I am not sure how I have been lucky enough never to encounter the HP/Compaq booby trap but until today I was so fortunate. Apparently HP Tattoos a number in the bios of their motherboards so that when you try to use the factory recovery, it checks to make sure the stock motherboard is in place. If it is not in place you get the following error:

Your system has detected a configuration error. Please report this error to Customer Care using the phone number found in the Warranty and Support Guide that came with your PC. Unless corrected, this error will prevent your PC from operating properly. Turn off your PC by pressing and holding the Power button. After a few seconds your PC will automatically turn off. (Code Purple)

I mean seriously? HP does not want you to be able to change the motherboard in their PC’s. I am guessing this is some idiots solutions to piracy somehow but in any case I will stop complaining and get to the solution.

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Today I have been working on a project for work that involved accessing FTPS using curl. I needed the curl –libcurl switch which is not available in curl 7.15 so I needed to upgrade curl on the CentOS server I was working on. The problem is that there are not any repos with newer versions of curl available so then I set out to create my own curl RPM package. I was able to do this while learning many things along the way such as signing RPM packages. The first revision of my curl RPM package was not signed but I wanted to go ahead and install it anyway so below I explain installing unsigned RPM packages using yum.

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A client of mine still has a computer running Microsoft Outlook Express and they wanted me to import the address book contacts into their Yahoo Mail account. At first I was a little worried that Yahoo Mail may no longer support the format of Outlook Express address book contacts but then I remembered that you can export contacts into a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file which means I could manipulate the data if it was not supported. Yahoo Mail says that it supports import from Outlook but it doesn’t specify Outlook Express. I assume the format between Outlook and Outlook Express must be similar because Yahoo Mail did import the exported contacts from Outlook Express. Below I describe how to export Outlook Express contacts and then import those contacts into Yahoo Mail. Follow the instructions below that are broken into two parts which include exporting the contacts using Outlook Express and then importing the contacts using the Yahoo Mail web interface.

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I used DotNetNuke a long time ago and was suprised to recently learn that there is still a large amount of people using the software. There are even more folks that installed it a long time ago and lack the resources to upgrade to a more up to date software package so there is still plenty of work to be done doing maintenance on sites using the DotNetNuke software. While many things seem really outdated there are still some cool features so the software can be updated to bring people a bit more up to date.

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Numerous people have been asking me recently how to modify the default language settings in Skype. Typically the people are living in a different country and the Skype installation appears to set the default language based on the country the application is downloaded in.

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