We’ve had a stubborn Windows 2003 server that we’ve been trying to get Office 2007 installed for a while. It has a couple of things wrong with it which have made the install substantially harder.

To Nature that is. It’s good to see that NTTA modified their plans, and instead of just messing with the land for other purposes, giving it back to nature. They had originally planned for the land to be used for toll booths, but with their change to ZipCash, they don’t really need the booths any more, and as such, will be doing replanting, and such in the 14.8 acres of land they’re not using.

I’ve been flashing my Tilt2 for a while now, and every time, I finish flashing, WMDC fails to see my phone. Usually a reboot fixes this, but with some group policy issues, and being remote, reboots take upwards of 10 minutes. This evening I dug into it a little more, and I stumbled across a solution right from the WMDC troubleshooting guide. Pop open the device manager, expand the “Mobile Devices”, and tell it to “Uninstall” the USB sync option, unplug the phone, plug it back in. It’ll see it as a new device, reinstall the drives, and WMDC will pick up again.

I don’t usually do reviews, I generally end up rambling, but thought I’d give it a shot with my camera/laptop back. I’ve had the Lowepro CompuRover AW for about 3 years now. I got it when I decided I wanted to start carrying my Nikon D70s around with me, as well as my Dell Inspiron 9300. I originally had 2 shoulder bags, quite cumbersome if you realize that the laptop alone is nearly 8lbs of laptop, not hugely heavy, but quite a beast if you’re carrying it all the time.

I had a bit of a challenge with this laptop, because it’s a 17” wide screen laptop, and most bags target smaller laptops. So I dropped by a local camera store, and took a look around. I found the CompuRover to be the right size for the laptop, and even better, handled my largest lens too. So I purchased it. When I got home, I moved all my laptop equipment, cables, card readers, power cables, etc, and then all my camera equipment. This made the bag pretty heavy, but when loaded on my back, I couldn’t feel a thing, the straps lifted the bag up nicely, and shifted the weight from the lower back to the shoulders, and made it feel good.

Jump forward 3 years, and it’s still going strong, I’ve got more camera equipment, and changed out my laptop, but it still going strong. The bag has been on multiple tours of the Dallas zoo, as well as various walks around the local parks, and the trips to and from work, getting thrown about, and onto my shoulder, several flights to and from various parts of the country, as well as back home to the UK. The stitching has held, the plastics are still very solid and no breaks. The elastics are still quite springy¹. The bag could easily be passed as “like new” if it wasn’t for the fact I had a cat and a dog, and their various off-sheds due to it coming up to summer.

So if you’re looking for a strong, sturdy laptop/camera back, with plenty of room for equipment, this bag certainly fits the bill.

The Networker Blog has an excellent post on support contracts, coining the term Icarus Support Contract. Preston warns on the dangers of using a using minimal support agreements when covering equipment, and software in an environment that is covered by an SLA.

A while back I wrote about The Reboot. Unfortunately I’ve not really had a chance to go back and address some of the things I’d mentioned in it, so I’m going to try getting to that very soon. First thing was working on me…

For the last day or so, we’ve been working on rolling out the next release of our code to our QA environment. When it came time to build a new set of solutions I stumbled across a weird validation error.

An error occurred while validating.  HRESULT=80004005

This error popped up on the setup applications for several new programs. Doing some searching I stumbled across a couple of posts that hinted on removing the project output from the setup, and trying again. This stopped the errors on the setup application, but not the actual application itself.

Then I saw a hint in the errors list…

Application Configuration file "App.config" is invalid. '-' is an unexpected token.

Checking into the app.config file, I stumbled across the cause. It looks like somebody had pasted code that had been “fixed” up by Outlook, or word, and broken a comment. Fixing this, resolved both the app compilation, and the setup validation error.

We had great weather last weekend in Dallas, reaching a nice 62F, so we decided to hit the Dallas Zoo. It’s probably the first time I’ve got the camera out in a while, excluding some small photo shoots for the office. Lugging around my D70s, and my Sigma 70-200, managed to make a complete circuit of the zoo this time. We ended up walking about 2 miles, and another mile on the monorail. GPX file for the tour can be found here, which can be opened in Google Earth, or your favourite GPS manager. Tinkering with some new software Zoner Photo Studio Professional, which is capable of taking GPS information, and creating KMZ files, and append the images to the map, as you can see here¹.

The picture to the right is probably one of my favourite from the trip. More can be seen on my gallery.

EDIT: Forgot to actually link to the KMZ file… oups.

For the longest time, I’ve had a random image sitting in the right sidebar. It happily picks random images from my local gallery. Last night, I figured it was about time to play catch up on the Gallery2 install we had been using. After all, we were on 2.2.3, and they were up to 2.3.something. All was working well, gallery loaded, images were all showing, everybody was happy. Until I checked the front page of my blog.

Part of our move was including the building of the new DR environment. Like most people, we cheated, and cloned the production servers to the new environment¹. One issue was host naming changes. In our DR environment, the host names change due to the location, and roll of the servers. This means that various IIS config options are now incorrect. This is easily fixed with the new AppCmd² in IIS7.

appcmd set vdir /vdir.name:"SiteName/virtual_dir" /physicalPath:"\\NewServer\Images"

The command is relatively easy to understand. /vdir.name is the path to the site, and virtual directory, and /physicalPath is the new path. Easy huh?