Windows 7/Vista & ArcGIS & ESRI License Manager

It seems that ESRI License Manager has difficulties running in Windows 7 or Vista – the License server fails to start at boot or on demand in License Manager Tools.
Consequently, ArcGIS didn’t start because there was no license server running. Obviously this problem doesn’t occur if the license server is running on another machine in the network.
At first I tried the quick and dirty solution – to manually start the server daemon and see where it fails.
I ran Command Prompt as an administrator:

Now, the server is called lmgrd.exe, so if you navigate to C:\Program Files\ESRI\License\arcgis9x and start lmgrd, it says that there is no license specified.
So I typed the location of the license (it was in the same folder), ran the program in the foreground:
lmgrd –c license.lic -z
I kept the command prompt open, and ArcGIS started succesfully.
But this isn’t really a long term solution, since this method would require manual server start in the command prompt everytime I would want to start ArcGIS.
So I thought, maybe the problem is that the server can’t find the license file. After some googling, I found out that the environment variable LM_LICENSE_FILE wasn’t set. It says on the support page that you’d need to enter port@machine-name for the variable value, but since we’re running the server on the local machine, you just need to enter your C:\Path\to\your\license.lic.

When all goes well with License Manager Tools, you might still need to enter "localhost" in the ArcGIS desktop manager in the license server.
If anyone has a better solution or information, please post in the comments.
UPDATE:
After further experimentation I found out that you also need the Sentinel driver to successfuly run License Manager on Windows 7. Don't know why, but it works. You should install Sentinel driver first, then the license manager, so that everything for the license works before you install ArcGIS. That way you won't have to manually configure ArcGIS for license after it has been installed. You have less work that way.

Quick Tip: light switch effect

Here's a quick tip for novice programmers. Every time you want to create a "light-switch" effect for toggling a parameter on and off, or should I say true or false, 0 or 1, ... You can simply do it by typing:

p ^= 1;

This is a binary-safe Exclusive-OR assignment operator. First, it computes the value of p XOR 1 (p = p ^ 1) and then stores that value in p. If we look at the truth table of exclusive-or (XOR)

a	b	a XOR b
0	0	0
0	1	1
1	0	1
1	1	0

We see that if our b variable is 1 (true) the result of a ^ 1 (a XOR 1) is exactly the opposite of a. All in all, this operation is simply a shortcut for these assignments:

p = p ^ 1;

p = !p;

p = p ? false : true;

if(p) p = false; else p = true;

So if you want to toggle something ON and OFF, let's say when a user clicks a button, this method is extremely short and useful.

Facebook Connect: FB.Connect.streamPublish() does not show up

DUE TO FREQUENT FACEBOOK API CHANGES THIS ARTICLE IS OUTDATED.

Here are the reasons why FBJS functions sometimes fail:

• xd_reciever.html is not installed correctly
• application key is not set in FB.init()
• Facebook Connect callback URL is not set in the application settings
• Facebook JavaScript API is not set correctly in your HTML. This should be set immediately after the body tag <script src="http://static.ak.connect.facebook.com/js/api_lib/v0.4/XdCommReceiver.js" type="text/javascript"></script> This should be set before the closing body tag <script src="http://static.ak.connect.facebook.com/js/api_lib/v0.4/FeatureLoader.js.php/en_US" type="text/javascript"></script>
• Facebook functions are called before JavaScript objects are initialized. FB.init(api_key, channel_path); FB.ensureInit(function() { // put your functions here });
• All Facebook JavaScript functions are called BEFORE the FeatureLoader.js.php You should put your functions after this call and into FB.ensureInit() function
• There are JavaScript errors in your code

If any of the errors mentioned above are met, the function will fail. If FBML tags are not rendered, you might also want to check, if you set the HTML header correctly. http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/XFBML Also, XFBML tags are required to render tags correctly.

PHP: mail() Sender domain must exist - UPDATE

Regarding my last post, it seems that you can't set the Return-Path in the header parameter of the mail() function. The workaround is in the fifth argument of mail() - the additional parameters. If you set the "-fsender@domain.com" it should set the Return-Path. Here's my mail() wrapper function:

function construct_mail($to,$subject,$content,$sender='') {
$from = ADMIN_EMAIL;
if(!empty($sender)) $from = $sender;
$header  = "From: $from\r\n";
$header .= "Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8\r\n";
$header .= "Date: ".date("r")."\r\n";
$header .= "Reply-To: $from\r\n";
$header .= "Return-Path: $from\r\n";
$header .= "X-Mailer: PHP\r\n";
$content = ''.$content.'';
$subject = ' =?UTF-8?B?'. base64_encode($subject) ."?=";
return mail($to,$subject,$content,$header,"-f$from");
}

Also, the -f switch might trigger a E_WARNING if you don't set the trusted users (the user that executes the script - webserver) in the /etc/mail/trusted-users

UPDATE: http://dev.kafol.net/2013/01/sendmail-x-authentication-warning-user.html

PHP: mail() Sender domain must exist

Lately I've found out that a lot of emails sent from PHP's mail() get bounced (they weren't before). Servers bounce the message with the "Sender domain must exist" error, or more precisely, the domain in question was the servers (the server that the script runs on, not the email server) hostname. Well of course that domain doesn't exist (localhost.localdomain), so after some googling, I figured that some additional headers might help, like Return-Path and Reply-To.

$from = "your@email.com";
$header  = "From: $from\r\n";
$header .= "Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8\r\n";
$header .= "Date: ".date("r")."\r\n";
$header .= "Reply-To: $from\r\n";
$header .= "Return-Path: $from\r\n";
$header .= "X-Mailer: PHP\r\n";

I'll test it now, when this post reaches my newsletter subscribers.

UPDATE: http://dev.kafol.net/2009/09/php-mail-sender-domain-must-exist.html

UPDATE #2: http://dev.kafol.net/2013/01/sendmail-x-authentication-warning-user.html