I received an email from Infragistics with a bunch of images. Every time I move through that email in Outlook 2007, it goes crazy. There is no virus in that email. Just a bunch of images and text.

Linksys wusb600n USB wireless N device shuts down while in use. I have experienced this on both Windows Vista and Windows 7. I checked why the connection was broken and then tried repair. Wireless settings are active. In the end I looked at the device and there was no light. I pulled out the device and plugged back in and it started working.

This may be due to the fact that the driver by default allows the device to be shutdown by the OS when not in use to save power. The problem seems to detecting if the device is in use and how long it has been in use. I need to look for a better wireless N device. I can update the device to never shutdown but that is not what I want.

Update: I disabled the option to allow shutting down to save power. That didn’t solve the problem. The radio goes off. I turn off the radio from device manager and turn on again to get the network connection back.

Update 2: I have reinstalled the driver version 2.0 from the Lynksys site.

There was a time when you could look for reviews of gadgets on Internet. These days there are no reviews. Most are either advertisements or just PR stuff. Major e-commerce sites are flooded with positive comments from who knows whom. You buy the gadget and then experience the pain.

I have cut down greatly on my gadget purchases due to unreliable products, faulty drivers and lack of reviews. I also cut down on online purchases because if I find the devices to be faulty, it is much easier to return to the local shop rather than returning to online site. That may help the local economy as well even though I the sales representatives are not that friendly or helpful.

Time to renew my car insurance. Wanted to get a quote from Geico. Instead I got this. This is a common theme every time I try to get a Geico quote. They should spend some of those caveman money on building a good infrastructure. I will see in 6 months.

Now the error changed. What is information on New Jersey?

I am a software developer and part of my job involves developing web applications. That means an IIS instance runs on my work computer.

Today after a computer restart, my web application won’t come up. I tried debugging from Visual Studio and it said debugging is not enabled for ASP.NET. I checked the requirements for ASP.NET debugging and everything seems to be fine.

Next logical step was to check the W3SVC service and it was running. Restarted the IISAdmin service which in turn restarted all related services and did not solve the problem.

Opened up the IIS admin snap-in it says the web site is stopped. When I clicked the start I got the error: Unexpected error 0×8ffe2740 occurred

Time to check the even viewer.

The service could not bind instance 1.  The data is the error code.

For additional information specific to this message please visit the Microsoft Online Support site located at: http://www.microsoft.com/contentredirect.asp.

Why is Skype listening on http (80) and https(443) ports?

Turns out that if those ports are available, Skype uses your computer as a supernode. Bad for a computer in a corporate network. It shouldn’t be there by default. But the official response is here.

What you can do?

At home I wouldn’t worry much unless it starts degrading my overall internet experience. But the bandwidth at work is precious.

Either way, I am going to disable Skype from automatically starting. That would resolve it blocking IIS from starting.

I tried using Chrome browser to login to Vonage and got this message:

Then I tried IE and everything fine. Came back to Chrome and got the same message again.

I am trying to create an iTunes store account that can be used on the second (old) iPhone. I did not want to attach a credit card to that account. Apple wouldn’t let me do that. I ask myself why do they need a credit card information until I make a purchase? Need a new law preventing such practice. No business should ask for credit card or social security number unless it is required to complete a transaction.

I found out a workaround that is to use a gift card to complete the account creation. So I go to the iTunes store and try to purchase a gift card. It won’t let me either. It gave me an error saying my legit account that I use on my new iPhone and successfully used for other transactions is not eligible. The error message is “This account is not currently eligible to purchase gift certificates”. Right. I can buy a certificate that they will mail to me but not something that can be used right away. The reason: not eligible! With Apple you never know what that means. You don’t need to know. You just need to be protected. Sound familiar?

There are some discussions at apple forums about this but not answered.

This is one of the reasons why I always wanted a Windows Mobile phone. But I ended up with not one but two iPhones. Wonder why?

I was listening to the hak5 podcast and heard a GameFly ad. I thought I heard there was some promotion there. Opened Chrome and type in GameFly address. Nothing comes up for a while and I look at the bottom and it says “Waiting for ad. somesite.com”.  I closed the tab.

It may be a good idea to prioritize your web content over ad delivery if your business is a subscription model.

Why would I want to change the resolution of my screen to that lowly setting?