I recently stumbled into an issue of which a ClickOnce application was not started when trying to open it using a browser (doesn't matter if it was Internet Explorer, or Google Chrome, or ...). An XML file was always visible in the browser.

After doing some reach, I noticed the .application file was served as content type: text/plain

We have an older version of Apache HTTPD running (2.2.8, with a release of 2008-01-19). In the $APACHE_HOME/conf/mime.types file, there was no mentioning of the content type for files with extension: application. In a more recent version of Apache HTTPD, the mime.types already takes care of these files.

After adding the following lines (and restarting the Apache HTTPD server), the problem was solved

application/x-ms-application 		        application
application/manifest 			        manifest
application/octet-stream 		        deploy

Problem

From SQL Server 2012 version, when a SQL Server instance is restarted, it can be possible the table's identity value is jumped and the actual jumped value depends on identity column data type. If it is integer (int) data type, then the jump value is 1000 and if big integer (bigint), then jump value is 10000. From our application point of view, this increment is not acceptable for all the business cases specially when the value shows to the client. This is the special case/issue ships with only SQL Server 2012 and older versions have no such issue.

Solutions

• Using Sequence
  • Remove identity column from tables
  • Create a sequence without cache feature and insert a number from that sequence

  • CREATE SEQUENCE Id_Sequence
        AS INT
        START WITH 1
        INCREMENT BY 1
        MINVALUE 0
        NO MAXVALUE
        NO CACHE

• Register -t272 to SQL Server startup parameter
  • Open SQL Server configuration manager
  • Select SQL Server 2012 instance
  • Right click => Properties
  • Choose tab: "Startup parameters"
  • Register parameter -t272 in the field: "Specify a startup parameter"
  • Restart the SQL Server 2012 instance

After a recent Microsoft update, my Office software packages (Word, Excel, Visio, ...) started to do some strange things. Within Office 2013, the screen output would be distorted. The ribbon was not painted properly until I mouse-over them again, or moved Office programs around. Other times the display would look corrupted and the navigation tree would not be properly rendered.

The underlying issue is discussed in KB 2768648 - Performance and display issues in Office 2013 client applications.
While the underlying issue is with the video card driver, there is a workaround until the video driver is updated.

Controlling Via Registry

Set a registry key to disable the feature Disable hardware graphics acceleration:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Graphics - REG_DWORD - DisableHardwareAcceleration Value: 0x1

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My Macbook was recently running very slow. I've noticed Spotlight was constantly rebuilding the index. By executing the following lines of code in my terminal, the corrupted index was fixed:

$ sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
$ sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

Query to list all the indexes which are disabled in your database:

SELECT
    sys.objects.name,
    sys.indexes.name
FROM sys.indexes
    INNER JOIN sys.objects ON sys.objects.object_id = sys.indexes.object_id
WHERE
    sys.indexes.is_disabled = 1
ORDER BY
    sys.objects.name,
    sys.indexes.name

My webhosting recently upgraded to PHP 5.4.X - my website is currently running on an old installation of Drupal 6 (version 33). I was suffering a lot of PHP warnings when browsing through some of my webpages. An interesting patch could be found at https://www.drupal.org/node/1543434, which actually cleared all warnings.

Thanks Peter Bowey!

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