life Archives - Page 12 of 23

Free Virtualization

Well, Microsoft has finally bowed to VMWare’s free Server product. You can finally download Virtual Server R2 Enterprise Edition for free. It’s great that VMWare has forced this upon Microsoft. However, there are still a few key differences. The free version of VMWare Server is actually a “beta” version, while Microsoft’s Virtual Server is the final build, and safe for production use (unless it’s running on XP).

This is great news for enterprise environments none-the-less, especially with the new licensing scheme for Windows 2003 products. Basically, if you have enterprise resources, you’re incredibly stupid not to be running some sort of virtualization, be it in production or not. You save too much money on the hardware (one machine now can host X number of virtual machines) and software end (one Windows 2003 license can be used on the host and up to four virtual machines, and the virtualizing software is free).

I personally can’t wait until hardware based virtualization technology becomes more main-stream, that’s when the huge performance increases will come.

Birthday Trip

So, for those of you that don’t read the comments, I pointed out that Erin was essentially kidnapping me for the weekend. She basically wouldn’t tell me where we were going, or what we were doing, just that I was driving because of my far superior gas mileage.

Turns out we went to Cedarburg, WI, where we ended up going on a winery tour, wine tasting, dinner, and then stayed in a bed and breakfast. It was actually quite a bit of fun.

Unfortunately, since it was daylight savings time, we forgot to sping ahead Saturday night, and then missed the breakfast. However, to make up for it, I got these awesome camera phone pictures while waiting for the winery tour. I honestly can’t believe I didn’t purchase the book. I mean, George and Laura in their under-roos? Oh, and make sure you include Reagan too!

It’s Official

Annoyances

Chewing with your mouth open and/or making a smacking noise while eating. I don’t know why, but this has got to be one of the worst things evar. What drives all of you up the wall?

Food of Summer

Yesterday Erin and I had some hamburgers made on the grill. Oh man were they tasty. And of course, if you’re having hamburgers, you have to have fries, so I made up some sweet potato fries.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have any blue cheese to stuff my burgers with, but they were nice and juicy none-the-less. It’s the egg and Worcestershire sauce that makes ‘em so good.

Kitchen Counters

Here at my apartment, we have black granite counter tops. When I get my own place about a year from now, I will not be getting black granite counter tops.

Now, don’t get me wrong, they look absolutely gorgeous. Well, at least right after you’ve cleaned them extensively. After that, they look absolutely horrible. The black color, much like with any other thing black, shows dirty very easily. It’s not even dirt either, if theres spot that’s not as polished, it’s very visible.

And streaks, don’t even get me started on streaks. You have to make sure that you towel dry them thoroughly, otherwise it’s streaks-a-plenty.

However, I love the granite countertops. Just not black.

Daily Humor

I was forwarded a hilarious link from Bud. It’s a little late for St. Patty’s day, but it’s well worth the watch. There are so many things wrong with this news clip, I don’t know where to begin.

V for Vendetta

Last night Erin and I went to see “V for Vendetta” at Hollywood Blvd. The place was packed, but it was fun nonetheless. Nothing like getting served alcohol while at the movies to make it a little bit more fun than normal.

Anyways, the movie was quite good. The special effects weren’t over the top, ala “The Matrix”, but instead a good addition to the story. And the story was also good. Granted, it was ripped from a comic book, but it still fit the adaptation to the big screen adequately.

Speaking of story, talk about a great time to release the movie. With everything that’s happening in Guantanamo Bay, and the President’s approval rating being so low, I don’t think the timing of the movie could be any better for the Wachowski brothers.

Another Reason Why Project Server Blows

The project server here at work hasn’t been connecting to our internal WSUS server, and I noticed that it was missing a few security patches. Since WSUS wasn’t working, I decided to visit Windows Update. HA, well that doesn’t work either. So I open up the %systemroot%WindowsUpdate.log and find the following error.

WARNING: WinHttp: SendRequestToServerForFileInformation failed with 0x80190191
WARNING: WinHttp: ShouldFileBeDownloaded failed with 0x80190191
WARNING: DownloadFileInternal failed for http://download.microsoft.com/v6/windowsupdate/redir/wuredir.cab: error 0x80190191
* WARNING: Failed to synchronize, error = 0x80244017
WARNING: WU client failed Searching for update with error 0x80244017
>>— RESUMED —COMAPI: Search [ClientId = WindowsUpdate]
– Updates found = 0
– WARNING: Exit code = 0x00000000, Result code = 0x80244017
————-
— END — COMAPI: Search [ClientId = WindowsUpdate]
——————-
WARNING: Operation failed due to earlier error, hr=80244017
FATAL: Unable to complete asynchronous search. (hr=80244017)

Doing a quick search on the error code on Google brings me to a lot of pages about proxy settings. However, I’m not running a proxy server anywhere, and I’m not running ICF on the project server either. What is going on?!

Then I see a link about project server with this error.

I now know that project server uses a proxy server with WSS. How stupid can that be? Well, basically, I added our local WSUS server to the bypass list. I also did it for *.microsoft.com, but that still doesn’t seem to be allowing me to hit Windows Update. Oh well, at least it can update from someplace.

Certified

Well, today I passed my last required MCSE test. In three months, I’ve been able to complete the 7 required tests. Unfortunately, I still have one more on my plate though, because I want to get the MCSE: Security certification. Thankfully the remaining test is simply an elective exam, so I can probably kill that in a week. Not having any of this pressure on me for the rest of the year will be nice too. I’m definitely glad I got this out of the way before summer rolled around.