Lately I prepared a bunch of spreadsheets in Open Office that contained lists of calendar data and values. I had a template file that already contained the basic layout which I just needed to fill in. So I typed, copied, typed, and so on until I was finished after almost three hours of work.

After saving the document and re-open it on my notebook (another installation of Open Office), I found my whole list of dates displayed with different years – they had gone four years into the past. At first I thought I made a mistake, corrected the dates, saved the document and re-opened it on my desktop computer. Yet again I found the dates shifted. I corrected the dates again, saved and re-opened it and annoyingly they were shifted again.

After a while I figured out that the reason for this behavior was due to different settings of the base date in Open Office

where one installation was set to to the default of “30/12/1899”, the other one to “01/01/1904”. Normally I would have expected that the base date settings are stored in the spreadsheet document, but for some reason this is not the case.

After settings both installations to the same base date, the problem was solved. Simple, if you know where to look. In the end it had cost me quite some time to figure this out.

Quite some time ago I discovered the Ambient Nights project by Alex Hephaestion, a collection of very high quality ambient music mixes. I haven't visited the project page for a while, but today I did and I was delighted to see that the project is still active.

Yet again I'm fond of the great quality and selection of music in these mixes. Alex, who did all the mixes, really deserves some appreciation and attention for his project.

Head over to ambient-nights.org and check it out yourself.

I'm available to help on your open source project. If you think my skillset below matches your requirements, feel free to contact me. I don't have any special preferences regarding the size or kind of your project, but preferably it should be of interest to a broader audience or address real world problems. Also, your time schedule should be somewhat flexible.

I can provide:

• Programming: C/C++, Python, Perl, SQL & database design, et al.
• Testing: Usability and stress tests
• Translations: German ↔ English
• Documentation
• Web design

Those of you who have been around here from time to time might be well aware of the lack of updates I've made over the last couple of months. This was not only caused by my chronic lack of time, but also my diffuse focus on topics.

I have always seen this website mainly as my personal playground, not wasting much thought on content or audience. Also, I'm reluctant to re-post so called 'popular stuff' that has been seen elsewhere on the web. All this has resulted in a bunch of infrequent posts I've published here, containing mainly uninteresting stuff.

I still suffer from the chronic lack of time, but I feel I should refocus the purpose of this site. So it's time to rethink, I guess...

Now, I have a very wide variety of interests and my field of attention changes over time. This comes in handy in real life, enabling me to participate in all kind of conversations. Unfortunately it is not suitable for writing articles on a blog, where you have to stay on focus of at most a handful of topics. But where to put the focus on?

Well, I'm not totally clear about this yet, but I have a bunch of ideas. What I'm already sure about is, that I won't narrow down to a single topic. Also, there won't be a redesign of the site (as I did so often in the past) and it will be continued in the form of a blog (though I was thinking about changing it into a wiki lately).

The quintessence is, that there needs to be some kind of change in order to turn this blog back into something useful. Maybe I should just let evolve it...

When it comes to webservers, my favorite is Apache. Today, however, I needed to install Microsoft’s IIS on my Windows 7 notebook for a bunch of compatibility tests of some Python web applications I wrote.

Installing IIS on Windows 7 is normally a very painless task. You just go to “Start > Control Panel > Programs” and select “Turn Windows features on or off” from the dialog box that opens. Thereafter you simply select IIS and the additional components you’d like to install. After a few moments IIS is installed and ready to use.

But today, once more, Windows did its best to cod me…

After clicking “Turn Windows features on or off” the upcoming dialog box, that should list these features, was empty. No matter how often I re-opened the dialog, it remained empty and it turned out to be a pretty stubborn problem.

I tried:

• Reboot the computer
• sfc /scannow
• Return to a system restore point created a few days ago

None of these steps helped, the list of components remained empty.

After some research on the web, it turned out that this problem has been around since quite a while and both, Windows 7 and Windows Vista, are affected. Microsoft has described the effects in its knowledge base article 934538 but the steps described there didn’t help to fix the problem. Many desperate users seemed to have reinstalled their systems because they didn’t find a solution for this issue.

Fortunately I came across a comment, which led me to this Knowledge base article, which – at a first glance – has nothing to do with this problem. However, after installing the described “System Update Readiness Tool” for my version of Windows (in this case Windows 7 x64), the problem was fixed and the list of components was properly populated.

I haven’t investigated this whole issue any further, since I had to get back to my actual task. But I thought I leave a few words about it here, just in case…