Adept Technologies Blog as Moved!

As of December 2010, We have moved our blog to:

www.adepttech.com/blog

We have plans to use this blog for a different topic in the future!!

Adept Technologies Inc.

SAP to pay Oracle $1.3 billion in damages (CNN)

Business software maker SAP said Tuesday it has been ordered to pay $1.3 billion to Oracle for copyright infringement by its now-defunct software maintenance unit. I saw this coming years ago, along with a few more in the works. Everyone needs to play by the rules.

The Blue Screen of Death in Windows

Over the years we all have experienced the Blue Screen of Death if you are using a Windows Based operating system. Most of the time this start up error is based upon an error that is not that serious which has occurred in a program running on your system, to a very serious problem like a hard drive failure. So make sure you have backups!

The best practice when this Blue screen of death occurs is to have your windows installation media, like the CD, DVD or USB Thumb-drive to boot the system with. ( A lot of Computer professionals will start off with trouble shooting the system by pressing the F8 key on startup and using the advanced windows startup to different startups like safe mode and safe mode with command prompt and so on. This wastes time in the long run, because 60% of the time it will not work, period. ) Here is my simple way that works everytime unless the hard drive is hosed. I will use Windows XP for this example.

Insert the Windows media, boot from the media, when the windows installation starts, let it get to the options of what you want to do, install a fresh copy, or repair an existing installation. We select repair an existing installation by typing in R. The system will then go to the Repair system which is a lot like DOS. At the C:\ prompt type in CHKDSK / R which looks like this: C:\chkdsk /r
Click enter, the system will ask you are you sure you want to run this. Type in Y, and let it run. It will take anywhere from 1 hour to 10 minutes based upon your system. When it has completed 90% of the time you system will be fixed. The other 9% means that the Master Boot section was hosed. This is not a problem. What we do next is boot from your installation media again, select R for the repair an existing installation, and at the command prompt type in FIXBOOT, should look like this  C:\fixboot  The system will ask you are your sure, type in Y and click enter. After it finishes, type in EXIT and reboot. Your system will be back to normal. For the other 1% which this did not fix, you will need to install a fresh copy of your Operating System, and most of ther time this will not work because your hard drive has failed, or is failing. When I have a system that none of this works, 100% of the time the Hard Drive has failed. So I replace the drive with a new one, install my OS, and applications and I am good to go.

Crystal Reports for the Microsoft .Net 4.0 Framework

The Adept Enterprise system uses many report features. One that our clients really like is the embedded Crystal Report system. April 2010 Microsoft released the new Visual Studio 2010 with the 4.0 .Net Framework. This release is the first release that did not come with Crystal Reports runtimes. SAP has a beta and should release the final very soon. We have been very impressed with the Beta 2 release of Crystal Reports. We were not pleased with the Beta 1 release it was very buggy, but Beta 2 fixed most of them. One of the major changes we like is the parameter value screen. They finally got it right, by making it easier to input data to query the report. Our clients testing our BETA release of the Adept Enterprise 2011 .NET 4.0 system scheduled for final release January 2011 noticed the new crystal reports parameter input and loved it. There are a few bugs that SAP will have fixed this fall, but we are very pleased. All the existing reports work, and even older reports created in legacy versions of Crystal worked perfectly. We look forward for the final release of Crystal Reports Runtime for the Microsoft 4.0 .NET Framework.

Word Automation and Upgrading to Office 2010

With the new release of Microsoft Office 2010 there are two ways to install the new office 2010 system. The first is to install the office system in 32 bit or 64 bit mode, and the second is to use the one click online installation. The first method is the only method that we at Adept will support, the second we do not. The reason why is the second method uses a virtualized system using the CVH.exe and the CVHSVE DCOM security settings. This will NOT work with document automation. Winword.exe MUST exist on the server, or workstation that accesses the automation processes.

If you are getting the famous COM Class Factory error 80040154, or the error: cannot create the active x component, and you have setup the run environments already in the DCOM rights on the server, check to see if the version of office is standard or virtualized. To find out what version, click run on the startup menu, type in winword. If Microsoft word opens you have the correct installation, if you get a message that it does not exist, you have the virtualized version. To correct this problem you will need to uninstall the virtualized version and install the normal or standard version. FYI the standard installation is 599 meg, the virtualized online installation is 1,591 KB.

Google vs. Oracle over Open Source (CNN)

New York Technology Council  (http://www.nytech.org/)

Installing Windows 7 Ultimate on a Panasonic CF-29 Toughbook  

First off is it possible... YES, I have done this, second off..it is very difficult to achieve, but well worth it. All of our test CF-29s are touchscreen models. They came with Windows XP Professional, and I purchased them a few years ago from an oil company on auction for 100 bucks each. Last week I wanted to upgrade my personal one to Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit.

Here is what I experienced.

1) The CF-29 has a 32 bit chip set thus 64bit of Windows 7 will not install, BUT the 32bit will!
2) All the drivers install perfectly except the Intel 82852/82855 GM/GME Graphics controller. (Intel will NOT make a Windows 7 Driver), and the touchscreen driver (XP Only) had problems too.
3) Windows 7 will only allow the default Generic VGA graphics driver. (Which does not support the touch screen driver)

So after talking with Panasonic and Intel they told me to forget about upgrading the CF-29 to Windows 7 it is impossible...and not supported...I have heard that before...lol :)

Solution: Force the Windows 7 to accept the Intel 82852/82855 GM/GME Graphics controller for Windows Vista, and force the Mouse driver to accept the XP Driver for touchscreen to work. All this works fine, and the Panasonic CF-29 has a few more years of life with Windows 7, and every driver works, and all the cool touch screen features with Windows 7 are very cool, and what is even more cool is I don't have to go out and purchase a new Toughbook and save myself thousands of dollars that can be spent elsewhere, like a badly needed spa vacation!!

Here are the instructions that worked for me: I found MANY helpful instructions I listed below from: Sevenforums.com  http://www.sevenforums.com/  

STEP 1 Go to the Intel website and Download the latest Intel 82852/82855 GM/GME Graphics controller for Windows Vista, and save the driver where you can find it later!

Make sure you uninstall all the video drivers that do not work. If you see exclamation marks on your previous drivers in Device Manager, uninstall them. Your Device Manager should say that you have Standard VGA Driver installed under Display category and exclamation mark on "video controller". Make sure you restart PC when asked.

STEP 2

We will need to edit "c:\windows\system32\drivers\vgapnp.sys" file, but there is a problem. Windows Vista and Windows 7 will NOT allow you to edit system files even when you are the admin. Changing security attributes of that file did not work either. The file is owned by "TrustedInstaller" service. We will need to own the file and give ourselves the full control to edit it.
Click 'Start' and in 'Search' type 'cmd'. The result will show on top. Right-click on 'cmd' and choose "Run as Administrator". If your account does not have admin rights you might be prompted to enter username and password. I used account that already has administrator privileges. You should have a command prompt with administrator privileges.

STEP 3

Lets say my logged in username is nick

First command you do is:

takeown /f c:\windows\system32\drivers\vgapnp.sys

This will give ownership to the your user account. You should see a message saying SUCCESS etc.....

Second command you do is:

cacls c:\windows\system32\drivers\vgapnp.sys /G nick:F

There will be a confirmation message so type 'Y'. This will change the security attributes to give you ONLY all the permissions for the file.

The fact is the CF-29 runs Windows 7 Better than XP! Yes the screen resolution is still 1024 x 768, but that is not bad when using the touch screen. Every Drivers works! I am very happy with the new life of the CF-29!!  

Cool Themes in Visual Studio 2010

When I first starting using VS 2010 in production, I didn't like the dark theme, and I needed to change the theme to make the development environment lighter in color. When I was at Microsoft a few weeks ago, another developer I work with showed me this cool feature.

To install this theme control, in Visual Studio 2010 click TOOLS, then click Extension Manager. Here you can add a whole bunch of cool controls to your development environment. Select online gallery on the left side menu, and add Visual Studio color theme editor! This will install the editor and you will now have the themes menu control. Enjoy, I love it!

Threat of 'cyberwar' has been hugely hyped (CNN)

Here is interesting reading about cyberwar vs cybercrime. What I know about cyber space, and what our partners know, cyberwar and cybercrime is real and must be taken seriously. When more and more systems require cyber space to operate, cybercrime or cyberwar is a clear and present danger. On any given day, our cloud based systems are attacked thousands of times an hour. These attacks are not done by humans, but by bots probing for weakness in the software, in the hardware and network systems. I have personally fixed websites that were created incorrectly by other corporations that were not designed to prevent attacks, where pages of data that a human cannot see, but were located in the DMZ, with open connections to the database server...hello??? and the bots just ate them up, and created millions of records that needed to be cleaned. Then you have the attacks on the DNS servers to shut down the internet.

So, as more and more governments, corporations, and individuals become completely dependant on cyberspace, it is and will always be a target for crime, and war. Its up to our existing law enforcement, and military to protect it. The USAF mission is read today as Space, Air, and Cyber. In 1990 it was Air and Space. So when developing software in todays world, it MUST be developed to prevent from being attacked, and that is very difficult to do.