Archive for October, 2010
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/29
After upgrading VMware workstation, I noticed when making backups of my VMs that they contained lots of files in the guestappscache subdirectory that have names containing GUIDs.
I’m always wary for sudden seemingly random files being created.
It might be just some kind of virus slipping through the gates targeting a specific vulnerability.
The files appear to be for Unity, and it is easy to disable Unity. (I don’t use Unity: I use VMs to separate work and keep the clutter away from my host machine’s desktop <g>).
–jeroen
via: VMware workstation guestappscache directory – Google Search.
Posted in Power User, VMware | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/28
I always forget the syntax, because different DBMS systems use different ways of doing this.
This is the SQL Server way of doing some date calculations: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Database Development, Development, SQL Server | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/27
Quite a while ago, Neil Moffat started the Delphi Basics site.
It is aimed at beginners, but since it has such a wealth of information (for instance a comprehensive list of compiler directives).
So even if you are a Delphi pro, it is worth to give Delphi Basics a look.
The cool thing: Neil originally is not even a programmer, nor a writer.
Maybe that is his strength: he learned by doing, step by step, now giving us a peak on what he learned.
–jeroen
via Delphi Basics.
Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | 8 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/26
Probably a few others will blog about these tweets too.
I have bolded the most important pieces:
kylix_rd Allen Bauer
If you must… Value := Integer(TList[x]) -> Value := NativeInt(TList[x]). Even better, TList<Integer>.
6 hours ago
kylix_rd Allen Bauer
Another Milestone: fixed my first legitimate 64bit RTL bug. if TryOpenForInput(t) then s/b if not TryOpenForInput(t) then
10 hours ago
kylix_rd Allen Bauer
Milestone: 64bit compiler now merged into the main dev branch! All devs are now locked and loaded!
13 hours ago
–jeroen
via Allen Bauer (kylix_rd) on Twitter.
Posted in Delphi, Development, kylix_rd, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/26
When on the road without access to your most favourite XML editing tools, and you want to view a local XML file, you are a bit stuck.
The built-in XML viewing capabilities of Internet Explorer 6 and up give you those nice “To help protect your security, Internet Explorer has restricted this…” messages.
Disabling those messages makes your system a lot less secure, so that is not a real option.
This besides the lack for viewing UTF-16 encoded XML files in Internet Explorer (and getting the dreaded “Switch from current encoding to specified encoding not supported. Line 1, Position 40“).
So, in my toolbox is XML Viewer from MindFusion. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Development, Power User, XML, XML/XSD | 3 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/25
Hilarious!
After all the hypes…
…the modern MVC framework built on the awesome power of Batch scripts
–jeroen
via DOS on Dope: The last MVC web framework you’ll ever need.
Posted in Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/22
Since you do this only once per server, it is easy to forget (I do) where to specify the hostname of your ESXi server.
vm-help.com describes in Change your host’s network name how easy it is in ESXi 3.x (and also how to change the DNS information and SSL certificate).
ESXi 4.x is very, but not completely, similar Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in ESXi4, Power User, VMware | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/21
Brilliant and so true:
New programmers are drawn to multithreading like moths to flame, with similar results.
Edit: And this is just one example on how tiny little details can impact threading so much.
–jeroen
via Twitter / Danny Thorpe: New programmers are drawn ….
Posted in .NET, Agile, CommandLine, Debugging, Delphi, Development, Opinions, Software Development | 10 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/20
When running different SQL server versions and editions, you often want to know what a certain instance is about.
For that, SQL Server T-SQL provides ServerProperty.
Since I absolutely love sqlcmd, I extended my set of SQL Server batch files with this one showing you some of the ServerProperty values: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Database Development, Development, SQL Server | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/19
Recently, I had the error message “Multiple-step OLE DB operation generated errors. Check each OLE DB status value, if available. No work was done” occur to me when connecting through the “Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server”.
O got the below message (in this case in Delphi, but I have seen lots of other people having the same issue using other environments too): Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Database Development, Delphi, Development, Software Development, SQL Server | 1 Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/18
A great new ESXi 4.1 feature us the much simplified support of USB Pass Through.
In fact it is one of the biggest reasons I updated so quickly; I have been running it now for almost 3 months now. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in ESXi4, Hardware Interfacing, Power User, USB, VMware | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/16
Drum- en Showband Adest Musica uit Sassenheim organiseert op zondag 14 november a.s. een play-inn. Tijdens deze play-inn kunnen muzikanten meespelen met het korps. Gedurende de dag zullen er enkele muzikale stukken op de lessenaar verschijnen welke op een ontspannen wijze worden ingestudeerd.
via Adest Musica organiseert Play-Inn | Teylingen en Noordwijkerhout (Witte Weekblad).
Posted in About, Adest Musica, Personal | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/15
WordPress Page Order is a number increasing from left to right.
You can have holes in the number sequence.
So, back to the BASIC and FORRAN line numbering schemes (increment bij 100, 10, or you name it).
–jeroen
via: Pages « WordPress Codex.
Posted in Development, Software Development, Web Development, WordPress | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/14
A while ago, I moved a single CPU Windows XP VM from VMware Workstation to ESXi 4.1 using the standalone VMware vCenter converter.
In ESXi, I increased the CPU count from 1 to 2, and wanting to to for 4 (since I had been running Windows on a quadcore CPU before).
Well, that turned out to be harder than I thought… Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in ESXi4, Power User, Reference, VMware, Windows, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP | 1 Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/12
While solving a problem with Windows 7 machines not being able to ping the machines on the GREEN LAN of an Endian when connecting through OpenVPN, but XP machines could, I did a few upgrades, then went on to solve the problem.
- Upgraded from ESX 3.5 to ESXi 4.1 (I needed this anyway because of Pass Through USB support)
- Upgraded the community edition appliance from Endian 2.2 to Endian 2.4 (which has more configuration options, and better ways for reporting and logging)
Then I went on solving the issue, which I suspected was a kind of routing problem. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Endian, ESXi4, Firewall, Infratructure, OpenVPN, Power User, VMware | 5 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/11
One of the annoying issues with LiveMeeting is that it has no way to set the audio level under which it should mute.
In other words: the auto-muting logic of LiveMeeting cannot be influenced, so you get strange audio articats.
So I’m glad that DavidI announced during CodeRage that Embarcadero will be moving to http://www.gotomeeting.com/fec/webinar later this month.
–jeroen
Posted in Opinions | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/08
Endian is a nice *nix based open source firewall appliance which has a free Community Edition (which always is a virtual appliance) and paid (either virtual or physical) edition.
It does a lot of things, including spam filtering, http caching, proxying, VPN, DHCP, routing, et cetera.
Those things are done very well, in a reasonably small footprint:
Registering for their community edition is meant to enable the on-line update mechanism for it.
It is supposed to work like this:
- You enter your email address
- They dispatch a mail to you with a verification link
- Clicking the verification link confirms that email address, and flags it in their database as valid for Endian Community updates
- You enter the same email on your Endian appliance to get updates
But using that registration is hard: their registration mechanism has at least two flaws: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in *nix, Endian, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/06
Thanks to an excellent post by Peter Sebastian from Jargon Technology, it was a breeze to upgrade.
I did the upgrade using Using the vMA virtual appliance, the statements are these:
After bringing the ESXi 4.0 box into maintenance mode, I performed these steps on an SSH connection to the vMA virtual appliance: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in *nix, ESXi4, Power User, VMware | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/05
In Visual Studio 2010, the empty “ASP.NET Web Service Application” projects are gone.
This is probably because Microsoft rather has you use WCF, so a few of those “older” templates are now gone:
To simplify things a bit in 2010, we’ve removed a few of the older templates. You can get the same thing by creating an empty website and adding a web service to it.
Funny though, as the “old” templates are still mentioned, of course in their ASP.NET 3.5 web service documentation, but also in their Visual Studio 2010 ASP.NET Web services documentation 
–jeroen
via: Visual Web Developer Express 2010 – WebService Template – ASP.NET Forums.
Posted in .NET, ASP.NET, Development, SOAP/WebServices, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/04
Remote Desktop Protocol (aka RDP) introduced span support in version 6.1, and multimon support in vesion 7.
RDP consists of a server part called Remote Desktop Services, and a client part (MSTSC.EXE, currently called Remote Desktop Connection, previously caled Terminal Services Client).
Because of the server/client split, not all feature combinations are possible.
Hence below a table listing what is possible, and a short explanation of a few features.
From those, I use often: ‘span’, ‘multimon’ and ’admin’ (previously called ‘console’).
My intention is to make this info as complete as possible; please comment on things that are wrong or incomplete. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Power User | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/01
Depending on UMTS and GPRS for my on-the-road internet access, ads take up a lot of my bandwidth and data limit so I decided to try to get rid of them.
My main browser is Chrome, so I did a quick search and found the AdBlock Google Chrome extension.
I have worked with that for at least a week now, and I’m happy: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Power User | Leave a Comment »
