.

Installing Ubuntu on ASUS A6RP-AP069 notebook (part 2 - headphones)

If you hear no sound after connecting headphones or external speakers to the headphones jack, try installing alsa-driver-1.0.14rc1, alsa-lib-1.0.14rc1 and alsa-utils-1.0.14rc1 packages and remove the options snd-hda-intel model=uniwill-m31 line from the /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base file (if you added it before).

Thanks for the advice, mario_7!

A property of a custom control is not shown in the Properties pane

If you are creating a custom control and it has a property that is not shown in the Properties pane in Visual Studio IDE, ensure the property is not write-only.

Write-only properties are not shown in the Properties pane.
Read-and-write as well as read-only properties are shown in the Properties pane.

Maximum column name length in SQL Server 2005

I was asked about this problem today and I could find it neither in SQL Server documentation nor online, so I checked it experimentally.

The name
'test1test1test1test1test1test1test1test1test1test1test1test1test1test1test1
test1test1test1test1test1test1test1test1test1test1test1test1test1test1test1'
is invalid because it is empty, contains invalid characters, or contains
more than 128 characters.

Maximum allowed column name length in SQL Server 2005 is 128 characters.

UPDATE:

As phorku wrote in his comment, the maximum column name length can also be determined by checking properties of the sysname data type:

sysname is a system-supplied user-defined data type that is functionally equivalent to nvarchar(128) and is used to reference database object names

Installing Ubuntu on ASUS A6RP-AP069 notebook

There were three problems that me and my girlfriend encountered while installing Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) on ASUS A6RP-AP069 notebook.

1. Starting the installation
   There was no problem to boot the laptop from the Ubuntu CD, it showed the available option, but after choosing any of them it... froze after a few seconds.
   We tried 3 or 4 different version of Ubuntu and Mandriva. Every time it hung as soon as Using hpet for high-res timesource message showed. (It is worth noticing that Ubuntu 6.10 does not show such information to the user by default, while its older version do.)
   We found the solution here - adding hpet=disable to the kernel parameters worked like a charm.
2. Connecting to the wireless network
   Ubuntu correctly detected the wireless card. We entered all necessary configuration parameters (SSID, key, etc.), activated the card and... it couldn't connect to the network no matter how many time we re-checked its configuration and restarted it.
   Finally, we found this post. It's really great! We followed the instructions and the WiFi network was up and running in no time.
3. Enabling sound
   That was the hardest part. Everything looked fine - Ubuntu detected the sound card, Amarok looked like it was playing a song, but... there was no sound. We tried to play files in different formats, we checked the headphones, we found countless posts telling to uncheck some External Amplifier option in KMix, but we found no such option.
   Late at night after a lot of googling I (my girlfriend went to sleep earlier) found this post. Another great post! I recompiled alsa-driver, alsa-lib and alsa-utils packages and the sound problem was gone.
4. Headphones
5. WPA

HOWTO: Configure SQL Server 2005 to allow remote connections

I know it doesn't seem a very hard task, but it really took me quite a lot of time to configure a SQL Server 2005 instance running on Windows XP SP2 machine to allow remote connections.

This KB article describes step by step what you have to do to be able to connect remotely to a SQL Server 2005.

In my case, there were two problems:

1. I disabled SQL Server Browser service (which has to be running if you want to use a named instance),
2. I didn't know that in Windows Firewall you can create exceptions for particular applications (and not only ports).