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Introduction
A minor update to Windows Live Essentials was recently released with some bug fixes and “minor changes”, while introducing new bugs and having people not very liking at least some of these “minor changes” like the one option that is left out where you could choose to only show your webcam instead of making a full video call.

Grey box when making a video call
In the recent version 14.0.8117.416 of Windows Live Messenger there exists some type of bug through which one might get a grey box when making a video call. I’m not sure which webcam’s this problems concerns, but I came across one laptop model where this was the case. I also found that there are also other people having this same problem.

“Show my webcam” not available
In this new version, the option to only show the webcam without having to start a video call is left out. Again, there are some people complaining about leaving out this used future.

Solution
The solution for any of the two problems is rather simple. You have to remove your current version (currently newest 14.0.8117.416) and install the older version 14.0.8089.726.

It seems as Microsoft does its best to not provide any downloads for the older (working) versions. Trying to keep your installers of your older versions for later use gets complicated as you can only download the online installer that always downloads the necessary files from the internet of the latest version. It is probably possible to get and save these installer files somehow, but for “normal” people I suppose this would be a hell of a struggle.

Anyway, I felt that I should provide the offline installer files for this older version. There is a full Windows Live installer that contains

• Windows Live Family Safety
• Windows Live Mail
• Windows Live Messenger
• Windows Live Movie Maker (Windows Vista and Windows 7 only)
• Windows Live Photo Gallery
• Windows Live Sync (integrated with Toolbar and Photo Gallery)
• Windows Live Toolbar
• Windows Live Writer
• Microsoft Office Outlook Connector
• Microsoft Office Live Add-in
• Microsoft Silverlight

but also a seperate Windows Live Messanger setup. You can download them both below.

Official Windows Live Essentials 14.0.8089.726 offline setup

Download Windows Live Essentials 14.0.8089.726 (135MB)

• Size: 141.402.440 bytes (135 MB)
• MD5 hash: 0ff7f12bb44f91cad117632e3edd13ae

Download Windows Live Messenger 14.0.8089.726 (24.0 MB)

• Size: 25.240.576 bytes (24.0 MB)
• MD5 hash: 500e43ce39cede387e263ed886d24a74 (MSI file inside the downloaded cab)

Update
* As FuGu pointed out in the comments, the other party you’re communicating with should probably also have the same or older version to  get this to work. If the other party has the newer version 14.0.8117.416 it will simply block the request if you just want to show the webcam instead of making a video call.

Introduction

CherryPy uses the Cookie module from Python and in particular the SimpleCookie object type to handle cookies.

Sending a cookie to a browser is accomplished by using cherrypy.response.cookie and receiving a cookie from the browser by cherrypy.request.cookie.

Example

This is demonstrated in the following example code where we use a login and logout procedure :

Download source code

Creating a cookie

It is important to note that

• cookie[name]
• cookie[name]['path']
• cookie[name]['max-age']

are a bare minimum of attributes that you have to set in order to get this working. If you do not set one of these three attributes, the cookie will simply not be set.

Deleting a cookie

Instead of cookie[name]['max-age']=0 you can also use cookie[name]['expires']=0, which results in the same effect of deleting the cookie.

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought.” – Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Some things just don’t work out like you expect them to do. During my quest with a new web application that I’m about to develop, the very first and basic thing went wrong. The setup of the rdflib python library (version 2.4.2) gave me the following error (on Windows):

“error: Setup script exited with error: Unable to find vcvarsall.bat”

After a lot of useless spent hours on trying to come up with some solution, the answer was found. There is a good solution on the project page of the library too, but I found a slightly quicker solution:

1. First of all download MinGW. You need g++ compiler and MingW make in setup.
2. If you installed MinGW for example to “C:\MinGW” then add “C:\MinGW\bin” to your PATH in Windows.
3. Now start your Command Prompt and go the directory where you have your setup.py residing.
4. Last and most important step:

   setup.py install build --compiler=mingw32

Note: This is all about rdflib version 2.4.2! Version 3.x for example has some major differences with 2.4.2 and so I’m not aware whether the problem there exists and even if it does, i’m not sure if it can be solved by the above solution.

If you have a similar problem but with some other module and you can’t fix it in this way, then you should try this.