tek-works.com

Last night some friends called and told me they were having problems installing Intuit’s TurboTax, every time they tried to install it Turbo Tax would have an error that BootStrapper Setup Failed and asked if i’d come check it out.
On Intuit’s web site the make it clear that if you get this error you need to uninstall .net framework 2.0 Link. What they don’t tell you is what to do if you can not uninstall .net framework 2.0.
Going into the control panel and clicking remove on a program doesn’t always work. This is what happened in the problem last night. With .net Framework, many programs use it in the background of your system, so it could have either been corrupt or windows just didn’t want to let it go, if some other program was using it.
Searching for a way to uninstall .net framework 2.0 manually pointed me to this site Aaron Stebner’s Blog where he’s written a program that will completely uninstall all the .net frameworks that you choose. The .NET Framework Cleanup Tool worked perfectly, one thing you may notice is that since many programs use the .net framework in their background, once you reboot some programs like at&t firewall and other things may not work, BUT once you download this .net framework 2.0 SP1, install it and reboot all programs should start to work once more.

If this post helped you please leave a comment, thank you

Technorati Tags: .NET Framework, BootStrapper, Installation, Intuit, TurboTax

On another one of my sites, celebrating the coming soon of my first son, I wanted to add a twitter update on the side bar, not unlike the one I use here on Tek-Works.com, but since it’s mostly family and they’d have no idea how to use Twitter. I wanted a wordpress twitter plugin that allowed them to reply to my tweets and it would show on the site but also send to my twitter on my phone. After alot of searching, I found one plugin that worked like this. The downside is that it used your username and password to send those tweets and others were complaining of Spammers hitting it over and over. The owner did add a moderation to it, but this function wouldn’t allow me to easily moderate from my phone and it wouldn’t be hands off. I still like the idea but I can’t think of a way around the spammers.

This got me thinking about other things spammers have ruined, the big one that everyone could guess is Email, no need to get into that one. One thing that you may not know is bandwidth, Spammers will hack a site or even create paid for or free hosting services and setup a bot. This bot will instantly start to send out millions of email, many times the hosting company will be monitoring this and catch it, but then not only is your and the worlds connection just a bit slower but now your account is shut down or site deleted to stop the bot. Take that and multiply it time thousands, you start to see the problem, you also see why Spammers make money, from a recent study: from http://tinyurl.com/56uhl4

“After 26 days, and almost 350 million email messages, only 28 sales resulted,” says the research paper.

Yet even with this apparently abysmal response rate of less than 0.00001 per cent, the researchers still estimate that the controllers of a network the size of Storm are still bringing in about $7,000 (£4,430) a day or $3.5m (£2.21m) over a year.

Spammers also ruin blogs, even with many anti-spam tools, spammers still get a post or 2 on many sites, if you take the time you have to read through the spam, monitoring your own site and the time it took the programmers to create the anti-spam tool, Spammers also are stealing our time. Next time you get an email asking you to buy something, even if it’s the coolest thing in the world, don’t buy it from them, do a Google search and buy it from a real company. If we can stop that 0.00001% of buyers maybe we can starve the Spammers out of business (yeah right!)

Technorati Tags: Blog, Password, Spam, twitter

Yes, the title and image are strange for a tech blog but hold on a bit… Here’s the back story..
My wife receives Pink Magazine every month, I’ve never read it but I have carried it from the mail box into the house, month after month. Yesterday, I open the mailbox and see the Pink Magazine, grab it and instantly put all the mail back in the box except the magazine. Again, I haven’t read it, but something seemed different, the cover felt different and the entire magazine didn’t feel the same. After bringing it into the house, I grabbed the month before to compare them. What a difference, the front cover isn’t glossy and thick paper, instead of having a hard spine like most magazines do, this months is now stapled and it went from 106 pages to 50 pages. If this was a magazine that I bought and read each month, I would wonder if next month I’d get my issue, specially with that many changes in one month. This brings me to the technology part of the post.
I’m guessing that the reason for these changes are the economy and not enough ads being sold. At what point does this happen to many publications (not just newspapers) and at what point do they just start to go online? If I was forced to take my magazine and change it to something that in my opinion looks like a college magazine, I’d be seriously thinking of online. In Pink’s defense, they do already have a large online presence. Seeing all these changes may have only been noticed by me, since I did a few searches today and found no one else complaining about them.

What are your thoughts? about magazines going online? would you complain if your favorite magazine suddenly went cheap on you?

–EDIT UPDATE–
I just found some info on Pink Magazines site about this, they only mention one of the changes but they also do mention they’ve started Pink Magazine Online.. So I guess i’m a bit behind on this..
Read about it here

The above photo of my driveway was brought to you by Google Maps, who I guess likes to take street view images of your house on garbage pickup day..
But I guess this is also a good image to say it’s time to take all the trash out and restart blogging again on Tek-Works. As you can see on the Archives page, there’s stuff on here from Dec 2006, I skip a month or 5 and then blog some more, skip a few more and blog again. So lets see if I can go the entire year of 2009 without skipping a month..
To help me, I think I’m going to be posting things like new tech bookmarks I create, some code for Wordpress and .net stuff I run across at work and any hacking kewlness I come across.