Michael Phillips Blog

TechNet wiki…

So a TechNet wiki is coming, as stated by Keith Combs here:

three big things we focus on for all TechNet scenarios are Content, Discoverability, and Participation. We really want to invite participation from everyone and what better way to combine that with discovery and content than to use Wiki technology?

Later this year TechNet and the Server & Cloud Division will partner to launch the new TechNet Wiki.
…
We believe a public wiki for technical content on TechNet has the potential to be a big step forward in all three areas:

• For content, while Microsoft teams write some great content, we cannot possibly author all the content customers need to be successful, and a wiki that offers content from the community will increase the breadth and depth of technical content available for IT Pros.
• For participation, the wiki is a great new way for any IT pro to create and share technical knowledge, engage with other technical people and with Microsoft, and build an identity and reputation within the TechNet community.

I used the word "potential" above because Microsoft cannot succeed with the TechNet Wiki on its own – success ultimately depends on the direct engagement, support, and ongoing feedback from the IT community.

I am not sure how I feel about this.  I like Wikipedia, and OFTEN reference it for information on non-work related topics.  We use a SharePoint wiki for a lot of our documentation where I work, but I don’t find it to be as useful as I would like, because for some reason, I don’t like the interface.  One of the big issues I have with it, is the inability to insert pictures directly in the article during the creation of the article.  You have to upload the picture (such as a screenshot) separately and then link to it.  That doesn’t seem very efficient to me.

With this blog, I use Windows Live Writer.  It allows me to take a snip like this:

and paste it right in the text.  When I publish, it is auto-magically uploaded and linked to my post.  I think the other issue that I have is that I am afraid I would take it personally if someone felt the need to correct something  I posted to a wiki.

I guess I am going to have to work on that.  Both for the wiki at work and (maybe) for the TechNet wiki.  There are those occasions when I actually have useful knowledge to share…

Cluster Maps or WorldMaps

I was roaming around looking for an answer to a question (didn’t find the answer, and I don’t remember the question), when I happened upon a site that had a Cluster Map, like the one I use, and also something called a worldmap. 

introducing worldmaps

See where your website visitors are from with WorldMaps. WorldMaps (currently in Beta) is an IP address to geographic mapping service designed to give website owners the ability to visually see where their visitors are coming from (red dots represent the top 5%, i.e., the most active visitors). These images can be displayed publically on the home page, or on a private page for administrators.

It looks to be a very similar idea to cluster maps, but this one has a bit of variety in the way it marks the map, and you get a few more options on how to display it.

http://www.structuretoobig.com/development/worldmaps.aspx

WordPress speed – take 2

So after I followed Patrick’s advice, it seemed like we had everything working better(?) but then again, it was only faster sometimes… 

After doing some tinkering and comparing between 4 different people, 2 of us with slow performance and 2 with normal performance, I stumbled on the answer…  Patrick and I both had the “wassup” plugin enabled and the others didn’t.  I wouldn’t have known that was it except I am hosting 2 blogs on this same machine and one responds faster than the other.  And the fast one has a post with a bunch of pictures in it…

So we both disabled the “wassup” plugin and now we are both happier with the performance.

Making a Header

In an effort to encourage my wife to share the site we created for keeping up with our family, I was trying to get a good picture to use as the banner in the WordPress theme that we are using.  I had a good picture, but since it doesn’t auto scale…

I ended up using Microsoft Expression Design to create a picture for it.  I first opened the default banner picture to figure out what size it was, and then I create a new file with the same dimensions.  Then I created a box the full size of the document.  I filled that box with a gradient, and then made a slightly smaller box also with a gradient, but I pushed the lighter shade more so that there is a hard edge around the smaller box.  Then I put my picture in the right edge of the smaller box.  The result wasn’t too bad.  And I think I can update the picture pretty easily for seasons.

You can see what I did here:

Personal websites

There are a lot of people who have personal websites that they use to keep track of family.  I have seen a few different types, but it seems that most of them are setup to be mostly a replacement for the photo albums that were always laying around especially at my grand parents house. 

I think this is actually a good thing, because it allows you to put more than just pictures.  In a personal website, you can put descriptions or even stories with the pictures.  And maybe in 25years when your now 3 year old is having his or her first child, you can show them the websites with all the stories of your sleepless nights and all the pictures of the sweet baby that you were so happy holding while you both caught a short nap…

This also makes it easier for families to keep up with each other.  I live a good distance from all of my family except a few cousins.  I am not good about visiting them, and am really bad about visiting with the rest of my family as well.  I hope that by creating a personal site that my wife (and maybe I will help) can keep the rest of the family "in the loop" as to the happenings in our lives, and maybe that will encourage them to keep us in the loop as well. 

Another good reason to do a personal website is that it gives me an opportunity to tinker with things that I don’t normally mess with too much.  I am a Systems Engineer, not  a programmer.  Tinker with my website(s) lets me pretend I understand what it is that programmers do.  (ha)

WordPress performance…

I was unhappy with the performance of my new blog, but Patrick told me that he fixed it by changing the MySQL engine to MyISAM instead of InnoDB.   Wasn’t that nice of him?  It would have been nicer if he had actually created a post about it….

Migrating from DasBlog to WordPress

So I don’t really Blog very much anyway, but that just means, that I want to keep all the entries that I have created over the past 5 years.  In moving to a new Blog, I don’t want to just dump the old stuff. 

WordPress is pretty popular with the group I work with, so that is what I decided to go with.  The problem…  there isn’t an importer for WordPress from DasBlog.  I did a search and came up with a few good posts, but I am not as knowledgeable as I should be so it took a little work to figure it all out.  This is the post that gave me the most help:
http://www.kavinda.net/2008/10/23/migrating-from-dasblog-to-wordpress.html

Here is what I did:

1. Build a server – I am using Server 2008 x64 Standard
   1. Install the IIS Role
   2. Install IIS Role Services
   3. Download and install the URL Rewrite Module http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/465/url-rewrite-module-configuration-reference/
2. Setup MySQL
   1. I just went to http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/ and downloaded the latest version.  I had a little bit of trouble with the install, because I tried to use a password with quotes in it.
3. Setup PHP
   1. Again, I just went to http://www.php.net/downloads.php and downloaded the latest version.  I believe I had to select the CGI setup, but I don’t remember for sure… 
4. Copy old web site content to new server (I have other things on the site besides the Blog)
   1. The nice thing about my situation is that I can leave the old stuff in production while I  figure out the new stuff.  Copying my old stuff over (minus the old Blog) was very simple.
5. Create web site and point to the directory that I copied over.
   1. Also, I had to set the default document as index.php for the Blog
   2. Setup URL Rewrite to get “Pretty URLs”
6. Export old Blog content
   1. This was the hard part.  I used a utility that I downloaded from http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/DasBlogML to convert my posts to BlogML.
   2. Then I used  the import module that I got from http://www.kavinda.net/content/other/BlogML-WordPress-Import.zip
   3. The import leaves a handy little permalinkmap.csv file.  I used Excel and Notepad to change it up a little bit to make lines that looked like: http://www.nukeitmike.com/blog/2009/02/18/ldquoFailedToSetEventLoggingrdquoErrorWhenLoggingIntoCitrixApps.aspx,http://nim.nukeitmike.com/Blog/2009/02/18/failed-to-set-event-logging-error-when-logging-into-citrix-apps/ look like <add key=”/2009/02/18/ldquoFailedToSetEventLoggingrdquoErrorWhenLoggingIntoCitrixApps.aspx” value=”/2009/02/18/failed-to-set-event-logging-error-when-logging-into-citrix-apps/” />  
   4. Add URL Rewrite to enable old links to get to the new post address.  With IIS 7 and the URL Rewrite module you can add the lines that were created in the above step to the webconfig file to get the old links to point to the new links.

So even though this is an exceptionally long post compared to most that make, I didn’t include most of the details…  guess you will just have to ask if you need to know…

“Failed to set Event Logging” error when logging into Citrix Apps

Users are getting the above error due to an invalid entry in the APPSRV.INI file. To fix it:

1. Open the appsrv.ini file located in the user’s Citrix ICA client folder, the default locations are:

In Windows Vista – C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\ICAClient\
In Windows XP – C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\ICAClient\

2. Find the line beginning with”LogFileWin32”, it should be near the top.

The default Value is:

In Windows Vista – C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\ICAClient\wfcwin32.log

In Windows XP – C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\ ICAClient\wfcwin32.log

I have been finding them with “User” instead of the actual name of the user.  For example: <LogFileWin32=C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\ICAClient\wfcwin32.log>

Instead of : <LogFileWin32=C:\Documents and Settings\Michael\Application Data\ICAClient\wfcwin32.log>

3. Update the entry to point to the correct location.

DPM could not connect to SQL reporting services because of IIS connectivity

I am running Data Protection Manager 2007 on Windows Server 2008 (x64).  I have not been able to use the reporting piece, and haven’t been running DPM long enough to wonder much about it, but when I went to finally figure it out the answer was rather simple.  If you want to fix it, the answer is here, but for more about what the problem is, you can go to the forum post below.

This problem occurs because of a new permission requirement in IIS 7.0. This
permission requirement is for ISAPI extensions that use a wildcard (*) script
mapping.

To work around this problem, follow these steps:
1. Click Start, click Run, type inetmgr, and then click OK.
2. In Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager, expand Web Sites, expand
Default Web Site, and then click the virtual directory for the report server.
3. Under Features View, double-click Handler Mappings.
4. Under Actions, click Edit Feature Permissions.
5. Click to select the Scripts check box, and then click OK.

How to fix— Data Protection Manager error 3013  SQL reporting tab  ? in Data Protection Manager

Icon Extractor in VB.NET – The Code Project – VB.NET

I was looking for a way to get a particular graphic, and came across this utility.  I thought it might be useful later.

Background

The general idea is to pull out icons that are embedded resources to DLL’s or EXE’s. The way it’s done is with the old fashioned Win32 API’s.

Icon Extractor in VB.NET – The Code Project – VB.NET