28 October 2010

Adobe Shows Off Prototype Tool for HTML5 Animation

13 October 2010

"NTLDR is missing" error on Windows 7

I was running a dual-boot XP Pro/Windows 7 box, with Windows 7 running on a second SATA drive. Finally decided to move the drive inside and surplus the XP drive. I hooked up the new drive internally and booted up, only to see it throw this error:
NTLDR is missing.

Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart.
No amount of rebooting helped. We tried using the Winternals boot disk to no avail. Finally did some research and found a forum thread that helped.

Two issues were going on: I had another external hard drive that was set to "Active" in Disk Management. The second issue had to do with the missing XP drive; apparently, the dual-boot menu was stored on that system. Following the instructions on the Microsoft article, I ran the Bootrec.exe utility with each of the switches, each time testing using the /ScanOs switch. It kept showing that there were 0 Windows installations.

But I crossed my fingers and rebooted anyway. Lo and behold -- it worked! One or more of the switches fixed it. I booted into Windows, logged in, and Windows automatically downloaded and installed the latest drivers for my system -- including dual displays.

08 October 2010

Java JDK installation on Windows

Installing Java on Windows for development can be one of the trickier things, especially if you're looking for Java 1.5 vs. 1.6: Java 1.5 is not readily available for download. However, some digging reveals this great site with a link to the download (which requires registration). From there, you can find the 32- and 64-bit versions of the Windows' installers.