IIS7 & PHP5

I am constantly setting up Sugar CRM versions - new ones each month - and working with different platforms as we upgrade.

The latest was to also swap to a new server platform in Windows Server 2008 with connection to a separate MS-SQL server all in 64-bit. Installed PHP5 and found amongst other things that sugar was giving a "cannot connect to database server" error when first loading.

Quoting from http://www.userscape.com/helpdesk/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=13

The resolution is with the "ntwdblib.dll Version - On some systems the ntwdblib.dll version is too old to work correctly with PHP. If your version does not end in 80.194.0 it's probably too old. You can download the 80.194 version here."

I was puzzled that the PHP5 install still includes a very old version 7.x something but went ahead and updated the ntwdblib.dll to the 80.194 version and the database error was cured.

Seven Words They Do Say on Television

Doing some web searching this morning and I came across a couple of articles about the late George Carlin. As an avid George fan way back in the 70's and 80's I lost 30 minutes or so reading articles including the Washington Post regarding a posthumous Twain prize awarded to Carlin last night (US time).

'Irony on irony' is the result of bleeping out the Seven Words You Can't Say on Television!

The stupidity for me is that the Carlin skit was first aired circa 1970 (I have not checked but I think this is right) and in the ensuing 38 years have seen the appearance of all bar one that I am aware of, and that one may well have been used just not in my hearing.

So why on earth would you censor a comedy skit that simply plays on the words and their common usage and questions why we use some of these words to hurt each other. We use them on TV already.... or maybe Australian censorship laws are more relaxed and the US made movies and shows that we see get a different soundtrack to what is played at home in the US. Maybe the irony is that the only people that don't hear the words are those to whom George was directing them.

Regardless, I am sure it's true that Carlin was simply way ahead of his time.

R.I.P George.

Fake Spyware message in Windows

Fixing a PC with a stupid Spyware bubble message.




"Windows has detected spyware infection!" is the alarming message popping up from your Windows toolbar. Windows XP in this case but likely to occur on other versions in a similar way.

Its not Windows doing the detection. The Windows operating system does not do detection. Spyware products do.

The other clues about this being a fake message is that the spelling is atrocious. 'pervent' instead of 'prevent' and 'recomended' instead of 'recommended'.

The message is malware. In longer words, the message is from a piece of software that is malicously designed and sent to your computer via an email or from a website. Once it is in the computer it's main aim is to get you to click on the bubble message and download their product which you then need to pay for.

Having spent a number of hours booting and rebooting, trying various AV techniques and looking into the registry I located more than a handful of issues including a rootkit. At that point I decided to grab what data I could save and reimage the system. Painful, but less so than manually trying to recover and still ending up with a compromised system.

First Take!

Hmm... musing on blogging and why or why not. I spend so much time tracking down fixes for computer issues that I have finally taken a leap and started a blog of my findings. 25 years of computers and sorting problems out and I've forgotten more than I remember about software and systems. In some ways thats ok as a lot of the software and systems no longer exist. So this blog is all about my PC experiences past and present.