development blog for the wicked stuff we encounter

Today is not my day - working with standard database management functions gives me more application errors as if I were typing blindfolded in Visual Studio and pressing F5 :D Today’s second googlely-clickitry-click-hotfix-install stopper was a lovely error, when I tried to get a Table usage Report from a database: System.Xml: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. Nice! Impressive! Informative! :D Of course it was reported before, and a hotfix is avaliable, so I’m just writing for the magnificent MS mailservers to handle me the download link… well it lasts for 15 minutes now (I’ve checked the spam folder…:) )

I got a backup of a database from a client, and I wanted to restore over a newly created database. When I selected the file, the Management Studio went berzerk: Cannot open backup device 'C:Program FilesMicrosoft SQL ServerMSSQL.1MSSQLBackupbackup.bak'. Operating system error 5(error not found). RESTORE HEADERONLY is terminating abnormally. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 3201) This is a true WTF heart stopper, I thought that all the backups were invalid since we’re running the site :D Afterwards it turned out that the client backs up the database files to a networks share, so magically somehow the permissions has been altered for a local restore. According to this hint by Stevied, I added the Network Service user as an owner, and voila: all functionality magically returned… :)

I’ve recreated a website for my friend using the Joomla portal-framework, the successor of the late Mamboo portal-engine. I personally think it is a bit over-rated, not an easy-to-use system at all.

One huge error I found with the 1.5 install: the search got mixed up somehow, and it failed with the following error message:

Fatal error: Call to undefined method SearchHelper::checknohtml() in /plugins/search/content.php on line 254

..and of course there were no checknohtml() functions in any of the directories.

So i’ve downloaded the last stable version, and found out that originally, this function must live in the ~/administrator/components/com_search/helpers/search.php file. So i’ve just copied over the old file, and voila: it’s working.

For some unknown reasons, using Google Mail or Google Mail for your domain with Windows (Live) Mail is a configuration hell. However, as I’m the proud author of ChromeMailer, on some occasions I need to use a real mailer program, for example sending multiple files (which was a true pain in the ass with the web based Gmail since last week), or sending Html mails with inline images.

If you set up your Gmail account according to Gmail Help, it will simply not work, Windows Mail will keep you entertained with silly error messages like  “This could, for example indicate a lack of memory on your system” and other nonsense error messages.

The only working setting is the following:

1) Your IMAP server is imap.googlemail.com not imap.gmail.com (and pop.googlemail.com instead of pop.googlemail.com)

2) Your SMTP server’s port is 587, not 564.

3) Under the IMAP tab, you should uncheck “Store special folders on IMAP server”

Now you can re-sych your accont, and finally you are able to check your emails :)