Lubo Blagoev's Blog

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!

You are using Visual Studio for development right? Chances are that you have everything under one solution file. This includes the usual Class library projects, Web projects, Database projects (Data Dude rocks!), Console applications, Smart Client applications, Web Services, Unit Testing, Functional Testing, Silverlight applications just about anything from CLR stored procedures and Drivers to UI applications is under one solution file right? Well not exactly but you got the point. If you have this many projects at one solution file you need an easy way to navigate and find files in it. There are couple of ways you can ease your work.

• First did you know that if you start typing a files name in solution explorer it will traverse down the tree and select the file that matches. It is the standard type-ahead support for all Windows list views and tree views controls.
• If you need something more robust you can install SonicFileFinder free add-in. It works great and list all file names containing the search expression.

It also supports wildcards so you can type Ext*Methods for example. For complete list of features see features overview.

• If you prefer open source you can look at Visual Studio Flat Solution Explorer. It doesn't allow to search by part of a file name though.
• What if you are in a file and you want to navigate to it in solution explorer. Well that is natively supported. You just need to enable Track Activity In Solution Explorer feature. It is ON/OFF setting unfortunately so you should work either enabled or disabled and sometimes it is irritating since when you switch to the next tab in VS it will jump to the file in solution explorer which may not be your intend. That's why I think it is disabled by default. In any case you can use it by double clicking on it just for the matter of one-time sync. You can also assign a keyboard shortcut through Options->Environment->Keyboard.

If you want more tips and tricks I suggest you visit Sara Ford's blog (category Visual Studio 2005 Tip of the Week).

I hope this helps. Don't worry, be happy!

I use VMWare Workstation extensively. I use it for all kinds of activities - developing, testing Windows behavior when I do weird stuff, installing software that I need but I know I will never install on my real machine, you name it. It works fine and one of the things I like the most is the pause/resume ability. I need only a couple of seconds to resume a paused machine test something and then pause it again till the next time. Today I needed to do just that but over remote desktop. I logged on my remote machine and started the Workstation Console. When I tried to resume the specific VM I got this error message:

The frame buffer layout of the current display cannot be made to match the frame buffer layout stored in the snapshot.  The dimensions of the frame buffer in the snapshot are: Max width 2560, Max height 1770, Max size 18153472.  The dimensions of the frame buffer on the current display are: Max width 2360, Max height 1770, Max size 16777216.
Error encountered while trying to restore the state of group SVGA from file "C:\Users\****\Documents\Virtual Machines\Win Xp\Windows XP Professional1.vmss".

When I clicked OK it allowed me to preserve my paused state:

Your virtual machine did not resume because of a correctable error. To preserve the suspended state so you can correct the error after the virtual machine is powered off, select Preserve.
To discard the suspended state, select Discard

That was not ok. I needed this machine running. After a while I realized that my remote machine has two monitors so my total desktop size is exactly 2560x1024. What was going on is that my remote desktop session was configured to Full screen and that means only 1280x1024 desktop size. Somehow my paused state depends on that whenever I resume my machine to have the original desktop size I was when I did the pause on the VM. This issue is very easy to fix. I needed to connect with more desktop size to my remote machine.

One way to do it to start "mstsc.exe /span /v:RemotePCName". This way I will get the desktop size of the remote machine.

The other way to do it to specify exactly what is the desired screen size using /w: /h: as parameters. In my case

"mstsc.exe /w:2560 /h:1024 /v:RemotePCName".

This is useful if you have paused a machine and you can't get it up because you have removed a monitor for example. You borrow one of you colleagues machine for a minute and remote connect to your PC specifying the screen size. After the  resume is successful you just go your PCs console or just start a normal remote desktop connection at Full screen.

Note: This works for Remote Desktop Client 6.0.