The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for 2010

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Using a USB connected APC UPS with Windows Server 2008 and VMware Server 2.0

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/24

Recently I took over some system management at a client.

They run Windows 2008 Server x64 and a Windows Server 2008 VM under VMware Server 2.0 and a LAN with some client machines
A lot of things were not covered, backup, power outage, etc, so I’m implementing those step by step.

They now have an APC UPS connected through USB.
There are a lot of references on the internet about the APC software (well, more like UPS vendor supplied software in general) being crap.

Luckily, Windows Server 2008 (and 2003) have built-in support for APC UPSes.
Furthermore when Windows Server shuts down, VMware Server needs to perform some actions on the guests as well.

This post covers the configuration of both :-) Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User, VMware | 8 Comments »

Changing a NIC in a VMware VM from a dynamic MAC into a static MAC address

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/23

Sometimes you want to hava a NIC in a VMware VM to have a static MAC address in stead of a dynamically generated one.

This sanbarrow.com page explains what to change in the VMX configuration file.

From:

ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:40:7e:22"
ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = "0"

To:

ethernet0.addressType = "static"
ethernet0.address = "00:50:56:3e:86:29"

VMware also has a few docs on this for workstation and ESX installs and a KB article for both.

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, VMware | 1 Comment »

Porting old Delphi component packages – things I always forget

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/22

I always seem to forget the solution for the error messages about DsgnIntf or DesignIntf.dcu not found when porting old (D# projects) to new (D####) projects.

Googling for this always gets a few false hits at the top, so for my memory,
here it is: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Component Development, Delphi, Designer Development, Development, Package Development, Software Development | 2 Comments »

Bleeding Edge: version WordPress.com “edit link” broken in latest Google Chrome stable build – or is Vodafone causing this? #fail

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/21

One of the things I use most when writing blog entries is in WordPress the “Alt-Shift-A” keyboard shortcut (the “Insert/edit link” button in the toolbar).

This used to work fine in Google Chrome (my favourite browser), but now it fails, well sort of.

This is what happens: when you perform the Edit/Insert action, you see only a blank popup window, and a wait cursor for about 30 seconds, then you see the final Insert/Edit link popup window.

I’m not sure it is because of the new stable build of Chrome, changes in the WordPress.com engine or the Vodafone UMTS network (I’ll explain below why).

It does work fine in these current browser versions:

I have put FireFox last, as the WordPress.com engine does not always works nice (kinds of display issues).

So back to IE for editing WordPress posts for at least a while…

Finding the cause

The reason I’m not sure that I’m not sure what caused this issue is that both WordPress.com and Google Chrome recently got updates:

Since I could not find similar stories on the internet about my problem, I’ve played around a bit with Fiddler 2, and found that the difference between the Insert/Edit link feature in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer is that Google Chrome tries to load this link

http://1.2.3.4/bmi-int-js/bmi.js

That obviously fails, but I have not found out why it is loaded in Google Chrome and not in Internet Explorer yet.
It might have to do that I recently used the Vodafone UMTS network, and Vodafone runs a transparant proxy messing up with the HTML.
The odd thing is that it fails now, I tried both an ADSL (xs4all ADSL) and a Cable (UPC Fiber Power) connection.

To be continued…

–jeroen

Posted in Google, Power User | 3 Comments »

similarity: the symbols used for completely different products

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/19

Funny how two completely different products have very similar symbols:

Activia Symbol

Activia Symbol

Lactacyd Femina Symbol

Lactacyd Femina Symbol

–jeroen

Posted in LifeHacker, Opinions, Power User | Leave a Comment »

view what your system has shared

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/18

Sometimes you want to know which network shares your system exposes to the outside world.

For me (I’m a keyboard addict), the easiest way is to run the “net share” command on the command-line.

The output looks like this: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User | 3 Comments »

Visual Studio 2005/2008 WPF bug: App.xaml not found messages

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/17

When you do some maintenance on old projects, you sometimes bump into things you have completely forgotten about.

This time it is in Visual Studio 2005, with a WPF app, and messages about App.xml.

Since there are few threads covering this problem, so I’m not sure how many people bump into this.
I know that the problem does not limit itself to C#;  I have seen people in VB.NET and Delphi.net bump into this as well.
This problem is not limited to Visual Studio 2005, some people also have it in Visual Studio 2010.
Some people also have it with other objects than App.xaml (like Windows1.xaml, etc).

If you get this error, the solution is simple:

  1. perform a “Clean Solution”,
  2. then run your app again.

This trick has worked for me every time I bumped into it. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, C#, Delphi, Development, Prism, Software Development, Visual Studio and tools, WPF | 2 Comments »

xkcd: Appropriate Term

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/17

My favourite pointing device: xkcd: Appropriate Term.

Posted in About, Opinions, Personal | Leave a Comment »

Long pathname support: Watch for MAX_PATH (was: Windows pathname max length problem « Dropbox Forums)

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/16

When you want to support long pathnames on Windows, you need to watch for the MAX_PATH limitation.
Some tools, like RoboCopy (developed in C++), Beyond Compare (developed in Delphi) and others get it right.
Getting it right does not depend in your development environment: it is all about calling the right API’s with the right parameters.

Let me take a tool – in this case DropBox, though other tools suffer from the same problem – and investigate how they should do it.

Even though DropBox is cross platform, the Windows version of DropBox limits itself to synchronizing files having less than 260 characters in their path.
This is a big drawback: it is so 20th century having a limitation like this. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, Delphi, Development, Encoding, Opinions, Software Development, Unicode | 6 Comments »

Deploying .EXE on a server share when it is in use by workstations (using Handles.exe and for)

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/15

In a lot of network environments, you (still ) find a situation where workstations run a .EXE from a network share.

In these situations, you cannot update the .EXE on the server: you get “Access Denied” errors.

Below is a simple batch-file trick to overcome this.
It kills all the handles that the workstations have to the .EXE
After you have run this batch-file, you can copy the .EXE.

Note:
There still is a small race condition: if between you kill the handles and copying the new .EXE, someone starts the old .EXE Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in CommandLine, Development, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

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