How to fix “hacked by Moroccanwolf” WordPress site
A client of mine had their wordpress hacked and when you would load the site, it would simply display a message that said "hacked by Moroccanwolf". I did some digging and luckily it wasn't a major hack and they didn't mess with the posts or other settings as a lot of the hacks do.
When updating Office 2011 for Mac, you are prompted that you must close “Microsoft Database Daemon” and “SyncServicesAgent”
If you're trying to update your install of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac, you may get the following message: "These applications must be closed before the software can be installed: Microsoft Database Daemon SyncServicesAgent Close these applications and try again" If you try to kill the apps using activity monitor, you'll find they keep getting restarted. The only way I found that worked to stop them is by following the instructions below.
Windows Server 2008/2012 Blue Screen after Login – No Desktop
One of my teammates was working on a Windows server and needed to access IIS to complete a Sitecore upgrade on the machine. After logging in, he was reporting that he only saw a blue screen with no user interface. I logged in under the administrator account and ran into the same thing. Here's how I was able to reset:
Steam is having trouble connecting to the Steam servers.
If you use Steam and  suddenly find yourself unable to connect receiving the error "Steam is having trouble connecting to the Steam servers.", check and see if you have Peerblock installed and running. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out why the connections wouldn't go through and finally went through apps running in the background one by one, until I closed Peerblock and discovered Steam suddenly started working. If you would like to continue to use Steam while Peerblock is open, follow these instructions for a workaround: 1. Start PeerBlock 2. Click List Manager 3. Click Add 4. Put something in the description like steam-allow 5. click add url and paste this: "http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=steam" (no quotes) 6. Choose type: allow 7. Click Ok then close the List Manager. This will download a list that adds exceptions for Steam and should let you connect with no issues.
ASP.NET MVC Model Generator
In making the switch to ASP.NET MVC, I've moved away from using my old Data Access Layer that I've used for years and have opted to use Dapper as my ORM of choice in the quest for optimal performance. My DAL was actually pretty optimized for WinForms and WebForms (using straight SQL Queries and SQL parameters) but mapping it to models wasn't something I had in mind when I created it. I'm finding Dapper takes some getting used too but it is still pretty fast. The downside is that writing the code for Models to wire it up is proving to be a little tedious. To that effect, I wrote a little application that has helped me generate the models from a database dynamically. It's in it's infancy stages and something I cobbled together in less than 8 hours but it works. I'll add more features too as time goes on if there's enough interest or to satisfy my own needs. In the meantime, I'm open sourcing the project as it may help others and I'd love to see it become something grander if others are willing to contribute to it. There's also some useful bits of code that others may find useful to reference like dynamically reading fields from a database, pluralization/singularization of words, amongst others. You can find the repository on Github: https://github.com/gregvarghese/MVCModelGenerator
How to Reset Sitecore 7.1 & Sitecore 7.5 Forgotten/Lost Admin Password
In working on implementing a Sitecore site into an existing code base inherited from another vendor, I discovered that the admin password had been modified and the vendor would not share it. Not being able to login to the admin section of Sitecore was not ideal to say the least. After scouring the web, most articles contained instructions on how to reset the password, but almost all of them applied to Sitecore 6 and below. For Sitecore 7 and above, most articles were not applicable as they introduced the PasswordSalt field into the database which Sitecore uses to hash the password. If you've run into a similar situation, or you've forgotten or lost your admin account password, getting access back to everything is pretty simple. Load SQL Management (or your favorite SQL editor) and execute this query against your Core database:
How to Import Multiple VCF contacts into iCloud
One of my users recently came to me with an interesting problem this week. She had left her old job but had left all her contacts on her work account. Once the account was deleted, all the addresses were wiped out as well. By sheer luck, her iPad had a copy of the contacts since she never connected it to a new network which prevented any type of sync. We managed to export the contacts off the iPad to VCF cards but were now left with the tedious task of importing them all into iCloud for her to use on her phone. I tried dragging and dropping all the VCF cards into the browser but iCloud displayed 300+ errors saying the card could not be imported, without specifying which ones were a problem. The import would error out after clicking OK at around 300 times and not actually import a single one. I remembered that the format of the cards is simple text and you can easily merge the files into one big file to import.
Mac Outlook 2011 Reply All Includes My E-mail (with solution)
I've started a new job and was assigned a Macbook for my daily work. I've found equivalents for most of my applications. Personally, I find the native Mac apps are just extremely underpowered for my computing needs. I hate Mail especially, and even more so how all the apps are split out into separate apps. Luckily I have Office for Mac. Not so luckily, Outlook Mac 2011 is not as well designed as Outlook for Windows in so many ways. One of the bugs I ran into was the "Reply All" bug where your e-mail is included in the CC field. It's rather annoying having to choose from having to manually delete your address or having an extra e-mail to delete from your inbox. The fix turned out to be rather simple for me. It turns out that Outlook for Mac isn't very smart. It doesn't seem to be able to tell which address you're sending the e-mail from even though it's doing the sending. When my account was initially setup, the company set it up with one of their subsidiary domains which was incorrect. Rather than creating a new inbox, they simply created an alias for the domain but never updated my configuration. To fix the issue, do the following: