*facepalm*

What a mini nightmare this turned out to be, but after an hour of unsuccessful googled fixes we have a winner! Here is a brief list of what I tried and then the one that worked and made the most sense; sorry I don't have post-backs to where the information came from, and I do not take credit for any of these fixes.

Attempt 1

• Boot into safemode ( f8 when restarting the computer )
• Click Start, then click run ( or hit windows key + r ), then type cmd and click ok
• Type in the following:
  • %windir%/system32/msiexec.exe /unregister
  • %windir%/syswow64/msiexec.exe /unregister
  • %windir%/system32/msiexec /regserver
  • %windir%/system32/msiexec /regserver
• Reboot and try your install again

Attempt 2 - Little more advanced, please don't screw up your system

• Click Start, then click run ( or hit windows key + r ), then type regedit and click ok
• Navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSIServer\Enum]
• The view pane should look like this:
  "0"="Root\\LEGACY_MSISERVER\\0000"
  "Count"=dword:00000001
  "NextInstance"=dword:00000001
• If it looks similar right click Enum entry in the left pane tree and select delete
• Reboot and try your install again

Attempt 3 - Little bit more advanced, be careful!

• Click Start, then click run ( or hit windows key + r ), then type regedit and click ok
• Navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSIServer]
• Look for the key name DisplayName and make sure that the value is set as C:\WINDOWS\SysWOW64\msiexec.exe /V
• If you change it reboot

Attempt 4 - this worked for me

- Click Start, then click run ( or hit windows key + r ), then type regedit and click ok
- Navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSIServer]
- Look for the key name WOW64, double click it and change the "Value data" to 0
- Reboot

In attempt 4, the WOW64 key value of 1 tells the installer to only deal with 32-bit installers and error on the rest, by changing this to 0 the system is now open to install 64-bit apps ( hopefully ) with less headaches.

Hope this helps someone!

Arrows, pointers, triangles, whatever you wish to call this technique you will end up making a pure CSS arrow; graphics are forbidden!

The process is actually extremely simple, the basic idea is that you you set a nice fat border then remove the side you wish the arrow to point to.

Example Code

Output

So that works fairly nice, but we want to actually do something useful with the arrow like pointing to a link; using a div just complicates the job as we now have to deal with floating. If we change the first example's tag from div to span and remove the font-size property, or set a width to it you will notice we get a trapezoid shape. Let's try and get this fix0red!

Example Code

Output

follow me on twitter!

The possibilities are fairly large with this technique and it almost certainly shuts out any previous requirement of an image to get the same functionality. With positioning properties we can move our arrow anywhere within a block element to make beautiful pointers on menu items, we can make pointing list items, link pointers, and even faux element wrapping!

Go and make peace with your GIFs and PNGs, they are going to hate you after this.

I often find myself turning to MSDN to get the possible conversion options on MS SQL's date data type, so I finally became un-lazy and created a little script to use in the future to quickly list all possibilities with nice example data and name references.

Pretty dang simple if you ask me; once you find the format you want take a look at the column name and reference it back to the code.

Enjoy!

The original stemmer class was developed by Martin Porter to bring words back to their word stems. For example "abilities" would stem to "able", "smelling" to "smell", "I'm awesome" to "damn straight", etc.

I couldn't find a Classic ASP version of this so I ported a port ( I'm not even sure if that's legal! ).

example usage

set Search = new Stemmer
     tmp_string = Search.Stem( "abilities" )

     response.write tmp_string
set Search = nothing

This should produce an echo of "able". Below is a dictionary list of words you can test the class out with, let me know if you find any bugs or issues.

Download ASP Stemmer 1.0.0
Download Dictionary File

I think the title says it all; I've seen many implementations for checking credit card numbers and in my opinion there is really only one that you need and actually works.

Sadly, still in use today by many code examples that I've run across is the good old

if ( first_digit = 4 ) then "visa"
elseif ( first_digit = 5 ) then "mastercard"
elseif ( first_digit = 3 ) then "amex"
elseif ( first_digit = 6 ) then "discover"
else
"invalid card"
end if

/facepalm

This isn't entirely bad ( yes it is, I'm just trying to be nice ), most likely those first digits will always be associated with the cards mentioned above, the problem is the numbers that follow.

"But I found one that checks and second and third numbers!"

Awesome, one tiny step closer to almost not really getting anywhere!

Obviously I'm leading up to the one and only Luhn algorithm which is basically a simple checksum formula used to validate a few different sequences of numbers, for example credit card account numbers.

Straight from Wikipedia here is what is going on with the algorithm

The formula verifies a number against its included check digit, which is usually appended to a partial account number to generate the full account number. This account number must pass the following test:

1. Counting from the check digit, which is the rightmost, and moving left, double the value of every second digit.
2. Sum the digits of the products together with the undoubled digits from the original number.
3. If the total ends in 0 (put another way, if the total modulo 10 is congruent to 0), then the number is valid according to the Luhn formula; else it is not valid.

As an illustration, if the account number is 49927398716, it will be validated as follows:

1. Double every second digit, from the rightmost: (1×2) = 2, (8×2) = 16, (3×2) = 6, (2×2) = 4, (9×2) = 18
2. Sum all the individual digits (digits in parentheses are the products from Step 1): 6 + (2) + 7 + (1+6) + 9 + (6) + 7 + (4) + 9 + (1+8) + 4 = 70
3. Take the sum modulo 10: 70 mod 10 = 0; the account number is valid.

Below is an ASP version I've ported, enjoy.

ACCOUNT = "4500000000000001"
alt = false
sum = 0

    for i = len( ACCOUNT ) to 1 step - 1
    
        digit = mid( ACCOUNT, i, 1 )
        
            if ( alt = true ) then
                digit = digit * 2

                    if ( digit > 9 ) then digit = digit - 9 end if
            end if

        sum = ( sum + digit ) mod 10                                
        
        if ( alt = true ) then alt = false else alt = true
    next


if ( sum = 0 ) then
  'legit
else
  'did not pass the test
end if