SQL Server Express - How Not To Install It!

So new year, new job and new laptop. This is a great way to start the new year.

Working for a new company has meant installing a new Microsoft based development environment, part of which is the freely available SQL Sever Express. Installing it should have been a breeze using the free to download installer (or I believe you can also install using the Web Installer). However, as I had already installed the ASP.Net framework stack it turned into a rather long process.

SQL Express does ship with Management Studio which I think is brilliant considering it's all free! However, when I installed SQL Express there was no option to install Management Studio. I, wrongly, assumed this would just be installed by default. When the install finished I looked for Management Studio but realised it was not installed. After much reading and research I found out that if you install SQL Express as part of the .Net framework installation you are unable to then install Management Studio tools as part of a subsequent instance installation.

That's really not very helpful!

The short version of the rest of the story is that you need to uninstall all instances of SQL server Express and then re install it again. Once you restart the installation you find you have the option to include Management Studio Tools.

Now don't get me started about not being able to change the servers default collation ....

Google Video Chat Fix

My wife and I tend to communicate through gtalk and recently the video chat. However, a couple of nights ago her laptop stopped allowing her to invite people to video call.

After realising it was something to do with the flash plugin I installed the latest version and applied all of the updates to no avail.

After a little Googling I found the answer to be the following and I thought I would post it here in case it's useful to anyone else.

Basically, go to your GMail account settings and find the Labs tab. Scroll right down to the bottom and there should be a Lab for Video Chat Enhancements. Click "Enable" for that lab and then save your settings. It worked a treat and she is now back up and running.

This issue seemed to effect both Chrome and Firefox although other people I have read about only seem to be effected if you use Chrome. Either way that solve her problem.

Arch Linux - LibreOffice Displaying Non English

When LibreOffice was first released I instantly installed it (via pacman) on Arch Linux. Having read lots about the grand work the project was doing to finally bring the project upto date since forking Open Office I was interested to see what they had achieved. I was quite impressed.

I don't do a lot of document based work on my Arch laptop (and there have been a number of updates since I last used it) but I went to type up a letter for the wife tonight and fired up LibreOffice and found the UI was rendering in what appeared to be Russian (which I do not read or write).

After a bit of digging about it appeared I made a fatal error in installing the libreoffice-uk language pack. Turns out that is the Ukrainian language pack ... oops!

It turns out that I am not alone in making this assumption and if you happen to hit this issue and you actually need English and not Ukrainian then install the libreoffice-en-GB language pack and all will be well (and readable) again.

Visual Studion 2010 Debugging Time Out.

One thing that has started to bother me since going to a VS 2010/IIS7 setup is that by default the time-out on the debugger is incredible short. You start looking into a problem and be on the point of realisation when a Message Box pops up saying that the thread is aborting.

Helpful, that is not.

After a little digging about I found that it has something to do with the application pool settings in IIS. To increase the time the thread is available open IIS Manager, open the application pool your site is running on and click "Advanced Settings". In the property dialog that comes up there is an item labelled "Ping Maximum Response Time (seconds)". Set this value to your desired value and click OK.

I have mine now set to 6000 which should be enough for now.

Arch KDE SC 4.7 Missing KDM Background

If after upgrading KDE to 4.7 on Arch you notice that your KDM theme is missing you need to run the following:

pacman -S kde-wallpapers

It turns out the KDM default theme use's an image from the KDE Wallpapers package which has been split out on it's own from 4.7.

Arch Linux Zope Interface Update Issue

The issue is old now, I have ignored it for about a month of pacman -Syu but in updating to KDE 4.7 tonight I hit it again.

If you pacman -Syu and get

error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)
python2-zope-interface: /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/zope.interface-3.6.3-py2.7.egg-info/ exists in filesystem

The you need to go to this page and follow the two simple commands.

It would appear to be a simple bug in pacmans conflict resolution handling. It had to happen sometime I guess!!

Disable Visual Studio 2010 w3wp Warning

So I have finally got to switch to my new laptop (windows 7, i5 lots of RAM!) and reinstalled all my tools.

This first thing that started to really annoy me was that every time I attempted to attach to the w3wp.exe process to debug Visual Studio showed a message telling me it might be a bit dangerous to do so. Clicking OK allows you to attach and debug as usual. I had to find a way to disable that message.

Apparently you can and I have! Thanks to a great little post over at thethoughtfulcoder.com it appears this can be turned off in the registry.

This is great and saved me some keystrokes however, it is the kind of thing you should be able to disable in Visual Studio itself rather than have to dig about in the registry for.