Free ways of earning Bitcoins

It's been a while since my last post on this blog, but I'd like to share some info with you since I dove into investing into Bitcoins lately. I've come across a few really nice websites that let you earn some free Bitcoins to get you started, so maybe you can take advantage of this too (and if this provides me with some new referrals, that's a nice benefit too of course ;-)).

I'll be listing the websites I'm using in orde of the amount of profit I've been making with them.

1) GITCOIN

You can click to claim some satoshi every 5 minutes, ranging from about 50-100 satoshi every time at this moment. This website also has some nice ways of earning something extra, like taking surveys which can easily make you over 50.000 satoshi for each survey.

2) freebitcoin

You can claim some satoshi every hour through some sort of lucky draw feature. Depending on what number you spin, you can currently get between 300 satoshi and 0.3 bitcoin every hour. You can also wager your earnings in a higher/lower game and you also earn reward points for every action you take on this website.

3) Take Free Bitcoin

You can click to claim some satoshi every 5 minutes. For every consecutive day you claim satoshi, you get a higher multiplier. The base amount is between 12 and 30 satoshi at this moment. This website also has some special offers with satoshi rewards from time to time.

4) Alien Faucet

You can "kill aliens" every five minutes to earn satoshi. Depending on which alien that gets selected, you currently get between 50 and 2200 satoshi every time.

5) Daily Free Bits

Click every hour for either 30 or 50 satoshi. No real high earnings here, but every bit counts!

No SharePoint for me anymore

Maybe I should have mentioned this earlier, but it just slipped my mind: I stopped doing SharePoint since August '10. So if you've been wondering why there are no new posts (not that I posted that frequently), that's why.

I'm doing something completely different now (sales support for the B2B branch of LG Belgium) and I love my new job, so there most probably won't be any IT related posts anymore any time soon.

I'll keep this blog as some sort of "archive" for people facing the same problems I was facing when using SharePoint and who knows, maybe I'll get back here some day for something completely different.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer has stopped working

I've been facing quite an annoying problem when trying to modify a SharePoint page throug SharePoint Designer. I could open SPD without a problem and I could easily navigate to the page I wanted to modify and when I opened it, it did render the code and the design, but it also gave me a dialog box to "Choose an encoding". Whatever endocing I selected, SPD immediately stopped working, every single time I tried it.

Luckily, I've found a workaround for this: in stead of opening the page in "Design" or "Split" mode, open it in "Code" view first. Then, when everything has loaded, just switch to Design or Split and it will work (well, it did for me...). To do this, just open SPD without opening the page already and pick "View" --> "Page" --> "Code".

SharePoint Designer error: The server could not complete your request

When the designer (or anyone else) tried to modify an aspx page or master page of one of our public sites, he could open aspx pages, but when he tried to save those or when he tried to open a master page, he got the following error:

"The server could not complete your request. Contact your Internet service provider or Web server administrator to make sure that the server has the FrontPage Server Extensions or SharePoint Services installed."

Clicking on "Details" gave a blank error. A lot of googling suggested recycling the application pool (didn't work) or extending the web application (that didn't apply to our situation, since that was when you were using FBA in stead of Windows authentication and we were using Windows authentication). The last option made me take a look at the security settings though, and that's where I found a solution that worked for me. It turned out that "Client Integration" had been turned off.

To enable this (and hopefully resolve your problem), go to your Central Administration and then navigate to Application Management --> Authentication Providers --> Default. On this page, you can enable client integration. For me, that did the trick...

"... is an invalid IP address" when editing a site binding in IIS

I was trying to change a binding in IIS 7 on a VPC to test something out and I wanted to make the url "http://intranet" point to my newly created web application on port 567.

To do this, I went to the web site in IIS, right clicked on it, selected "Edit Bindings...", selected the only entry there, clicked "Edit..." and filled in "http://intranet" in the "Host name" box. When I clicked on "OK", I got the message "'*:567' is an invalid IP address.". Turns out you can't fill in "http://" there, which makes sense cause it's already mentioned in the "Type" field, but I still think it's not a clear error message you get...

So long story short: just fill in the actual host name and not the "http" part.

Error when deploying a solution

Today I was trying to install one of the "fantastic 40" templates and when I tried deploying the wsp file, the job started running and resulted in an "error" state. There was nothing in the Event Logs and nothing in the ULS logs either. After some reading on the MS forum, I saw a post where someone suggested (for a similar problem) that the Windows SharePoint Services Administration service had to be running. So I restarted this service on all servers and tried to deploy again... and it worked! I don't know if this will apply in all situations where you just get an error when deploying a solution (most likely not), but it's something you can give a try...

Something completely different this time...

I just want to do a little promotion this time. I've got a friend who's a photographer and together we've created a website to showcase some of her work. So you should all go to www.sarahdewilde.be and give her pictures a look!

The detection failed, this can be due to a corrupted installation database

If you ever encounter the above error when trying to install a hotfix or service pack for SharePoint (as I did), then there's a lot of possible answers around, but the right one is quite hard to find, so hopefully, I can help with pointing you in the right direction.

This site helped me a lot with solving the issue, so just go there, follow the second solution and if you're as lucky as I was, it will solve the problem and you'll be able to install hotfixes and all other stuff on your server again!

Thanks to KbNk for posting this!!

Unable to select different display modes in picture library

Just a quick one this time... When you add a Picture Library to SharePoint, you usually can choose between three display modes: filmstrip, details and thumbnail. You can select these through a small menu that appears when you hover over the "All Items" view in the view picker. But what if you don't get this little menu?

This was the case in the environment I was working in. Turned out that this was a bug caused by the installation of the WSS Infrastructure Update. Luckily for all people with this problem, there is a hotfix for this:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/959644

Just request the hotfix through this page and install it on your front end server and everything should work as it is supposed to work again!

Unable to locate the xml-definition for FieldName with FieldId ...

If you're trying to deploy some custom site columns using a feature and the feature activates fine, but the columns don't show up and your logs give you the above error, then the solution is pretty simple: when you're defining your columns, you have to make sure to use brackets around your column guid, like this: {GUID}. Deploy your feature again, deactivate it, activate it again and everything should work fine! You also have to use the brackets when you're referencing the column in a content type!

Thanks to Edwin Vriethoff for posting this!

Modify the default scope for your search box

Today I got asked how to modify the search box on a MOSS site so that it displayed "People" by default in stead of "All Sites". The customer already figured out a way to do this with code, but they weren't 100% sure about it. I had to search for this myself too, cause to be honest, I hadn't done this before, even though I'm already working with SharePoint for almost 3 years now... That's why I'm making this short post, so that all the other people who are trying to do this, know how easy it really is.

To modify the default scope, go to your home page and navigate to "Site Actions” --> “Site Settings” --> “Modify All Site Settings". On this page, pick "Search scopes" under the Site Collection Administration. Here you'll see some different "Display groups", one of them is the "Search Dropdown", which is the search box you see on your SharePoint site. If you click on the "Search Dropdown" link, you'll be taken to a page with some settings for this group and the bottom one is where you set your default scope. So modify this to whatever you want, click OK and you're done!

The path specified cannot be used at this time

When I opened my IIS manager (on a server with SharePoint 2007 installed) today and tried to connect to the localhost (which had always been possible in the past, without any changes done to the server), I suddenly got the error "The path specified cannot be used at this time". The solution for this is quite simple luckily... Just go to the services on your server and restart the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service. Then refresh your IIS manager and everything should be back to normal again!

Service stuck in "stopping" state

A couple of days ago I wanted to restart the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service on one of our SharePoint servers because some timer jobs seemed to be stuck. When I tried this though, the state of the service became "stopping" and it stayed that way for hours. I tried stopping it with NET STOP, but this gave me an error that the service "could not be controlled in its current state". I read online that rebooting didn't help with most people and this also wasn't an option since this was a live server, but then I read about PsTools. This set of command line tools contains a little something called PsKill. This little tool kills the process for you, allowing you to start it again. In my case, I used it the following way:

PsKill.exe \\moss-server owstimer

This killed it immediately and I was able to start the service again.

You do have to be careful with this though, since not all services can be killed without any risk (for example when a process is writing things to a database).

One last thing, for your convenience: the link to PsTools: http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/PsTools.zip.

OWSTIMER error when restoring a SharePoint site

When I was trying to restore a web application with a single site in it and one content database, I received the following two errors:

Error: Object OldIntranet (89) (previous name: Intranet (80)) failed in event OnRestore. For more information, see the error log located in the backup directory.
SPUpdatedConcurrencyException: An update conflict has occurred, and you must re-try this action. The object SPWebApplication Name=OldIntranet (89) Parent=SPWebService is being updated by svc_moss_sql, in the OWSTIMER process, on machine MP-MOSS-INDEX01. View the tracing log for more information about the conflict.

Error: Object SharePoint _OldIntranet89_Content (previous name: SharePoint _Intranet_Content) failed in event OnPostRestore. For more information, see the error log located in the backup directory.
SPException: Cannot attach database to Web application. Use the command line tool or Central Administration pages to attach the database manually to the proper Web Application.

I tried every possible solution I found on the internet, but nothing worked. Then I decided to try the update with stsadm through the following command:

stsadm -o restore -directory "\\fileshare\backupfolder" -restoremethod new -item
"Farm\Windows SharePoint Services Web Application\Intranet (80)"

After doing this, I first got a new, different error about the Administration Service. I restarted this service and after that, the stsadm command also gave me the two previous errors. So then I decided to just turn off the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service... and what do you know, it worked! Afterwards, I also noticed that I had turned off the WSS Administration service, so if turning off the Timer service doesn't work, you can also try this one.

I do know that turning off the Timer service in a live environment probably is not such a good idea, but well, if nothing else works, you might be forced to do so...

I also didn't test doing the restore through Central Administration (since it had already been succesfully restored through stsadm), but feel free to give it a shot and let me know if it also works! (Although I doubt it, since I think the procedure through the Central Admin uses a timer job for this, which won't work if the Timer services has been stopped.)

Workflow task: Value does not fall within the expected range

If you get the above error when trying to open a task form in a workflow, then read on!

Here's the situation where I got this error: I have a custom approval workflow where one user adds an order request through an InfoPath form. When the form gets submitted, the "IT Approval" group gets assigned the task to approve or reject the order. Also important is that security has been broken so that only the right people can see and approve the tasks. The whole thing is a bit more elaborate than this, but this is basically all you need to know to understand the problem and hopefully recognize it...

Now, if someone in the IT Approval group goes to check his "My Tasks" page, he sees all the tasks assigned to the group. So far, so good... But when he tries opening a task, he gets an error page displaying the "Value does not fall within the expected range" error message.

I've tried many different things, making sure the IT Approval group had contribute access to the task, read access to the site, the task list and the workflow history, but nothing seemed to work. However, there was one place that I missed: the original document.

So if you're facing this problem and you're using custom security, check your InfoPath form (or any other kind of document that triggered the workflow) and make sure the approval user has read access to this file too. I don't know the exact reason for this, but I guess this is because the workflow is copying fields from the original file into the task form and apparently, this only works when the user can read the original file too.