For whatever reason, Microsoft has decided that driver signing is now REQUIRED in Windows Vista x64 (and I hear this also applied to Windows 2008). There used to be a couple of different ways you could disable this requirement, but as of Vista SP1 neither of these methods work anymore. There are also individual pre-SP1 hotfixes that “fix” Windows so you can’t disable the driver signing requirement. This is a big issue for anyone who wants to use tweaked video drivers, or for anyone who wants to use VMWare Server. Read on for the solution.

At a company I work for we recently had to downgrade from the 64 bit version of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 back to the 32 bit version (long story ). After removing the 64 bit version of SQL Server and installing the 32 bit version and then recreating the master db and setting up all of the databases again, Optimum no longer worked correctly. I could log in fine, but whenever I tried to open up Employees, or just about anything else, I got a big nasty error message saying “you must declare the scalar variable @USERID”. Read on for the solution to the problem.

Getting Syspro e.net Business Objects to work remotely from a non-Administrator account can be tricky if you’re not familiar with DCOM. Syspro has some general instructions in their Support Zone, but they are missing a couple of steps for Windows Server 2003. Below are the steps I used to configure DCOM for Syspro e.net Business Objects in Windows Server 2003.

Visual Color Picker is one of the most handy little utilities around (and it’s free!). It’s basically a stand alone, all purpose color picker for Windows. It’s got all the little sliders and swatches you’d expect in a color picker. [...] Both HTML and RGB color codes for your selected color are displayed in the main window, ready for cut and paste. [...] There’s also a handy Color Preview window that allows you to see how different colors look together. [...] By far the most useful feature of all is the Screen Area Capture. This is similar to the eye dropper tool in Photoshop, but you can grab a color from anywhere on your screen! [...] Simple, handy, just works, and it’s free!

In this post I will explain how to ensure your WHM/CPanel installation is access securely using SSL. WHM and CPanel support SSL out of the box, as long as you connect to the right port. However, the words whm, cpanel, and webmail are a lot easier to remember than port numbers like 2087, 2083, or 2096. So, I prefer to log in by putting them at the end of the URL. Unfortunately by default these URLs point to the insecure ports, and not the SSL ones. Sure, you can you use “/securewhm” instead of “/whm” or “/securecpanel” instead of “/cpanel”, but that’s more typing, and there is no “/securewebmail” alias by default. Besides, why would you ever want to log into these services without SSL? Fortunately, you can change this behavior and have all of these URLs point to the SSL ports.