Since installing Windows 7 RTM I have been slowly reinstalling all of my development programs.  The only one that has given me a fit has been SP1 for Visual Studio 2008.  The base program installed just fine, but SP1 failed every time.  Even after trying some suggestions I saw while searching, nothing worked.  But, earlier today I finally found success.  Prior to firing up the install for SP1, run the following from the command line (make sure you fire up the command prompt as an administrator.

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reg delete HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\DisabledSessions /va /f

After running this command, SP1 installed with no issues.

Most of you know that my favorite Twitter client for my BlackBerry has been UberTwitter.  I started using it since their first beta release and have been an avid user ever since.  Yesterday saw a new update to the application, Beta 4.  Two items included in this update jumped right out at me.

It appears that Twitter is still experiencing some issues with some API calls.  UberTwitter is still not returning any data on my BlackBerry, and my news aggregators that post to Twitter using TweetSharp are returning nothing via the response.  I would take a guess that these issues are related to the DDoS attacks yesterday.  Hopefully things will be back to normal soon.  Anyone else having issues with the Twitter API?

 I am sure that most of you are aware of today’s attack against Twitter.  The attack crippled the service for a good portion of the day.  News is coming out now about the attack, and according to an article by The New York Times the attack could be related to cyber warfare.  The article cites Bill Woodcock, an expert in this area, who believes the attack was a result of the conflict between Russia and Georgia.  Woodcock stated the attack was not like a normal DDoS attack, as these attacks were using spam emails to overwhelm the service.  Hopefully this is not a sign of things to come.

Twitter seems to be experiencing a rather massive outage this morning.  The social media site has been down for around an hour and a half.  There is no word on what the issue is or when it will be resolved.  Twitter’s official status blog states they are looking into the issue: Twitter Status

Yesterday afternoon ESPN released a memo to it’s employees detailing guidelines in their social media policy. I’m not sure they were really guidelines, but appear to say you cannot participate in any social media conversations that involve sports (without prior approval from your department head). You can judge the policy yourself by reading the memo as sent to Mashable.

Have you ever had the need to use a label control, but you don’t need the span tag that the control automatically wraps around the text? Switch your control over to the Literal control instead. It serves the same general purpose as the label control, but will not wrap your output in those pesky span tags.

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<asp:literal text="Some random value" runat="server" id="myControl"></asp:literal>
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You can then use your normal server side code to the change the value, just as you would the label control:

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myControl.Text = "My new random value"
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This is just a quick note that Adobe has released the public beta versions of ColdFusion 9 and the new ColdFusion Builder. Download links are below. I would also like to point out that while you try these versions out, please report any bugs you find to Adobe. This will benefit them by allowing them to address the issues and it will benefit the community as a whole, as in the end it makes for a better more stable product.

Download ColdFusion 9 Beta

Download ColdFusion Builder Beta

Adobe has just released the hotfix for the FCKEditor security issue. You can read about and download the hotfix directly from Adobe.

A summary of the potential exploit taken from the Adobe security bulletin:

A vulnerability in FCKEditor, which is included as part of ColdFusion 8, could allow a remote attacker to upload files in arbitrary directories which could lead to a system compromise. This hotfix updates the version of FCKEditor included with ColdFusion 8, turns off file upload capabilities by default, restricts access to cfm files in the FCKeditor\editor\filenamanger directory, and limits file upload capabilities to users with valid sessions. This issue is remotely exploitable. There are reports that this issue is being exploited in the wild.

Last night Google dropped some very big news to the world: Google Chrome OS. Yes, you heard that right, Google will be releasing a new operating system. From the small details that were revealed, the OS will be based on a Linux kernel and will first be targeted to netbooks and will be open source. Google is already working with hardware vendors and claim you will be able to purchase a netbook powered by Google Chrome OS sometime in 2010.

The interesting piece of this news is the OS will be built in a way that most of the user experience will take place over the web. So according to Google your apps that run on the new OS will also be able to be used on any of standards compliant web browsers. I was surprised at this news as I am sure some other makers out there were as well.

You can read the full post from Google on their blog.