Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

(pictures of food to come later...)

Now playing: Pick a Piper - Rooms

Despite what some people might think, I'm not writing journal entries on Facebook. No, these are blog posts from my one, true web presence: www.ntldr.net (www.ntldr.com…ntldr.net…ntldr.com…whatever, they're all just host headers for a single IIS 7.5 site).

See, there's this nice little part of the web called RSS. It lets content be automatically published in a nifty machine-readable way. I even wrote about it years ago… Anyway, its relevance here is that there's a RSS feed published by www.ntldr.net that some other sites (such as Windows Live Profiles, and notably Facebook) are subscribed to. These two other sites are able to pick up a change I make to the site (add/change/delete blog posts) and inform their users. So everyone stays up to date and everything is happy-fun-unicorn-prancing-in-the-sun times.

Note that I called out 2 sites there. Never wrote anything about the Windows Live addition of syndication. Now, some might say that's because I don't have any Windows Live Network members (fine, I'll say what everyone is thinking "he doesn't have any Friends"), to which I'd reply "ha! But who's got the traffic analysis to show otherwise!". (note that this argument applies to Windows Live Friends; I don't have nearly the resources (or wherewithal!) to stalk everyone in real life…and no, I'm not looking for grants from Homeland Security to change that…) In truth, I just don't have a problem with the way Windows Live implemented the feature. But I do have a few issues & comments regarding how Facebook does it.

One issue is feed refresh speed. I made a post midafternoon Sunday. I log into Facebook to catch up on friends*, go to my profile for some reason (or maybe just look at the Facebook Feeds), and notice that it hasn't picked up the post made hours earlier. Now, this isn't really that big of a problem. I mean, how often do I really make posts? How critical is it that people get these & read it that second? It's not like I'm giving out stock tips or something here.

But Facebook has this weird insistence that the timestamps of the "journal" entries be different from the timestamps on the posted content. So in combination with slow refreshes of the feed, it's possible to get into situations where multiple posts are made, Facebook picks them all up at once, and then totally screws up the order of the posts. So much for being able to carefully lead readers through a series of posts! Just think how much fun it would be to read a mystery novel where the final chapter shows up before the mystery is even presented!** Even more annoying is that the order seems to depend on what view is presented. This happened to me later Sunday evening, after everything finally refreshed, with friends viewing the "oh noes! I goofed up!" post before reading the much more recent "praise of Hyper-V" post that reflected a much better personal mood.

Going in a slightly different direction, Facebook proxies every request to the host website from its users through itself. I can't really take issue with this behavior, because I think the original intent is to protect users from malicious content. Facebook pulls the entire feed content down and presents it as a user journal entry. So if I wanted to be malicious and put things like Web bugs, or perhaps a little bit of script to go do evil, nefarious acts, that trash could gain legitimacy and bypass restrictions because it's now on Facebook's site. Proxying also allows for another level of caching to occur (I suspect I may be seeing this behavior in my servers logs), thus improving performance and maybe letting the source site stay up if something becomes really, really popular (obviously good). However, as a site admin, I get kind of nervous about the blatant way this seems to be occurring, and the lack of control I seem to have over it. Plus, it wouldn't really be necessary if the design were tweaked a bit to not trick users into thinking everything was Facebook & originated on Facebook & that Facebook is the Real Internet.***

Tied to the content proxying is content reformatting. RSS feeds are XML; entries can contain XHTML and all its glorious formatting. As part of "journal-ifying", the original site's CSS and formatting are ignored, and the Facebook styles get applied. In most cases, this is fine, and works well to create a more seamless experience. But on a couple of my entries, the formatting has reacted strangely and the resulting Frankenstein looks horrible. Again, I much prefer the Windows Live route where users get just a headline & a brief snippet to catch their interest. Unfortunately, I doubt that model will ever be picked up by Facebook. They're too focused on keeping people on the site and making money off those people, even if they are misrepresenting the origins of the content that those people are coming to see. Now, I don't really have a problem with a company making money. I just don't like seeing ads next to things I've written. I don't run ads on www.ntldr.net, and I don't plan on ever doing so.

Umm…so…"boo! to these Facebook journal entries!" visit www.ntldr.net! ;-D (I'll conveniently ignore how many, many more people (and better targeted! these people might actually care about this stuff!) have probably read these posts now via Facebook than have ever visited my actual site…)

* this part's hypothetical; despite having an account there since the beginning of 2004, I'm still not really sure why people use Facebook

** not that I'm planning on featuring detective stories at any point, but it'd be nice to have the flexibility for me to make that choice

*** some exaggeration added for dramatic effect…please don't "eliminate" me if I've stumbled across the super-secret plans for world domination!

Now playing: Lifehouse – Who We Are – 02 First Time

Hmm... can this get posted from Microsoft Office Word 2010 Beta?

Here, let's try a picture too:

& how about a category too while I'm at it?

Update: okay, so can I update this too?

Okay, Hyper-V is cool. It's fast, easy to use, has a lot more features, & generally works very nicely. Much better than Virtual Server 2005 R2. Moved this website over to a new VM (upgraded to 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2 in the process...yeah!) on my new server, and it's working great (I hope...guess I'll know for sure if any comments get posted...:)). Tried moving another VM over just by coping the VHD file, but that didn't work so well. Didn't really expect it to before trying, but then got hopeful when first starting it up and trying to install the integration components, and now have finally accepted that the two solutions (VS2005R2 & Hyper-V) are just too different for things to work.

Not sure I care that much for Hyper-V's licensing model though...yes, the basic product is free, but to get the "good" management tools you have to shell out the big $$$'s for System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Guess I'm just greedy and want everything for free... ;) (no, seriously, would it be too hard to have a management interface that allows you to see, at a glance, how many resources have been allocated to the VM's? kind of like the old VMRCplus view?)

Now playing: Stabbing Westward – Stabbing Westward – 07 Angel

Bunch of random thoughts here...kind of like a Link Post only much more commentary than usual, so...

Hmm...maybe I should think about taking a vacation: RP among National Geographic’s 25 travel destinations. Sounds like it would be pretty & relaxing & nice. Or maybe not take a vacation; not sure what I'd do there (yes, there's a reason to go, but I've got this stupid hang-up around needing to be invited over first (and I'm fairly certain at this point that that wont happen)).

Moving pictures of the typhoon disasters in RP (well, I found them moving at least; might be different if you're not sitting warm & dry in a recliner thousands of miles away...).

I'd forgotten about how much I liked Wire in the Blood until both Emil mentioned it, and Leverage-writer-guy blogged about it on the same night. Although for some reason that just made me want to watch Spooks again instead...

Interesting blog post about politics & economics. Not sure I fully agree with the post, but an interesting view nonetheless.

Fascinating reading about the Olson time zone database. No, seriously! It's not that boring! Okay, so given my penchant for regional settings, date formats, & other miscellaneous bits, I might be a bit biased. Go check it out & find out for yourself. (aside: examples of my wierdness: 24 hour clocks, clocks set to UTC, ISO8601 formatting (yes, I may even have multiple editions of the standard!), usage of Celsius, changing of currency formatting so the currency symbol is after the #, usage of the space as a number group separator, etc.)

Cool: instructions on how to get the Active Directory detection of TMG servers to work. Now I just need to upgrade Forefront TMG and implement this client feature...

Haven't watched this video series yet, but it was referred to me as a good introduction to functional programming.

Recommended UEFI-based Disk Partition Configurations: read that if setting up an EFI booting Windows system! It'll make things a lot easier.

And a sign that I've been dealing WAY too much with thermal/power management: first reaction to this comic was total confusion – which plate? the one reinforcing the heatsink mount? there's no thermal sensor/thermocouple there is there? maybe it's referring to part of the chassis? but that doesn't get hot? and why would I be being warned anyway...shouldn’t everything just safely throttle down?

Now playing: Joel Plaskett – Three (Disc 1) – 9 Run, Run, Run

Screwed up a couple things at work last week. Well, found out about the screw ups (yep, there's 2!) at least. The original decisions I made/that were made happened weeks & months ago. The first involved a big upgrade project that I feel like I somehow got to be essentially in charge of (regular readers might be able to figure out what product was involved by going back through previous posts...), and is really just the result of poor communication, although I'm not sure how much clearer things could be than having the scenario in the stupid subject line of the emails... Anyway, it feels kind of like the rug got pulled out from underneath me on this one, and I'm probably taking it a lot harder than I should, with no one really to blame (uh-huh...like that's going to last...the finger pointing has already started; just a matter of seeing how political it gets). The second screw up involved the same product, but a new installation this time. A new server had to be spec'd and built, and there's a hard deadline & tight timeline to get it done. This time my mistake was in specifying the wrong OS to be installed – amd64 instead of i386 like the product's documentation said. Double checked everything, saw the note about supported platforms in the docs, and then spec'd the amd64 version anyway. Not quite sure what I was thinking; maybe that any well-written app wont have a problem with 64-bit? maybe just thinking about the cost & upgradeability of the system instead of the specs? maybe just a total-brain-failure while reading? Not quite sure what's going to happen there...

Huh...that went longer than I intended...guess I'm still fairly upset about it. [what, like writing a blog post trolling for sympathy wasn't already a good enough indication???]

Now playing: Harry Chapin – Legends of the Lost & Found – 16 You Are the Only Song

Looks like my nice new Intel SR1630HGP server, with its Intel Xeon X3460 processor is affected by the CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT STOP error discussed in KB975530:

0: kd> !analyze -v
*******************************************************************************
*                                                                             *
*                        Bugcheck Analysis                                    *
*                                                                             *
*******************************************************************************

CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT (101)
An expected clock interrupt was not received on a secondary processor in an
MP system within the allocated interval. This indicates that the specified
processor is hung and not processing interrupts.
Arguments:
Arg1: 0000000000000019, Clock interrupt time out interval in nominal clock ticks.
Arg2: 0000000000000000, 0.
Arg3: fffff880021e1180, The PRCB address of the hung processor.
Arg4: 0000000000000006, 0.

(additional details follow that but don't really add anything)

GRRRRR!!! Looks like, at the time of this writing, the KB article needs to be updated, since the Xeon 3400 series aren't Xeon 5500's, nor Core i5's, nor Core i7's...

Now playing: The Beatles – One – 26 Let It Be

A couple days ago someone mentioned Pidgin, so I thought "what the heck, I'll see what the commotion is about". And hey! It's come a long way since the Gaim days when I last used it! Support for Jingle and XMPP audio/video is very cool, and it really doesn't look & feel that bad (okay, other than the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons being backwards from the Windows norm on every dialog). Unfortunately I haven't been able to test the Jabber support, since it appears the entire amessage.de server that I used to use is just gone...so I tried using my old FBE28E45 AIM account & what the heck????!!!! it still works!

I mean, it's been years since I used that account! (this is where someone is going to point out that I've actually been logged in this whole time (from some random transport server), and that this explains why I've been such a jerk and not responded to thousands of IM's over the years...)

But yeah, not only did logging into the account still work, all my contacts were still there! A whole bunch of people were online that I haven't talked to since the beginning of college...plus all the defunct accounts from people that have moved on. So I think I'll keep Pidgin around for a bit & see if I can't "reconnect" with some people (translation: Pidgin is going to sit around and run in the background for a while, until I forget about, then get uninstalled once I rediscover that something's using a bunch of resources...hehe...).

Update: hey, it turns out that amessage.de is still there...I'm just an idiot and 1) remembered to add the enabled AIM protocol to the TMG firewall access policy, but 2) forgot to define XMPP, add it to an access rule, and enable the rule. So I'm also reactivating NTSN@amessage.de! Yay! (although, ouch, it turns out people were trying to contact me on that account...sorry Taylor!)

Now playing: Jim Croce – I Got a Name – 11 The Hard Way Every Time

0xc0000225 error when trying to boot into the Windows Server 2008 R2 installer? And you're running on a Broadcom HT1000 based motherboard? Solution: hide/disable the XIOAPIC functions of the HT1000.

On the Supermicro H8SSL-i board this means going into the BIOS, Advanced tab, Advanced Chipset Control menu, "HT1000 Southbridge Configuration" menu, and finally changing the "Hide XIOAPIC PCI Functions" option to "Yes". Save the changes and reboot. (Note that this applies to v1.2 of the BIOS...which based on its age is probably going to be the last one ever released for that board...)

Now playing: Emm Gryner – Public – 08 Your Sort of Human Being

Got a brand spanking new Intel Xeon X34xx (Nehalem based!) server recently (like within the last month). It’s a barebones Intel Server System SR1630HGP, with an Intel S3420GP motherboard. Which means...it supports EFI! So I'd finally be able to see what all the hype & excitement about the cool new BIOS replacement was! And I'd be able to boot off a storage array > 2TB in size! Or so I thought (insert thunderclaps, lightning, and other ominous (or just drama enhancing) signs here).

It turns out there's a bit more to getting EFI to work with Windows than just popping the DVD in the drive and powering up the computer. A brief caveat here at the beginning: these comments apply to the following firmware, so the settings may change as new releases are made:

• BIOS: S3420GP.86B.01.00.0027
• BMC: v01.14
• FRUSDR: 15
• Windows Server 2008 R2 (RTM)

So, first of all, the RAID functions of the chipset don't work with EFI. Period. Neither the Intel Matrix RAID option ROM, nor the LSI/ESRT2 option ROM, appear to support EFI. Sure, they're useable with the CSM enabled, and the system setup may make it seem like they can be enabled, but as soon as EFI is used, things just stop working and any arrays either wont be bootable or wont even be found.

Actually, even with a standalone LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-4i, things aren't that easy to get working. The CSM has to be enabled in order to get into the controllers firmware ("WebBIOS" or something now). And there's only like half a second to press the right keys to get into it the first time... But once the arrays and any settings are configured, EFI does work with the controller and CSM can be disabled.

Oh, and if using an internal SATA DVD drive, apparently it has to be plugged into port 5, otherwise it doesn't always show up as a bootable device. This might just be a legacy of leaving the Matrix RAID enabled when it shouldn't have been, but with the drive on port 5 it always worked.

Once the storage stuff is taken care of, the big tricky bit is that Windows apparently requires a VGA BIOS to be present in order to work properly. This little nugget of crucial information can be found by digging around the Windows Hardware Design site and reading up on firmware & UEFI/EFI. In the system setup, there's a setting for "Enable Use Legacy Video for EFI OS" that becomes available when "Enable EFI Optimized Boot" is enabled. BOTH settings need to be enabled for Windows to successfully run. I think I may have been able to get WinPE to start off the DVD without the video setting enabled, but it certainly wasn't stable & reliable. May just have been that the setting didn't actually get cleared, got temporarily turned back on again, or I'm just confused by having tried too many different things.

A final bit of trouble I ran into was getting Windows Setup to not encounter errors. For some reason it kept saying that Windows couldn't be installed to the drive because the system couldn't boot from the selected drive (although Setup would let you continue with the installation, true to its word, Windows wouldn't boot after setup). To fix this issue, I had to boot into WinPE (with CSM enabled/EFI boot disabled again! otherwise you can't get a command prompt from the setup disks!), fire up diskpart, convert the disk to GPT, then manually create the EFI System Partition (ESP) and Microsoft Reserved Partition (MSR). The next time setup started from an EFI boot, the error was gone and setup worked correctly.

So, a summary of what needs to be done:

1. Make sure the DVD drive is connected to SATA port 5!
2. Get a FAT32 EFI System Partition created on the disk somehow.
3. In the firmware setup:
   1. Switch SATA controller to AHCI mode
   2. Disable AHCI Option ROM
   3. Enable EFI Optimized Boot
   4. Enable Use Legacy Video for EFI OS
4. Save changes to firmware setup, then reenter it to double check that the settings took (& to verify the boot settings...those have an annoying habit of changing all the time)
5. Start up Windows Setup and install

Now playing: Emm Gryner – Public – 05 Phonecall 45