Wednesday, January 15, 2014

A Possible Internet News Feed Design

The behavior of human varies. Watching news on TV is very different from reading news on computers. While watching TV, people are free to do other things as long as their ears or eyes are paying attention to the TV.

For people reading news on computers, the assumptions is that their hands are on mouse or keyboard so that they can scroll or click through pages.

However, as many of you have noticed websites, like MSN or Yahoo, that with marqueue pictures, users could simply watch the slide show without touching the mouse or the keyboard, which can be the case when programmers or office workers are taking breaks eating lunches.

Since computer and websites are flexible in terms of programmable. These sites can easily be enhanced to provide better features - like topic selection, large subtitles, adjustable shuffle speed, voice annotated ... etc. With voice activation enhancement, this can further free office workers to perform other activities while follow up with news.

VPN failed - Error 711, 1068 - Remote Access Connection Manager, dependency

The goal of this article is to report an instance of mine that failed me on my VPN. Hopefully, this will help people with exactly the same problem.

The error involved the failing of the starting of "Remote Access Connection Manager" service - Error 711: Cannot load the Remote Access Connection Manager Service. Trying to start the "Remote Access Connection Manager" service manually produced the "Error 1068: the dependency service or group failed to start." message.

The 1068 error is a very general one and the task is to find out exactly which dependency services caused the program to fail since the error message provides no indication. Not being a Windows expert, I result to brutal force. I manually went through each service listed and try to start them. In the process, few processes failed to start. The most suspicious one is the "Windows Event Log" process - "Cannot start windows event log service on Windows 7. Error 4201".

After fixing the "Windows event log" error, the VPN worked.

The article I Googled are:
Error 711: Cannot load the Remote Access Connection Manager Service.
Error 1068: the dependency service or group failed to start.
Cannot start windows event log service on Windows 7. Error 4201.
How to use MSCONFIG in Windows 7