Skype chat messages appear in wrong order – how to fix

I use skype for chatting almost all day, and today it started doing a strange behavior – my types messages would jump “up” the chat thread, to appear earlier than other messages I had already received from my chat partner. I figured it would clear itself up, but a day later things were still wrong. I assumed either my system clock or my partner’s was off, so we started comparing notes and I dicovered the clock on my laptop had skewed off just a few seconds- 5 or 6 – from what the time services show as the “correct” time, and so this was causing skype to get confused about when it was receiving new messages – my chat partner messages seemed to be almost in the future a bit, and so my messages sent to him would jump up the page behind his, in their “chronological” order based on the timestamps of each message. 

I’m actually not having this issue any longer, so I’m not sure if it was being caused by issues with connecting with a time server, or it might have been the intensive ftp transfers I had running for almost a week, pulling 10 threads of files constantly- I think this may have been taxing the cpu in a way that caused the time to shift over the course of a day. In any case, it seems to have stopped now. 

Back on topic- If you find this happening on your system, how can you fix it? 

We can force the clock to sync with a time server again to get the clock back on track. Follow these steps: 

– Open Control Panel, and open Date and Time icon
– Click the Internet Time tab (if you are on a domain, this apprently is not available)
– Click the Change Settings button on the page
– If UAC pops up, click Yes
– Check the “Synchornize with Internet time server” check box, pick a time server from the dropdown (or use the default), and click Update Now

Sometimes this will throw an error if the server cannot be reached. You can try hitting Update Now again, or try selecting a different server and do it again.

Now you’re done! Go back to skype and test out your chats, they should show up in the correct order now. 

There is a commandline option as well, but I haven’t had luck making this one work- maybe you will: 

-open an admin-level command prompt
– run: w32tm /resync   OR IF on a domain run: net time /domain

I’ve seen this throw a “time service is not running” error, in which case I tried starting the windows time service and ran it again, but still no luck. Apparently you can keep trying it until it works, but I just used the UI version above instead. 

Could not load file or assembly Newtonsoft.Json

I’ve run into this problem a few times, usually when source control is involved. 

-Delete the package from you /packages folder

-open nuget package manager, it will notify that things are out of sync- click the resolve button. 

-if you have version conflicts, edit your dependentAssembly bindingRedirect so that the older version(s) are redirected to the newer. 

-You may also try uninstalling using nuget and reinstalling, but this usually doesn’t fix everything. 

IE8 not supported in Jquery 2.x

If you’re using jquery 2.0 or newer, it is no longer supported in internet explorer 8 or older. You can use the older jquery lib to make things work again with IE8 though.

Note that the following code has the current at time of posting versions of jquery, you should replace this with whichever version of 2.x you are using, and check if there is a newer ver for 1.9.x as well.

ALSO note- since IE8 will be using an older version of jquery, you’ll likely need to test this separately to make sure your site still works with the 1.9.x version. Big headache? Sure.

<!–[if (!IE)|(gt IE 8)]><!–>

  <script src=”//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.0.3/jquery.min.js”></script>

<!–<![endif]–>

<!–[if lte IE 8]>

  <script src=”//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min.js”></script>

<![endif]–>

Jquery mobile is broken

A while back we produced our first “mobile specific” web app, which was produced with Jquery Mobile. This framework seems to make building forms etc so easy for mobile. But after we did a bit of testing on some mobile devices, we soon realized this pretty ui is not without issues. We have various input controls that would simply refuse to work correctly, and even had a date picker control that would… somehow?… actually crash the browser. After a lot of headache and retesting, and removing anything beyond just the most basic of input controls, we finally got things working well enough to release it.

But now I’m finding that, not only was our experience no uncommon, it seems that many others have not done the testing we did and discover the bugs… and have actually deployed production websites using JQM… that simply do not work. I first noticed this with a popular ecommerce package that released mobile extensions- browsing certain pages just simply did not work. So customers who had deployed this option would actually see their mobile sales drop a bunch, instead of improve them as they should. I’ve even seen some analysis that “mobile traffic is junk”, which I’m not convinced is derived from some similiar issues to this.

And just in the last two weeks, I’ve personally encountered 2 other production sites that are having serious mobile website issues that make them unusable to many mobile users.

Is Jquery Mobile doing more harm than good?

A timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the….

A timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the Windows Error Reporting Service service to connect.

My new and really fast laptop has been occasionally freezing all input for a long period.. maybe a minute, maybe more.. and then suddenly unfreezes and catches up. I can still move the mouse around, but no clicks and no keyboard input is accepted.

What the heck?

The error above is what I found in the event viewer after it just happened today.

Any solutions out there?

Running Windows 8 64, Dell XPS 15.

A big ol SSD too. Hope that’s not going out…

Update: I’ve noticed this error shows up in searches for a lot of similar errors, such as:

a timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the windows error reporting service service to connect

a timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the print spooler service to connect

a timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the file replication service to connect

a timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) vmtools

and also while waiting:

for a  transaction response from the VMTools service

for the Symantec Endpoint Protection service to connect

for the SQL Server Reporting Services service to connect

a transaction response from the AudioEndpointBuilder service

a transaction response from the ShellHWDetection service

Ok so the list is too long…