April 2004 - Posts
After I've reinstalled my machine and MSDN, I can't use the search function in MSDN.
If I select View - Navigation - Search in the menu, I get an error:
“The operation could not be completed. No such interface supported“
Any ideas?
I recently had to reinstall most of my applications.
After the redo, I encountered several problems with my dev environment.
One of the problems I encountered was with reverse engineering my code from VS.Net to Visio. The error I got was: “Couldn't add the UML diagram to the solution. Error number 32”. Several posts on the web suggested that the problem occurs due to mismatches in the environment settings in vs.net and the model measurement units in Visio.
I pursued this and ensured that it matches by setting my Tools - Options - International settings to 'Same as Microsoft Office (Language Neutral)', according to this guys' blog. Unfortunately, this didn't solve my problem, as it did his.
Instead of mucking around and waisting more time, I just reinstalled visio, ensuring that I installed only the default stencils (Not the metric ones). It would probably have worked if I chose to install the metric ones too, but I'm not in the mood to find out :-).
I've been looking forward to the SADev meeting on Friday.
Unfortunately I have been informed on short notice that I have to attend the weekend away with my girlfriend's parents. It's a long drive, so I won't be making it.
Usually the weekend away falls on the easter long weekend, but this year we're going one week later.
I have been migrating our applications from our old server to the new one today.
Our servers are hosted at Internet Solutions in Rosebank.
I arrived at 07h30 this morning and I'm still as busy as a beaver.
Luckily I managed to keep our system state by ghosting the partition - much better than configuring the whole server again. With all the Java stuff (before my time) and certs and whatever, all the ft indexes on our sites, you get the idea, I had to think of something else than a manual install.
After a whole shlep to get the boot partition to write to a ghost image (We couldn't get it to mirror - due to the fact that it contains bad sectors), we tried to boot from the disk. I was so glad when I saw the familiar stripes of the OS loading. When we logged in, it accepted our password, only to loop back to the logon dialogue again - indefinitely.
After an exhaustive search, I found someting on the internet that bypasses this problem. Now I'm actually starting the migration process!!! To get the solution for this: http://forums.winxpcentral.com/showthread.php?t=1018
I'm sitting here with my hooded sweater, the hood coming in handy at last. The server room's cold tends to seep into your bones after a few hours, luckily I have a chair.
One thing really rules about the situation. I used to work for a company that had their offices in this same building. When I started working there, we had unthrottled access to IS' bandwidth!! I forgot how fast the internet can be.. I've got ADSL installed at home, and it doesn't even come close to this.
I downloaded a copy of partition magic - weighing in at just over 22MB, in less than 2 secs. I'm not lying. It was probably hosted in the same building. But I have downloaded another 20MB plusser from an international site, and it clocked at 250kb/s - according to DAP.
Amazing!!!
I don't know about you guys, but I'm counting the days until DevDays come to town!!
Even people from my office that normally wouldn't be interested at all in a MS event have registered.
Most of the people that I know will be attending the Web track.
Although the Web track would probably better for me and what I'm busy with, I want to attend the Smart Client track. I attended the Architect forum at CS holdings a while ago, and it got me real interested in it, due to the excellent and amusing presentation by Gianpaolo Carraro.
I started writing a post on the subject, but it turned into an article.
The article can be viewed at: http://dotnet.org.za/hendrik/articles/1061.aspx
Although I'm still sitting at the office at 20:30 in the evening at the start of the long weekend, I'm really excited.
I'm going to attend the Oppikoppi music festival in Northam this weekend.
I haven't been there since the last century, so it's going to be fun!
It's a pity some of the other guys on http://dotnet.org.za won't be attending - they have to finish some contract work.
One of my fiends will be entertaining the crowds in his first Oppikoppi gig: Stefan Dixon. This guy is amazing! I used to be a David Gray fan (Ok, I still am), but Stefan blows him out of the water... He composes all his own songs and it rocks!!
I need this long weekend more than ever!!
On Monday I decided to install Whidbey on my laptop. I already have 2003 on it, so I didn't want to risk my development environment by running 2005 and 2003 in the same installation.
Problem
Thus I decided to go the dual boot route. My hard drive was already partitioned in a C and D drive. The problem was that I couldn't install the second instance of w2k/xp on the second drive, because it was full of MP3's. And I use the laptop to play music at home as well - so I didn't want to copy them to a network location.
Brain flash
I decided to buy myself an external drive, so that I can boot from this drive and not harm my current environment in any way. I bought a cool gadget - a USB/firewire external casing, but for laptop hard drives, meaning it's nice and compact - and fits into my laptop's bag.
Hard drive surgery
So all I needed now, was a laptop hard drive (Which costs about R1k). I had another deprecated (another story) laptop at home, with a brand new hard drive, so I decided to retrieve it. This wasn't as easy as I estimated it to be, I struggled for about an hour to open the laptop and retrieve the hard drive, without using any powertools. After the operation I was set - I had an external drive and it displayed the extra space without hassle in windows.
Dual boot disaster
So, all I had to do was pop in a XP CD and run it. This is what I did. I haven't configured a dual boot in yonks, so I should probably have paid more intention.... On restart, after copying the files, I entered the normal blue installation screens. I entered and accepted everyting, waiting for the familiar screen to reveal itself - the one where I can choose on which partition I want to install the new instance. But to no avail... I realized that I wont get this screen at a later stage, when the computer restarted and it was just XP splash screens all over - no mention of my good old trusty W2K installation. Damnit!! I decided that I'll go through with the XP install, and make the best of it.
XP fiasco
In the half of my new (unwanted) XP installation, I received an error, informing me that the required file isn't available - that the disk may be dirty and that I should clean it or try another disk. None of these options resolved the issue. OK, so now I'm OSless.
File Safety
So I reached the same exact point which I tried to avoid, mucking up my current dev environment. I adopted a new primary concern: my files. My pst files, some dev files, and other stuff.
Resolution (The short version)
- I had to open up my laptop - without powertools - and insert the external disk.
- Install this disk with W2K, access my files on the other disk (which I put into the external gadget).
- Switch hard drives gain (I have to keep my disk external - because it's still under a 1 year warrantee)
- Reinstall my old environment
- Copy all the files from my D drive to the external disc
- Install W2K on the second partition - with whidbey
Needless to say, I haven't coded a lot this week.