If you tried to install Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio .NET 2005 (aka KB926601), via Microsoft Update or manually, chances are high that the upgrade failed. The reason is that the deployment MSI package is almost 500M large. Before the actual installation process begins, Windows tries to verify the package. In order to do it it needs to load it into a continuous block of memory. Since even modern … more »

There used to be quite a few problems, when installing Drupal on GoDaddy's shared hosting. There is a lengthy discussion of the related issues. However, recently GoDaddy fixed a few most serious ones, in particular, they gave users permission to invoke MySQL "TABLE LOCK" command, which was the greatest problem of all. So if you deploy Drupal on GoDaddy now, it should be a very straightforward process. If you want … more »

An article in EconBrowser tells an interesting and probably worrying story of an employee pension fund for the City of San Diego, USA. In short, a legislation was passed, that used any fund's profit above 8% to increase the final payments to the employees, without any requirement to invest additional money into the scheme. For years it worked quite marvellously, since markets performed exceptionally well and the fund made 8%+ … more »

Looks like Yahoo! follows closely Google - they have now something called SiteExplorer - very similar to what Google provides via Webmasters tools. Most important, they now support sitemaps , which is very convenient. more »

A very interesting article in The Guardian tells the story of a nice elderly couple from Ashford, UK, which has built a property empire worth £280 million. It's simply amazing what you can reach, if you start at the right time and in the right place. more »

A review of the latest budget speech from the small business point of view has been published . A simple Q&A article about the budget is available on BBC. more »

I was deeply disappointed to discover, that .NET framework 2.0 didn't contain XQuery implementation. Apparently, it was included in one of the earlier beta releases, but then was dropped by Microsoft in favour of the forthcoming LINQ project - some sort of blend between C# and Oracle's Pro*C (probably much prettier than the latter). I can't say I buy their explanation on why it was done or their proposition to … more »

Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2003 has been released. To be honest, I don't understand why the changes required a whole SP - the list is very short and doesn't look all that important. Maybe the release notes are incomplete? more »

The web site has new look - share your comments! more »

The official build of Fedora Core 6 doesn't include Firefox version 2, rather the outdated 1.5. Fortunately, a French RPM repository seems to fill the gap. Apparently, you can also get Firefox 2 from the development branch of Fedora - simply run more »