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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Gutsy Gibbon and Really Slow Internet

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Last month, Canonical Ltd. released the newest update to their extremely popular Ubuntu: Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10)… But it hasn’t been all fun and games, as thousands of irate users will tell you… If you search the web, the blogosphere, usenet, and the Ubuntu Support Forums for slow internet problems, you’ll get more than you ever bargained for. Ubuntu 7.10’s networking stack is broken, make no mistake about it.

The symptoms include incredibly-slow internet access, inability to access certain domains, slow logon times, slow application launch times (under GNOME), and so on and so forth. There hasn’t been any official acknowledgement, but the consensus is that it’s a bug that’s re-surfaced from Ubuntu Edgy Eft (version 6.10).

In short, internet on Ubuntu is useless. There are multiple guides across the net with the solution along with an “explanation” we find to be inadequate and fundamentally flawed. The solution is to disable anything that even smells remotely of IPv6. Remove it from the network settings, remove the definitions from the hosts file, configure your favorite web browser to pretend it doesn’t exist, and you’ll get your internet back.

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Why Skype for Windows Mobile Sucks… On Purpose!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Skype is a great and most-useful program, and undoubtedly one of the revolutionizing services in the world of online communication. Windows Mobile (both versions 5 and 6) is an awesome examples of mobile productivity and portable office that fits in your pocket. But unfortunately, the two just don’t mix… not at all. Skype for Windows Mobile has been out for years now, and it’s completely unusable thanks to a problem that has yet to be addressed: it’s absolutely useless without a headset.

Skype doesn’t make this too obvious, but if you take a look at the Installation Instructions for Windows Mobile, you will find this:

At the moment, Skype calls only come through the loudspeaker or a headset. We’re working on this [emphasis added], but in the meantime, please use a headset for the best audio quality.

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Windows Vista SP1 RC1, Server 2008 Nov. CTP Released to Testers

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Microsoft [[MSFT]] has just released another version of its most-eagerly anticipated Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista, labeled as Release Candidate 1; along with another build of Windows Server 2008: the November CTP. Both releases are available to official testers from Microsoft Connect.

This is the third SP1 release made “available” to the public, starting with the leaked build back in August, followed closely by the first official release of Windows Vista SP1 beta in September.

Vista SP1 RC1 (build tag: 6001-17042-071107-1618) has been available as both an slip-streamed ISO image and a standalone upgrade utility. The slip-streamed ISO image is available in either English or Japanese, while the upgrade utility supports the five main Windows Vista localizations (Arabic, English, French, German, and Japanese).

The Windows Server 2008 November CTP (build tag: 6001-17042-071107-1618) is only available as an ISO in English in multiple flavors (Web Server & Standard Edition) for multiple platforms (x86, x64, and IA64).

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Microsoft FastCGI Updated – But Should You Upgrade?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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We previously covered the final release of the IIS FastCGI module, jointly developed between Microsoft and Zend… But just this week, Microsoft [[MSFT]] announced the availability of the RTM of the IIS FastCGI module.

So what’s going on? We’ve downloaded the current release (which, by the way, is not compatible with the old one, you must uninstall then install the new version) and checked the version number on \Windows\System32\inetsrv\fcgiext.dll – it came out to be 6.1.36.1.

By contrast, the version we downloaded and installed a month ago (which seems to have been dubbed the Go Live release) was checked and found to be 7.0.6001.16606.

Obviously the Go Live release was using the numbering from the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 releases, but it’s got us confused.

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Proper Shell Scripting on Windows Servers with Perl

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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  • Fact: Shell scripting is a must for any serious IT admin managing a server. From automating backups to checking logs and keeping server performance and load in check, scripting is a must.
  • Fact: Shell scripting on Windows sucks.1
  • Fact: Shell scripting on Linux and other *nix operating systems is powerful, well-documented, and quite straight-forward.

Most people take a look at these three facts, and instantly come to a conclusion.. the wrong conclusion: you can’t properly manage a Windows server because it’s inherently lacking in the shell scripting department.

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  1. Hopefully Monad (Microsoft Power Shell) will provide a solution, but so far the results are mixed; and it’s not popular enough to be considered a viable substitute at the moment. ↩

EasyBCD 1.7.1 Released!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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EasyBCD 1.7.1 has just hit the press, our caching engines have been activated, and we’re ready for you to come and get it!

EasyBCD 1.7.1 is a bugfix build that fixes a couple of bugs and improves some other aspects of the program:

  • Compatible with the new Wubi Gutsy Gibbon releases.
  • EasyBCD now warns users if NTLDR or Bootsect.dos was not found in the process of adding a XP or 9x entry.
  • The WinPE section has been completely overhauled… under the hood. No more delays, just raw, sheer performance to match the speed of WinPE 2.0 itself.
  • Rewritten (no longer caches responses) update checker.

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Getting WordPress Super Cache to Run on a Windows (IIS or Apache) Server

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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If you’re a regular reader, you probably know by now that we just love performance and can’t get enough of server performance-improving software/code… Especially when it comes to WordPress.

Donncha has recently released a great plugin for WordPress, called "WordPress Super Cache." It builds on the original WP-Cache plugin by Ricardo Granada – except that it fixes all the bugs in the original implementation and has been written in enough pure PHP that it’ll also run on Windows servers – both IIS and Apache for that matter! <cue applause>

At the moment (as of version 0.3.1) it needs a bit of work to make it run, but not much. So here goes – 10 easy steps to get cached content on your IIS or Apache server under Windows:

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Is the Gigabyte P35-DQ6 Being Discontinued?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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The Gigabyte P35-DQ6. Gigabyte’s most-popular motherboard in recent history and possibly the best-selling Intel [[INTC]] Core 2 Duo motherboard currently on the market. It overclocks well, it’s well within budget for a performance PC, it has tons of options, and it’s pretty damn stable. Is it also on the verge of a product recall?

In the past two weeks, the GA P35-DQ6 has been – quite literally – disappearing off shelves both online and offline. Popular online computer part retailers like Newegg, ZipZoomFly, TigerDirect, Fry’s, and Amazon — all of whom carried this highly-successful board a month ago — no longer have it in stock.

What’s even weirder (scarier, even) is that some stores like NewEgg and ZipZoomFly would keep some sort of record of out-of-stock items. The page would still be there, a backorder button would be present, and there would be some form of indication or the other that the product, at the very least, even existed at some point of time… but for some odd reason, they don’t.

We even had the DQ6 in a saved wishlist on NewEgg, and it just vanished from the wishlist without a warning or notification – only the 200-dollar less total alerted us to its absence – whereas an nVidia 8800 GTX model that was currently out of stock presented us with a colored warning in bold, red text at the top of the page.

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