I've always loved my WHS.  I've been using it since the first beta, but I don't mind admitting I'm not the most committed beta tester.  There was no way I was going to try restoring a backup to a machine that had nothing wrong with it using a beta product.  If one of my machines failed during the beta, sure no problem, but I don't go looking for trouble.  So in all the months I've been using the WHS I've never had to do a restore, until this weekend.

Steph's laptop randomly rebooted and then came up with a little message explaining the registry was corrupt.  No problem, I'll restore it!  Well the first restore didn't go as planned, in fact it bombed out with no message at all.  However I figured it was a hard drive consistency problem, so I tried to do a chkdsk which told me there were errors that couldn't be fixed.  So I bought a new hard drive, popped it in and tried the restore again (Note, I had to create a primary partition first which I could have done using Disk Management right in the restore process).  This time the restore took an hour and at the end of that hour the laptop was up and running like nothing had ever happened!   

I love it, I would have spent a couple days trying to fix the problem without blowing away the OS and then I would have given up on that, and then I would have spent some time trying to get all the files off the machine, then I would have to reinstall windows, then I would have to put all the files back on. The whole time Steph would be 'asking' when her computer was going to be fixed.

 

So why don't you have your own home server yet?!?  Don't know what a home server is?  Have more than 2 machines at home?  Ask me about it sometime and I'll talk your ear off.

Note: The above picture is not an accurate representation of the events that led to the Steph lappy failure of '08 because we don't have a dog yet.

The dasBlog team has released a new .Net 2.0 medium trust version of dasBlog.  You can find an announcement of dasBlog 2.0 at Scott Hanselman's blog or at the dasBlog home page.  The upgrade is pretty smooth and painless, and there are a lot of great things coming down the pipe as well.

Ok, I've been back for almost a week now, and I just barely found time to pump out a new version with only one small change.

 

Change Log 1.2

- Removed settings tab

 

Version 1.2 is now released, unless I hear about some bugs or some interesting feature requests this will probably be the last version.  I think it does what it was meant to do, and I'd like to get started on my other add-in.

Well I should be packing right now, I'm leaving for my wedding tomorrow... but instead I wanted to add a quick feature that hornetfig mentioned in the WHS Developers Forum.  So instead of getting ready and packed I sat down and did some coding.  

So here is version 1.1

Update - Version 1.2

If there are issues with that build you can stil get 1.0 here.

Thanks to We Got Served for their post on my 'succinctly named' add-in. :)

I've been playing around with some Windows Home Server development and I got sick of having the console open and having a RDC connection open to check the Event Log or mess with IIS settings.  Thus the program launcher was born. 

 

You can download it here

I only have one Home Server so testing is a little difficult so let me know if you run into any issues.

 

UPDATE:  Posted a new version, to fix some icon problems.

Dan

Just installed the beta 2 release of Home Server and I moved all my web junk up to it and off my desktop.  Seems to be working perfectly so far...

I went down to the Ice House Microsoft built for their Vista launch event in Toronto today to check things out.  First of all the ice house was pretty impressive with lots of details, but damn cold.  They had some simple yet impressive demos going on all over the 'house' with even more MVPs and other 'experts' wandering around answering questions for the masses.  The one thing that almost all the machines had was DreamScene, this is a new (in beta) Ultra Extra that lets you set a movie as your desktop wallpaper.  Now you could set anything if you wanted, but it ships with a couple of small subtle looping videos.  The one I was looking at was a shot of a rainforest (I think) and a waterfall.  Looked amazing.  Going to look into getting a copy of the beta.  I've been running Vista Ultimate since mid-December and finally got a legit license for it now.  The initial 'wow factor' has worn off, and I still love it.  It's fast, it's sleek, and they fixed a lot of little things that really pissed me off in XP.  I think it is a big step forward for my tech support customer (ie, my family). It will be a learning curve in certain spots, but it should keep their machines nice and clean (hopefully).

 

The event seemed like a success to me just wandering around, I heard lots of people talking about all the cool things, like DreamScene and Media Centre slideshows.  Not sure how many of those 'oh I want that' will translate into a bought copy of Vista but hopefully a few of them at least. <Rant> I did of course hear 'dude, just download it off bittorrent you do know the url for bittorrent right?', so many things wrong with this statement, BitTorrent is a protocol, a site that hosts BitTorrent files is just that, a site that hosts BitTorrent files, not BitTorrent itself.  </Rant>

 

Anyways, I snapped a couple of pics with my new phone.  Turns out I should have looked into the Camera capabilities before I left.  I had the thing set on the low quality setting, so I apologize for the lower quality pics, next ones will be better I promise.

 

Vista Ice House (PicasaWeb)

Well it has been almost a month of fighting with IBM I finally got my laptop back.  I had a problem with the machine locking up and then when I rebooted it, the LCD refused to turn on.  Before I get started, I love my Lenovo laptop.   But I hate Lenovo.   Such unbelievably terrible service.  The story is long, and boring, and not appropriate for children.  If anyone wants to hear it let me know I don't mind telling it.

 

Now that it is back, I'll start blogging again more.

 

Update: I think IBM broke my SD card reader.

I'm not 100% how this works, cause I don't watch a tonne of Oprah, but I guess she can explain stuff...

If you don't know what RSS or a Feed is, I strongly recommend that you take a look at this article.  RSS is a great tool.

RSS Explain

 

Scott Hannselman finally announced that the new DasBlog 1.9 has finally be released.  This blog runs on DasBlog and I've just finished the upgrade to 1.9 from 1.7.  The upgrade process was more or less painless and everything seems to be running well so far.  If anyone runs into a problem let me know. 

Also moved my feeds over to FeedBurner, that should be seamless.  Check out my next post if you don't know what a feed or RSS is.

I blogged about how much I love Gmail shortcuts the other day, well here is a great little reference sheet of the available shortcuts.  Printable version available as well.  

Link to Gmail Shortcuts (printable cheatsheet)

A very handy little Firefox extension for 'Blog This' functionality with Windows Live Writer.  

Link to Firefox Addon (Extension) for Windows Live Writer - Live Writerfox | Can Erten

Windows Live Writer

I've created the last couple posts while on the train using Windows Live Writer, a pretty cool tool that lets you write and post all in one.  I know there are a whack of tools out there that let you blog offline and then publish but this is the first one I've used.  Only thing I wished it had is a queue, so I can write a whack of posts in one sitting and just have them upload over the span of a week.  I'll have to give a couple of the other packages a spin now that I'm trying to get blogging again. 

 

GMail and PicasaWeb

Pretty much everyone I know has heard my preach my Gmail sermon.  I just love it that much.  My only problem now is that I'm having to use Outlook more at work right now and none of the keyboard shortcuts work in Outlook.  My fingers keep using them, but nothing happens... Simple things like typing 'r' while reading an email should open a reply, it just makes sense, to more complex like 'G' then 'I' to go back to the inbox.  I love the shortcuts.  PicasaWeb is one of the newer offerings from Google.  If you haven't used Picasa before it is a decent way to view, edit and organize your photo collection.  Now they have added a WebAlbum feature which allows you to upload 250 meg of pictures to Google's servers in either a public or private gallery.  Absolutely love it, check out my public gallery.

My Blog Map

Found a great new mapping extension for Firefox. Almost a quick guide on how to install an extension for those that have not done so yet.

There are a tonne of quality Firefox extensions out there, check them out.

New Blog Tool means more blogging?

MapFox is an excellent mapping extension for Firefox, give it a try.

MapFox is an excellent mapping extension for Firefox, give it a try.