Hi, we have moved to a new home.
http://www.scorpiotek.com/blog
We are still ironing out details with the new web site, so things might not be perfect. Please bear with us until we get things back on track.
Please updated your RSS & bookmarks.
Thanks!
PS: This blog will most likely self-destruct by early June.
Posted in Random
This post has moved to a new location, please visit: http://scorpiotek.com/blog/?p=428
Posted in Windows Hyper-V, Windows Server 2008 R2 | Tags: Hyper-V, Modify VHD, Mounting VHD, VHD, Virtualization, Windows Server 2008 R2
This post has moved to a new location, please visit: http://scorpiotek.com/blog/?p=424
Posted in Virtualization, Windows Hyper-V | Tags: Differencing VHD, Hyper-V, Snapshots, VHD, Virtualization, Windows Server 2008
All the buzz these days is around Windows 7; but its big brother, Windows Server 2008 R2 is the one that should be stealing all the attention (IMHO). I’ve been using it for a while, to the point (don’t try this @ home) of using it as my main Hyper-V solution because of a problem I faced with regular Windows Server 2008 a couple of weeks ago.
Today I thought about what would happen if I ever needed to move the images from R2 to 2008 and the obvious question arose: Will it blend work?
I searched a bit on the web and no one has reported on this (it’s a hard search query to formulate). Anyhow, to save you some time and headaches in the future, I have carried this procedure for you 
I am right now in the Server Manager console, opening Hyper-V and about to select import and point to the machine I exported from Hyper-V R2.
After pointing it to the folder, it successfully imported the machines with ALL respective snapshots. When I started the machine it failed to start. This machine was exported with a saved state, so after deleting the Saved State and trying again, the machine booted up.
After this, I was immediately blue screened by the host, but this is something that had happened before and was the reason why I switched to R2 (no blue screens after upgrading to R2 – ironically, the beta of R2 is more stable than the release of 2008 on my HP machine).
So in a nutshell, Hyper-V images exported from Windows Server 2008 R2 can be successfully imported to previous versions of Windows Server 2008 given that they do not have saved states. Hope this helps!
This post has moved to a new location, please visit: http://scorpiotek.com/blog/?p=393
Posted in C#
Things changed a bit from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 when it comes to startup items. In W2K8, the place where you want to put items launched at startup is:
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
This works great, but what about Server Core? The path exists and you can place all you want in there, but guess what? When you log into the server core machine, nothing happens and this is most likely because there is no start menu 
The fix to this is to modify your registry in Server Core:
Sources:
Posted in Server Core, Windows Server 2008
I have tried not to rant about anything in this blog, mostly to try and stick with a problem-solving scenario but lately there has been something that has really made me lose my hair – the AppleTV. When I purchased this unit, I was expecting it would change the way I watch TV, and it certainly did. After using the AppleTV for less than 6 months, I am on the verge of never watching anything on TV again, that’s how badly scarred I have been left from this experience.
The OS X version that runs on the system is really slow, and it takes a long time for it to respond to the remote. As of now, when you pair the AppleTV v1.0 with iTunes, it immediately disappears from devices and the connection is lost. This is the most frustrating issue with the AppleTV: no matter if it is paired via wireless or through a wired connection to the network, it will suddenly disappear from your list of devices (I had to switch to Ethernet once the wireless of the AppleTV died on me completely). The ways of getting it back to work usually involve restoring the AppleTV to factory settings, upgrading to version 2.0 and re-pairing the AppleTV – something that can easily take 30 minutes depending on your Internet connection and your patience (trust me, I am not the only one facing these issues)
The AppleTV is an “OK” device at best when it decides it wants to work. The constant disconnects has turned me into the worst fan that it will have, and I want to take this opportunity to urge you to stay AWAY from any incarnation of the AppleTV, even at version 2.0 it is buggy and will only drive you nuts. I really should have bought an XBOX and use that for media, most likely I’ll but a 360 in the future and completely forget about Apple when it comes to watching anything on my TV.
Posted in Random Rant
Creating PDF documents is quickly becoming a daily routine for me. Whether it’s invoicing or making sure that I do not send a nasty macro virus, I create PDFs to share my documents when they do not need editing. Recently my sister asked me if there was a way to combine PDFs on the Mac. There are many many programs that will do the trick for you, but you will need to shell out some dough to help you through.
OS X has a free way of allowing you to combine PDFs, and here is how you do it:
Keep in mind that this script will merge the documents based on the names of the documents, so you may want to rename your docs 01-First File.pdf, 02-Second File.pdf, etc. in order to mandate the order of the merging. Let me know if it works for you!
Posted in Mac Tutorials, Software Tools
Quick post, this is to work as reference for the future as I know I will need this again.
First off, to load a static function from a DLL, what I do is open an SDK window and fire off dumpbin with the /EXPORTS switch to see if the names of the functions are correctly exported (in this case DisplayHelloFromDLL):
Ok, now the code. You need a function pointer type as you will invoke this function dynamically:
typedef void (__stdcall *HELLO-DLL)();
Next, load the DLL (I called mine SortLibrary.dll)
HMODULE hMod = LoadLibrary (L”SortLibrary.dll”);
if (NULL == hMod) { printf (”LoadLibrary failed\n”); return 1; }
Then you must find the function in the DLL by using GetProcAddress:
HELLO-DLL pHello = (HELLO-DLL) GetProcAddress (hMod, “DisplayHelloFromDLL”);
if (NULL == pHello) { printf (”GetProcAddress failed\n”); return 1; }
Now, you can call the function:
pHello();
And the world is a much much better place:
Posted in Virtualization
