We ran into an issue last night where a web server we use for testing wasn’t able to open anymore connections. It turned out that our web application was creating too many connections too fast and Windows ran out of port numbers to allocate.

By default, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 (not sure about other versions of Windows) wait 4 minutes before releasing sockets in TIME-WAIT state (RFC 793) and the highest …

Error Message:

The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect.

Received this error after submitting an application written in C++ to the Microsoft HPC Server 2008 cluster. To fix it, simply install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package on the compute nodes. I recommend you install both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions as you may have some users compiling their applications in 32-bit and some in 64-bit.

Reference: http://docs.hp.com/en/BA683-90006/ch13s08.html

I was writing some scripts today and part of it is to compress some files. I normally make an external application call to 7-Zip command line when I do this, but then I decided to just do a quick Google search to see if Python has one built in.

It turned out there’s this zipfile module that’s part of the standard library that can compress and decompress files for you (only the standard ZIP compression …

In Windows XP connecting to the Netgear WGPS606 wireless printer server is pretty simple, you connect to it the same way you connect to a Windows print server, using the UNC path (i.e. \\print_server_name_or_ip). In Windows Vista or Windows 7, however, this won’t work.

I actually first ran into this problem about a year ago when I upgraded to Windows Vista. I then did a fresh install of Windows 7 a few months ago and …

My drive is now formatting, but I could’ve been done with the installation already if only I had the drivers handy so I’m gonna host it here on my website for future reference and hopefully it saves other people some time too from looking. I’ve found websites posting fake drivers and some require you to sign up and pay a membership fee.

Here’s a direct download link to the driver (Note: the entire content may …