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I am on transit to USA, doing this blog from Singapore Changi Airport. Flying out of Chennai to USA, gives you good options only if the transit is either in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur. BA flyes only twices a week out of Chennai, I heard they are flying everyday from this year-end, Lufthansa flies out everyday to Frankfurt and now Delta has started the service. But after years of flying, I seem to prefer the Asian Airlines, particularly on the long-haul flights and you are flying Economy. I find the service in Asian Airlines (Singapore Airlines, Malaysian, Thai or EvaAir) to be anyday better than European/American airlines, especially the attention of the InFlight Staff and ofcourse the meal. After 9/11, the European and more so all American airlines have cut everything they can including service I suppose, added on top of it no visible upgrade of interiors/Aircrafts. Compare this with Asian Airlines, the 777-300 I travelled from Chennai to Singapore (Singapore Airlines) was literally brand new. The Economy seats surprisingly where comfortable with all adjustments available on seat, individual on-demand Video and good Aisle pathway spaces. Though Indian travelling abroad spends the most in day, the average revenue from an Indian Passenger for a seat is one of the lowest in the world (I believe due to Government Regulations), western Airlines are reluctant in offering their best to this sector.
Last year, when I flew from Chennai to Seattle by NorthWest Airlines (via Mumbai, Amsterdam), I had my worst nightmare. The flight was a very old DC10. Compared to that, my journey today was a pleasant experience. I hope my next leg from here to Los Angeles and then to San Jose is equally good.
You can’t live without a desktop search utility installed now. Though Copernic and X1 have been there around for years, the need for this became clear only with Google entering the arena and Microsoft announcing similar capabilities in their Longhorn OS.
Almost a year back, I started using Lookout – which is being offered free from MSN Sandbox by Microsoft. I instantly started seeing it benefits, with the ability to find emails accurately and that too in seconds (unlike minutes or hours that Outlook otherwise takes). I quickly realized I can also have it index by Data partition in my hard drive, which really helps in finding stuffs especially if you have GBs of Data and the files go back several years in time. I normally keep my data files in a seperate partition (D:\) which is different from my OS partitions. This way I need to backup only one partition and will get back all my stuffs – emails, files, favourites, etc. Within this partition, I keep the files in meaningful folders that normally go by the year (2001, 2002, etc.) inside each categories – main folders (Photos, Softwares, Emails, Documents, etc.). Once I started using a Desktop search, I became slightly complacent in following this rule, but anyways that is not my story today.
Though I liked Lookout, when Google launched their beta desktop search, I downloaded and tried it. The speed with which the results came back at you was amazing. Though I missed the ability to conveniently put filter criterias (From Date, To Date, From a sender, etc.) like in Lookout, I should say it was impressive. Quickly I had to remove it, because it required Administrative privileges and my normal userID doesn’t have that permission for security reasons. By then MSN Toolbar Desktop Search came and I have been using till yesterday. Comparing with Google, what I liked in MSN was mainly two things – 1) It runs perfectly under non-admin users as well, 2) The ability to double-click on an email shown in results and easily have the email opened in Outlook. Other than ability to search IE History there is nothing major that I was missing in MSN search, anyways just for a change I was looking at alternatives.
I tried X1 (and the Yahoo version of the same), it was definitely very impressive when it comes to relevance and speed (in fact, PC Magazine had recently voted it as the Editors choice) but I was not comfortable with the UI, it was a bit “Old”. So I kept searching – I remembered about Copernic Desktop Search. Few months back my Sister in Law who has hundreds of word documents in her PC, was finding it difficulting in managing her files, I recommended she install a Desktop Search. It turned out that she had Windows ME and non of the popular Desktop Searches (Yahoo, Google or MSN) work on Windows 9x. It was then I found Copernic and recommended it to her.
Remembering this, I downloaded and installed Copernic Desktop Search. Though it took a long time to index my hard-drive, I am happy with its functionality. Watch out for more of my comments on this topic, as I start using it on a daily-basis.
Tip: On installing Copernic Desktop Search, one thing I didn’t like was its default web search goes to Alltheweb.com. I wanted it to go to Google.com or MSN Search. I searched and searched, but couldn’t find a way to do the change in the default UI of the application. A quick search in RegEdit utility revealed the key and I got it working my way. The key name is URL and it is found here “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Copernic\DesktopSearch\Meta\Categories\TheWeb”. I have given below registry (.reg) files that you can use to switch it to Google or MSN Search. Remember to download the file, rename the .txt extension to .reg and double-click on them. Since Copernic Desktop Search caches this hive, you may need to log off and login for the change it to take forward.
You can also download this registry file, rename it to .reg and double-click on it, to have your web search in Copernic set to Google.
Just after I started using Copernic Search, within days MSN released the final version of its Windows Desktop Search (WDS). On my evaluation in my desktop, WDS seems to be impressive, especially its built-in preview and IFilter Extensions. I think the game has completed just one lap!
Apart from my laptop (HP nx7010) I always have a powerful workstation in my desk. The Desktop serves as my experiment (R & D) machine – in other words, the machine that I trash every few weeks with beta software (like VS 2005 CTPs!) and have it reinstalled. Because of this, the desktop gets outdated very quickly and I get a replacement done every 12 months or so.
The latest desktop in this series has been my new AMD 64 based beast with 2GB RAM and Sony 17″ LCD. Though I got it about two months back, only early April 2005 I installed Windows XP 64-bit on it.
Though I was skeptical initially (mainly due to the claims on the media that 64-bit is only for Servers campaign for years) about 64-bit, after using the machine for almost 2 weeks+ I should confess that I have fallen in love. Everything about it has been good, Windows boots up in seconds (unlike minutes with my co-workers desktops) , all applications I use including Visual Studio.NET, Word or Excel come up almost instantly. The reliability is unbelievable.
Remember the bad ol’ days of Win16 to Win32 upgrade?. Oh’ god, I don’t want to relive it. But this time the upgrade to 64-bit has been without any major compatibility problems. The only two issues I faced are:
- Non of the major Antivirus vendors support Windows XP x64 (they do support Windows Server 2003 on Itanium platform). I tried unsuccessfully with our existing AV Vendor – Symantec (we use in all machines NAV CE) who said they have no firm dates for support, CA E-Trust Eval & AVG Eval. Amongst this NAV and E-Trust gets installed but their Real-Time Support don’t work – what good is an AV without Real-time protection anyways?. After a Google Search, I found this E-Week Article “Windows x64 Lacks Major Anti-Virus Coverage“, that confirmed my findings. But the same article pointed me to ”Avast! Pro“, writing to their sales, got me an instant reply with a path to download. I downloaded and installed their eval today morning. It seems to work like a charm!
- Non of the HP printer drivers that came with your printer will install. Windows XP 64, requires all drivers to be 64-bit. But after experimenting with a few HP printer drivers that comes along with Windows from Microsoft, I got our Network Printer working.
In Windows XP 64, 32 & 64 bit applications run side by side, with the 32 bit legacy application (the new application you wrote yesterday with Win32 API is now called legacy) running on a WOW (Windows on Windows) layer. Notice all the major applications that comes in Windows are now 64-bit, this includes your Explorer and Internet Explorer. Notice in the screenshot below after the application name *32 indicating these are 32-bit applications.
So if you are buying a machine any time soon, go for the big jump – the 64 bit jump. For me, I am now waiting for the jump to 128-bit 
Setting up Debugging ASP (vanilla Active Server Pages, not ASP.NET) has always been tricky. I remember doing it for the first time as early as 1998 or so. It was during MS Visual Interdev launch in Chennai, which happened to be my first presentation for Microsoft India as well. Those days, it was on Windows NT 4.0 SP4 & IIS 4.0. The whole installation normally would take those days (with those ancient hardware) about half a day.
Anyways, today we were setting up a web application that was written by us long time back on ASP. We successfully restored the DB, copied the source into a Windows 2003/IIS 6.0 machine and tried to run. We got strange errors and figured out that if we are going to get this working, we need to debug the application line by line. So started the effort of getting a simple ASP page debugged in Windows 2003. After nearly 4 hours strangely I got it working across 3 different OS configurations!
Before going to the steps, remember that setting up Native Debugging (in fact, any form of Debugging) in a Production Web Server is a big security risk and performance degrade, so please do it only on your Development machines.
Windows XP (32-bit) SP2, IIS 5.1 & Visual Studio.NET 2003
- Ensure the currently logged in user who is running Visual Studio.NET is a member of the “Debugging Users” group in the computer.
- Ensure you have IIS 5.1 installed with Frontpage extensions enabled. Try creating a simple Visual Basic.NET ASP.NET Web application and run it.
- Once it runs successfully, add a new file into the project and name it “Check.asp” or any other name, but .asp file extension. Then have a simple <% Response.Write (“Welcome”) %> ASP line, setup the breakpoint on this line.
- Run VS.NET 2003 Setup, and ensure you have either Native Remote Debugging or Full Remote Debugging (as shown below) enabled. I think these features are available only VS.NET Enterprise Editions. If not, have it installed.
- Then right-click on the VS.NET web project properties, in Configuration Properties -> Debugging, select ASP Debugging (as shown below)
- Open in Notepad URLScan Configuration file (normally found at C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv\urlscan\urlscan.ini). This comes pre-installed with Windows XP SP2. Add a line in the [AllowVerbs] section, DEBUG. This is to add an allowed Verb, in this case DEBUG, HTTP method.
- Go to IIS MMC Snap-in. Right Click on Web Sites, go to Home Directory Tab, click on Configuration button. Goto to Mappings tab, select .asp row, click Edit. In that dialog box, select All Verbs (as shown below). Press OK all way down.
- Reset IIS, using IISRESET command from Command Prompt or IIS Snap-In.
- Go to the VS.NET Web Application, right-click on the ASP file (Check.asp) and Set as Start Page.
- Run the VS.NET application in Debug mode by pressing F5, you should hit the break point. Good Luck.
The above steps work only if both IIS and VS.NET are on the same machine and you are also administrator to the box. Both these may be rare (and potential security bad-practise) in a real scenerio. In that case refer to my general items to check at the bottom.
Windows XP (64-bit) or Windows 2003, IIS 6.0 & Visual Studio.NET 2003
Windows XP 64 bit, ships with IIS 6.0. So remember to Allow the Active Server Pages, in Web Server Extensions page in IIS snap in. Apart from this you should follow all the steps I have told above for Windows XP 32-bit.
Some webpages, talk about running IIS 6.0 in IIS 5.1 mode, I don’t think so it is necessary. IIS 6.0 perfectly supports debugging of ASP pages with VS.NET 2003.
Windows 2003/Windows-XP (64 bit), IIS 6.0 & Visual Interdev
- Ensure your IIS is up and running.
- Then Allow Active Server Pages, in Web Server Extensions page in IIS snap in.
- Create a simple ASP page, run it and check that it is working correctly.
- Have the second CD of Visual Studio 6.0 handy. Launch the setup and select “Server Components”, choose “Backoffice Server components”, press Install, in that ensure you have Visual Interdev Server and Remote Debugging components selected. Install them.
- Reboot the machine.
- Install Visual Studio 6.0 Service Pack 6.0 and Reboot the machine.
- Create a simple Web project in Visual Interdev and run it. Most probably your Front Page Server extensions will need tweaking, set it up.
- Create a simple ASP page, name it “Check.asp” or any other name. Then have a simple <% Response.Write (“Welcome”) %> ASP line, setup the breakpoint on this line.
- Refer and ensure you have all the points mentioned in my section “General Items to check” below, especially #2 & 3.
- Run it, it should work. If not doesn’t worry, normally it takes more than few hours to get this working especially with IIS 6.0.
- Refer to this support page at Microsoft at “INFO: Visual InterDev 6.0 Debugging Resources“, which contains a host of links on this issue. Since many of the contents here are dated and for Windows NT 4.0/9x,
General Items to check
Even with all the above, you couldn’t get it working, check out the following:
- Ensure the currently logged in user who is running Visual Studio.NET is a member of the “Debugging Users” group in the computer. You may also want to add “INTERACTIVE, NETWORK SERVICE, IWAM_MACHINENAME” users into the group for testing and once everything works out, keep removing them one by one.
- The official pages: Visual Studio Remote Debugging Setup index page and ASP Remote Debugging Setup. The second link talks of adding few registry keys. For convenience, I have saved it as a text file here. Download and save it in your machine with .REG file extension and run it. It will add the necessary registry keys.
- Check whether you have enabled ASP Server side script debugging enabled. This can be done in IIS Snap In, Web Sites, Right-Click Properties, Home Directory Tab, Click on the configuration button, go to Debugging Tab (as shown below):
- Go to Component Services from Control Panel. Go to Computers->My Computer->DCOM Config, in that select the Catalog Class object. Right Click and go to Security Tab. In that Select Access Permissions area. Select Customize, press Edit and ensure to add all the relevant users (like IWAM_MACHINENAME, NETWORK SERVICE, INTERACTIVE, etc.). NETWORK SERVICE user will exist only on IIS 6.0 (Windows XP 64 bit and on Windows 2003), so if it doesn’t exist, it is OK.
- In the Catalog Class properties dialog, select Identity tab, ensure “The Launching user” is selected.
This thursday when I was signing a letter, I wrote that day’s date as 05/05/05 (dd/mm/yy format). It suddenly dawned on me that the day, month and year are same. Interesting but useless fact, right?
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