Today when I tried to start MSSQL EXPRESS 2005 on my laptop in which I have not started the SQL service for quite some time, I received the following error:

Windows could not start the SQL Server (SQLEXPRESS2005) on Local Computer. For more information, review the System Event Log. If this is a non-Microsoft service, contact the service vendor, and refer to service-specific error code 3417.

And I found the following error detail in the Event Viewer (Windows XP: Start > Settings > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer > Application)

“The file ‘ C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data\mastlog.ldf ‘ is compressed but does not reside in a read-only database or file group. The file must be decompressed.”

Immediately the cause was known. As my laptop disk space did run low quite some time ago, Windows actually helped to compress the files that were not used frequently. MSSQL doesn’t know how to load compressed database files, as simple as that.

I simply browse to ‘ C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.2\MSSQL\DATA\ ‘, right click on ‘ mastlog.ldf ‘, proceed to ‘ Properties > General > Advanced ‘ and uncheck ” Compress contents to save disk space “

If that still does not solve your problem, try to do the same for all the files under that folder, that should do the trick.

Cheers!

I was working in one of the projects where our client requested to allow clean URL  which contains ampersand symbol (&). The website is powered by our inhouse CMS which allow generation of clean URL (without file extensions) by page.

While it is not a good practise (at all) to allow ampersand (and other special characters) in the URL, there are some situations where you just have to work around it and accept those URL (e.g. the URL was previously created and the URL was widely spreaded).

By default, IIS will block URL requests containing special characters (%, &, :, *) for security concerns, throwing error “400 Bad Request” (or simply “Bad Request” for some cases).

The workaround is rather simple, just following the following steps. Be extra careful as it involves changes in your registry

1. Set “AllowRestrictedChars” to 1 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/820129)
2. Set “VerificationCompatibility” to 1 (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;826437) – yes, it applies to ASP.NET frameworks other than 1.1
3. If you are running on Windows 64-bit version, you may also want to set “VerificationCompatibility” to 1 (Path: Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\ASP.NET)
4. And if all the above does not help, you may want to try to set “<Page ValidateRequest=false>” on your website’s web.config

Do note that for step 1 and 2, you’ll need to restart IIS and/or HTTP related services, so you may want to follow the steps closely.

Hopefully it will help those who had the same problem as I did.

WebEx, currently acquired by CISCO, was started up aiming to provide a suite of applications specifically designed for business processes such as sales, support, training and marketing processes. Any company taking web platform seriously in their business will find it advantage with WebEx’s on-demand collaboration, online meeting, web conferencing and video conferencing applications.

Using WebEx out of the box is straight forward. However, to date, WebEx seriously need to have their documentation relooked, especially the “Lesson-1: How to get started” kind of documentation.

Here, we are going to look at the fundamental steps in integrating WebEx API, particularly in ASP.NET.

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Finally, I spared some time on upgrading adorr.net from WordPress 2.6 to 2.8, skipping the 2.7 Coltrane that was a big leap from 2.6, mainly on the back-end changes for user interface and some core architectures.

Some notable features and upgrades on WordPress 2.8 (The Baker) after 2.7 are:

• - Faster and smoother back-end admin panel;
• - New (easier to use) theme install capabilities;
• - Syntax highlighting in the code editor;
• - Improved Widget user interface and support for using more than one widget of the same type;
• - New screen options in every page to better organize the items on the screen.

Although upgrading WordPress is known to be simple and straightforward, I still followed through the WordPress Official Upgrade Guide as I couldn’t afford to lose anything on my site. As usual (bet they haven’t change much on their upgrade guide for some time), it takes only three simple steps. Particularly, the following was what I did to get WordPress 2.8, mainly detailed elaborations on the three simple steps…
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Google Maps has made its presence for quite some time now, and we have seen many sites utilizing it for various purposes. This includes SinGeo and maplandia.com.

In this post, I would like to talk about the indepth of how we can overlay multiple maps in one display, and allowing to toggle between maps in real-time, all these with the available functions of addOverlay(), removeOverlay(), and clearOverlays().

I would assume that you have already known the basic of Google Maps. If you have not, check out the Basics of Google Maps.

I will start off with a simple demonstration of 3 overlapping google maps (using KML taken from SinGeo)

• View All
• MRT Stations
• Webcams
• Wifi Hotspots

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