IT and technology

Just ran into a small issue while trying to export JPEG files made from RAW files provuded by 25 megapixel Sony Alpha 900. Every time I've tried to save or export the JPEG, Picasa would say that there is a disk error or it's full. After trying a few things here and there the solution finally materialized - you need to run Picasa as an "Administrator".

To make this a permanent fix - right click on the Picasa icon, go to properties, go to Advanced and put a checkmark to always run the program as Administrator. Now you should have no problems exporting or saving files from Picasa!

Recently I've needed to use SIP/VoIP application on my iPhone (iSip and Softphone) only to discover that my D-Link DIR615 doesn't work correctly with SIP traffic. The router has some settings, but no combination would allow the phone to work, so I've had to replace it.

I needed something fast, fairly flexible, with wireless access point. After a quick look at what's avaliable from D-Link, Linksys and Netgear I've picked up Netgear WNDR3700 wireless router.

So far the new router runs like a champ I'm definitely having none of the issues (such as dropped connections) as I've had with the old. This is by far the best and fastest router I've tried, and tried many in my line of work.

So here is what makes WNDR3700 special:
1- Gigabit LAN
2- Dual band wireless - 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz
3- Dual band wireless guest network (separated from LAN)
4- QoS (quality of service) which allows for traffic proritization
5- USB hard drive sharing

If you are experiencing error "WindowsUpdate_80096004 WindowsUpdate_dt000" when running Windows Update on Windows 7 64bit Ultimate, Vista 64bit Ultimate or other 64bit versions - please try the following:

Just discovered a "feature" of recent versions of windows that can lead to loss of your data. In fact, this is something that has happened to me, but luckily I've had backups!

If you try to MOVE any of your personal folder within your profile (such as "My Documents", "My Pictures", etc) they will be moved to a new location, but you will still have "My Documents" or "My Pictures" which will point to the new location. Windows does this automatically, so you never loose track of your files. However, later you may discover that it appears that you have files in two locations - the old one on drive C C:\Users\username and in the new one (where ever you've moved the files). If you delete to clean up your computer and delete files from that "OTHER" location - you will erase all of your personal files. You don't actually have files in two locations - Windows makes a link in your "C:\Users\username\ to the new location.

I thought i had files in two places and deleted one of them - well, they were gone from both.

If you've done this - restore from backup. If you don't have a backup - stop using your computer immediately and use a data recovery software before you overwrite those files. They are still probably on your computer, but are marked as "free space" by windows.

Good luck and be careful!

If you own a business or if you have important files on your personal computer - you should really think what would happen to you if the hard drive crashed and . At the very least, you will loose a lot of time trying to recreate some of the files. In the worst case - your entire business can be devastated.

Beyond this scary disclaimer above - I'm not going to tell you why backups are important. But I will tell you about a few tools that you can use to make sure your data is safe. If you are a photographer or in any other business that depends on data on your computer, there are a few very cheap ways to make sure your important files will stay safe.

There are three basic strategies for backups:

As recently as 2007, there were thousands of certification centers in the United States that have specialized in Microsoft certifications such as Microsoft certification series (MCSE, MCITP, MCPD, MCA, MCSA, MCTS and others) and Cisco's CCNA, CCDA, CCNP...
Right here in San Diego there were about 80 various locations for certifications and roughly 30 colleges and cert. centers offering the preparation courses. The biggest one - MicroSkills (which advertised heavily on TV and radio) went out of business right as the recession was approaching. Many companies have sensed it a mile away and others were simply disenchanted with
the whole certification industry.

Analyzing logs for this site I've noticed quite a few people looking for information about Dlink DIR-615 features and operation. To help all those people I will review portions of the configuration that majority look for.

All of the important options are in the "Advanced" tab of the router configuration. Let's take a look at them one by one (you can find the configuration sections on the right of the router's administration page).

Virtual Servers: this is a useful but improperly named feature. It should have been called "port address translation" or PAT. Do not confuse it with "port forwarding" which is very close in function, but works a bit differently. Here you would specify a port on the firewall, that needs to be mapped to a different port on one of the computers on the network.

Example: You have several (two in our case) web or ftp servers on the network, but you have one IP address and can't share one port 80 or 21 for connections to all of these servers. The solution is to use port translation! If your first ftp server is at 192.168.1.10 on port 21 you create a rule by filling out the information on the page. The entry for FTP server one would have the same public and private ports since you are trying to make a streight through connection. However, for the second server you would change the public port ( TCP 31 in our case) but set the private port to still be 21.  So when you need to connect to the Server 2 via FTP from outside your network, you would use ftp://*your public IP*:31. When your ftp client connect to the router on port 31, it will know that this connection needs to be redirected to the port 21 on the FTP server 2 at 192.168.1.20