Author Archives: NeoSmart Technologies

How to Repair the Windows Vista Bootloader

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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There’s a section of the EasyBCD documentation/user manual/wiki that contains more than just information on how to use the program. If you’ve corrupted your bootloader, run into one or more bootmgr-related errors, installed Windows XP or Linux after installing Vista, or otherwise managed to fry, crack, melt, or break the Vista bootloader, then here’s how you fix it.

We’ve compiled information from over twos-years’ worth of experience with fixing broken bootloaders into a single guide, broken up into subsections for varying levels of damage to the bootloader. If you can get into Windows, we advise that you download & install EasyBCD, then follow the instructions in this section of the guide to repair the Vista bootloader from within Windows.

If your bootloader is so damaged that you cannot get into a Windows operating system, then get your Windows Vista DVD out and boot from it. If you don’t have a Windows Vista DVD, grab a copy of our Windows Vista Recovery DVD instead, stick it in your CD-ROM drive, and prepare to boot from it.

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Forget Mashable; It’s the Chinese You Should Worry About!

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Several days ago, blogger Louis Gray lashed-out at Mashable‘s considerable disregard for proper citing/linking back to the original source on certain stories. Gray’s post spread pretty fast across the blogosphere, with support coming in from all corners of the web. As a result, Mashable updated several stories with proper links and acknowledgement to the original sources.

But the truth is, what Mashable does is nothing, nothing in comparison to what goes on in the non-English territories on the web. A couple of days ago, we published an article along with a download link to a Windows Vista Recovery DVD… Within 24 hours, we’d gotten first taste of the Chinese Web. For some odd reason, our story download link to the 120MB ISO image spread like wild-fire in the Chinese corners of the internet.

To put things in perspective, NeoSmart Technologies was under load the equivalent of 15 simultaneous Slashdot effects. Impressive, right?

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Hotlinking of Vista Recovery Disc Disabled

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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The Windows Vista Recovery Disc ISO image that we published a couple of days ago has been a hugely-popular success – thank you all for your interest and your links. Unfortunately, we’ve had a lot of people (*cough* Chinese download sites *cough*) hotlinking the image directly, and as a result we’ve been forced to take certain measures.

The Windows Vista Recovery Disc is a 120 MiB download, and our bandwidth has jumped quite drastically since making it publicly available. Effective immediately, all hotlinked requests to the ISO image are being redirected to the download page, we ask you (quite humbly) to refrain from linking directly to the image file.

We haven’t done anything evil like disabling the usage of download managers or any other such nefarious actions that would bring the wrath of our beloved readers upon us though; so no worries :)

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Don’t Believe The Lies: PHP Isn’t Thread-Safe Yet

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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If you took everything you heard for granted, you’d have been lead to believe that the official PHP distributions (from php.net) have been thread-safe since version 5.2.0.

That’s not true. Don’t fall for it. Don’t attempt to use PHP in a multi-threaded environment (mpm_worker on Apache, ISAPI on IIS, etc.), because PHP thread-safety is a myth.. nothing more than a bunch of lies, if you will.

If you look at the PHP download page, you’ll see that the pre-built binaries (in this case, Windows) are split into two: thread-safe and non-thread-safe:

Thread-Safety

The problem is, no matter which you choose, PHP isn’t thread safe. You’ll still get the same, old, dreaded “PHP has encountered an access violation at memory_address” error.

It’s not a question of server configuration so much as it is one of PHP writing bad code and pretending that’s not the case. PHP isn’t multi-threading ready and most everyone knows it… but it seems they still feel the need to pass it off as if it were, never mind the complaints and bug reports that come.

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January 2008 Update

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There’s been a lot going on so far at NeoSmart Technologies, and 2008 is shaping up to be an exciting year… Yes, January is almost over; so, no, this isn’t a New Year’s resolutions list. The thing about New Year’s resolutions is that they’re almost always left unfulfilled. But that doesn’t mean we can’t share the good times, does it? Here’s some stuff to look forward to out of NST’s camp in the coming days/weeks/months:

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Microsoft to Push Silverlight via Redesigned Website

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Microsoft SilverlightSeveral months ago, Microsoft inserted themselves into the RIA framework business – years too late and against pretty scary odds – with the initial release of the Silverlight framework. Microsoft Silverlight is the online counterpart to the Microsoft .NET 3.0 Framework and a direct Adobe Flash/Flex competitor.

Microsoft isn’t new to the whole “virtual” monopoly business (where a single company holds the entire market thanks to “superior technology” and “better business sense”) – it’s just not too often that they’re on the wrong side of this particular proverbial fence.

When Silverlight was first announced and PopFly, Microsoft’s social network built to demonstrate and hopefully kickoff Silverlight, were simultaneously launched; we were quick to appreciate the technical aspects of .NET and WPF taken online, but were careful to make it clear that we didn’t think it stood much of a chance.

But things might be on the verge of a big change. Large portions Microsoft’s website are in the middle of a redesign that will feature a fully Silverlight-powered interface – doing away with HTML and everything else. We’ve had a chance to test the new interface (currently in beta), and here’s what we think:

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Scribd Isn’t Flickr…

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Scribd isn’t Flickr. Sure, they’re both similar: both are social “web 2.0” websites established on the principle that people love to share stuff, both let you tag and group objects, both give you unlimited space, and both are great examples of the internet being put to good use. And, let’s not forget, both seem to love to Murdr the English language (pun intended)… But that’s where the similarities end.

Flickr is for photos. Scribd is for documents. Period… Or at least that’s the way it should be – theoretically.

So why is that so hard for people to get? Something about Scribd’s ease-of-use and flexibility has made people forget – and it looks like the people up top don’t seem to mind much, either. For instance, “i LOVE Milla Jovovich,” a group with over 1500 photos pretending to be documents was one of today’s “Featured Groups” on the Scribd homepage.

But the thing is, Scribd isn’t only not intended for photos, it’s not optimized for photos either. Users are uploading photos as PDF documents – unnecessarily increasing their size and limiting the photos’ usages. It has limited tagging options, doesn’t support any form of EXIF implementations, and offers all the wrong tools.

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Microsoft’s .NET-Powered Windows Live Writer

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Believe it or not, Microsoft’s Microsoft .NET LogoWindows Live Writer is important in more ways than one. To most PC users, Windows Live Writer is simply the best tool that gets the “job” done. More importantly is how “job” is defined though, because WLW does things quite well and quite thorough.

Windows Live Writer has a huge range of options and takes advantage of almost all the features and functionality available via remote blogging/XMLRPC that make it almost pointless to even enter your blog’s administration center. You can upload images and movies, set categories and keywords, specify the slug/permalink to posts, modify the post date, set passwords on posts, send trackbacks, manually create an excerpt, and even specify whether comments are or aren’t allowed on any given post – all this without leaving your desktop client.

But what most don’t know about Windows Live Writer is more what it represents than what it does: Windows Live Writer is the first full-scale consumer product to ship out of Microsoft’s camp built on the .NET Framework.

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Are you Still Manually Approving Online Sales? Don’t!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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The whole point of the online sales revolution, and as a direct result, the growth of companies like Amazon, eBay, and dozens of smaller sites like Newegg and ZipZoomFly, is to take advantage of the benefits brought by technology to the retail industry. These advantages include less overhead costs, fewer employees, constant availability, and instantaneous sales. So, please do tell, why is that you’re still manually verifying and validating all sales before they go out!?

This may not be too obvious when you’re selling tangible goods over the internet – after all, there is still a lot of the “human element” when it comes to packaging and shipping the product. But when you’re selling digital products, be it software, music, games, or text, you should never, ever have a human doing the verification. It’s insulting.

With presence of automated purchase validation systems, like 2Checkout and PayPal IPN available which give virtually real-time updates on the status of a transaction and let you know when you’ve received your money (or at least when it’s on its way), there is absolutely no need for a data monkey to press “OK” at the prompt. After all, what’s this data monkey know that PayPal’s IPN report hasn’t already told your system?

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Vista’s Purple Screen of Death

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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We’ve all heard of (and, quite unfortunately, experienced) the infamous Blue Screen of Death. Some of us who tested the earlier Windows Vista beta builds had the unique experience of trying out the Red of Screen Death, which occurred when the bootloader experienced an un-handled exception (we experienced more than our fair share of these during the early days of EasyBCD development!). And then there’s Vista’s Purple Screen of Death, which few have seen.

Vista Purple Screen of Death 

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