This is an explanation on how to configure a sandbox virtual machine for website development. My reason for doing this is two fold; first, it protects my important daily work from potential desaster and secondly it allows me to develop code that will run on a different operating system. My host os is Ubuntu 8.04 but most of the work I do is run on Windows servers and because of this old code was not created with case-sensitivity in mind.

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Today I had the strangest thing happen. I turned on my laptop and found my SQL Server Express (2005) service came up with one of the databases saying "restoring...". Nothing I did could make it go away (restarting the computer, restarting sql server, nothing). Also, there was nothing I could do in the tasks like detach the db. It just kept erroring saying the database was in the process of restoring. Finally after some Google searching I came across this ExpertsExchange question (http://www.experts-exchange.com/Microsoft/Development/MS-SQL-Server/Q_22875577.html).

The answer is to execute this sql:

RESTORE DATABASE [your database name] WITH RECOVERY

I'm going to have to look into what actually was going on but right now I've got stuff to do...

Ok, so I'm trying to change the password on my ColdFusion install to something that includes tags (< and >). In the admin it say's the password has been updated ok but when I logout an try it it's still set to the old one. If I remove either of the < or > characters it works. Now here is the best part, I've had a password with both those characters before but I set it on install of ColdFusion when it was accepting the password from a shell prompt (command line for you Windows users). I'm thinking that whatever encryption or validation algorithm is being run in the admin is failing but not actually throwing an error. Does anyone know what's going on or have seen this before?