Searching for my lost shaker of salt

http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2006/09/26/772250.aspx Follow the link to the Microsoft Connect website, where you can submit a survey and join the list to participate in the SP1 beta program!

http://www.infoq.com/news/dotnet-3-release-candidate The first RC is now available for download.  Just when I was getting the hang of .NET 2.0... Keep in mind there are some licensing and redistributions restrictions on this RC, as detailed in the post above.

I have a slightly different memory associated with that fateful morning than most; it was the time I thought that civilization itself had ended in this country.  At this time in my life I was living in Providence, Rhode Island, working in downtown Boston for a large financial services company.  My commute was an hour and a half (each way) on the T.  I was very isolated from the outside world when going or at work.  Communication was limited to my cell phone and my desk Internet. After the first report that a plane had hit the first tower, all we heard is it was a small plane.  The Internet was completely clogged and I was unable to get any information.  Cell towers were also down, overloaded by the scramble of others to learn of the events.  My co-workers were scrambling to get a radio set up so we could learn something, which never worked quite right.  I had a very limited window to the world: CNN Breaking News e-mails.  While may of the reports were exaggerated or incorrect at the time, this was the picture painted for me; Washington DC completely in flames, with similar scenarios playing out in New York and Pittsburg.  When would Boston be next? I don’t recall exactly when we were evacuated from our own office tower, sometime around 11 AM I think.  The entire city was outside heading to their homes, and it was an eerily quiet walk to the train station, in the train station, and on the train ride home.  No one spoke.  A few cried.  Most just look in shock, afraid, and fearful.  Imagine my “relief” when I finally arrived home to learn the truth that only the towers, pentagon, and a farm field fell victim to the attacks, not the holocost I had imagined.  As with many others, I part of me died that morning on September the 11th, 2001.

6:58 AM BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com -- Iraq claims U.S. spy plane shot down; Pentagon confirms losing contact with unmanned craft. Details to come.

8:55 AM BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com -- World trade center damaged; unconfirmed reports say a plane has crashed into tower. Details to come.

9:23 AM BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com -- Second plane crashes into World Trade Center.

9:27 AM BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com -- FBI investigating reports of foul play in World Trade Center plane crashes, according to the Associated Press. Details to come.

9:35 AM BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com -- Sources tell CNN one of two planes that crashed into World Trade Center was an American Airlines 767.

9:44 AM BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com -- President Bush calls plane crashes at World Trade Center a terrorist act.

9:49 AM BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com -- White House evactuated. Details to come.

9:52 AM BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com -- Fire reported on National Mall in Washington

9:59 AM BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com -- CNN confirms a plane hit the Pentagon.

10:01 AM BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com -- Significant fire at the Pentagon. Details to come.

10:07 AM BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com -- One of World Trade Center towers collapses; fire forces evacuation of State Department

10:29 AM BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com -- United Nations evacuated.

10:41 AM BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com -- Car bombing at the State Department, The Associated Press reports.

10:47 AM BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com -- Pentagon monitoring second suspected hijacked plane.

10:52 AM BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com -- Fighter scrambled amid reports of second plane headed for Pentagon.

10:58 AM BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com -- FAA diverting all U.S.-bound international flights to Canada.

11:02 AM BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com -- Part of Pentagon collapses

11:13 AM BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com -- Second World Trade Center tower collapses in Manhattan

11:21 AM BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com -- NTSB confirms plane crashes near Pittsburgh

I had an absolutely wonderful time.  Thank you to everyone who showed up and made it such an informative and entertaining event.  Believe it or not, that presentation was NOT fueled by sugar or caffine. Many thanks to the folks at Fahrenheit Technology for the abundance of pizza, soda, projector, and room. As promised, here is the slide deck.

One of the new features of my hosting service, WebHost4Life, is a vastly improved webmail interface.  A sprinkling of ajax here and there to make it more user friendly, but the big thing is a very good spam trap.  I use webmail from work (like everyone else), but typically are challenged to find the real messages between the constant barrage of refinance offers, offers to enlarge certain things, offers to loose certain things, etc.  Their new interface, from SmarterTools, cuts it down to a usable level.  Yes, some still make it through but we are talking on the order of less than a hundred a day.  Who would have ever thought that less than 100 spam messages per day was now a good thing?! Even more, there is a nifty reporting feature that offered an astonishing figure: I received 6,722 e-mail messages during the month of August.  No more than 2-300 of those could be legitimate, and that's being very generous.  That's a lotta spam!

Many thanks to Frank, Andy, and Andrew for making this happen! http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032308404&Culture=en-US

Thursday, September 7, 2006 at 6:30 PM Location: 4600 Cox Road, Glen Allen, VA [map] Bring your Analysts and Managers! In plain English we will review and discuss the most basic object oriented concepts.  Objects are not only the building blocks of an application but a practical way to divide and work with complex business processes.  Renew your OOA and OOD resume credentials!   Special thanks to this month's sponsor: Fahrenheit Technology. Be sure to thank the good people at Fahrenheit for arranging the meeting space - as well as providing pizza and sodas!    The Richmond .Net Users Group plans to meet at 6:30 PM on the first Thursday of each month at the Markel facilities. Hope to see you there!

Ok, this falls under the category of really reading the manual to fully understand this.  As I wrote earlier, Virtual PC 2004 is now freely available from Microsoft.  This is a fantastic tool to spin up virtual computers to try out new operating systems, or, try things to operating systems you wouldn't normally want to do to a "real" machine.  A sandbox is the truest sense of the word.

Before I continue, I have read that Windows Server 2003 is not officially supported on VPC 2004.  Doesn't mean it doesn't work, its just not officially supported.  And, you should have a licensed copy of Windows Server 2003 to play with.  Enough said.

Installation of Windows Server 2003 is the same as with any VPC "guest" operating system, and is covered in ample other locations.  Once your install gets done you'll want to install all your patches Windows Update, maybe even Sysprep the VPC image so you can recycle it (great article on that here).

So now you have this fully functional server, what's next?  Get your host machine to talk to it of course!  That's where my fun began.

You may think that because you were able to access the Internet its a snap to access local network resources.  Not so.  By default, VPC configures networking to a "Shared Networking" setting.  This creates a DHCP server inside of the VPC host, and with DHCP being the default TCP/IP setting inside of Windows Server 2003 you are good to go.  But the VPC DHCP server (say that 3 times fast) acts as a firewall to network resources; you can't access them from the guest operating system.

The answer is relatively simple (now that I RFTM).  After installing VPC, you have a new service available in your network adapter settings; "Virtual Machine Network Services".  Check this on the adapter that is used to connect you to your network (and presumably the Internet).

 

Return to the VPC console, and select Settings on the Windows Server 2003 guest.  Under Network Settings you will see your physical network adapter listed.  Select it.

 

Start up the guest OS and make the following TCP/IP changes.

I could not get DHCP to work with my network gateway, so I specified a network address like I would for any machine on my network.  This also required me to manually enter DNS addresses (do not use your gateway address; it won't work).  So, for example, if your host machine's IP address is 192.168.1.11, set the guest OS to 192.168.1.20.  Same subnet, same gateway.  Adjust your address values according to your network settings.

At this point you should be able to ping the host machine from the guest OS, and vice versa.