… to the virtual machine.  Check the values provided and try again.” error

It sucks as an error message.  Would it take too much programming effort to make it more meaningful Virtual PC team?

What does it mean?

It means you have a Virtual Hard Disk file larger than 127.5GB.  Which Virtual PC does not support.
You might have created this with the Microsoft Disk2VHD tool.
To confirm the “disk is too big” problem, open the Settings on an existing Virtual PC, and try to attach the drive:

In other words, we’ve captured a 160GB hard disk, and Virtual PC won’t let us use it.

But we can fix it, it’s a two step process

First we use DiskPart, and then we use VHD Resizer.

(more…)

  Or how tape backups have failed my customers over the years, and wasted our collective time, because of customer stupidity.

1. Melted tapes
   The school which stored their entire backup tape set next to their server.
   One office fire later, “No, we can’t restore your melted tapes.”
2. Old tapes
   The schools which refused to buy replacement tapes, because they were too expensive.
   And wondered why, after a server hard disk failure, we couldn’t restore data off their 4 year old tapes.
3. Dirty tape drives
   The office locations which never ever cleaned their tape drives.
   The tape drives would gum up, and make the tapes un-readable.
4. “Not my job”
   It wasn’t a difficult task to change the backup tapes every day, but it was always “someone else” responsible for it.
   Net result: continual backup failure, and lost data.
5. Slowing down with age.
   Tape drives, being mechanical devices, slow down with age.  So you get Tape Drive A (the old drive) creating tapes that Tape Drive B (the new drive) couldn’t read.

So what did we do to encourage the customers to be concerned about their backups?

Melted tapes:
Showed them what a fire-damaged tape looked like.  “Oh!” was the most common comment.

Old tapes:
Try and grab a copy of the “critical” data when we could, via over-the-network backups.

Dirty tape drives:
Cleaned the drive when we visited once a year.  Little else we could do. 

“Not my job”:
Nothing we could do about that.  A hardware failure would often change the attitude at the customer site.

Slowing down with age:
We’d only see the effect of this after a hard disk crash, where we try and read the tape, and fail.
Often involved paying a service technician *lots* of money to adjust a drive for us, so it could read the data.

Got an old PC which you cannot replace because it’s got a specialised ISA Adapter board in it?

ISA, dear reader, was introduced in 1981, with the original IBM PC.  By 2000, ISA was a dead standard.

I remember one of my customers had a stack of 80386 systems piled in a corner.  “What are those for?”, I queried.
’Those are for the CashTally system.  It won’t work with later hardware.’, was the customer reply.
Yes, the CashTally system used specialised hardware.

So what do you do, if you have ISA adapter cards, which you must keep using?

Well one solution, is to drop over to ARS Technologies and buy yourself a USB2ISA adapter.

Sure, it’s not cheap at $149USD.  But if you had to re-develop a custom system to do what your current ISA adapter is doing, how much would you be looking at?

(The bigger argument is, what the heck are you doing stuck on hardware which requires an ISA adapter?  If that ISA adapter you’re using is that CRITICAL, I wouldn’t be relying on a $149USD adapter to dodge the “I have not updated my application/system because I’m a cheap arse” bullet.)

“I’m concerned about the heating of external drives because many of these little enclosures provide no active air flow across the drive.”, opines Steve Gibson.

And in the field of hard disk maintenance, he would have to be the expert.  SpinRite is the result of his knowledge in the field.

My Seagate FreeAgent Classic drive is an example of this heating issue.

The case was getting far too hot for my comfort, so I drilled holes in it.

But I haven’t done this for my other two external drives, as they run cooler.

“Why do they?”, you ask.

Two likely reasons:

1. The drives turn themselves off when not being used.  This is known as an Idle Sleep.  All three of my external drives do that.
2. I suspect the drives have heat detection built-in, and they slow themselves down as they get hotter.
   This would explain why my WD Passport drive slows down during heavy prolonged use.

2. isn’t so bad. But 1., the drive shutting itself down, can play havoc with instant-on applications.  Such as satellite TV recording.  The work-around is to find drives which don’t shutdown, such as the LaCie range of external drives.

Everyone I’ve shared this poster:

with, has said, “Where did you get it?”

Right here:
sonic84.com and sonic84 @ deviantart.com

I was discussing the poor state of print media journalism, the other day over a drink, with one of the blokes that I work with.

Since it’s Christmas and all, here’s a Nicholson animation movie which sums up it up.

(click on the picture for the movie)

Strangely enough, I see this error occasionally when I connect to our corporate Citrix server farm.  Googling for the answer, I found Microsoft’s answer, which was less than helpful.

As my (Citrix) server administrators are only two desks away, I asked

“What gives???”

Windows does that, the fix is to delete the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSLicensing registry entry.

You can either do that manually, or use the registry file I created here.

So Telstra Australia have finally released the BlackBerry Bold 9700.  And if you loved the BlackBerry Curve 8300 series, you’ll love the new Bold.

If you have a BlackBerry Bold 9000, you’ll love it not as much.  That’ll be because the 9700 is a 9000 in a smaller package.
And you Curve users?  Well it’s the same size, and thinner than the Curve.

What’s to like about the 9700?

• Size, it’s smaller than the current Bold 9000, and a little thinner than the BlackBerry Curve.
  
• It’s lighter than the Bold 9000.
• While in the holster, you can have an audio cable plugged in.
  (this is one of thing that annoys me about some PDAs)
  
• Faster than the Bold 9000.
• The BlackBerry 9700 has a physical lock button, which means we don’t need to place a Lock icon on the home screen.
  

What’s not to like about it?

• The physical lock button.  I kept hitting it by accident.
  I’m sure I would get used to it.
• The microSD card is hard to get out.
  There seems to be some sort of lip or catch that holds the card in.
  
• Trackpad takes a little bit of time to get used to.

How do I think it’ll go in the field, amongst real users?

Very well.  I think it will sell like hotcakes.  And with the Trackpad replacing the fault prone TrackBall means we’ll see a lot less (faulty) handsets being returned to us.
It’s definitely a GOOD thing.  FASTer than the Bold 9000, but unfortunately not any CHEAPer than the current Bold 9000.
I’m looking forward to our customers getting their hands on the 9700.

The problem was reported thus.

Internet Explorer is not storing session cookies for XYZ website.  The session cookies are stored when we use Firefox.

Two hours later, I can tell you that:

• I learnt more about web cookies than I will ever need to know again.
• Firefox does things differently to Internet Explorer.

Gentle reader, Session Cookies are cookies which only exist for the time which your web browser is open for.  They are deleted when you close your browser.  They are often used to cache your user name and password.

If you don’t have your username/password cached, you repeatedly get prompted for it.  Which is annoying.  Hence the need for session cookies.

So I started investigating the cookies not being stored issue..  The first thing I noticed was that Internet Explorer wasn’t even bothering to write the cookie down to the local hard disk.  So I broke out the network sniffer (Wireshark).  It didn’t tell me much, as all the web traffic was encrypted.

The next step was to load up Fiddler, the Web Debugging Proxy.  Fiddler allows you to inspect all the encrypted web traffic between your computer, and the rest of the world.  The session cookie that the XYZ website was trying to push down, had the following details:

There are two issues with this session cookie:

1. It sets an Expires date.
   This normally means that it is a Persistent Cookie, and not a Session Cookie.
   In other words, we should not see Expires in a session cookie.
2. The Expires date was set to a date/time in the past, which is not supported behaviour either.

So why does it work with Firefox then? – Firefox seems to be treating the expired Expires date as no date at all.  So it defaults to a Session Cookie.

Internet Explorer? – A bit more complicated:

Some further reading:
The Unofficial Cookie FAQ
Wikipedia HTTP Cookies

When creating a desktop operating system install, we’ll often have a "computer specific” section, where we’ll install particular software for particular PCs.  For example, we would install fingerprint scanning software on those Lenovo laptops which had a fingerprint scanner built in.

But what if we’d detected a PC we don’t know about?

Throw up an error:

Like all good idiot proofing, we were countering the actions of idiots.  The two reasons which drove that were:

1. The computer manufacturer, HP in this case, AKA the Integration Centre, would introduce a a new model without telling us SOE developers.
   The first we’d hear about it, was when an end user would ring up and say “my PC doesn’t play sound …”
2. Our Desktop Support staff, WHO SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER, would install the desktop operating system image on a PC which wasn’t supported.
   And then complain to everyone but us, that the SOE build was broken.