Microsoft technologies, dissected.
Over the last few days we have truly seen the problem with the modern game of football (“soccer” if you are reading this in the US of A).
First up, let’s set the record straight: I’m a Fulham fan so no vested interest in either party here.
Who is involved?
In the left corner, wearing red all over:
Manchester United, the “Red Devils”, without a doubt one of the marquee clubs (that’s “franchise” if you are reading this in the US of A) in the world. Something like 40+ major trophies, a heritage that the Roman Catholic Church would be proud of, a stadium that is the envy of most European clubs and a manager that is almost the definition of “icon”.
In the right corner, wearing a red shirt on a green underlayer:
Wayne Rooney, undoubtedly a very very talented player. Good at Old Trafford, apparently plays well away also. 100+ Premier League goals, ~25 goals in an England Shirt. Husband to Colleen, father to Kai, worshipped by millions.
The Battleground?
Ego or Greed – you decide.
There are surely only 2 scenarios playing out and both look bad for the player.
1) Wayne is not happy with the treatment he has received in the light of recent press coverage of his private life = EGO
2) Wayne thinks he is worth more than the <insert vast sum per week> he currently earns and in light of the possible FIFA/UEFA fair play wage sanctions being imposed in the next year or two wants to cash in = GREED
If there is a hidden 3rd (or even 4th) scenario playing out, I would love to hear about it.
Long story short, Wayne plainly thinks he is bigger than the Club. Wrong. No player, no matter how good, will ever be bigger than their club. Fact.
And the problem I mentioned at the top of the post?
Money.
I have little sympathy for the giant clubs because they created the problem in the first place. The arms race of ever escalating wages can only end one way, somebody pushing the big red button and blowing it all to smithereens. I’d quite like to see Sky push the big “backup” button on their giant remote control of the Premier League and next time around bid much, much less for the TV rights, after all the BBC and ITV can’t afford it anymore…
Let’s hope it happens soon or else Sepp and the FIFA posse will pony over the horizon and all hell will break loose!
This weekend has been monumental!
I have not seen “the big guy from France” for a few years (Athens 2001, I think) and have been eager with anticipation of his much publicised World Arena Tour since I first heard about it early in the year.
As somebody who has been a lifelong fan (my first CD was RendezVous, and I still have it) and who has seen Jarre half a dozen times (including the wet ‘n’ wild Destination Docklands on 8th October 1988 (as a tender 15 year old)) I was beginning to worry that I might not get to see him again, after all he is not getting any younger and must surely be thinking about not bothering with all the rigmarole associated to concerts and touring.
Despite being indoors (and with about 800,000 fewer people than his infamous extravanganzas of the past) I was like a kid on Christmas eve in the run up to the events, it is fair to say that knowing that I was due to see him twice in three days was almost too much to bear.
I have to say, just arriving in the arena in Birmingham (at the NIA) set the scene for me. We were front and centre a mere 3 rows back and had a mark 1 eyeball view of more vintage gear than Camden Market in the Summer.
I swear. There was every piece of analogue gear a boy could want on the stage. There must have been a mile of patch cable and more wooden veneer than in an IKEA factory. It was heaven.
Modern concessions? A sprinkling of Nord gear and more Roland TD pads than you can shake a baguette at, but not a Triton in sight; I couldn’t decide if I was jealous, really jealous or seriously jealous.
After a suitable time waiting, listening to “En Attendant Cousteau” (and overhearing all kinds of discussions about what people (plainly non-fans) were expecting of the show) the show kicked off with the haunting arpeggio from Oxygene Part 2 while the lighting slowly came to life.
I have to say the quality of the sound was staggering, plainly some serious engineering time had gone into getting things sounding right and the addition of some fairly serious sub-woofer cabinets stage left and right punched just the right amount of low frequency into the mix to give a BIG arena feel to what is, in reality, quite a small space.
Once complete en petit peau de anglais emerged from the man welcoming us to the show with his usual impish facial expression (he will always look like an excited kid playing with his dads tools to me) and we were then plunged into Magnetic Fields Part 1, a track I have always struggled with in a live context as I don’t see how it fits into a performance, but hey-ho, what do I know?
Queue lots of clapping and grimmacing from Jarre to get the crowd whipped up into a frenzy.
Running back behind his stack of keys, we were immersed into Equinoxe Part 7 (still one of my all time Jarre favorites) and the lights began to give us some idea of what might be coming – some awesome work from the lighting team illuminated sections of the stage and facias of individual instruments giving a real visual dimension to the show.
After Part 7, Equinoxe Part 5 leapt out and brought some folk to their feet (and a comment of “doesn’t it sound like the theme to Brookside” from a lady behind me) and our first glimpse of what the light crew had planned for us in their use of Lasers. A great web of yellow formed around and across the stage working very well to the uptempo “pop” feel of the classic track.
Time for the Laser Harp!
For those not in the know, the Laser Harp is an instrument of Jarre’s (and presumably Michel Geiss) own making that uses Laser beams (which are then broken by hand movements to trigger MIDI instruments) to provide an awesome visual element to a couple of Jarre’s most haunting and moving pieces.
Although impressive outside, the Laser Harp is truly immense in an arena setting with the beams looking almost solid until Jarre slices his hands through them.
I’m not going to walk through the entire show in this entry (I may do in a future post when I have the time) but I include the set list here for posterity:
1. Oxygene Part 2
2. Magnetic Fields Part 1
3. Equinoxe Part 7
4. Equinoxe Part 5
5. Rendez-Vous Part 3 (Laser Harp)
6. Magnetic Fields Part 2
7. Souvenir of China
8. Oxygene Part 5
9. Variation 3
10. Theremin Piece
11. Equinoxe Part 4
12. Adagio
13. Industrial Revolution Part 2
14. Rendez-Vous 2 (all parts)
15. Rendez-Vous 4
16. Chronologie 6
17. Chronologie 2
Encore 1:
18. Oxygene Part 4
19. Oxygene Part 12
Encore 2:
20. Calypso Part 3 (Fin De Siecle)
All in all – awesome, immense, mind-numbing, bloody super-smashing, great!
Sunday saw us at the O2, a venue we often frequent to see the show again, but from a different angle, further out and off to one side. Why? So we could take in the spectacle in a more objective way visually and boy I am glad we did.
Our seats on Sunday afforded us a great view of (in my view) one of French musics’ unsung heros; Francis Rimbert. Rimbert has been with Jarre (in the “band” as Jarre says) since the year dot and I have always felt a sense that he is a loyal and trusted friend of Jarre’s given some of the other trials and tribulations Jarre has had with others in his life (such as Dreyfuss).
In addition to being able to see Rimbert, our Sunday seats allowed us to really take in the visual aspects of the show including the truly mind-boggling animated backdrops that were like something usually only seen in an IMAX cinema.
Rest assured, if Jarre comes back again for more European dates, I will be there. I have tried to get tickets for one of his France shows this month but no dice.
Anybody got one?
Trying to install SQL Server Express 2005 on Windows 7 64bit?
You may see issues especially if you are using one of the lightweight downloads of SSE that is dual x86/x64 packaged for x64 WOW.
If you are seeing an ASP registration error, make sure you have the ASP and IIS features ON in Windows 7 – especially the IIS 6 compatibility pieces of IIS.
Once this is switched on you can execute (excluding the quotes):
“cscript %systemdrive%\inetpub\AdminScripts\adsutil.vbs set w3svc/AppPools/Enable32bitAppOnWin64 1″
Which should set you right to run SQL Server setup again.
I stumbled on this on a fresh VM of Windows 7 installed today to run a legacy App that uses SQL Server Express 2005 and plucked this line of script out of my SharePoint knowledgebase after 5 minutes of headscratching.
Hope this helps somebody out there.
Enjoy, but remember no warranty expressed or implied and use at your own risk!
If you install Windows Storage Server 2008 you will notice that it does not prompt you (like other Windows Server installers) for an Administrator password.
It’s:
wSS2008!
(case sensitive and you need the exclamation mark (or pling if you are old school…)
How very annoying!
This weekend has been unusual for me. I like to hunt, shoot, fish as some of you know; I am an outdoors kind of guy.
For a light change of pace on Saturday just gone, it was like being back in the US of A – I went to a geek event; SharePoint Saturday UK.
SharePoint Saturday UK was put together by those friendly folks at Lightning and ID (Brett, Tony and Mark) and was sponsored by the usual suspects in the SharePoint vendor world along with a couple of others whom I had not come across until now.
Was it worth my time? On balance it was, but not for the reasons many others would have derived value.
I always find the sessions on events like this slightly frustrating. Its nothing that can be altered, but it always leaves me with a sense of helplessness.
Let me draw you a picture. I remember when I was choosing my GCSE “options” back in high school, you could never quite get the combination that would suit you *perfectly* and you had to make do with whatever you could schedule in the tracks permitted.
Hence I ended up having to pick Geography.
Geography? What the frak am I ever going to need geography for? “In about 10 years time some bright spark will invent a cost effective computerised replacement for a map that will get me to wherever I need to be anywhere in the world, right?” was always my way of looking at the world.
Anyway, I digress. Events like #spsuk (for those of you who are Twitter enabled) are forced to utilise a track model and I never seem to be able to attend precisely what I want to. Solution? Running the event over a longer period (for instance, 2 days) may help the problem, but I wildly suspect that in a 2 day format all that would happen would be twice as much stuff would be crammed in exacerbating the problem and just adding to my frustration!
Am I complaining? Hell no.
The event was (to all intents and purposes) free to attend and provided a great opportunity to combine catching up with old friends and acquaintances, networking with new folks and putting flesh and blood faces to Twitter posts all whilst learning more about the most addictive narcotic in Microsoft’s medicine cabinet; SharePoint.
In fact if I have 1 complaint it would be a more general statement about the SharePoint “circuit” which seems to have reached saturation with the same faces speaking across the globe. Is nobody new stepping up to be counted or is there a conspiracy of an elite club of SharePoint “rock stars” freezing out the rest of the presenting world? Who knows, but as somebody who has been in and around the SharePoint world for many years now, it surely must be time for some new faces to emerge from the shadows.
It was refreshing to see Veronique Palmer (a new face from South Africa with a light-hearted and frank approach to Governance), Symon Garfield (one to watch from my old firm) and the charming Dave Coleman and Mike Herrity (educators turned techno-entrepreneurs) amongst the familiar faces, I hope a slow influx of newer faces continues…
Will I attend next year? Assuming I can get a seat, I’ll be there; you never know, I might even have re-emerged from the shadows by then and be on the other side of the PowerPoint deck…
My overall view? HIT!
I made a major boo-boo mistake, inadvertently marking a non-boot partition as Active on my primary development server making it un-bootable and with no recovery image (doh!) a simple error could have been a catastrophe. On a sidebar, this error is just another reason to use the awesome BGINFO as it probably would have stopped me from doing what I was doing thinking I was in a virtual machine… 
In the old days, reloading Windows was not so much of a drama, but now with Hyper-V “importing” virtual machines that are not “exported” is a pain in the backside meaning that if you hose your host system, recovering everything can take a while.
Restarting the host server resulted in a “BOOTMGR is missing” error and a little shudder went down my spine.
I popped in the W2k8R2 DVD and (as I suspected) there were no available repair options, dropping into a command prompt, I tried to use DISKPART to mark the wrong partition inactive and mark the correct one active, but no dice.
I also tried from the prompt to rebuild the BCD with a “bootrec /rebuildbcd” but again, no dice.
Despair almost set in until I remembered something that a chum had told me about (if I ever remember who it was I will for sure credit them!) where he had used a Windows 7 x64 DVD to boot a non-booting Windows 2008 Server R2 server as the boot loading elements are essentially the same and Windows 7 comes with a user friendly recovery tool as part of the install/boot process.
Quickly burning an MSDN DVD image I booted the server off the DVD and after the requisite location choices dropped into repair mode and lo-and-behold Windows 7 (god bless it) noticed that something was awry with my bootable partition, offered to fix it, rebooted once, did some more silent magic and on the next reboot; presto! Windows Server 2008 R2 came back.
Once the server was back I knew a little bit of tinkering with the boot configuration data store would be required using bcdedit, so I opened an elevated command prompt and entered:
bcdedit /set {current} hypervisorlaunchtype auto
(note: this assumes there is only 1 bootable option, you may need to insert the actual id instead of “{current}” if you have more than one and are following this post in a cold sweat!)
then a quick check with:
bcdedit /enum
just to check that the hypervisor launch was indeed set to auto, and for the second time in as many minutes; hey presto! W2k8 is running smoothly and with the hypervisor underneath ready for me to be spinning up virtual machines until bedtime.
Now wouldn’t it be nice for Microsoft Windows Server Engineering Group to add some of the Windows 7 friendly goodness to Server 2k8 R2? I know that server admins know better and don’t need any help but wouldn’t it just be nice for the help to be there!
Just a thought!
Please note that if you stumble on this post and use it to recover your own system, you do so at your own risk and no warranty of any kind is expressed or implied in this blog posting; it’s just me sharing my experiences!
