Publishing to Arvixe via Visual Studio Publish in two steps

For non-mission critical sites, it is sometimes convenient to deploy directly through Visual Studio 2010's Publish feature. I use this for a couple of simple sites hosted on the very cost effective Arvixe shared hosting.

1. Create a remote management password on the Arvixe control panel by opening the control panel, drilling down into your website configuration, and clicking on the Management tab. Enter a password for remote management and accept the change.
   
2. In Visual Studio, right click on the web project and click Publish. Then fill out the publish dialog as below, and click Publish:
   
   
   
   

Sound for Ubuntu 10.04 on the Compaq Presario CQ56

After installing Ubuntu 10.04, and then every time the kernel updated, I had no sound. The operating system seems to detect the card, and I can set the volume, but no sound is played through the speaker.

I hope the next point release gets a fix for this, but in the meantime, this page has the solution for next time I need to update the kernel:

InstallingLinuxAlsaDriverModules.

The technique I use is to execute the following three lines at the command line, and then reboot:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-audio-dev/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-alsa-driver-modules-$(uname -r)

Don't forget to reboot!


Note that you may hit the following error, which means that the package has not been created for the newer version of the kernel. The solution is usually to wait a few weeks for the package to be created and try again.

Couldn't find package linux-alsa-driver-modules-2.6.32-37-generic

Which browsers should I test in?

I needed to answer the question "Which browsers should I test in?", but was frustrated by how difficult this was to answer in Google Analytics. After months of frustration and not being able to easily give solid figures from our websites, I knocked up a one-page site that aggregates the Analytics data of the logged in user and allows them to play around with various scenarios to decide which browsers to test in. Most importantly, this uses data from the target market, not from a generic or randomised sites.

Please note that this site uses the Google GData JavaScript API, so none of your Analytics data is sent to my servers.

The site is here:
browsertest.info

One day sales site - example of jQuery widgets and QUnit unit tests

I have made a small site that uses some Javascript features such as drag and drop so that I could try writing QUnit unit tests. The tests were refreshingly easy to write, including testing things such as dragging and dropping by simulating mouse clicks.

The site allows users to view popular one-day sale sites in New Zealand, and the tests can be found here.

Microsoft Money Deluxe: "There has been an error reading or writing the file '.'"

I ran into the following error using Microsoft Money Deluxe (version 14.0.120.1105) while trying to view the Account Transactions report:

There has been an error reading or writing the file '.'

A quick Google search turned up KB281865 on Microsoft's site, but that only helped by confirming that this is a known issue. I was seemingly unable to get into the configuration dialog box to effect the fix, so not sure what to do.

The fix that worked for me was to view the report and wait for the error dialog saying There has been an error reading or writing the file '.'
to appear. Then, I positioned my mouse over the Customize... button and hit enter to dismiss the error dialog. Immediately after closing the dialog, I clicked the Customize... button, and the report customisation dialog popped up. After resetting the report using the Reset button, I was good to go!

Note that the Money 2005 Deluxe comes out of the box as version 14.0.120.805, so upgrading to version 14.0.120.1105 requires the installation of a QFE (aka SP1). This used to be downloaded automatically by money, but now must be downloaded directly from Microsoft here.

Installing ReSharper 6 causes several error dialogs

I recently installed ReSharper 6 (6.0.2202.688) into Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and was greeted with some error dialogs:

It looks as though this is a known issue, caused by a conflict between some plugins, Visual Studio 2010, and SQL Server 2008 R2.

The solution for me was to install \WCU\DAC\DACProjectSystemSetup_enu.msi from the Visual Studio 2010 installation media.

Using the File Checksum Integrity Verifier (fciv.exe) to ensure file integrity

The File Checksum Integrity Verifier (fciv.exe) can be used to calculate and verify that file contents have not changed.

Calculating Hashes

The following PowerShell command line will calculate the hashes for the current folder and all subfolders, saving the results into ..\Hashes.xml.

fciv -add (resolve-path .) -bp (resolve-path .) -r -xml ..\Hashes.xml -sha1

Verifying Hashes

The purpose of calculating a hash is to compare it at a later date to see whether the file has changed or not.

Use the following command to list all the hashes in the databases.

fciv.exe -list -xml ..\Hashes.xml -sha1

This command will verify the file content.

fciv.exe -v . -r -xml ..\Hashes.xml -sha1