Microsoft – Page 6 – Absoblogginlutely!

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools v1

By Andy on Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Microsoft just released version 1 of their Pro Photo Tools (genuine advantage and .net framework 3 required) that allows you to geotag your photos. Interestingly the software seems to think it is called Photo Info v2 as trying to install it popped up a message saying I needed to remove Photo Info version 1 before installing version2. Having got that hurdle out of the way I loaded the software. I was pleased straight away as this application loaded a lot faster than photo info v1 which could take about 45 seconds to load but at first glance I shuddered at the dark grey colour scheme but then continued to click around the application. I loaded a photo I had already geotagged and sure enough the information was displayed in the gps fields and on the map. One cool feature is the “Get Location Text” button that gets the street address from the co-ordinates – very cool. The application also allows you to load in a gpx file (or other location files) from your gps and automatically sync the location with the time stamp from the camera. I haven’t tried this yet as I don’t have a recent gps log with photos – I’ll have to go out geocaching some more to rectify this! If your camera time is slightly off (I just realised mine is an hour slow due to the time change) you can change the time stamp on all of your photos basing the original time on gps time or exif time.

I finally stamped a whole load of photos with my name, website and description of the event and quickly saved all the information back to the files. Keywords can be entered to tag the photos but need to be comma separated (the software doesn’t tell you that and space separating them puts them all in as one long keyword.) It was handy to have the photos open in Windows Live Photo to view the keywords as the files were changed to see how this would work. No changes in WLP were necessary – as the files were saved the tags were changing in real time.

I’d really like to be able to create macros in this application to automatically stamp my data into photos such as Photographer, url etc as at the moment its a process taking a few steps – not many, but it would be nice to automate it. Also the ability to select various copyright choices such as creative commons would be good too (it defaults to all rights reserved).

Overall a nice package to be added to my existing set of photo editing tools – it will probably replace wwmx as my geotagging tool of choice.

Microsoft

Heroes happen here.

By Andy on Tuesday, March 18, 2008

I’m off to the Heroes Happen Here event in Columbus on Thursday – any other readers going? I’ve not managed to get my hands dirty with the Windows2008 server yet so this event should be interesting and hopefully pretty fun too. The last Microsoft held event was packed which spoilt it a bit but I’m hoping this one won’t be as crowded. It is a sellout which hopefully means they’ve only allowed enough people that they actually have room for this time.

Exchange / Outlook Microsoft Technet Windows 2003 Work

Exchange 2007 Migration is almost done.

By Andy on Tuesday, February 19, 2008

The migration from NT4 and Exchange 5.5 to Exchange2007 and Windows 2003 is almost done. This weekend was the installation of Exchange 2007 and the move of mailboxes. Unfortunately it did not go to plan. Upromote worked great on the first server that needed the software and after two or three reboots it was acting as a member server. The second server however did not go well. Instead the server bluescreened in the middle of the process and I was left with a server that was neither in a domain or in a workgroup. The logon box did not include the domain option but the local SAM was corrupted and wouldn’t let me login. As the machine was out of the domain I couldn’t connect to it remotely apart from ping activity. After struggling for a long time with a multitude of recovery tools we ended up with a parallel installation of NT4 on the machine so that we could access the data on the drives. This was not without hassles – the RAID controller drivers would not recognise the disk in NT4 – you would have thought that downloading the drivers for the raid controller that appears in the BIOS boot would work but nope – we had to use different drivers! I tried to access the machine using Microsoft’s Dart Tool – the rebranded ERD commander, but this tool doesn’t support NT – in the end I had to go back to ERD Commander 2002 to get a version that worked with NT4 (although it didn’t actually help). The parallel installation of NT also needed SQL 7 reinstalling but this needed ie4 installed (and where do you get *that* from?) Fortunately it would also accept IE6 too.

Installing the Exchange2007 sp1 was not a fun experience either – the process stopped half way through with an error saying that a file was in use and that I needed to reboot the server to continue. When I did so, the installation would not continue as all of the Exchange services and several other essential windows services had been set to disabled by the previous installation and the upgrade needs the Information Store to be running. As the other services were stopped the machine acted like it was behind a firewall – you were not able to ping out or into it. Setting all the services to automatic and then starting them got through this problem – I had to boot up my Virtual Exchange 2007 server to see which disabled services should normally be running though. I actually had to try the upgrade about 3 times before I got through with no errors but the whole experience made SQL2005 look stable.

Now I am having major trouble getting the remote outlook clients to connect through to the exchange 2007 server using RPC over HTTPS – it worked great with the Exchange 2003 server but just will not work with Exchange 2007 – if you have any bright ideas then let me know – tomorrow I’ll be logging a call with Microsoft for some assistance.

At the end of the weekend I felt like I had installed every piece of Microsoft software just to get Exchange migrated onto new servers. I have got some great ideas for future migrations and I know that I don’t want to repeat the process sometime soon!

Then to top it all off, the advert shown in this blog post arrived stuck to the front cover of my Technet magazine today – talk about bad timing. Having said that, I have received the white paper and I don’t think we’d use their services as it sounds expensive. The advice was pretty basic but did include the steps of removing old mailboxes and cleaning up the database. One REALLY annoying thing to see when you are moving mailboxes on a weekend without pay is a lot of “moving 1 of 3654 spam messages” and “moving 3 of 12876 deleted items”. I had told the users to delete these items before the upgrade but this hadn’t been done. I think next time I will include a step of telling the users to delete their spam, junk and deleted items BEFORE the upgrade as it will be done as part of the upgrade “automatically” (and if anyone has a tool that will walk through a message store deleting items in the spam, junk and deleted items then let me know)

Microsoft

Undersea internet cable cut

By Andy on Thursday, January 31, 2008

You may have heard that an undersea cable was cut affecting various countries internet access. Initially I didn’t think this would concern me but apparently some of the companies who have off-shored their tech support to India like Microsoft are affected. This explains why it’s been over two days to receive a hotfix from the Microsoft support website. Fortunately I got tired of waiting and called them up for it but I still haven’t received my emailed version either.

Exchange / Outlook Hotfixes Microsoft

When things go wrong……….working at the weekend

By Andy on Sunday, January 27, 2008

It’s been a very long weekend. I’ve been trying to do a migration from nt4 and exchange 5.5 up to Windows 2003 64bit, Active Directory and Exchange2007 and although I succeeded there have been several large hiccups along the way. More details in the extended entry as it will get technical!

Microsoft

Group Shot expired

By Andy on Wednesday, January 16, 2008

I was going to use the Microsoft Group Shot software this evening for some editing on a photo but the software has expired and Microsoft haven’t posted a new version online – a real shame as how am I going to do my clone shots now?
Update It turns out that setting your clock back to September 2006 gets this working again –

Microsoft

Bill’s last day?

By Andy on Tuesday, January 8, 2008

There’s a pretty funny video doing the rounds on Bill’s last day from the CES keynotes. I’m wondering who will sign my MCSE certificate when I get there…..

Bugs Microsoft SQL

Fixing ReportServerVirtualDirectory element is missing

By Andy on Sunday, December 9, 2007

Thanks to the post from Danalive on the sql msdn forums by adding the characters ReportServer between the ReportServerVirtualDirectory tags in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.3\Reporting Services\ReportManager\RSWebApplication.config the error message of “The reportservervirtualdirectory element is missing” disappeared and I could access the Reporting Services homepage.
This weekend I had to rename the server as part of the GoLive procedure with this server. Sure enough, the rename of the server caused a lot more errors. There are a couple of pages on the MSDN site with instructions – Basic overview and instructions for renaming SQL2005 and Renaming a Report Server.
So far I’ve had several issues with this server – SQL2005 seems to have the buggiest and most unstable installation routine I’ve ever seen.

Exams Microsoft

70-291 exam passed

By Andy on Friday, December 7, 2007

Got a 900 score this morning – the passmark was 700 so I am very pleased. I tick off the number of questions that I *know* I have correct (32), the number of simulations (3) and the number of questions that I’m not sure if the answer is correct (9). Any question that I’m not sure about I make my best answer too, mark the question for review and go on to the next question. Sim’s I immediately mark for review and go onto the next question. At the end of all the questions I go back and finish off all the review questions.
The exam was 4.25 hours long for 46 questions – I took about 90 minutes – the longest I’ve had so far I think.
This marks the end of my quest for MCSA certification – now I start on the remaining questions to get the MCSE certification.

Microsoft

Ironic BSOD

By Andy on Tuesday, November 20, 2007

It’s rather ironic when the laptop Blue Screens as I start to install the debug symbols in order to debug a blue screen on a server. I think the pc is having one of those days – much like my past two weeks (I think I’m still trying to catch up on having 4 days vacation in October – and yet I’ve got two more days off at the end of this week – can’t wait!)
Update Annoyingly, the pc reboots after the blue screen appears for about 2 seconds. I have turned off the restart on system failure option in My Computer properties. It occurs whenever I double click one of the symbol.exe files across the network.
Update2 After extracting the symbol files from a local version I was able to analyze the dump file and it told me that the problem was in ip_fw.sys – which at first glance looks like a firewall driver. Sure enough, a google search told me that it was from the wipfw openbsd firewall implementation on Windows. Removing the software means I can run the exe with no crashes. The strange thing is that I’ve never heard of wipfw before and I certainly didn’t install it (by itself) as I log all the programs that I install and that wasn’t one of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if it came with another program such as wireshark or bidiblah or something along those lines…more investigation to come.