How to fix "Error: foursquare.com timestamp refused. Check system clock?"

For Barriorsquare on N900, you might stumbled with this error "Error: foursquare.com timestamp refused. Check system clock?" when you try to sign-in to you Foursquare account.
Reason - This is due to foursquare.com requiring all requests to have a timestamp in them, and that timestamp must be within 10 minutes of foursquare's server time. This error means that the timestamp that was sent with your request is out of this range. Check that your device's time is set as close to a reliable source as possible and try again.

So try to reset you clock in setting menu.

GMail - Error 502

This error occur yesterday. According to the Google official blog, apparently GMail experiencing a temporary outage in GMail contact system. You know, the section where you save all your friends and contacts info in your GMail application. Luckily I was already at home (GMT +8 Malaysia time) so my GMail or other Google app usage normally drop to 5% only. I'm kind of get to use of this accessibility problem anyway.

Previously, even though my GMail is working, I usually still experiencing some glitch due to either my ISP or my office network congestion. This kind of glitch makes me wondering, are we ready to adapt a full blown service-based software or the Microsoft Outlook still shine for at least 10 more years? A tough question indeed don't you think?

Byte Order Mark (BOM) Tales

Recently I encountered a problem that I never seen before. There is no error display on the system except this weird character ÿþ. I remember searching for the log files looking for clues but nothing could be relate to this character. Later I found out this ÿþ character is an encoding signature called byte order mark or BOM for a file, in this case it's a XSL transformation file. Generally, it's a particular sequence of bytes at the beginning of the file that indicates the encoding and the byte order. For example any file with this particular encoding will have a different BOM:

UTF-8 - EF BB BF - 

UTF-16LE - FF FE - ÿþ

UTF-16BE - FE FF - þÿ

The W3C specify that all XML processor must read the UTF-8 and UTF-16 encoding. This text explain that to differentiate between UTF-8 and UTF-16 a BOM must be present, and that the BOM must be used by the parser as encoding signature. Other encoding may be supported, but no parser is required to have support for all of them, or one in particular, besides the UTF-8 and UTF-16.

This encoding signature is not to be displayed, any tool that support Unicode will understand this and will not show this to you nor consider it to be part of the text file. By checking the Hexadecimal of the file or opening the file in a non-unicode text editor will give you those characters presented in the above.

Now I know what the meaning of the character, but now how could I relate this information to the current problem? Read on...

With IE and MSXML, there are two really common errors that happen when something is not correct with the steps defined below.

An invalid character was found in text content

A parser found a character on your file that is not according the encoding declaration or the BOM specified for that file. If you have character encoded with ISO-8859-1 and then speficy the UTF-8 on the encoding declaration, this will issue the error.

Switch from current encoding to specified encoding not supported

In a basic thinking this error is almost identical to the previous, the only thing is that the parser understands that the real encoding on the file is different from the one in the encoding declaration. What the error is trying to tell you is that it can’t make the switch from the file encoding to the one you specify on the encoding declaration.

Let say if a file encoded as UTF-8 and a text encoding of UTF-16, since UTF-16 must always be two bytes, the parser known forehand that something is wrong with the encoding.

So in my case, it was the first one, character encoded with ISO-8859-1 and then speficy the UTF-8 on the encoding declaration. Case close.

Note: If none works, maybe you should consider re-install the MSXML parser according to your code, because each version has different coding requirement.

Snap-in failed to initialize in SQL 2000 MMC

I had this problem recently and this problem causing the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) for SQL 2000 fail to load all database. This is all caused by uninstalling MSSQL 2005 server which was at the same time has another version of MSSQL 2000 server installed. At first I thought the MSSQL is corrupted, however the database remain intact and accessible through SQL service or ODBC. So this must be something to do with MMC alone, and it was. Luckily the solution is simple enough.

All I have to do is reregistering the sqlmmc.dll located in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\Binn\

Just run this command

regsvr32 C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\Binn\sqlmmc.dll

That did the trick for me. There are lot of trouble related to MSSQL that I have not discovered yet, maybe I should take the MSSQL professional course.

VISTA Compatibility Issues Driver on Dell Notebook: Sonic Solutions DLA

If you buy a new Dell Notebook recently, perhaps this annoying pop-up message from VISTA's Program Compatibility Assistant is haunting you each time you start your Vista...



I've kept pressing 'Check for solutions online' for weeks but there is no solutions suggested by Microsoft. So much of "ASISTANT". I guess if you want to get thing right and fast you must get it your own. So today, the pop-message really pissed me off and I found the solution for this problem with just a query from Google.

So if you have the same problem like mine, all you have to do is go straight to this link http://kb.roxio.com/content/kb/Creator/000131CR and read their instruction. It's a patch for Roxio Drag-Drop program. Run the program, restart and my problem solved.