Lubo Blagoev's Blog

Do you want go to the moon? You think it's not possible. Well it is. NASA collects names to put onboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. You can't go exactly but you can show your support to the program by participating. Just enter your first and second names on the Name To The Moon form its as simple as that.

LRO's objectives are to find safe landing sites, locate potential resources, characterize the radiation environment, and demonstrate new technology. If you want to know more visit LRO's home page at http://lunar.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Here's the certificate I got

If you think layered application design is good and it's the best way to throw some work at the juniors in you team think again.

If you want to learn more about

• Inner Dependency Problem
• Dependency Inversion
• Service locator
• Poor's man Dependency Injection
• Inversion of Control Containers
• Static Gateway Pattern
• What's wrong with singletons
• Boo programming language
• Decorator pattern
• Coding to contract rather than concrete implementation
• Dependency Resolver

there is a very good MSDN article about software component dependencies. I suggest you read it if you haven't already.

Tame Your Software Dependencies for More Flexible Apps (By James Kovacs)

Unfortunately the author missed to mention about Object Builder nor the recently announced Unity Application Block but I think you can investigate further on your own.

Loosen up!
Lubo.

Yeah! After less than 4 days and 21 hours on 09, 10, 11 May 2008 Formula 1 is going to hit Istanbul Park track.

Are you going? I certainly am. Here is some useful information I found about the race.

The Istanbul Park is located on Ballica Yolu road 

View Larger Map

Follow this guide to get there - How to get there

Take a look at the detailed race track map

You can even check out how the race track was build Race Track Construction

By the way I guess these are the non official safety cars.

These guys are afraid to stand from their seats cause they have paid 400 EUR for it.

And you haven't booked yet! Well think again quick!

(source: http://www.motorsport.com/)

See you at the track.

In case you are looking what to reading during the weekend I found a couple of articles. I like hardware stuff so all of them are mostly that. The guys at www.bit-tech.net have some very good hits.

CPU related.

Intel 45nm technology overview High-k, Metal Gate Transistors and Penryns.

Intel talks about Nehalem, Larrabee & 32nm Event more acronyms - Nehalem, Tukwila, Larrabee, Sandy Bridge.

My guess is that we will remember one for a long time - Nehalem (just like web now know Conroe).

Memory.

Read the very detailed articles on PC Memory. What DDR is? DDR1 vs DDR2 vs DDR3 vs Graphics DDR (GDDR) vs QDR and XDR. What is a Data Eye? DDR Topology, memory hierarchy, latency and bandwidth and more.

The Secrets of PC Memory: Part 1

The Secrets of PC Memory: Part 2

The Secrets of PC Memory: Part 3

The Secrets of PC Memory: Part 4

HDD stuff.

Understanding RAID

In the last few years RAID has become really quite popular. Once purely in the domain of high-end enterprise servers, today, any self respecting enthusiast motherboard had better have onboard RAID if it wants to be taken seriously. The abundance of onboard RAID controllers mean that it’s not unusual to see small arrays in today’s home computers. The reasons for this can be for increased speed, increased reliability or simply for bragging rights. After all, two (or more) disks are better than one, right?

One thing I can add is "Never do a RAID 5 array on your MB integrated controller (P965 to be specific), NEVER".

Introduction to hard drive technology

So then, what do all of these fancy letters mean? NCQ, TCQ, RAID, IDE, SCSI, SATA, MTBF, SCSI vs. SATA, Asynchronous Notifications. Article for HDD basics.

Misc

64-bit: More than just the RAM - The 64 million dollar question!

First Look: Extensible Firmware Interface EFI the new Bios is here.

Do you have anything interesting to read? How about sharing it.

Not so long time ago Microsoft have released a new version of their FTP Publishing Service - FTP 7. It is a long waited update to the aging FTP6 service that shipped with Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP RTM. A lot have changed and in fact it is a complete rewrite introducing many things like IIS7 integration, integrating FTP into a Web site, virtual host name support,  user isolation, SSL , IPv6 and UTF8 support to name a few. For more go to the features overview or the detailed What's New page.

Unfortunately FTP7 requires Windows Server 2008 to be installed. That is not a big deal but knowing that Windows Server and Windows Vista share the same code base, a question raises can it be deployed on Windows Vista machine? The answer is yes and in the following lines I will show you how. Keep in mind that this is not officially supported and the license requires a valid Windows Server 2008 license.

First you need to download the installation file from the official IIS.NET site. It is an msi file. Running it directly will show you a not supported OS message and will exit. Now you immediately realize that there is a Launch Condition not satisfying the installation and you know that this is not a problem. You need to open ORCA and delete that custom launch condition so the installation can proceed without checking the NT version number.

That's exactly what I did trying to install FTP7 rc1 on Vista RTM. And it failed "gracefully" with the message "Configuration error: Unrecognized configuration path MACHINE/REDIRECTION"

This was on Vista RTM which had problems with HTTP redirection so I gave up till Vista SP1. Now when all the failing factors are removed - SP1 shipped and the final FTP7 version is alive I decided to try again. I did the same procedure but logged the installation using msiexec /L ftp7.log /I ftp7_x86_rtw.msi command line and to my surprise it failed again with another strange message:

DEBUG: Error 2356:  Couldn't locate cabinet in stream: _91EE006EA23648B6D8093FEC97F98FC7.
The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2356. The arguments are: _91EE006EA23648B6D8093FEC97F98FC7, ,
MSI (s) (A0:BC) [15:31:03:795]: Product: Microsoft FTP Service for IIS 7.0 -- The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2356. The arguments are: _91EE006EA23648B6D8093FEC97F98FC7, ,

Well not that strange since this service is not supported on Vista may be there is dependency on specific Windows Server 2008 API's. After inspecting the log I found that the setup fails after it can't locate a specific MEDIA stream in the msi file. That was strange since I haven't modified anything in it just a launch condition that have nothing to do with included msi streams. What was wrong was the fact that after deleting the launch condition I did a "Save As" and it happens that ORCA doesn't preserve all information from the original msi to the new one. (That's not so strange I know at least one other Microsoft tool that does the same thing - EntlibConfig.exe). After that I did a "Save" over the original file. This allows the setup to succeed.

Now you are free to setup your FTP through IIS Manager

I guess I could have written this in couple of lines huh!