NortuRE's Blog

Office 2010 Technical Preview (TP) does not need any keys to install, as we might have known. But, when it nears the 30-day limit of activation, a nag screen appears asking us to activate it. The screen appears starting a few days (usually 4) before the grace period ends. For those who might still be interested in using it for more days, they can extend (or 'rearm' in Microsoft's software jargon) the software using the following method.

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I'm currently working on a database project using Visual Basic .NET, and it uses MySQL. Just a moment ago, I've updated my database connector, MySQL Connector/NET from version 5.2.5 to 6.0.3, after seeing such new version from MySQL's website. Before installing the new one, I was told to remove the old one first, so I did. The update was successful, but I was surprised to see several error messages when recompiling my project, telling me that "Type of 'MySQLConnection' is not defined".

Click on the picture to see a bigger version.

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Yesterday, I faced a very confusing problem when I was trying to burn a CD-R with Nero Burning ROM using my laptop's built-in MATSHITA DVD-RAM UJ-852S. Nero gave me an error message that says 'Invalid field in parameter' and the burning process stopped even before the progress bar show up like the one below:

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It's been a tough day today. I've taken an Digital Electronics mid-semester examination where we're asked to do two awfully confusing questions (well, at least for me, that is). I would recommend the reader to have a basic knowledge of logic circuits before reading, as the explanation below will be confusing to you unless you do so. The first one asked us to make a logic circuit design that combines adder & subtractor in one, selectable through an input pin (Sub). See the diagram below to see the implementation.

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Hmm... This bothered me for a while. Yesterday, I was designing a registration form for PMB when after some testing I noticed weird behaviour with my registration form. It would post the form without validating each entries, despite the javascript form validation check in place. At first I thought it was caused by some installed add-ons that got through Firefox unnoticed, as I see some gibberish javascript codes written after my reg. page (i.e in the built-in Firefox's View->Page Source menu).

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Quite recently, I've downloaded my copy of NOD32 anti virus (which includes antispyware). My previous AV was McAfee VirusScan Enterprise. I had a good experience with it, after so many months of usage there *hasn't* been a single incident of reinstalling my Windows installation due to virus infection! Needless to say that the software is terrific.

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My third post

This morning I noticed something weird with my Vista's notification area, the network icon was missing! This icon usually shows up in the bottom-right corner of the screen, along with battery status and audio icons. I tried the usual method to enable the icon (through Taskbar Properties->Notification Area) to no avail because its checkbox is greyed out. I previously thought it was caused by a clean-up process I recently did using a registry cleaner program, but after searching on Google I found out that the problem is caused by a slight hiccups with two registry entries, IconStream and PastIconStreams.

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