Sharing some tribal knowlege

Hey guys,

Two totally unrelated things, but both bits of tribal knowledge that you may find useful.

If you get a 1722 error when installing something on Windows XP/Vista

I got one of these when trying to setup a Logitech QuickCam Pro webcam. I believe 1722 is a generic Installshield error, so you can get one of these in other cases as well. It seems like you get this error when certain DLLs are not properly registered. If you run regsvr32 on the DLLs listed below:

Start-->Run-->regsvr32 urlmon.dll
Start-->Run-->regsvr32 Shdocvw.dll
Start-->Run-->regsvr32 Msjava.dll
Start-->Run-->regsvr32 Actxprxy.dll
Start-->Run-->regsvr32 Oleaut32.dll
Start-->Run-->regsvr32 Mshtml.dll
Start-->Run-->regsvr32 Browseui.dll
Start-->Run-->regsvr32 Shell32.dll

These were taken from this post (http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=553785). If you don't have some of these DLLs that is probably OK. If this still doesn't work, do the same thing for vbscript.dll.

If you start up a VM in Hyper-V and that VM cannot connect to the network

In the Hyper-V manager, select your VM, right-click and choose settings. In the resulting dialog box, go to the Add Hardware section (this is probably selected for you by default) and choose to add the Legacy Network Adapter (you will have to shutdown your VM first). Doing this should enable networking in your VM.

Thanks!

Eric.

Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V

Hey guys,

As you may already know, Microsoft entered the hypervisor-based virtualization market with their Hyper-V product; it is currently available as a Release Candidate.

I've had a bit of a chance to play with Hyper-V and it kind of strikes me as really good bad medicine. I know it's good for me and I'll feel better in the long run, but it's kind of hard to get it down at first.

There has been a fair bit written about Hyper-V already; what I struggled with, however , is their snapshot feature. This feature replaces the saved state and undo drives that you may have used with Virtual PC and Virtual Server.

The video below illustrates how to use snapshots. It is a little bit long; I really wanted to be very explicit in explaining this feature since there are some subtle things that can trip you up.

Click on the image below to start the video



Thanks!

Eric.

Sharing Blists

Hey guys,

I wrote about Blist earlier this year - they are a startup in Seattle building the world's easiest database. I wanted to have a closer look at their sharing feature. It is really useful, my contractors and I use it to track hours on a given project.

This is also a chance for me to try a few new things with my videos. Please click the image below to view it.



Thanks!

Eric.

Fun business card ideas

Hey guys,

I'm in the process of re-branding (again!) and stumbled across an interesting article about fun business card ideas: http://inventorspot.com/articles/business_cards_best_12841

Thanks!

Eric.

Finally a new home for Hemi!

Hey guys,

A long while ago, I wrote a tool that helped you move work items from one team project to another in Team Foundation Server. I've had a few requests for the source code for that tool, but the machine that I had it on had crashed. In going through some old backups, I finally was able to recover what looks like a reasonable version of that tool.

I created a CodePlex project http://www.codeplex.com/hemi so that others can make enhancements and improvements.

Thanks and apologies this took so long!

Eric.

Animoto.com - no more boring slide shows

Hey guys,

Animoto.com is a start-up you have to check out if one of the following apply to you:

1. You have been subjected to boring slide shows by your friends
2. You subject your friends to boring slide shows
   

These guys take your digital images and music that you pick and create a really unique video slide show out of them. That description really doesn't do their work justice, you really have to see the video that they produce.

Check out a video of me using their service below, or just have a look at the end result here.



Thanks!

Eric.

One more integrated ALM player in the market...

Hey guys,

As you probably know, IBM Rational has been working on Jazz, a collaboration/ALM platform for quite some time.

Today, at the Rational Developer Conference, an official announcement was made to outline the pricing and road map of Jazz and Rational Team Concert (the first commercial Jazz client).

I've had a chance to experiment with some of the Jazz beta releases. I won't go into my opinions about them in this post. There is no Visual Studio client for Jazz so the choice between using TFS or VSTS is still really a platform decision (.NET vs J2EE).

Here are a couple of articles that describe this latest addition to the integrate ALM market.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/06/02/IBM-reveals-Jazz-product-launch-wave_1.html

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/development/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208401008

In that second article, you'll find a description of how Jazz will be priced:

"Team Concert will be available in a free Express-C edition for use by up to three developers and in the Express edition, aimed at departments or midsize companies with up to 50 developers and priced at $1,200 per developer. The Standard edition ($3,900 per developer) supports as many as 250 developers. A full-blown Enterprise edition is slated for next year."

I copied a table from the Jazz community site that describes how the features are distributed amongst the various editions. I noticed a slight discrepancy in the maximum number of users for the Express-C edition - the Jazz community site says 10 but the article above says 3. I'm sure one of the two will get corrected shortly.
Apologies, there is something odd with template, any table has a huge leading space added to it.

Features		Express-C		Express		Standard
Max User Limit		10		50		250
Database included (optional)		Derby only		Derby and DB2 Express (DB2, Oracle)		Derby and DB2 Express (DB2, Oracle)
App Server included (optional)		Tomcat only		Tomcat (WebSphere)		Tomcat (WebSphere)
Source Code Management		yes		yes		yes
Work Item Tracking		yes		yes		yes
Build Management		yes		yes		yes
Agile Planning		yes		yes		yes
Subversion Integration		yes		yes		yes
Server Level Permissions		yes		yes		yes
LDAP Authentication		yes		yes		yes
Customizable Process		yes		yes		yes
Customizable Work Item Attributes and Workflow						yes
Reports						yes
Dashboard						yes
Role-based Process Permissions						yes
ClearCase Connector						yes
ClearQuest Connector						yes
LDAP Import						yes