If you want to create a (mountable, bootable) image of your local hard disk just use that small and cool tool Disk4vhd
Source: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx
Every once in a while you download some code and fire up your Visual Studio and find out that this particular solution was once associated to a team foundation server you don’t know or have a login to. Like when you download source code from CodePlex and you get this “Please type in your username+password for this CodePlex Team Foundation Server”.
Or maybe you’re working on your companies team foundation server and you want to put some code out in the public. You surely want to get rid of these Team Foundation Server bindings.
There’s a fairly complicated way in Visual Studio to do this but since I was able to produce unforseen side effects I do not recommend it.
So what I did was looking into those files a Visual Studio Solution and Project consists of. And I found that there are really just a few files that hold those association information. As you can see in the picture below there are several files side by side to the .sln and .csproj files – like that .vssscc and .vspscc file. Even inside the .csproj and .sln file there are hints that lead to the team foundation server – so obviously besides removing some files a tool would have to edit some files to remove the tfs association.
So I wrote such a tool and I am going release it’s source code just beneath this article. Have fun with it. It compiles with Visual Studio and even Mono Xbuild – actually I wrote it with Monodevelop on Linux 
Multi-platform galore! Who would have thought of that in the founding days of the .NET platform?
So this is easy – this small tool runs on command line and takes one parameter. This parameter is the path to a folder you want to traverse and remove all team foundation server associations in. So normally I take a check-out folder and run the tool on that folder and all its subfolders to remove all associations.
So if you want to have this cool tool you just have to click here: Sourcecode Download
So finally after years and years of hope and nerdy ideas I am able to hold a tablet device in my own hands and it’s not only as good as Picards tablet was back in that great “Star Trek: Next Generation” series, it’s better.
Of course I had to import that particular iPad from the U.S. (thanks Alex!) – actually it was the first time I imported something that expensive. Beside some fun with the shipping company everything went fine. Since Apple just announced to delay the launch of the iPad in Europe for a month it’s nice to have a gadget just a few weeks after it was available in the U.S.
Developing software is hard work – especially when you target several operating systems. One task that you have to perform quite often would be to deploy a new installation of an operating system as fast as possible on a test machine.
Doing this with Windows is easy – you can use the Windows Deployment Services to bootstrap Windows onto almost every machine which can boot over ethernet using PXE. Everything needed to make WDS work on a Windows Boot-Image is located on that image. Since it’s that easy I won’t dive into more detail here.
What I want to show in greater detail is how you can use WDS to deploy even Linux over your network.
Step 1: Get PXELINUX
What’s needed to boot Linux over a network is a dedicated PXE Boot Loader. This one is called PXELINUX and can be downloaded here.
“PXELINUX is a SYSLINUX derivative, for booting Linux off a network server, using a network ROM conforming to the Intel PXE (Pre-Execution Environment) specification.”
On the homepage of PXELINUX is also a short tutorial which files you need and where to copy them.
Step 2: Setup WDS with PXELINUX
I suppose you got your WDS Installation up and running and you are able to deploy Windows. If that’s the case you can go to your WDS Server Management Tool and right-click on the server name – in my case “fileserver.sones”. If you select “Properties” in the context menu you would see the properties windows like in the screenshot below:
You have to change the Boot-Loader from the standard Windows BootMgr to the newly downloaded PXELINUX bootloader. Since this bootloader comes with it’s own set of config files you can edit this config file to allow booting into Windows.
Step 3: Edit PXELINUX configuration file
The first entry I made into the boot menu of the PXELINUX boot loader is the “Install Windows…” entry. Since the first thing the users will see after booting is the PXELINUX loader menu they need to be able to continue to their Windows Installation. Since this Windows Installation cannot be handled by the PXELINUX loader you have to define a boot menu entry which looks a lot like this:
LABEL wds
MENU LABEL Install Windows…
KERNEL pxeboot.0
To add OpenSuSE to the menu you would add an entry looking like this:
LABEL opensuse
MENU LABEL Install OpenSuSE 11.x
kernel /Linux/opensuse/linux
append initrd=/Linux/opensuse/initrd splash=silent showopts
The paths given in the above entry should be altered according to the paths you’re using in your installation. I took the /Linux/opensuse/ files from the network install dvd images of OpenSuSE.
That’s basically everything there is about the installation of Linux (Debian works accordingly) over PXE and WDS.
And finally this is what it should look like if everything worked great:
Source 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preboot_Execution_Environment
Source 2: http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/PXELINUX
Oh what a nice n3rd toy this would be. Rumors say it will be available soon for under $30. And for those who right now think: “What the hell is this?” – This is a coffee mug in the shape of a quite expensive canon lens. In fact I already heard of that idea more than a year ago and wrote about it here. At this time there were only hopes that it would be produced.
Source: http://www.petapixel.com/2010/03/06/canon-lens-mug-purchased-in-canada/
That’s great news for everyone interested in science and history. As it turns out Google and PopSci just made their entire 137-year archive available online… good times!
“We’ve partnered with Google to offer our entire 137-year archive for free browsing. Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. It’s an amazing resource that beautifully encapsulates our ongoing fascination with the future, and science and technology’s incredible potential to improve our lives. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.”
Source: http://www.popsci.com/archives
At sones I am involved in a project that works with a piece of hardware I wanted to work with for about 3 years now: the Microsoft Surface Table.
I was able to play with some tables every now and then but I never had a “business case” which contained a Surface. Now that case just came to us: sones is at the CeBIT fair this year – we were invited by Microsoft Germany to join them and present our cool technology along with theirs.
Since we already had a graph visualisation tool the idea was to bring that tool to Surface and use the platform specific touch controls and gestures.
the VisualGraph application that gave the initial idea
The good news was that it’s easier than thought to develop an application for Surface and all parties are highly committed to the project. The bad news is that we were short on time right from the start: less than 10 days from concept to live presentation isn’t the definition of “comfortable time schedule”. And since we’re currently in the process of development it’s a continueing race.
Thankfully Microsoft is committed to a degree they even made it possible to have two great Surface and WPF ninjas who enable is to get up to speed with the project (thanks to Frank Fischer, Andrea Kohlbauer-Hug, Rainer Nasch and Denis Bauer, you guys rock!).
a Surface simulator
I was able to convice UID to jump in and contribute their designing and user interface knowledge to our little project (thanks to Franz Koller and Cristian Acevedo).
During the process of development I made some pictures which will be used here and there promoting the demonstration. To give you an idea of the progress we made here’s a before and after picture:
We started with a simple port of VisualGraph to the surface table…
…and had something better working and looking at the end of that day.
I think everyone did a great job so far and will continue to do so – a lot work to be done till CeBIT! 
Source 1: http://www.sones.com
Source 2: http://www.microsoft.de
Source 3: http://www.uid.com/
Since sones will be at some community events, conferences and trade shows this year we thought it might be a good idea to have some hardware to document these events.
Since we wanted to have video and we did not want to cope with the rather complex subject of DSLRs we bought a full-hd-camcorder.
Panasonic HDC-SD300
Touchscreen… hard to find anything without a Touchscreen these days.
As you may know, my team and I are developing a graph database. A graph database is a database which is able to handle such things as the following:
So instead of tables with rows and columns, a graph database concentrates on objects and the connections between them and is therefore forming a graph which can be queried, traversed, whatever-you-might-want-to-do.
Lately more and more companies start realizing that their demand for storing unstructured data is growing. Reflecting on unstructured data, I always think of data which cannot single-handedly be mapped in columns and rows (e.g. tables). Normally complex relations between data are represented in relation-tables only containing this relational information. The complexity to query these data structures is humongous as the table based database needs to ‘calculate’ (JOINs, …) the relations every time they are queried. Even though modern databases cache these calculations the costs in terms of memory and cpu time are huge.
Graph databases more or less try to represent this graph of objects and edges (as the relations are called there) as native as possible. The sones GraphDB we have been working on for the last 5 years does exactly that: It stores and queries a data structure which represents a graph of objects. Our approach is to give the user a simple and easy to learn query language and handle all the object storage and object management tasks in a fully blown object oriented graph database developed from the scratch.
Since not everybody seems to have heard of graph databases, we thought it might be a good idea to lower barriers by providing personalized test instances. Everyone can get one of these without the need to install anything – a working AJAX/Javascript compatible browser will suit all needs. (get your instance here.)
Of course the user can choose between different ways to access the database test instance (like SOAP and REST) but the one we just released only needs a browser.
The sones GraphDB WebShell – as we call it – resembles a command line interface. The user can type a query and it is instantly executed on the database server and the results are presented in either a xml, json or text format.
Granted – the interested user needs to know about the query language and the possible usage scenarios. Everyone can access a long and a short documentation here.
Source 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_graph
Source 2: http://www.sones.com
Source 3: Long documentation
Source 4: Short documentation
Today was Linux-Distribution-ISO-Install-Day. And it turned out that the only existing external DVD drive was fubar.
So what to do? We had a spare USB stick and it turns out that you can quite easily convert that USB stick into a bootable Linux-Distribution-Install-USB-Stick. Awesome!
Just download the tool called “UNetbootin”, start it and you can turn virtually any ISO Distribution Image into an USB Stick that boots and installs that ISO:
Create a new folder, rename it to:
GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
After hitting <return> the folder will be a shortcut to the Windows 7 Administration GOD Mode. Enjoy. (Thanks Damir)
I had the task to make my Outlook Task List appear on my iPhone. As everyone knows Apple did not do anything about todo lists or tasks on their phone… well there’s an app for that: Most of the task applications on the iPhone use Toodledos services to sync task lists with the desktop.
To sync the Toodledo service with the desktop you need another tool. This tool uses your Toodledo account and your locally running Outlook to sync between both. So this little desktop sync tool needs access to the Outlook data: This means you will maybe be bugged by Outlook that some program wants to have access to the data. You can allow it for a number of minutes but not forever.
Okay one solution would be to install appropriate antivirus tools to suit the operating systems security needs. Because this wasn’t a solution in my case I needed something more sophisticated to solve the problem.
Now that’s the point where “Advanced Security for Outlook” from MapiLab comes into play. This Outlook Plugin extends Outlooks Security Dialog and adds things like “always allow”:
Source 1: http://www.toodledo.com/
Source 2: http://www.mapilab.com/download/
While setting up a new machine I got this message:
45056 x 19207 pixel… not that bad…
Thanks to a podcast I found a great software for my iPhone and iPod touch. It’s a small tool which does cost less than 3 Euro and it’s served by a server tool which runs on Windows and Mac OS X.
It’s called Air Video and it’s frikin’ awesome! ™
What you do is you install the server software and point it to all your directories / drives that might contain video material. You then take your iPhone and install the client app. If you configured the server to be available over the internet you can now connect from anywhere you want using a pass-pin (which is generated) and a password (which is set by you). And by “from anywhere” they mean “anywhere”. WLAN or 3g didn’t make any difference in my test. You start the client, point to a video file and most of the time you are asked if you a) want to directly play is (if the file is ipod-compatible) or b) if you want to live-convert it and play it (when the file isn’t compatible and needs to be re-encoded live for you) or c) if you want to add the file to a conversion queue which will off-line convert the video for you.
In terms of “finding your video” it does look like this:
Simple, eh? Taping a video will bring up this screen:
As I said – Play directoy, Play with Live Conversion and Offline-Conversion-Queue…
It did work with EVERY Video I tried. When I tried Full-HD Movies my serving PC wasn’t able to handle the load but everyhing in SD worked great which is perfect for me.
Therefore I can highly recommend this tool – it really does work better than anything I’ve seen before.
I am proud to anounce that there’s a video publicly available which shows parts and projects Microsoft Research is working on currently. It’s great to see theses projects, concepts and ideas become publicly available one by one:
“Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft, presents “Rethinking Computing,” a look a how software and information technology can help solve the most pressing global challenges we face today. Part of UW’s Computer Science and Engineering’s Distinguished Lecture Series, Mundie demonstrates a number of current and future-looking technologies that show how computer science is changing scientific exploration and discovery in exciting ways. He discusses the role of new science in solving the global energy crisis, and answer questions from the audience.”
Source: http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.aspx?rID=30363&fID=6021
Great stuff ahead – this is just the thing I would want to write if it’s not been written already. This tool is free and open source and it’s the perfect workaround for those usual cases when you want to download a podcast in your holiday and your apple branded device tells you “You can only download files up to 10 Megabyte over 3G connections” – You take your notebook, log into 3G, create a WiFi Hotspot with this tool and off you go.
“Over the last week some of you may have heard about Connectify. It’s an app that unleashes the “Virtual WiFi” and Wireless Hosted Network features of Windows 7 to turn a PC into a Wireless Access Point or Hot Spot. Well, I looked into what it would take to build such an app, and it really wasn’t that difficult since Windows 7 has all the API’s built in to do it. After some time of looking things up and referencing the “Wireless Hosted Network” C++ sample within the WIndows 7 SDK, I now have a nice working version of the application to release. I’m calling this project “Virtual Router” since it essentially allows you to host a software based wireless router from your laptop or other PC with a Wifi card. Oh, and did I mention that this is FREE and OPEN SOURCE!”
“The Wireless Network create/shared with Virtual Router uses WPA2 Encryption, and there is not way to turn off that encryption. This is actually a feature of the Wireless Hosted Network API’s built into Windows 7 and 2008 R2 to ensure the best security possible.
You can give your "virtual" wireless network any name you want, and also set the password to anything. Just make sure the password is at least 8 characters.”
Hurray for VMWare! – I am using their products for years now – both private and on my job. It’s a blast to work with the Workstation and Fusion. Now they brought a major update to version 7 for VMWare Workstation and version 3 for VMWare Fusion. I upgraded my VMWare Fusion installation and finally the one feature that I missed the most on my Windows Vista and 7 virtual machines is available now: Aero Glas!
Oh… and it’s faster too
After a very very long wait finally Forza 3 arrived! The first panoramic view of a 1-series BMW in Forza 3:
Finally a game where I can drive that car!
Source: http://www.forzaclans.com
This is just beautiful:
this time a XPS M1330 blue-screened and only shows colored lines if you restart it:
If only the hardware would be as great as their service is!
“Und ein weiterer Schritt im Free! Music! Contest wurde getan: Der Sampler steht nun zum Download zur Verfügung! Da die Rückfrage kam: Natürlich sind alle Stücke unter Creative Commons lizenziert.
Fast vier Stunden Musik waren eingereicht worden und am Ende stand eines fest: Mit einer einzelnen CD wären wir nicht in der Lage gewesen, die Qualität der Einsendungen entsprechend zu würdigen. Also verzichten wir auf ungefähr 70% des Gewinns und haben dafür 100% mehr feinste freie Musik. ”
Track-Listing
Source: musik.klarmachen-zum-aendern.de
It’s also suitable for anyone who wants to develop iPhone Applications.
“I started investigating how I might wire up — and then write native iPhone apps from — a scripting language. Lua was on my radar already. It’s compact, expressive, fast enough, and was designed to be embedded. Took only about 20 minutes to get the Lua interpreter running on the iPhone. The real work was to bridge Lua and all the Objective-C/CocoaTouch classes. The bridge had to work in two directions: it would need to be able to create CocoaTouch objects and also be able to respond to callbacks as part of the familiar delegate/protocol model.”
Source: Announcing iPhone WAX
There’s a great Visual Studio documentary on CH9. Highly recommended to anyone who wants to see what happened from the start till now.
“Welcome to the first installment of the Visual Studio Documentary.This is an hour long documentary that is split into two parts, roughly a half hour each. Welcome to part one, where we take you back to the days of MS-DOS and Alan Cooper who originally sold Visual Basic to Bill Gates back in 1988. Next week we will feature Part Two but for those that would like to watch it sooner, here is Part Two. In addition, each week we will post a longer and more in-depth stand alone interview from the interviewees that were featured in the documentary.”
Almost three years ago I wrote about this nice little Regular Expression Tool which provides not only a RegEx-Builder but also a clean and nice interface to test and play.
It was a CodeProject sample project in that time and as it turns out it became a full blown version 3!
Obviously the user interface was revamped completely:
So you now not only get the Testing and playing but also a Regular Expression Library, a cool How-To, a more useable design mode and you can even output your final regular expressions to C#, VB.NET or managed C++!
Great stuff! Even better is the fact that it does not come at any costs. Despite the fact that there’s a registration you can just get your free license on their website.
Source 1: http://www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htm
Source 2: want some espresso?
If you – like me – want to migrate from dasBlog to WordPress by using the great BlogML Export and Import you might want to take this advice:
After exporting the BlogML you should replace all “ ”s in the XML file. If you don’t do that WordPress won’t import anything in the article after the “ "s.
Great stuff this week: Notepad++ was released in a new version 5.5. Nice new features all around:
Mission accomplished. I successfully talked a co-worker, who needed to buy a new car, into buying a gadget-packed BMW 1 series.
He calls it his “cluster on 4 wheels” – because obviously there is some processing “horse-power” in this machine
May he always have a safe ride!
Source 1: http://blog.ahzf.de/index.php/2009/09/21/mein-cluster-hat-vier-rader/
…is just great! A cool tool to find bottlenecks and the cause why your machine is just slow right now.
I’ve run into several problems while trying to install the current 8.1 version of the APC PowerChute Business Edition.
Basically I get this error message when I am trying to install it:
So you can simply not install this version of PowerChute on this machine – OR you could go here and follow the link to the Download of the 8.0 version of the software. This will start the setup with this screen:
Great! Just get the “old” version and use it.
Source 1: APC PowerChute and VMWare
So here we are on a new blog engine. It took me the better part of two days to do the Migration of 2,869 posts and 2,732 comments, a lot of pictures and movie files.
I will write an article on this but for now only two captures images from the migration:
yeah PHP rocks!
had to do some regex action to do the url rewrites
…switch this website to another weblog software in the future. The dasBlog development isn’t exactly what I would call fast-paced. It even seems that there was no movement at all for the last year at all regarding new features.
I took a short look at a current WordPress installation we did for our Developer Website at sones – and I have to admit that feature-wise this WordPress is way beyond anything I could achieve in dasBlog anytime soon.
Additionally the fact that the skin of this site seems to be broken (especially for older browsers) I would have to do a skin-redesign – turns out that this is way easier in WordPress than it is in dasBlog.
Hey it’s great to see that Apple thinks some of the ideas of the new Windows 7 UI (like the new Task Bar). With iTunes 9 you get things like this:
I ran into some strange problems with a notebook that leaded to sound drop-outs or things like sluggish UI and HDD performance. So I tried almost everything troubleshootig the problem. That worked for some problems but there are occasions when I want to have a more systematic approach to those kinds of hardware / driver related problems.
One tool that can help to find hardware / driver problems is the DPC Latency Checker. This tool measures and displays the latency of your system. All you have to do is watch as the measurements scroll by and remove / disable one device after another from your machine. As soon as the latency turns green again there’s a high probability that the device you removed last has a problem of some kind.
On my machine everything is in the greens now – after some BIOS and driver updates. If your system has some issues you would see something like that:
(courtesy of Gnawgnu’s Realm)
Source 1: http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml
Source 2: http://gnawgnu.blogspot.com/2009/01/dell-latitude-e6400-sound-problem-fixed.html
Normally I am using a notebook and a 24” Widescreen TFT as a Dual-Monitor solution. In fact I am mostly using the 24” TFT for work and the notebook 14” TFT for all the things that don’t need to be in focus right now like Instant Messengers.
Now in those few cases when a video needs to be played I want it on the main monitor but I want it to take as little of space as possible. And I want it On Top of everything else… maybe sometimes I even want to control it’s opacity a bit…
Now there’s this cool tool called “OnTopReplica” – It’s available for free on Codeplex and works out of the box without installation.
After you start it you’ll end with a small glas window where you can right-click to get a menu. You choose a Window which needs to be replaces – for example the YouTube Browser Window. After that you can even control which region of this Window should be displayed. You can resize, move and of course control the opacity of this window.
It’s also great for presentations because it allows you to simply resize any window you like. It will resize it and while it does that the window always is “live” – so everything you’re doing in the original window will be displayed in the replica.
Last week I upgraded my iPod touch to an iPhone… well actually I got a new iPhone 3GS aside the iPod.
It’s a fast device – even noticeably faster than the 2nd gen iPod Touch. It’s got almost the same battery life like the touch for me and it was a plug-and-play experience to use it the first time.
What I wasn’t expecting is that the smooth experience suddenly came to a stop when I tried to plug the iPhone into my car – just where the iPod touch did the job for about 5 months (including that the touch got charged by the car along the way).
With the iPhone I got two error messages simultaneously:
“Charging not supported by this accessory”
“This accessory is not supported by iPhone”
Damn you Apple! What’s the problem? There’s a standard USB port which powered 2,5 inch hard disk drives previously and the iPhone just states that it cannot be charged with this accessory (e.g. the car).
On the other hand everything else just works as it was working with the iPod. I can browse my music library on the iDrive I can listen to music – everything works, beside those two error messages and the not-charging iPhone. Thank you Apple B-) Maybe I need to up-grayed my car too?
While trying out the new Mozilla Weave I came across the nice interface the guys built into their sync service. Funny messages included.
Source: http://labs.mozilla.com/weave/
Today we had a great meeting with SciEngines. These guys offer a great platform for everything that needs massive parallelism and IO bandwidth scalability. They even brought a small copacobana cluster to our headquater.
Source: http://www.sciengines.com
Today the new lens for our Canon DSLR arrived – just in time when we need it. Hopefully the polarizing filters will arrive also this week.
Behold the beauty of the first picture! *narf*… Awwww
If you want to completely destroy your productivity for today, just go ahead and visit this great Mash-Up Charts website.
“A mashup, bootleg or blend (also mash up and mash-up) is a song or composition created by blending two or more songs, usually by overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the music track of another.
In full swing at the end of the 20th century, mashups have been described positively as “ultimate post-modern pop song[s]” or “‘culture jamming in its purest form’” They have also been described negatively as “the logical extension of the sampling fever of the ’80s taken to its dumbest extreme”. Due to the questionable legal status of mash ups and little chance of profits “there’s a real punk rock attitude attached to the movement”.” (Source)
Oh… by the way: This is not the first time I am writing about Mash-Ups… be sure to have a look here and here.
Source 1: http://www.mashup-charts.com/
Source 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_%28music%29
One of our two DSL lines in the office is provided by QSC. So far the decision to go with QSC was one of the best since I deal with Internet providers. These guys at QSC are just brilliant. Great support, great service, great pricing!
They even sent me a notice that there will be a planned maintenance downtime in more than a week. They do the maintenance on a saturday morning. When it’s unlikely that anyone will miss the uplink. (Since we got two, we won’t actually miss it… it’s just slower)
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