This little apps, “Open Street Map” is getting popular among my colleagues and quite becoming the topic of discussion this morning. It’s all started from strangepants who pass on the word to my bro zatlite and now everyone at the office started adding street names for their residential areas. As for me, I just observed the site but haven’t done any actual work on it since almost every streets in our area has already been added by my bro. Anyways, here is how this cool little thing works.

It’s a wiki sort of world street map where anyone can login to add/edit the streets in your region.

OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world. It is made by people like you.

OpenStreetMap allows you to view, edit and use geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere on Earth.

To edit, you need to sign in first. Anyone can open an account there easily. You can also export the chosen map area into a few formats, (png, jpeg, svg, pdf, postscript) and can play around with the size, scale etc under “Export” tab.
You can also write some diaries on it or do some GPS tracing.

Ofcos’ if you are confused with how to do the tracing, you can always check out their wiki help page. In the Beginners’ Guide, there is an very well explained introductory video for you to get started with. I’m also checking out the video and briefly reading through the steps.

I did ask my bro, who actually done editing on the map, to write a post about it since it’s quite interesting to play around but as usual the lazy slime just passed me the video and ignored my request. So here I am dropping a note to whoever out there love playing with maps to check this site out.

Ciao!

I was reading this post, “Endless Conversation: The Unfolding Saga of Blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Social Sites” from Web 2.0 Blog and checked out a few twitter applications mentioned in there.

I LOVE Summize and Twitterfeed; I use them the most. I find this two, Tweetwheel and Twitter Charts, pretty interesting especially the Tweetwheel.

The result wheel is just amazing and you can hover over to see all those links in your connections.

Beautiful isn’t it? Well, if you have time, try play around with those. I bet you’ll love a few.

This is something interesting to check out. You can access your files and folders from any of your computers remotely.

Keep all your files in sync
Use FolderShare to create a mirrored image of your most important folders – like your Favorites, Pictures, and Documents – so they’re the same on all your computers.

Sharing files is easier than ever
Sharing with friends, co-workers, and family is easy when you add and update files in a shared library. Large files? Not a problem – FolderShare can sync files up to 2 GBs in size. And it works on both Mac and PC.

Get to your files instantly when you’re away from home
Install FolderShare on all your computers, and you can access all your files from any computer on the Internet.

It’s 3 steps installation,
# it will ask you whether you are an invited user or a new user,
# Name your computer,
# if you are new user, this step create an account for you,
Then you are done.

If you’re interested, download and test it out here: FolderShare and visit the site.

When I install LLBLGen Pro 2.0 on Windows Vista, I got the following error and the installer rolled back itself.

Error:
The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2869.

So I dig around the forum and found this solution from Otis.

• Create a new .bat file in the same folder as the one the LLBLGenPro20.msi file is in.
• Add the following text ‘msiexec /i LLBLGenPro20.msi’ and save the file.
• Right click the .bat file and select ‘Run as Administrator’.

I tried doing as mentioned in the steps but I got the following message and couldn’t able to install it.

So I changed the Otis’s command to ‘msiexec /a LLBLGenPro20.msi‘ and run it directly from command line instead of right-click – run as administrator on the .bat file and it works!

If it still doesn’t work for you after following the above steps, I guess you better do these, disable UAC and enable XP compatibility mode as mentioned here.

Check out this program called “DreamSpark“, on msdn-channel8. This is really cool, MS for once, is giving out free developer and designer tools to students around the world.

DreamSpark is simple, it’s all about giving students Microsoft professional-level developer and design tools at no charge so you can chase your dreams and create the next big breakthrough in technology – or just get a head start on your career.

Starting today (or soon in some areas), students worldwide will be able to download our professional development and design tools for free! It’s called DreamSpark and it is upon us.

At the moment it’s available for 10 countries – United States, the United Kingdom, China, Germany, France, Finland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Belgium but they will make it available for more countries through out the year so keep checking this page for updates. Australia and Oceania regions are not in the list yet but we are eagerly looking forward to it.

And here are the list of all the available MS products that the students can download: Product for Download

Pretty cool isn’t it? This is the best news I’ve ever come across from Microsoft these days.

This was a humongous pain for me and took quite a lot of my time so just noting down a few points for self reference. Previously, I have Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 installed on my Vista machine and they worked just fine. Now we are upgrading to VS2008, I uninstalled everything related to VS2005 then reinstall SQL Server 2005 and things got screwed up. Check out the failure list that I got – pretty much everything failed.

The worst thing about this installation is that, it takes ages to install till the end, then shows up the error message box.

Program Versions:

# SQL Server 2005 – Developer Edition
# Windows Vista Ultimate
# Visual Studio Team Suite 2008

Make sure you cross check Hardware and Software Requirements for Installing SQL Server 2005 before installation.

The first error/warning I tried to fixed was about IIS requirement. I’m sure I have IIS7 enabled on my Vista and also enabled IIS6 compatiblity mode but that is not enough and have to enable some more features.

System Configuration Check: IIS Feature Requirement
Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) is either not installed or is disabled. IIS is required by some SQL Server features. Without IIS, some SQL Server features will not be available for installation. To install all SQL Server features, install IIS from Add or Remove programs in Control Panel or enable the IIS server through the Control Panel if it is already installed, and then run SQL Server Setup again. For a list of features that depend on IIS, see Features Supported by Editions of SQL Server in Books Online.

I think it is to do with Installing SQL Server 2005 Reporting Service on Vista, untill or unless you enable all those features the Reporting services cannot be installed.

Solution:
The main features to turn on are as mentioned here but I turned on almost everything just to make sure.

More info links:
# How to install SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services on a Windows Vista-based computer
# Installation of SQL Server 2005 in Windows Vista – warning message on IIS feature requirement during System Configuration Check
# Tip for Installing SQL Server 2005 Reporting Service on Vista

Ok, this one is the weirdest error and solution I got. Don’t even ask why in the world do I need to install Office 2003 Web Component add-in while I have Office 2007 installed on my machine. I have no clue, but that’s the only solution I found which works for me. It solves the “OWC11 Setup failed error and the following error message.

ERROR 1706 Setup cannot find the required files. Check your connection to the network, or CD ROM! For other potential solutions to this problem, see c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\1033\Setup.chm

Solution
You have to download and install “Office 2003 web components” first and install SQL Server 2005 again; which then in my case cleared the error and installed successfully.
# Download: Office 2003 Add-in: Office Web Components – owc11.exe [ 17.6MB ]

After everything is done, remember to install Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2. Pheewww! That’s it!

I’ve been moving around files and programs from the old XP to a new Vista machine and Infragistics is one of the problems I get while installing on Vista. Just posting it here for my own future reference.

Program Version:

# Infragistics NetAdvantage 2005 Volume2 + hotfixes
# Windows Vista Ultimate

Problem:

The installer runs almost to the end then throws up some compatibility issues errors and didn’t get install properly. The dll library files get loaded in the GAC but cannot load the form design views and also there is no infragistics folder in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\aspnet_client.

Solution:
Need to follow these 4 steps properly.

1. Disable User Account Control (UAC)
2. Restart your machine
3. Edit the System Registry for Internet Information Services (IIS)
4. Enable IIS 6.0 Compatibility

Reference Links:

# FAQ:Installing NetAdvantage for .NET on Windows Vista
# Tip/Trick: Using IIS7 on Vista with VS 2005