It took over an hour to figure this one out this morning. Setting up Drupal 6 on Windows 7 (instead of Linux, which would be my preferred platform but this time I’d no choice). Everything went smoothly until I got the White Screen Of Death (blank page) when I tried to launch the install.php. OK, probably screwed up the MySQL URL in settings.php. Nope. That’s the usual usr:pwd@localhost/db format, too simple to get wrong. Apache errors? Nope, nothing in the logs. Apache .htaccess or <Directory> options? Nope, I’m using familiar and well-tested boilerplate. And on it went down the diagnostics rat-hole.
Eventually I checked the MySQL session connections and there was no sign of anything inbound. Uh oh… Double check [click title to read more…]
Windows 7 (and Vista) does not permit a static IP address and DHCP support to co-exist on the same NIC. The registry hack that works for XP does not work on newer Windows. I needed to add an extra local IP address for testing of some server software, but my NIC needs to use DHCP in the office. The solution was to install the Microsoft Loopback Adapter and assign a local IP address to it. Installation was easy:
Run a command prompt as Administrator.
Run the command: hdwwiz.exe
Select the manual installation option.
Select Network adapters and install the Microsoft Loopback Adapter
Configure the new local connection in the Network and Sharing Center
I picked a 10.*.*.* address, [click title to read more…]
It’s an annoying bug in Windows 7. The folder tree to the left of the Explorer view (present in Windows Explorer, the Save dialog box and elsewhere) does not have a horizontal scroll bar. So if, like me, you have a well-organised and deep hierarchy of folders to be explored, you’ll often find that the deeper folders disappear. Sure, you can drag the vertical divider to expand the tree’s view, but that unnecessarily constrains the main view. The bug has been around for quite some time. I don’t hold out much hope of anyone fixing it any time soon.
Screenshot of a typical Save As dialog in Windows 7
For weeks I’ve noticedĀ the laptop churn along at 50% CPU (total spread over both cores) and the temperature slowly rise, to the point that the trackpad was too hot to use. Thank goodness for wireless mice. Task Manager showed nothing in particular, but when I decided to use SysInternals Process Monitor (now a MS tool) it revealed that the load was caused by hardware interrupts.
Searching the Web turned up lots of possibilities but nothing certain. I experimented, and eventually discovered that this was only happening when my Wifi was off. If I resumed the Wifi, or disabled it completely through Vista’s “Manage Network Connections” panel, then the interrupts stopped. I’m using the latest drivers. Odd.