<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
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<?xml-stylesheet href="http://www.virtualpcfaq.com/lib/rss/rss-style.css" type="text/css"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="http://www.virtualpcfaq.com/lib/rss/rss20.xsl" type="text/xsl"?>
<rss version="2.0">
    <channel>
        <title>Tiki RSS feed for weblogs</title>
        <description></description>
        <link>http://www.virtualpcfaq.com/tiki-blogs_rss.php?ver=2</link>
        <lastBuildDate>Thu, 23 May 2013 23:40:52 +0100</lastBuildDate>
        <generator>Tiki CMS/Groupware via FeedCreator 1.7.2</generator>
        <image>
            <url>http://www.virtualpcfaq.com/img/tiki.jpg</url>
            <title>tikiwiki logo</title>
            <link>http://www.virtualpcfaq.com/tiki-index.php</link>
            <description><![CDATA[Feed provided by http://www.virtualpcfaq.com/tiki-index.php. Click to visit.]]></description>
        </image>
        <language>en-us</language>
        <item>
            <title>Adding RSS news to your site using JavaScript</title>
            <link>http://www.virtualpcfaq.com/tiki-view_blog_post.php?blogId=4&amp;postId=36</link>
            <description><![CDATA[I was redoing our &quot;news&quot; section of <a class="wiki external"  href="www.bitshop.com">www.bitshop.com</a><img border="0" class="externallink" src="img/icons/external_link.gif" alt="external link" /> to pull from a RSS feed of our blogs and ran into several more complications than I expected to have.<br />
<br />
First let me preface with I did this as a quick measure, I feel custom code to render the blog news IN HTML (not in javascript) is useful, that way the search engines pick it up and see the main page (or all pages) of your site are changing regularly.<br />
<br />
When you do the same in javascript it APPEARS the same to the end users, but to search engines it isn't displaying your blog at all.  Realize this.<br />
<br />
Back to the issue:<br />
<br />
I decided to use Google's AJAX Feed API, their example is pretty simple and shows the rss item's title, however it doesn't show a link.  Adding a link you wouldn't think is hard, yet the way it's coded they add TEXT, so I can't put in &amp;lt a href&gt; to get a link.<br />
<br />
NOTE: your script src including your google key, something like http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=.....<br />
<br />
<b>Unfortunately the software on this site is messing up the below code, feel free to email me and I'll send you a copy of this code if this doesn't answer your questions. </b><br />
<br />
<pre class='codelisting'>

 &lt; / script &gt;



google.load(&quot;feeds&quot;, &quot;1&quot;); 

function initialize() 
 { 
 var feed = new google.feeds.Feed(&quot;http://www.bitshop.com/Blogs/tabid/95/rssid/7/Default.aspx&quot;); 
 feed.load(function(result) 
   { 
   if (!result.error) 
      { 
      var container = document.getElementById(&quot;feed&quot;); 
      container.innerHTML = '';
      for (var i = 0; i &lt; result.feed.entries.length; i++) 
         {
         var entry = result.feed.entries[i];
         var newSpan = document.createElement(&quot;span&quot;); 
         newSpan.innerHTML = '&amp;lta href=&quot;' + entry.link + '&quot;&gt;' + entry.title + '&amp;lt/a&gt;&amp;lt br&gt;';
         container.appendChild(newSpan); 
         }
      }
    }
  );
 }

 google.setOnLoadCallback(initialize); 

&lt; / script &gt;

&lt;div id=&quot;feed&quot;&gt;Loading BitShop News...&lt;/div&gt; 
</pre><br />
<br />
You'll notice I add a span and set the innerHTML of the span, then append it to the container (The container is the div id feed).<br />
<br />
This code I didn't find online easily and was surprised this wasn't easy to find.<br />
<br />
References:<br />
<h1></h1><a id="flipperid758659" class="link" href="javascript:flipWithSign('id758659')">[+]</a><div id="id758659" style="display:none;">
http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/dynamicfeed/reference.html#hello-world<br />
http://www.nabble.com/-OT--HTML-in-document.createTextnode()--td17448424.html<br />
<h2></h2>
<br />
</div>
]]></description>
            <author>steveradich</author>
            <pubDate>Thu, 12 Feb 2009 08:14:30 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>DotNetNuke upload image file error</title>
            <link>http://www.virtualpcfaq.com/tiki-view_blog_post.php?blogId=7&amp;postId=35</link>
            <description><![CDATA[You might come across the following error, like I did; while trying to browse an image file to upload using dotnetnuke. Please view the solution below and it shall fix it:<br />
<br />
<span style="text-decoration:underline;"><b>Error:</b></span><br />
<br />
Could not load type  'DotNetNuke.HtmlEditor.FckHtmlEditorProvider.fckimagegallery'<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="text-decoration:underline;"><b>Solution:</b></span><br />
<br />
Move 'DotNetNuke.HtmlEditor.FckHtmlEditorProvider.fckimagegallery from bin/Provider to just bin, that will solve your problem.<br />
]]></description>
            <author>ayeshaa</author>
            <pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2009 12:41:49 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>Lenovo Thinkpad X61 disk drive failure / boot problem</title>
            <link>http://www.virtualpcfaq.com/tiki-view_blog_post.php?blogId=4&amp;postId=34</link>
            <description><![CDATA[I'll confess to using a few laptops, however the one I carry most and use the most is a Lenovo Thinkpad X61 which is a decent tablet PC.<br />
<br />
I've had about a dozen times the system won't boot saying drive failed, usually if I throw it on the ground and pick it up it'll work (ok, I'm exaggerating..).. But it's obviously something &quot;loose&quot;.<br />
<br />
Today I couldn't get it to boot and pulled out the disk drive cover screw (on bottom under the right shift key there's a Phillips screw). The disk drive was installed, the cover on, the padding there - yet the disk drive wasn't connected to the laptop at all. I simply pushed it back in, put back on the cover, and everything worked.<br />
<br />
This almost seems like either a) my padding around the disk is worn, b) a piece of padding was left off at the factory.<br />
<br />
I was in a rush to do something on it so booted and did my work, however I'm curious if others have had this same problem. A quick search didn't turn up any stories like this so I am posting this blog entry.<br />
<br />
Hopefully this helps someone get their laptop to boot and avoids a service call / data loss for a simple &quot;fit&quot; issue.<br />
<br />
Steve Radich<br />
BitShop, Inc.<br />
<br />
]]></description>
            <author>steveradich</author>
            <pubDate>Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:54:45 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>SAS Storage Controller Problems and weekend support</title>
            <link>http://www.virtualpcfaq.com/tiki-view_blog_post.php?blogId=4&amp;postId=33</link>
            <description><![CDATA[So here I am, Memorial Day weekend, doing some testing of a new NAS which is in the process of going into production after passing most of our tests (the ones it hasn't  passed we're considering non-critical at this point).  The system is OpenSolaris based, using ZFS which IMHO is the best storage pool / file system around right now - at least at a reasonable price point. I confess I'm not overly familiar with the higher priced ones as we *REALLY* value something we can dig into ourselves if there's a problem (i.e. open source is good for that).  It would be nice if Sun officially supported the components we need, but they're only in OpenSolaris as of today.<br />
<br />
Now, let's take a simple task - Add 6 drives to a SAS enclosure using an Adaptec storage controller (latest HBA &quot;Performance&quot; series, not the value series controllers).  What happens? 3 drives recognized as added, 3 not.<br />
<br />
Now right here let me stop and say we've already had to waste about 20 hours with Adaptec to get the controller to work - When we added SATA drives it locked up until flashing the controller. There's no mention that anyone pointed us to saying this is a known issue, no mention of it on the knowledge base that we found, etc.  That put us NOT very happy with the quality of this controller previously.  We've worked through all those problems, but I'm not very happy with the Adaptec controller including a few features that are &quot;missing&quot; like ability to export unassigned drives as JBODs to the host OS (3ware and areca both do this I'm 99% sure, I should verify but don't have time to right now).<br />
<br />
So 3 drives are recognized, 3 aren't. Let's unplug the 3 that aren't working and try re-plugging them.  Nope, no dice.  Controller reports drives removed (first thought, good, it recognized them)... oh %(*&amp;! those were drives that are in production that it says were removed - they weren't removed though!<br />
<br />
So here we are, a production server that's supposed to handle 250+ drives being attached, and Adaptec can't figure out what drives are being plugged in and what are being removed.<br />
<br />
Let's try a bunch of things, find the drivse didn't seem to actually disappear (although the ones that disappeared luckily were only hooked up for a performance test, so I honestly did little about it saying they were removed - Instead I concentrated on the new drives).  So far I'd say everything sounds like an enclosure problem, not controller, but...<br />
<br />
I get a notice for a SMART warning on a new SATA drive (don't laugh, but about 4 of 7 new drives had issues in the first 72 hours. When i say new I mean right out of the box. Generally we test drives before going into production but for this box we didn't).  So SMART error - There's a spare drive that I've inserted so let's tell Solaris to move the mirror to the new drive - Sounds easy, right? zpool replace ... starts off fine.<br />
<br />
Now let's go back to getting drives to hot plug, the move / remirror above is running in the background (it's a 1TB SATA drive, so takes a while).  swap this, that, toss in a kitchen sink (hard to get it to fit in the 3.5&quot; bay, but we tried)..  So far we're just spinning in circles...<br />
<br />
Suddenly the NEW 1tb SATA drive volume has been removed according to the Adaptec Storage Manager - I look at the drive light and low and behold it's flashing still for activity.   iostat shows the drive writing about 60 megabytes per second - Imprsesive for a drive that's been removed, I didn't realize wireless SATA was available <img alt="rolleyes" src="img/smiles/icon_rolleyes.gif" /><br />
<br />
Tell Adaptec Storage Manager to rescan the bus, eventually the drive shows back up. The entire time it's writing according to the OS fine, never removed.<br />
<br />
So at this point I'm thinking more Adaptec bugs, let's call them. Of course there's no weekend support. Frustrated with the entire set of problems I decide to see what LSI's support policy is - It's not <b>too</b> much trouble to replcae the controller (ok, it WOULD be a lot of trouble, but I'm really unhappy with Adaptec so far).<br />
<br />
Check LSI's web site: Sounds good, 24/7/365 support, just what I wanted. Cnosider ordering LSI controller (already have seen fairly close model and was considering it during earlier problems).  Just for fun let's call the number and see if I had this problem with a LSI controller would I have support today?<br />
<br />
Let's examine the wording on their site:<br />
<pre class='codelisting'>
Access support for Host Bus Adapters (HBAs), Internal RAID (MegaRAID), 
and External RAID (Engenio) products, 
24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
</pre><br />
<br />
So here we go: Call LSI.. Answered almost immediately by a human (impressive so far). Explain I'd like to find out if I'd have support for this issue if I had a LSI controller in the box right now.. What's the answer: <b>No, there's not support for that on weekends</b>.  WHAT?  The web site says.. I'll let you fill in the rest of the conversation.  The person was <b>extremely</b> professional, in Kansas (USA), and very friendly about it. He also said it was another group that handled the controller, but that it would be Tuesday before I'd have an answer unless i wanted to do their premium hourly at something like $300/hour.  Let's see, 24/7 support, it's Sunday around midnight on a holiday weekend, expect a call back in 60 hours or so.. Or maybe the more <b>famous support answer</b>: You are currently #1 in the queue, <b>the expected wait time is approximately 3600 minutes.</b> <img alt="twisted" src="img/smiles/icon_twisted.gif" /> Lovely 24/7 support. I'll conclude with he was very pleasant and if I had a server down with their controller I may be fuming, but honestly before you discredit them TOO much how many people would ADMIT that if you didn't have a serial # you were calling about? Probably less than you think.<br />
<br />
So let's try Adaptec's paid support. Call, get a big long recording, finally a human. I'm 95% sure she said $149 per call - My main question at this point (since my production drives are working) is: &quot;If this is a BUG do I pay?&quot; I guess I'm used to Microsoft's professionalism on finding legit bugs with their products - You don't pay. If you did something then yes, pay you must :-) But if you discover a problem they're quite good about refunding their charges.  I ask if this is Adaptec's policy - She isn't sure, she tells me she can page someone from that group who will take the call, the credit card info, and let me know if it's chargable. So far so good.. 90 minute call back window (not too good for a potentially production storage device to be down 90 minutes, but I'll live).<br />
<br />
Pleasant surprise, about the time it takes me to log into my blog and start to type my cell rings, it's Adaptec support.  I explain briefly the problem and ask if it's a bug what's the policy? You pay, you pay regardless of what is found, you pay if your controller needs to be RMAd because it was a defect. You simply pay.<br />
<br />
Now let me say, how much you pay was reasonable - However given that, like I said above, we're already 20+ hours of debugging problems with their controller not having the capabilities they claim I'm not real happy to pay to get it to do the ONLY thing it's supposed to do - Handle drives being hot plugged.<br />
<br />
So here I am, about 4 hours into adding 6 drives to a box and thinking we probably need a different controller vendor than Adaptec.<br />
<br />
In all this I've learned a LOT more about SAS, I realized before it was far superior to SATA especially (and SCSI too), however I didn't realize how much.  It's easily expandable by dropping in another enclosure, which Adaptec says is hot pluggable - the whole enclosure full of drives they say can be hot plugged..  Of course can you trust that? The <b>drives are supposed to be hot pluggable</b> and <b>THAT simple task doesn't work</b>, can you imagine dropping in 24 drives with one cable being connected?<br />
<br />
I even more strongly agree with Sun's philosophy that the controller just needs to be stupid and export the disks to the operating system as JBODs.<br />
<br />
I need to also blog sometime about what happens if you try to pull a failed drive from the controller - It says no, you can't do that, it MAY have data on it. I'll get around to writing that up sometime - but basically since the Adaptec won't export the drives to the OS we had to create simple volumes for each drive - The simple volume though we can't remove to take out a drive, argh.<br />
<br />
The joy of being on the bleeding edge of technology.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
]]></description>
            <author>steveradich</author>
            <pubDate>Sun, 25 May 2008 05:48:24 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>Live from CommunityOne (Sun's event)..</title>
            <link>http://www.virtualpcfaq.com/tiki-view_blog_post.php?blogId=4&amp;postId=32</link>
            <description><![CDATA[Let me preface with I've been loyal to Microsoft technologies for almost 20 years, but on some areas they are loosing touch with at least my needs if not plenty of others.<br />
<br />
So I decided to go check out what Sun had to offer, I decided Friday night to get a airline ticket - now Monday I'm in San Fransisco, California (I'm from the DC area, other end of the US).. Pretty spure of the moment, but their ZFS file system and some of the virtualization technologies interested me quite a bit and not knowing really anything about Sun I figured I'd learn something..<br />
<br />
What did I think? I have to say, they're impressive, until you try to IMPLEMENT their &quot;available&quot; technologies.<br />
<br />
Let's take some examples:<br />
<ul><li> VirtualBox / Xen / whatever they call it (since they don't really seem to know themselves)..  Well, the presenter says the binary download is identical to the open source - I saw a few things I'd want to change to even consider using it on our network, so I start downloading at the presentation..  The open source edition is crippled and lacks several features - They JUST said that's NOT the case - Which is it? Crippled or full product?
</li></ul>
<br />
<ul><li> ZFS timeouts on disk i/o - I tried installing Solaris on a somewhat flaky box, I ended up locking up the system with no errors during an install; and during running ZFS I could corrupt the pool.  Ask a question and I get the typical &quot;good&quot; speakers response of take it offline afterwards - That's a sign of one of two things: 1) The speaker really wants to talk technical, 2) You've caught him not knowing how to respond and he wants to blow you off. Talk after - basically the discussion is speaker has to go to another presentation, adios.
</li></ul>
<br />
So I've pretty well wasted a day on technologies that sound great; Sun's got some FANTASTIC ideas and technologies they're working on - And I even understand getting people excited before they are products / ready - But don't tell me you have something that you don't, especially when I take a day off work, fly across the country, just to find the things I wanted to hear about don't really exist in a useable fashion.<br />
<br />
So I'm frustrated, but I'm also going to end with ZFS makes Solaris *THE* file storage operating system to use. We'll be dumping a lot of hours into ZFS, even if it means coding it to make it meet our needs. The base is there, although perhaps buggy - Windows has nothing to compare today, and I know of no rumors of anything close.  The management ease and expandability of ZFS makes it worth some headache; if we don't put the headache into it we'll just have the headache managing our current SAN and NAS environments.<br />
<br />
Hopefully a few people read this and consider it, in summary:<br />
<br />
<ul><li> Microsoft: I feel you are falling behind in file storage and volume management IMHO. Look out, Sun may just make a comeback.
</li></ul>
<br />
<ul><li> Sun: I hear plenty of bloggers say you don't know how to manage/market what you have, I've just witnessed that first hand. I also don't know even if you released everything to open source today how you'd profit from your investment, not good for investors - Look out.
</li></ul>
<br />
<ul><li> Admins: Times are changing in storage, a revolution started a while ago with NAS and SAN, but the bottom is dropping out of the pricing for those technologies and many new ones are worth looking at.
</li></ul>
<br />
Live from San Fransisco a few more minute before I leave for the airport being nobody from Sun seems to want to discuss the issues I have with rolling out their technologies, or their hardware questions I hoped to address while here.<br />
]]></description>
            <author>steveradich</author>
            <pubDate>Tue, 06 May 2008 02:42:41 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>Windows Vista won't open media files (.wmv) from Internet Explorer (IE7)</title>
            <link>http://www.virtualpcfaq.com/tiki-view_blog_post.php?blogId=4&amp;postId=31</link>
            <description><![CDATA[If you're like some others (myself included) you may get a Vista computer which can't open media files, for example Windows Media Videos. I don't have the details on what causes this, but I do have a work around:<br />
<br />
You can watch a quick video at <a title="BitShop's Streaming Video ASP.Net 2.0 Tutorials" href='tiki-index.php?page=bitshop_asp_videos' class='wiki'>bitshop_asp_videos</a><br />
<br />
The steps are:<br />
<ul><li> Launch IE
</li><li> Go to the Tools Menu, then Internet Options
</li><li> Click &quot;Programs&quot;
</li><li> Click &quot;Set Programs&quot;
</li><li> Click &quot;Set program access and computer defaults&quot;
</li><li> NOTE: Allow the action which requires permission
</li><li> Click &quot;Custom&quot;
</li><li> Scroll down to &quot;Choose a default media player:&quot;
</li><li> Select &quot;Windows Media Player&quot;
</li><li> Click OK, X, etc. to close the windows..
</li></ul>
<br />
This should work around the problem.<br />
<br />
Happy media watching :-)<br />
<br />
]]></description>
            <author>steveradich</author>
            <pubDate>Sat, 08 Sep 2007 06:39:38 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>Linux Device Driver Installation</title>
            <link>http://www.virtualpcfaq.com/tiki-view_blog_post.php?blogId=5&amp;postId=30</link>
            <description><![CDATA[If you need to install a device driver during install on Linux you add &quot;dd&quot; to the boot options - i.e. boot the installation cd and do &quot;linux dd&quot; or &quot;text dd&quot; to specifiy &quot;D&quot;evice &quot;D&quot;river.<br />
<br />
You may however find you either don't have a floppy disk or cdrom image for the driver, in this case how do you get the driver?<br />
<br />
text dd=http://...../img<br />
<br />
This will tell it to pull the floppy image from the url.  By doing this you avoid having to connect a floppy, burn a cd, or anything else.<br />
<br />
I hope someone finds this tip useful,<br />
<br />
]]></description>
            <author>steveradich</author>
            <pubDate>Fri, 22 Jun 2007 13:35:35 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>At MIX06 and seeing lots of new and interesting things</title>
            <link>http://www.virtualpcfaq.com/tiki-view_blog_post.php?blogId=4&amp;postId=29</link>
            <description><![CDATA[Unfortunately I didn't have time to blog much last night or this morning, but I'm at MIX06 and interested in meeting anyone while here who is interested in meeting.  I'm also not going back until Thursday evening (extra day) so have some time to meet then.<br />
<br />
So what is MIX06? Well, it's most basically showing what's coming on the web in what many refer to as Web 2.0 - AJAX, Microsoft Atlas, Windows Presentation Foundation, and much MUCH more.<br />
<br />
Everything so far is great, It's very obvious the browser wars are back in full force, as well as so much is changing on the desktop we may as well say a desktop war is being started.  LOTS of new featuers in IE7, some are a bit of a hassle (like pop ups warning me a site may be unsafe if it's based on an IP instead of a domain name), but overall I'd recommend IE 7 be quickly adopted.  The UI is much cleaner.<br />
<br />
I'll be blogging more tonight (time permitting) and trying to do a few videos about these technologies here over the next few days.<br />
<br />
Steve Radich<br />
BitShop, Inc.<br />
<br />
]]></description>
            <author>steveradich</author>
            <pubDate>Tue, 21 Mar 2006 16:13:26 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>Cannot find X.509 certificate using WSE - Required permissions</title>
            <link>http://www.virtualpcfaq.com/tiki-view_blog_post.php?blogId=4&amp;postId=28</link>
            <description><![CDATA[You may receive the following error if your permissions on your X.509 certificate are wrong:<br />
<br />
System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException: Cryptography_CSP_NoPrivateKey<br />
<br />
If this happens then you want to launch the X.509 Certificate Tool, select your certificate and press View Private Key File Properties - Then the security tab.<br />
<br />
At this point the exact permissions depend on your app pool, impersonation, etc.<br />
<br />
Most likely if you don't know what to set then you can try the local ASPNET user and the local NETWORK SERVICE user. They will need access to this file for the certificate to be used.<br />
<br />
Hope this helps.<br />
<br />
You can always contact www.BitShop.com for your hosting and WSE hosting needs and we'll make sure you have this set up right and working reliably, from a single shared server running a WSE based app to a cluster of dedicated web services servers.<br />
]]></description>
            <author>steveradich</author>
            <pubDate>Fri, 03 Feb 2006 21:20:52 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>HOWTO: Run any program as a service on Windows</title>
            <link>http://www.virtualpcfaq.com/tiki-view_blog_post.php?blogId=6&amp;postId=27</link>
            <description><![CDATA[<b>HOWTO: Run any program as a service on Windows</b><br />
<br />
<b>Question:</b><br />
<br />
I need to run (some application) always with system startup.  The program is not designed to be a service, what can I do?<br />
<br />
<b>Answer:</b><br />
<br />
This is a pretty common question of Windows admins, programs have to be designed to be a service by default, however most are not - And services generally don't have a UI (User Interface).<br />
<br />
I found this handy program for creating windows services, there's a LOT of different solutions out there with this same functionality, even srvany.exe from Microsoft (part of the resource kit), however I found this one more useful:<br />
<br />
<a class="wiki external" target="_blank" href="http://www.codeproject.com/system/xyntservice.asp?df=100&amp;forumid=1239&amp;exp=0&amp;select=952286">http://www.codeproject.com/system/xyntservice.asp?df=100&amp;forumid=1239&amp;exp=0&amp;select=952286</a><img border="0" class="externallink" src="img/icons/external_link.gif" alt="external link" /> <a class="wikicache" target="_blank" href="tiki-view_cache.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.codeproject.com%2Fsystem%2Fxyntservice.asp%3Fdf%3D100%26amp%3Bforumid%3D1239%26amp%3Bexp%3D0%26amp%3Bselect%3D952286">(cache)</a><br />
<br />
This uses a simple .INI file which can contain multiple programs which will run under your single service. It also has the capability to easily specify if they interact with the desktop or not, and if they should be restarted automatically if they fail / exit (for example if a user accidentally closes the program).<br />
<br />
]]></description>
            <author>steveradich</author>
            <pubDate>Tue, 17 Jan 2006 08:00:30 +0100</pubDate>
        </item>
    </channel>
</rss>
