PopFly

Microsoft have a new project which looks fun. http://www.popfly.com. If you have seen the Yahoo effort called Pipelines http://pipes.yahoo.com/ then this may well be Microsoft's version of the same. I'm not sure yet but basically it will allow people to connect together various web services and create their own applications.

Anyway, the name they chose inspired a new Aphobia cartoon so here it is...

IEBlog : Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar - Get it Now!

IEBlog : Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar - Get it Now!

Every now and then a tool comes along that stops you in your tracks. You wonder how you ever got by without it. I've just discovered this IE add in that I think will be invaluable if you are a Web developer!!

It basically gives you a whole load of information about the current web page, stuff like div tags and tables, properties etc. The amount of time I've spent trolling through the "View Source" page trying to figure out how a certain effect has been achieved makes this tool a winner.

I've only just installed it but it looks great! check it out and let me know what you think.

REMIX07 - Helping you redefine the online experience

REMIX07 - Helping you redefine the online experience

I just caught wind of Remix07 and it looks like it's going to be huge.

I've booked my accomodation ($28!!), the event ($140) and my flight ($78 tax - My wife let me use some of her frequent flyer points as I've run out) so it looks like I've managed to do the whole thing for less than $250. Not bad eh!?

Venom rules!

Just got back from Spider-man 3 and I've got mixed feelings... It was awesome. Venom was spectacular. The fight scenes rocked. I was even happy with the ending (won't spoil it for you). I did however recall thinking as I was leaving the cinema "I hope they stop there..."

Not sure why... could be the slight changes to the story line for the big screen? Anyway, mission was a success for me, I enjoyed it.

On another note, I had a big evening. Tonight (actually it was yesterday now) I presented at the Perth .Net user group meeting. It was my first presentation and I counted 20 people. Overall I think I'd call it a success. People thanked me and told me it was a good presentation. In hindsight I'm remembering all the little things that didn't quite go as I had planned but I did learn a LOT both in the last few weeks leading up to the presentation, and the actual presentation. They even laughed at the jokes I cracked and didnt laugh when I was trying to be serious. :)

The presentation was on Microsoft's WPF. I did a quick demo of the four products in the new Expression suite and then walked through a few samples of code that I picked up from Charles Petzold's book, Application = Code + Markup. I've read some pretty harsh reviews but also some positive ones. My view of the book is a positive one. Lots of content, loads of examples and Charles's writing style is quite clear and concise. It's argued that pictures and screenshots and colour make for a better book. I wouldn't mind the code being in colour (using the same colour scheme as Visual Studio) but to be honest it really wouldnt have added that much to the book. The book is thick enough without wasting space with screenshots and pictures.

I did come unstuck at one point when I had deviated from my practiced demo and lost my train of thought. It's quite difficult to sit and debug something that won't compile with people sitting waiting expectantly. I fortunately got back on track pretty quick. I also learned that using snippits in Visual studio are great for not having to type code but remembering which ones you want and which is which was a challenge. More practice with the demos and sticking to the plan in future.

Anyway, a big thanks to those who attended. I hope it was informative and gave you an insight into the upcoming technologies, it's pretty exciting stuff!

What Will Microsoft Office Diagnostics Do?

A friend of mine pointed this out to me, saying it caused him to have a little accident. I think I might have had a similar accident. In Microsoft Outlook 2007 click Help then Office Diagnostics. There is a link at the bottom that says What will Microsoft Office Diagnostics do?

Click that and you will see a web page. See point 4 below.
Access, Excel, PowerPoint, or Word
1. Click the Microsoft Office Button , and then click Access Options, Excel Options, PowerPoint Options, or Word Options.
2. Click Trust Center, click Advanced Trust Center Settings, and then click Privacy Options.
3. Select the Download a file periodically that helps determine system problems check box.
4. Wait about a week to allow the file to be downloaded, and then run Microsoft Office Diagnostics again.

Mozy

I stumbled upon https://mozy.com/?ref=BABF67 not so long ago but for some reason I didn't download it. I think the thought of paying for backups put me off but they do have a 2Gb free service.

Anyway I was at the Tiger Tiger today and Dave mentioned he uses Mozy and said some good things about it. So I've just created an account and downloaded the client. I had a bit of a read of the FAQ's and unfortunately they don't support network shares.
Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but if you have noticed lately I've blogged a fair bit about Windows Home Server... and guess what. The files are only available via the shares, even when you are locally logged into the server, it is recommended highly to access the files via the \\servername\share otherwise you would never know if the file you are accessing is the only copy... (It does duplication for redundancy if you configure it to).
So it looks like I couldn't use Mozy to do backups of my WHS files if I wanted to.
I think that might be over kill anyway... I'm going to try out the 2Gb free service and then if that goes ok I'll upgrade to the unlimited. Its way cheaper than buying your own hardware for an offsite backup. Will use it for my documents, cartoons and photos. Not fussed about movies/Tv shows and music.

So far I'm impressed. If you want to try it out let me know, they run a referal system where you can get bonus space on the free account... Click the url https://mozy.com/?ref=BABF67 and if you start using it I'll get bonus space. I'll most likely be upgrading but will give a try to make sure it has no issues.

More WHS...

Seems like all I'm doing lately is blog about WHS. The CTP came out a few days ago. I've downloaded it and after a bit of research to see if anyone else had had issues (there were some but I did it anyway) and it all went very smoothly.

Some extra polish is noticable and the upgrade process was straight forward. It basically formats the system drive and installs a fresh one. All of the tombstone data lives on the data partition (it splits your main install disk into a 10Gb system and the rest data). It was nice to see this data partition was left alone.

Interestingly two disks were missing until I installed the Sata drivers, but all the data seemed to be there. I suspect that was because the data I was looking at was not located on those disks. Installed drivers and everything is working nicely.

Am currently backing up my laptop and my wife's laptop (both via wireless) and a backup takes a few minutes (only changed clusters are copied to the server). The restore I did a few days ago is going fine. all the backups were still available after the upgrade. I read that was a problem upgrading to the beta2 from previous version but beta2 was my first install.

This product is going to do really well. It's awesome!

More WHS...

Seems like all I'm doing lately is blog about WHS. The CTP came out a few days ago. I've downloaded it and after a bit of research to see if anyone else had had issues (there were some but I did it anyway) and it all went very smoothly.

Some extra polish is noticable and the upgrade process was straight forward. It basically formats the system drive and installs a fresh one. All of the tombstone data lives on the data partition (it splits your main install disk into a 10Gb system and the rest data). It was nice to see this data partition was left alone.

Interestingly two disks were missing until I installed the Sata drivers, but all the data seemed to be there. I suspect that was because the data I was looking at was not located on those disks. Installed drivers and everything is working nicely.

Am currently backing up my laptop and my wife's laptop (both via wireless) and a backup takes a few minutes (only changed clusters are copied to the server). The restore I did a few days ago is going fine. all the backups were still available after the upgrade. I read that was a problem upgrading to the beta2 from previous version but beta2 was my first install.

This product is going to do really well. It's awesome!

WHS

Last night, after doing a backup of my laptop from Vista (built in backup) as well as a manual backup with the Windows Home Server client, I did a full restore.

The reason I did this was that Dell kindly put a restore partition on my hard drive. It was 10Gb in size and when you have a 100Gb drive which ends up being 81Gb after losing the 10Gb you feel like you have been short changed. I dont need a recovery partition as Dell use it for the poor people who kill their system. They tell you to run the recovery tool and it reimages your Dell back to the original. I'm sure its great for those that need it but I'd rather get my full 100Gb (or as close as I can get).

I was nervous. It's beta software after all, but everything went fairly smoothly. I had to switch to a network cable as it would not restore over wifi. (a good thing). I had the option of opening the disk manager, which is essentially the same tool you get under Manage in Vista. I deleted all of the partitions and created a new one. I did a quick format, and in hind sight I probably should have done a full format.
It saw the server and gave me a choice of all the available backups after asking for my password. I selected the manual backup and away it went. I then went to bed but it was showing a restore time of 1hour and 20 mins.

This morning it was sitting on the finished screen so I clicked the finished and it rebooted. It booted into Vista (it did show that it had not been shut down properly but i selected normal boot). Once I was in windows It told me that it had a bunch of problems with drivers etc telling me i should update them. I rebooted and it did a check disk on boot up and found a whole load of problems. I'm not sure why this happened but It seemed to fix them (orphaned files and that sort of thing) all and everything is now working normally.

This leads me to a question. Do I trust that everything is ok? How do I know? Is there a tool that one can run that does a full integrity check of all of your files? Much the way a clickonce application checks no files have been modified. It would be nice if there is a tool (and there may well be) that checks your system files are all healthy.

I just got an email letting me know that Windows Home Server CTP is available so I'm hoping that Beta 2 upgrades ok. The manuals say that it will be upgradable when it is released.

Family PC Support Helpdesk

While on the subject of fixing family member PC's (my last post was about removing viruses from my mother-in-law's PC)... I've just reinstalled Windows XP onto my brother-in-law's laptop because of the issues he's been having with Vista Home. Personally, I love Vista, but acknowledge it's still got some teething problems. It seems to be the norm with new OS's. It takes a while for drivers to catch up.

Anyway, he had some photos on the laptop which he wanted (no, no backups anywhere) and he said other than the pics, I could wipe the laptop. First couple of attempts I thought I would just install XP over the top. No can do. When I told it to install into the same Window directory, overwriting the old (Vista) version it came up with a number of xml files that it could not write to disk. The install failed so I retried with my own XP disc and got the same errors. I figured there must be some permission issues overwriting some files so installed into a new folder (called it WinXp). I got another error trying to boot up. So having already copied the photos to a DVD I went the format approach. No problems...

Well, except for one. While the format was happening I put the DVD into my laptop to check the photos were all there ok (before I started the format of course) and it was all fine. I was looking at a power point funny on the DVD when my laptop hung. Everythign stopped responding and the DVD drive would not eject. After about 5 minutes of nothing I powered off my laptop. On rebooting and looking at the DVD it showed it as blank. Copy your files here it said. It showed me nothing on the DVD. I felt horrible as I looked across to his laptop as it was 60% through a format. Crap.

I took the DVD out and you could see the session on the DVD so I thought maybe Vista had opened a new session for burning and that hid the previous one temporarily. I left the DVD alone until I had reinstalled XP. On putting the DVD into the freshly built XP system I could once again see the photos. Man that was a LONG install. So I copied the pics all back to his laptop with a sigh of relief... I'll have a look at the DVD on Vista later and see if closing the session brings back the files. If thats how DVD's work under Vista it makes me wonder if that is a good thing.

What stories of family PC support have you got?

Virus world

I've not usually had much problems with viruses. I keep the kids away from my PC's as much as I can, and the number of sites I visit myself is quite small with the majority of them being return visits to sites I trust.

My mother-in-law on the other hand... Last week I dropped over to fix a problem she was having with some pop up ads. After a couple of hours I still had not fixed the problem and had to leave. Last night I returned to fix her machine while she is away over east. I spent about 5 hours trying to find a tool to remove the virus(es) that had infected her machine. The first visit I had upgraded IE to IE7 in the hope that it would prevent the popups. It didn't. I had installed AVG antivirus when I originally set it up for her and that didn't stop them. I tried spy-bot search and destroy, which found a number of cookies and virus entries in the registry. It happily removed them, but next time you ran a scan they were back. It might have been a false positive, except the ads were still poping up in new windows. Frustrating.

I then tried Avast which didn't seem to find any issues. Pop ups still occuring. My recent purchase of a new laptop (Dell) included a three year subscription to McAfee (Security Center) so I thought i'd give that a try. It removed 20 threats (most of them cookies) and since then two different applications that looked suspicious were blocked giving me the option to remove them. Finally, the ads seemed to have stopped.

This has altered my view of McAfee another step towards the positive. I used to hate the thing, but granted this opinion was based on an old version (some years ago) which would chew up huge chunks of CPU processing, slowing down normal activities. Doing a compile with McAfee running would increase the compile time considerably. I've not done any recent benchmarking but I wonder if now, with dual core CPU's if this is finally less of an issue.

I'm still stunned that IE7 along with several different Anti-spyware tools (I tried 2 blockers, 1 scanner and 3 antivirus programs) that none of them stopped this virus. One of them was WinFixer which I've read about having infected several big name web sites (including Microsoft and AOL I think)

I think i'll recommend my mother-in-law gets the McAfee subscription especially if it keeps her machine clean.

Vista Pain

Found a good write up on WHS here A Week with WHS.

Still moving data from my drives and adding them into the WHS pool. Have set up redundancy on my photos... It's like Juggling moving the data off a drive then adding it into the pool so I can then add the next one.

I finally got Vista installed on this here desktop. I must have tried a dozen times, downloading different SATA device drivers for the VIA chipset. The motherboard is an A8V Asus mb and as far as I can tell there is no way to get around the problem. I could install XP and begin the install, and about 27% through the "expanding" step it would reboot (normal behaviour I think) and after rebooting it would come up with an 0x80070008 error. Googling shows this to be an Access denied error message. So I eventually put in a PATA drive and used that as my system drive and it installed first go, so it was as I suspected, an issue with SATA drivers.
Am happy to leave it as is, as I can still access the SATA drive now that Vista is installed.

I do like the new feature of Vista that allows drivers to be loaded from floppy, CD/DVD or USB. You have no idea how hard it is finding a floppy disk around here that still actually works! Not to mention a floppy disk drive!

More WHS

Update on how the Windows Home Server install went. Not too bad.

I ended up going with a 300Gb drive as my system drive as it is a PATA drive and the 500Gb drive is SATA. Why? I've had so many problems installing stuff onto systems with SATA drives, having to find the correct drivers etc and the old PATA (IDE) drives just work.

Unplugged all drives and plugged in 300Gb system drive. Installed Windows Home Server. It was hands off and it even downloaded some updates (at least thats what it said it was doing). I was surpised to see a Windows Small Business Server screen during the install. I didn't realise that was the underlaying technology but it made me feel somewhat happier to be running it. Vista is still so new, and with the driver problems I've had along with other problems I've heard about I'm not so sure its ready to be a server. Longhorn will hopefully be better, but for now WHS appears to be a modified SBS.

The good news is that plugging in my other drives with data on them did not wipe them. Doing the install wiped the install disk (with plenty of warnings, so that's good). You can log into the server locally and copy the files to the server shares. There is a really nice full screen warning letting you know that traditional windows tools can break WHS.

On another note, while WHS was installing, I took one of my spare drives and tried to install Vista on my recently repaired server. My laptop hasn't been as good in the games department (bit dissapointed there but it's a great laptop for development so oh well) and it just would not install! It's an ASUS motherboard and it recognises the SATA drive but when it begins to expand the files it gets a little way in and then gives an error. Windows XP installs fine so I tried to do an install from within XP and got the same error. Will have to investigate this further. Might have to try a PATA drive and see if that works. No Vista drivers on the ASUS web site but I think that is because Vista already has them??

Windows Home Server

After a long weekend that took forever to end (I was waiting for the computer shop to open so I could pick up the new power supply and 500Gb drive I had ordered) I'm now on the way to installing WHS.

Put new power supply into Athlon 64 machine (old one fried when fan died) and installed new 500Gb hard drive. Drive would not be recognised by server. The damn thing was so quiet that I didn't think it was even powering up!! Tried it in my other server (the server that will eventually have WHS) that currently has 5 drives in it. No go. Checked invoice... ahh... It's a SATA2 drive. Cool! Not cool. Doesn't seem to be backward compatible with SATA1 controllers.

Did some research and found the drive can be put into SATA1 mode (The drive does Auto speed detection but the controller has to support it.) First hurdle sorted. Got drive going and then discovered that machine only has a CD drive, no DVD. Not wanting to steal a DVD drive from any other PC's I decided to install XP instead of Vista. Might be able to install Vista later across the network.

So now i'm moving data from the WHS server (currently running Vista) to the new XP machine. Need to get everything off the Raid0 drives so I can break the raid into seperate drives, as well as clear a 250Gb drive to install WHS onto (with all other drives unplugged). I'm hoping once I have WHS installed on a single drive that I can plug in the other drives without formatting them and then copy the data to the WHS share. I've learned how to add and remove drives (its in one of the manuals) and it seems straight forward but the drives get wiped.

The next week or so is going to be juggling data from drive to drive etc. I'm just thinking now while I type this that maybe I should start over... moving this amount of data across the network is too slow. Think i'll put the 500Gb drive into the WHS server and make that the system drive. The recommendation is for the system drive to be the largest drive and it will get rid of the issue of trying to clear a drive for the install.

WHS Update

This weekend I decided that it was time to take the next step towards installing Window Home Server (Beta 2). One thing that prompted this was that I discovered the power supply on my Domain controller was fried. The fan wasnt working and there was strange plastic smells coming from it. Also I kept finding the server off and because its up high on a cupboard to keep away from kids I didn't notice the problem initially.

So I pulled apart my domain controller and my old desktop and spent the morning swapping motherboards. I had planned to put 4 drives into the new machine basically merging two PC's into one. I then realised two things. 1. Domain controller motherboard (only about 2 months old) only has 2 SATA ports. I need 4. My old desktop (3+ years old) was a good one (not counting the NIC had stopped working) so it has 4 SATA ports. 2. I realised that my desktop pc has 2 x 250Gb drives striped in RAID 0. I thought it unlikely putting these two drives on the other motherboard would recognise the RAID 0. It's backed up but I still have stuff on there that isn't and I didn't want to risk it...
I also discovered while trying an install that WHS wipes ALL hard drives when you install it. What the...??? Where am I supposed to put all of my data that I want to store onto WHS while i'm setting it up?
So I installed Vista onto the new machine (old desktop with 4 SATA drives. 3 x 250Gb + 1 x 120Gb. I order a new powersupply (430W should do) and a 500Gb SATA2 hard drive. (would have gone the 750Gb but none in stock...) Then i discover the computer shop is closed for the long weekend. Doh!!

So i'll be spending the next few days sorting through this PC seeing what crap I can delete before shuffling what I can onto the new 500Gb drive so I can install WHS and let it wipe everything.
Once it's set up I can transfer the data back to a share on the WHS box and then swap the 120Gb drive with the new 500Gb. End result should give me a huge storage area for backing up all the PC's in the house (currently 2 laptops and 2 desktops). One question springs to mind though... how do you remove a drive from a WHS? Adding them is easy (apparently) using the wizard but can you remove drives as well? Time will tell.

Back from Code Camp Oz 2007

Well I'm back now from Code Camp Oz and really enjoyed it. Definitely worth going even if it was a long way to travel. It would have been much easier to get to if it had been held in Sydney or Melbourne. The extra travel to Wagga Wagga makes getting there an extra step I can see some might baulk at.

I support Nick's suggestion to moving it to a more friendly location. Some advantages I see would be increased numbers from people who are close to the venue. Alternating between Sydney and Melbourne each year I think would work well. The down side is you miss out on the visit to Wagga Wagga. Some would say that would be an advantage but I admit I did enjoy seeing Wagga, and the University/Winery etc was nice to visit.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/littlevoices/sets/72157600044370982/

I’ve added mine pictures which you can find at the url above. If you go to the url below you can see some pics from other people who have put stuff up on Flickr.

http://flickr.com/photos/tags/codecampoz

Think I'll be going next year too. Might even become a .Net Code Camp groupie... travel the world going to Code Camps worldwide. Hmm... interesting idea, think I'll look into that. :)

Code Camp OZ 2007

This weekend I'm at Code Camp OZ 2007, geeking on. It's going great... almost at the end of the last session of day one. Wine tasting is next.

The best part I think is meeting a whole bunch of other .netters. Networking with other people who are doing the same stuff.

More later... am in an interesting session. Dan Green's tips...

Rosey Outlook

Spent about an hour and a half troubleshooting an issue with Outlook 2007 tonight.

Problem: Navigating emails was slow, often a 5 second delay, with Outlook periodically coming up with (Not Responding).

Initially I blamed Mcafee Antivirus. I wonder why I paid for the subscription when I'm so against it. It slows me down at work, and antivirus is SO often the cause for problems. I must admit I jumped the gun a bit this time, being to quick to point the finger. The strangest thing was that disabling McAfee's email functions actually made the problem go away so you wouldnt blame me for thinking it was the problem.

So I thought I'd try out the support seeing I paid for it and all. I very quickly found myself in a one on one chat with a McAfee helldesk operator. She was quite helpful and in about 20 mins had given me instructions to disable ALL of the addins in outlook. Too bad if I actually wanted any of them, but I'll assume this was just to narrow down the problem. Unfortunately you CANT disable the Addins in Outlook if they are in the registry. So I turned off what I could and loaded up Regedit.
I exported the whole Addin Key so I could easily revert back and turned off all of the addins. To do this I changed each Loadbehaviour to a 0. The problem went away. Yay. So I turned them back on one at a time and fortunately started at the right end.
Solution: The problem Addin was OutlookAddin.Connect. A quick Google showed this was possibly related to Business Contact Manager. I dont really recall getting excited about this and thought If I miss the addin I can always turn it on. I'm guessing I wont notice it missing.

So although it doesn't seem to be related to McAfee SecurityCentre at this point they pointed me in the right direction regardless. A refreshing change from the usual "lame everyone else and handball" that seems all too common.

I still don't like stuff hitting my every file load, that has got to add overhead. How much of my life has been wasted from the accumlative effects of waiting for stuff to happen?

Vista + Windows Media Player = SLOW! - Page 2 - Notebook Forums and Laptop Discussion

Vista + Windows Media Player = SLOW! - Page 2 - Notebook Forums and Laptop Discussion

Had a weird problem in windows media player on the new laptop. Periodically the music would stall and stutter. Watching movies over wifi at home was quite painful pausing and continuing the movie like a streaming problem.

The link I just found above described that it took a long time to change songs. So i tried changing songs and sure enough it took about 10 seconds to change to the next track. So I tried the fix which for the sake of convenience (and its slightly different for my audio drivers) will repeat.

Problem: takes ages to start/change songs. experience stuttering and freezing as the DMR stuff does its thing.

Here's how I fixed it:
Start > Control Panel > Sound > Playback Tab > Double-click "Speakers/Headphones" > Enhancements Tab > Check "Disable System Effects"

I figure most of those effects wont make much difference for headphones... but I might experiment with it later to see if i can tell the difference.

Anyway, it's not skipped a beat since so hopefully thats that. (touch wood)

History & info - Daylight Saving Time idea from Benjamin Franklin

History & info - Daylight Saving Time idea from Benjamin Franklin

< RANT >
WTF were they thinking?!

Ok... personally, I'm against daylight savings. If people REALLY wanted an extra hour of sunglight in the evenings they would move to the other side of the planet. They would follow the summer around the globe, turning into a nomad. It's been done before... It's not a new thing to humans.

Here in Perth we have been trialing daylight savings. It's been horrible. So far, I don't think I have met anyone who actually likes it. Microsoft have yet to sort out their patches for Exchange server, so you never quite know if the meeting in your calendar is for the right time. Not being able to trust it means you can't count on it. They (politicians) didn't even ASK us (the people) if we even WANTED daylight savings. I seem to recall a few years ago that we were asked and the outcome of the vote was NO. So they wait a few years and then implement it regardless. Why do we need it? So businesses can deal with Sydney easier? Who cares!! We've dealt with it until now, why mess with it? WTF??

I've noticed Microsoft are also having problems with daylight savings patches in other parts of the world. It can't be easy having a moving goal post.

Time is an illusion. Lunch time, doubly so. It is something we have created in order to introduce structure to our day, but if there is no consistency what is the point of structure? It's just chaos! The sun does not care what time it is. The earth spins and the sun becomes visible. Why don't we just get out of bed when the sun comes up and go to bed when the sun goes down? There would be no need for lighting so think of the environmental impact.
< /RANT >

I'm done now. Moving on.