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December 2004 - Posts

The funny thing about time traveling ...

... is that it will invalidate all patents as "prior art". But what you just need in this case is not pure time travel, but only the ability to send information back in time. Which brings the interesting question - assuming that there is a physical way Read More...
Posted Friday, December 31, 2004 1:58 AM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments
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The VSS (Volume Shadow Copy) SDK is available for download

This is the link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0B4F56E4-0CCC-4626-826A-ED2C4C95C871&displaylang=en You can use this SDK to develop VSS requestors, writers and providers. For example, you can write code that define and use Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 30, 2004 3:40 PM by AdiOltean | 6 Comments

How would you administer millions of machines?

With the arrival of "Internet search engines" like Google, Yahoo or MSN, it is now a common practice to administer a pretty large cluster of machines. It is not uncommon to find these days clusters that comprise hundreds of thousands of computers. So Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 29, 2004 3:04 AM by AdiOltean | 6 Comments
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Building a bridge in France versus US

Recently I read an article about the newest bridge in Millau, France. Everything about this bridge is out of scale. The highest point is 1,125ft (343m). That's right - its pillars are taller than the Eiffel tower! And the highway is suspended at max 885ft Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 28, 2004 3:43 AM by AdiOltean | 13 Comments
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Keeping a cool head about the Open Source pixie dust...

I just read an interesting proposal from Robert Scoble to "open source" WMP along with all sorts of funny comments that followed. Here is the most juicy part, I think: Hi Bill. I've been thinking about how to make Windows Media cool. You know, cooler Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 28, 2004 2:11 AM by AdiOltean | 4 Comments
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Useful copy/paste trick in CMD.EXE

Many people have trouble doing copy/paste in CMD.EXE. Indeed, there are no keyboard shortucts for this thing, and the selection of the text to copy can only be done through the mouse. You have to go to the system menu, select "Copy", then do your selection, Read More...
Posted Monday, December 27, 2004 6:24 PM by AdiOltean | 11 Comments

Don't disable system services! (unless you REALLY know what you are doing)

(1) The problem While searching the newsgroups I found out an interesting issue. It seems that many people are manually disabling some System Services, like "Volume Shadow Copy" (VSS) or "MS Software Shadow Copy Provider" (SWPRV). While this seems to Read More...
Posted Sunday, December 26, 2004 8:20 PM by AdiOltean | 11 Comments
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Who hogs down my CPU?

I always wanted to find a simple way to figure out the answer for this puzzling question. Usually I ended up opening Task Manager to find out what process eats all my CPU resources. But this doesn't work in most of the cases. For example, what about the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 21, 2004 7:00 PM by AdiOltean | 6 Comments

Book: Mind hacks

This is one of the weirdest books... http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mindhks/ A collection of sample hacks is also presented online: Hack 11: Why People Don't Work Like Elevator Buttons (PDF) Hack 16: Map Your Blind Spot (PDF) Hack 17: Glimpse the Gaps Read More...
Posted Sunday, December 19, 2004 1:10 AM by AdiOltean | 5 Comments
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The Volume Shadow copy Service (VSS) API is finally available on MSDN!

The link is here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/vss/base/vss_portal.asp Read More...
Posted Friday, December 17, 2004 4:21 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments

Tips for deploying Shadow copies for Shared Folders

Shadow copies for shared folders (in short, SCSF) requires two steps in deployment: 1) Enabling shadow copy creation at the file server side. With this, you ensure that files exposed in your shares on this server will have previous versions. 2) Ensuring Read More...
Posted Friday, December 17, 2004 4:11 PM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments
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Reading books online on amazon.com?

Amazingly enough, you can read (at least apparently) entire books online at amazon.com, using the "Search inside this book" feature. First let me tell you that "Search in this book" this is one of the greatest features that were introduced this year. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 15, 2004 4:03 AM by AdiOltean | 7 Comments
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Creating shadow copies from the command line.

A less-known feature in Windows XP and Server 2003 is the command-line support for shadow copies. The command is called VSSADMIN.EXE and is already present in the operating system - just run it without parameters and you will see some sample usage. Here Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 14, 2004 8:44 PM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments

Shadow copies - a peek under the hood

Starting with XP and Windows Server 2003 we have a new shadow copy functionality feature built-in the operating system. In my previous posts, I already mentioned some of of the high-level scenarios that are enabled by this feature. One example is backup, Read More...
Posted Saturday, December 11, 2004 6:54 PM by AdiOltean | 10 Comments
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No fireworks yet...

... but we have pollution. At least this is the conclusion from the latest Seattle Times article . Environmentalists hooted when Ronald Reagan claimed — wrongly — that trees produce more pollution than cars. But right now, the biggest single source of Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 08, 2004 3:05 AM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments
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When is a volume eligible for Shadow Copies for Shared Folders?

There is a new feature in Windows Server 2003 that works almost like magic: you can automatically keep previous versions of your shared files. The feature is called Shadow Copies for Folders (in short, SCSF). Shadow copies are disabled by default, but Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 07, 2004 1:39 PM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments
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Running SBS under Virtual PC

I downloaded the trial version of Virtual PC and installed a full SBS instance under it: Next step - I will create a number of Windows XP workstations, so my server won't be alone in this cruel world :-) This is interesting, I can set up the IT infrastructure Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 07, 2004 2:03 PM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments
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Contrarian finding: Computers are a drag on learning

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1206/p11s01-legn.html Hmmm, interesting - especially the quote about the "big joke" at the end :-) I remember a similar statistic done a while ago (presented in How to lie with statistics ): Somebody once went to a good deal Read More...
Posted Monday, December 06, 2004 9:28 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments
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Sun shines on interoperability progress with Microsoft

In ComputerWorld (and the associated thread in theserverside.com ) I read today a different type of article concerning Sun and Microsoft. Now, since I work on the Volume Shadow copy team, I remarked one quote in particular: In storage, Microsoft and Sun Read More...
Posted Monday, December 06, 2004 5:43 PM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments
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Tabbed browsing interface

I try to get myself used to tabbed browsing - it is an interesting concept. Not only Firefox has this feature - you can find it in IE too! Maxthon is a powerwful web extension that brings these little tabs to the IE world: http://www.maxthon.com/en/index.ht Read More...
Posted Monday, December 06, 2004 3:17 PM by AdiOltean | 5 Comments

Yet another MSN Spaces post

The MSN Spaces buzz is hard to miss. In case you live under a rock and you haven't heard of it, click here . And, by the way, do I need to add that I've created my own blog there? :-) What I like most is the ability to post stuff just by sending an email... Read More...
Posted Friday, December 03, 2004 2:45 AM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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The virtual enterprise

I think that virtual machines are one of the coolest products from the last decade. And what I like about them is the ease of which you can do purely hardware-related management using plain scripts. No need to go three floors down into the datacenter Read More...
Posted Friday, December 03, 2004 1:50 AM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
 
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