Beta – bloggingIT

Alfresco – You Will Not Beat ME!

Christ.

I was working and playing with some settings on an Alfresco server to try and harden it security-wise. BIG mistake. I couldn’t get the bugger to start up afterwards. With other work commitments in the way, it’s been down for about a day now. I’ve tried downloading the BETA of Alfresco Labs and read various forums with no joy.

The error was

org.alfresco.error.AlfrescoRuntimeException: A previous schema upgrade failed. Revert to the original database before attempting the upgrade again.

FINALLY I found the solution at Bits n Bobs. It’s ridiculously simple: drop the table alf_bootstrap_lock and restart the server.

Now to deal with the next crisis.

Sound Stops in Windows Vista

I hear that Microsoft didn’t take one of my BETA bug reports very seriously. Even after updating the drivers through windows update, audio is an issue.

Sound is still stopping on my Analog Devices sound card, with no errors, just an absence of noise.

Since Beta 2, I’ve adopted this method (which seems to be the quickest without writing a command script):

Step 1

Run command prompt with Administrator privlidges

Click the Start button
Type cmd
Right-click on ‘Command Prompt’ and click ‘Run as Administrator’
Accept the UAC Prompt

Step 2

Restart the Audio Service

Type net stop audiosrv and press Enter.
Type net start audiosrv and press Enter.
Type exit to close the command prompt

Now go and play that CD you wanted to listen to!

Making it automatic

If you are like me and hate typing that in everysingle time, we can create a simple script to do the work for you. Start Notepad and type the first two lines of the above commands into it:

net stop audiosrv net start audiosrv

Save the file as restartaudio.cmd in Desktop.

Now, whenever the audio plays up, right-click on the file, and select Run as Administrator.

Internet Explorer 7 BETA 2

I decided to give IE7 a try today and see what the new version offered after the disastrous BETA that graced my computer system last year.

Looking at the Microsoft website – I could see that they were gearing up for the big marketing push. It was time to get people excited about a new version of IE7 (which I’m feeling quite unexcited about, but I’ll come to that).

The Internet Explorer 7 homepage is a visual treat – something you would typically expect from Microsoft when the product is being pitched at consumers. Classic productivity buzzwords are banded around like they’re going out of fashion: “Do more by doing less” / “Cut through the clutter”. Oh, and there was a nice shade of blue.

After downloading an 11MB installer, everything seemed to go okay. A reboot later (I bet you didn’t see that one coming) and IE7 was on my screen. Apparently, it has some anti-phishing system in place. That’s a good idea, I though to myself as I turned it on and clicked next. Hmm, seem to have trouble getting off this page, I mused as I hit the IE7 homepage.

Something was wrong, and it’s not the fact that I couldn’t find half the menus – or that right-clicking on the toolbar still brings up the system menu instead of something context-appropriate. Steve told me that he’d filed a bug report sometime ago about this being weird. Obviously when MS stapled “we heard you” over their IE7 website, they weren’t directing that at my colleague.

And then the grief happened. I could not move the IE7 window. At all. The toolbars stopped responding after a few clicks, and although the browser window and address bar remained functional, I was getting beautiful dropped-window corruption – the standard desktop art created by windows that are not responding.

I tried to restart IE7 a few times with task manager. Thankfully, resetting IE7 doesn’t kill Explorer as well, so all my system tray icons remained in place. However, the problem persisted.

I reminisced over installing the IE4 BETA on my Windows 95 PC many years ago. And how it created so much new functionality for Windows. It really made a difference, and the BETA was quite stable. I don’t think that I uninstalled it I was so impressed. Of course, security wasn’t such an issue then – I don’t think that I was even connected to the Internet at the time. Scrub that – I definitely wasn’t.

But I don’t feel let down. The good news is that the uninstaller seems to work very well, and I’m happily back in the land of Firefox and IE6 browsing. I suppose that after being accustomed to browsing with Firefox for so long I had low expectations of IE7. I was hoping that it would last a couple of weeks, rather than a couple of minutes but you can’t have everything.

I’m amazed that I found it even more unusable than the last BETA. So, let’s wait for the next BETA, eh? We’ll see what else doesn’t work then.