Installing Google notebook extension of Firefox 3.5.x

I love google notebook, it helps me organize my daily activities and I use it as a task tracker as well. I had the firefox google notebook extension installed in previous version of firefox, but it fails to upgrade when I moved to firefox 3.5. However after some investigation I found out this very useful [...]

Visual Studio 2008 Internal Web Server stopped working in Vista

I have been debugging perfectly fine using Visual Studio 2008 using visual studio internal web server, but suddenly today it stopped working (maybe due to windows update, but still not sure about the cause of this suddenly not working), On starting the debugger IE came up with a blank page saying the page could not [...]

Return Newely Created ID of Record using Typed Datasets

When Using ADO.net typed datasets, Visual Studio Automatically creates the Update, and Insert Methods, however the return integer value indicate if the record was added successfully or not, in order to get the ID of the newely created entry one can access the ID field of the original dataset that was used to [...]

disable windows vista magnifier on startup

This took me sometime to find out, and finally found this at a forum.
Go to All Programs — Go to Accessories — Go to Ease of Access — Go to Ease of Access Center — Click the blue link titled Make computer easier to see — UNCHECK turn on Magnifier — Click Apply and then [...]

Regular Expressions for strong password in asp.net

For security consideration its always good to apply a strong password for authentication, these are few regular expressions I found to enable strong passwords in ASP.net text field control
^.*(?=.{10,})(?=.*\d)(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])(?=.*[@#$%^&+=]).*$
Must be at least 10 characters , contain at least one one lower case letter, one upper case letter, one digit and one special character, Valid special [...]

SQL Server 2005 User password expiration

It turns out that SQL Server 2005 users have a default setting of password expiration, and if not disabled after a certain time the password expires and the clients are unable to connect to the SQL Server with the error of user permissions. Disabling password expiration for the user sorts out the problem.

Managing Resources in Exchange 2003

Managing resources like meeting rooms, shared laptops, mobiles etc is required in all offices, doing this in exchange 2003 is not as straight forward as one would want it to be, however I found this very useful article how to go about doing this.
 Booking Resources with Exchange

SendMail tips

Some nice tips for setting up sendmail. The more important of it is to setup the domain name that is the MTA correct, so that the receiving server may not consider the sent emails as spam. By default emails are sent out from the domain name of localhost.localdomain which will be considered spam, best is [...]

MySQL error “Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client”

MySQL 4.1 and up uses an authentication protocol based on a password hashing algorithm that is incompatible with that used by older clients. If you upgrade the server to 4.1, attempts to connect to it with an older client may fail with the following message:
shell> mysql
Client does not support authentication protocol [...]

Email in Java

I have been using direct socket connections to SMTP server to send out emails through JSP / Java code, but it turns out that no of email clients found that insufficient since, the emails sent out this way had bad chars in the headers that most clients did not understand, I guess its because of [...]