Happy Halloween!!!!!

Ah yes, the only holiday that is worth celebrating is finally upon us. No pansy bunnies or fat old men; only ghost, goblins and horror movies!!!!

Enjoy the day people. Go to a party tonight and celebrate the dark arts. Speaking of horror movies, here is a poster of the horror movie king himself.

BASH Friday!

http://www.bash.org/?817477
http://www.bash.org/?816911
http://www.bash.org/?813967
http://www.bash.org/?814211
http://www.bash.org/?814243
http://www.bash.org/?814572
http://www.bash.org/?814888
http://www.bash.org/?816484
http://www.bash.org/?816907
http://www.bash.org/?1332
http://www.bash.org/?1728
http://www.bash.org/?2404
http://www.bash.org/?3105
http://www.bash.org/?4253
http://www.bash.org/?4427
http://www.bash.org/?5980
http://www.bash.org/?8170
http://www.bash.org/?9336
http://www.bash.org/?18270
http://www.bash.org/?55664
http://www.bash.org/?123109
http://www.bash.org/?154492
http://www.bash.org/?204240
http://www.bash.org/?449908
http://www.bash.org/?458504

I do this sometimes

VMware Windows 2000 migration: Errors encoutered and solutions.

During my migration of my Windows 2000 Advanced server using VMware Converter and Server, I managed to run into two very big and annoying problems. Below are the solutions to those problems. Mind you I was doing a migration of Windows 2000 Advanced Server with SP4 applied.

I first ran into a problem where the converter wanted an updated scsiport.sys. Any version of the file I tried to point it to wouldn’t work. I even downloaded the SP4 Rollup Version 2 and extracted the scsiport.sys file from that and it still didn’t like it. In the end I decided to try installing the Rollup on the physical server first before the migration. After installing the Rollup, I ran the converter again and it didn’t complain about the scsiport.sys file. Apparently you have to install the Rollup first before doing the migration.

Once the migration was done and everything was ready to go, I booted up the virtual machine and ran into this little gem on booting up Windows 2000:

Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.
Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.
Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information.

The error above means that your boot.ini now has some problems. This is the error that had me stuck for at least 2 hours as there was really no solution I could find. To get around this you will need to mount the virtual drive and edit the boot.ini.

The first thing to do is to download the Virtual DiskMount Utility (VDU) from VMware and install it on the server housing the virtual machine. Next you need to mount the virtual drive. Change to where the VDU was installed (usually “c:\program files\vmware\vmware diskmount utility”) and run the following command from the command line:

vmware-mount <driveletter>: <path to virtual disk>

In my case it was the following:

vmware-mount x: “c:\virtual machines\my server\my server.vmdk”

Remember to use quotes if your path has spaces in it. Another tip is that if you setup your virtual machine’s disk to allocate the drive space like I did, you will have two vmdk files, a my server.vmdk and a my server-flat.vmdk. Do not try to mount the -flat one, it will throw an error, mount the other vmdk file instead.

Once you have your virtual disk mounted, open up the boot.ini file. There are two common problems with the boot.ini when you do a conversion:

1. your partition number is wrong
2. your path is using scsi instead of multi

In my case my boot.ini looked like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=scsi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
scsi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT=”Microsoft Windows 2000″ /fastdetect

All I had to do was edit the boot.ini to use multi instead of scsi and save it like so:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT=”Microsoft Windows 2000″ /fastdetect

If you’re one of those people who’s partition number is wrong, try changing the value from 2 to 1 and saving.

After that I just unmounted the virtual disk from the command line like so:

vmware-mount x: /d

I was the able to start up the virtual machine with no problems.

Below are links to the files, utilities and references used in this posting:

1. Boot.ini reference
2. Windows 2000 SP4 Rollup 1 Version 2
3. VMWare Server
4. VMWare Converter
5. VMWare DiskMount Utility 5.5 and the documentation for it

Bike Messanger Race

These people fare just fucking nuts.

WARNING: before viewing I would strongly suggest having a pack of cigarettes and bottle of tequila near you to counter act the anxiety.

How To Bypass Comcast’s BitTorrent Throttling: the true way

I don’t know why people are constantly trying to come up with all these wacky ways to defeat Comcast’s throttling of BitTorrent traffic. Almost ever single way out there eventually fails.

I’ll tell you this that I have Comcast and use BitTorrent, with no problem. Want to know how? Here is the simple way:

Set your BitTorrent client to use only port 80.

There now you can share all you’re movies and porn to your hearts content. I’ve been doing this since Comacast starting throttling traffic and I’ve never had a problem. So stop trying to be so ultra nerd and use this simple solution.

Happy Seeding! Digg This!

CF8 Extension for Eclipse bugs

Some of the bugs I’ve found with the CF8 extensions for Eclipse:

1. CFIMAGE: the resize action is spelled wrong. Currently spelled rezized.
2. The “Request Interface” under “ColdFusion Java CFX Reference” throws and org.xml.sax.SAXParseException error.

I’ll continue updating the list as I find more now that I’ve officially switched over to CF8 for all my projects.

BASH Friday!!!!

http://www.bash.org/?813756
http://www.bash.org/?813967
http://www.bash.org/?814211
http://www.bash.org/?814572
http://www.bash.org/?814698
http://www.bash.org/?814739
http://www.bash.org/?814900
http://www.bash.org/?1979
http://www.bash.org/?36842
http://www.bash.org/?43902
http://www.bash.org/?187922
http://www.bash.org/?237959
http://www.bash.org/?351717

A tribute to goatse

Pictures of my future kids.

Rules I never knew

FamFamFam Silk Icons converted to gifs

Sometime in your career, you’ve used the famfamfam silk icon set for a project. If not, shoot yourself right now. This icon set should be the defacto in icons for websites. They’re incredibly drawn and FREE! Problem is though that they only come in PNG format and IE6.X has a problem displaying them natively. The only way around this is to convert them to GIFs. So I took it upon myself to convert them to GIFs using Photoshop’s Batch processing and made them available to download.

Visit FamFamFam web site

Download the icons as GIFs

My Ways to Save Money – idea from Peter

I was just reading Peter J Farrell’s post on his money saving ways and thought that I would chime in with some of my own:

1) I’ve mentioned this before to people, but can’t mention it enough: if you own any type of real estate property, you owe it to yourself to check out the Money Merge Account from United First Financial. I’ve been on the program for the last six months and I’m on track of paying my mortgage and all of my debt off in 6.3 years instead of 27 years! This program not only works with your primary residence, but also investment properties second homes, credit card debt and any other type of debt (like student loans). Do yourself the favor and take the 3 minutes to view their presentation.

2) Peter mentioned the American Express Blue Cash card in his post. I personally have both the Blue Cash card and the One card from American Express. I will tell you this that the One card offers a better rate, interest protection and not to mention the fact that they put 1% of the money you spend into a 5% savings account. To compare the two in terms of money you earn yearly with them: I received about $80 cash back last year from my Blue Card and currently my One card has $105 in the saving account after only using it for 6 months. If I were you out there, I would definitely sign up from the One card and start using it. Cash back is a one time deal, but a savings account earns interest! Plus, when you stop to think about, the rate on the saving account is on par with most CDs out there.

3) Coupons and rebates are great. One of the ones that I use the most is RetailMeNot.com. The best thing about it is you can search by domain name. Check them out!

(NSFW?) – That’s my boy!

I can’t wait to have kids….

BTW: the reason this post is marked NSFW? is because of the 2nd image (the Playboy cover). I didn’t know if that image could get some people in trouble if they were viewing it at their desk or not. I guess it would mostly depend on your co-workers sense of humor.