Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
Archive for February, 2008
Heading to Mix 08 Next week!
Feb 29th
I’m Vegas bound once again. . . . Seems I was just there in November?!?! This trip though is all business (yeah.. uh huh in Vegas . . . Keep telling yourself that Jess).
Anyway, looks like MIX has sold out once again but if you’re heading to Vegas and want to meet up feel free to drop me a note.
So far I know the following guys are heading to Mix:
- Myself & Carlos
- Hosters like ourselves and I hear guys from crystal, discount, etc.
- Microsoft Superstars like our buddies Joe Healy, Russ Fustino and Scott Hanselman.
- The guys from BVsoftware / BVcommerce.
- This is going to my first year attending MIX but I’m told it’s the event to be at for Web technologies on the Microsoft Platform (which is pretty much everyone).
- Oh and if you’re in South Florida and heading out, Joe has a great post on his DevFish ( ><<<(o>) site.
Migrating your old workstation to your new workstation with virtualization.
Feb 15th
Like any die-hard computer geek/junkie, when Vista was first released I moved to a new desktop running Vista. The downside to going to a new desktop is that same old problem “what do I do about my old desktop? I don’t want to (or I can’t) re-install all my programs, documents, etc?”. So for the past year+ I’ve been running two desktops, my current desktop and my legacy desktop and using terminal services to access my legacy desktop. Over time, I’ve found myself accessing it less and less as I’ve managed to migrate most of the important bits over but I still don’t want completely retire it, so what do I do? As a huge advocate of virtualization, it was time to virtualize my old desktop.
Virtualizing your old desktop the easy way.
After looking for FREE ways to do this to Virtual PC, I couldn’t find anything FREE immediately and simply didn’t want to waste time trying to hunt something down so I decided to check out what VMWare had to offer (let’s face it, they’ve been doing VM long before anyone else, they gotta have something) and sure enough they have a conversion tool that’s available for free to convert your physical machine to a VM (P2V as it’s called) it’s called the VMware Converter.
I installed the VMWare converter on my old desktop, hooked up a USB drive with plenty of free diskspace on it and started stepping through the wizard (what a great concept). After a few mouse clicks a had the conversion process running creating a new VMware VM for the latest version of VMware workstation.
I left the converter running over night and the next morning came in and found it had completed after about 12 hours (I blame the fact that my old desktop was aging hardware, I was writing to a USB drive and I had 80GB of data to convert over). What’s really impressive is that this was all run while the old desktop was online and active! (READ: NO DOWNTIME).
When I got in this morning I installed a 30 day trial of VMware workstation, connected the USB drive with the VM on it and started it up. It started immediately! I had to let the new hardware wizard run a few times, install the VMware tools and then reboot the virtual machine but after a few minutes my old desktop was now running on my new desktop as a virtual machine and I’m now able to retire my old desktop!
So why is this worthy of a blog post?
Because it’s what I call: BAD ASS TECHNOLOGY. Here’s a bullet list of what I’ve been able to accomplish thanks to this technology:
- Going Green: Today we’re all ‘going green’ and worried about carbon emissions, rising fuel costs, etc. By virtualizing my old desktop I just took one more desktop offline.
- Security: My old desktop ran Windows XP and although I kept it up to date, it’s an aged platform that will eventually no longer be supported. My virtualizing it and only running that VM when I need to access it, I’m more secure against it getting compromised.
- Legacy Data & Programs Safe and Accessible: By virtualizing my old desktop all my old programs, documents, email, etc are safe. How often have you moved to a new machine only to realize you didn’t copy a document over or that a program you use from time to time no longer runs on your new desktop. For me I have a program called Adobe ImageStyler I use to create web graphics that has been long retired and no longer available but still very handy.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any whiz-bang screenshots or pictures available. Quite honestly, I didn’t think it was going to work on the first go round and I thought I was going to have re-image the old box again before I could get it to virtualize, but it worked perfectly the first time!
If you’re like me and recently moved to a new desktop (Perhaps now you’re running Windows Vista 64bit and have applications on your old desktop running Windows XP 32bit that you can no longer run) this is a good route to go.
Conclusion
This is also the first time I’ve run VMware workstation in a couple years (let’s face it, VirtualPC is free afterall and free is hard to compete with) but I have to say it’s definitely still the leader in desktop virtualization (and yeah probably still has the edge in server virtualization too but the gap is narrowing daily). I highly encourage anyone with an old desktop still running for whatever reason to give VMware a try. With the free converter and 30 day full version trial available, it’s well worth the time to experiment to see if it will work for you. If it does work, it’s going to cost less than $200 to license VMware workstation and make your old workstation your new virtual workstation on your new machine.
Straight from the Horse’s Mouth – Microsoft Code Samples
Feb 4th
Microsoft has recently started providing a series of websites to help with adoption of their development tools. We’re all familiar with the ASP.NET and IIS.NET but there’s a couple other new sites I thought I’d point out, MSDN Code Gallery and CodePlex.
The MSDN Code Gallery
The MSDN Code Gallery is a brand new resource and it’s goal is to provide a portal for snippets, samples and other code resources. You can find code gallery at:
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com
and on code gallery you can find articles on all the latest topics, Sharepoint, LINQ, MVC, WPF, etc.
CodePlex
CodePlex is Microsoft’s donation to the development of opensource projects on the Microsoft family of development tools. You can learn more about it:
The nice thing about codeplex is that it’s all open-source (FREE) projects and has everything from project homepages and downloads to discussions and bug reporting. Projects are tagged and searchable.
Today we say good bye to Netscape
Feb 1st
It was announced back in December that Netscape would be officially no longer supported as of February 1st 2008, for many they see it as just another forgotten software program but for many others it was much more than that. For me, Netscape is part of the events that got me hooked on the Internet and that eventually led to the start of Applied Innovations (it seems fitting that in the same month Netscape retires, AppliedI turns 9).
In 1994, I was just starting a career in Electrical Engineering at Motorola and had been using the Internet via gopher, FTP and USENET for a while already. I had been using NCSA’s Mosaic browser and HTTP Daemon running on SunOS and already building webpages and applications around it. NCSA’s tools were nice but simply unpolished. Then I read this USENET posting:
Mosaic Communications Corporation is a making a public version of Mosaic Netscape 0.9 Beta available for anonymous FTP. Mosaic Netscape is a built-from-scratch Internet navigator featuring performance optimized for 14.4 modems, native JPEG support, and more.
You can FTP Mosaic Netscape 0.9 Beta from the following locations:
ftp.mcom.com in /netscape
gatekeeper.dec.com in /pub/net/infosys/Mosaic-Comm
lark.cc.ukans.edu in /Netscape
ftp.meer.net in /Netscape
doc.ic.ac.uk in /packages/Netscape
archie.au in /pub/misc/netscape
ftp.cica.indiana.edu in /pub/pc/win3/winsock/nscape09.zip (PC only)
mac.archive.umich.edu in /mac (Mac only)Please make sure to read the README and LICENSE files.
An up-to-date listing of mirror sites can be obtained at any time
by sending email to rele…@mcom.com.Subject to the timing and results of this beta cycle, Mosaic Communications will release Mosaic Netscape 1.0, also available free for personal use via the Internet. It will be subject to license terms; please review them when and if you obtain Mosaic Netscape 1.0.
A commercial version of Mosaic Netscape 1.0, including technical support from Mosaic Communications, will be available upon completion of the beta cycle. Contact us at i…@mcom.com for more information.
Have fun!
Marc and the gang
i…@mcom.com, http://mosaic.mcom.com/
That post was dated October 13th 1994, 8:51am and the archived message pulled from google groups.
I quickly downloaded, installed and was AMAZED by this new web browser and I wasn’t alone. Here’s a few of the follow up posts from USENET that give you an idea of just how the Internet community accepted the Netscape Beta back then:
As blown away as you may have been by seeing the original Mosaic
for the first time, Netscape is even more impressive.Besides being faster, easier to use and more rubust than Mosaic,
it elegantly handles news and mail.It’s terribly, terrible impressive.
Looks great so far! (Windows version.)
- Transparent GIFs are nice!
- Delayed inline-image loading a-la MacMosaic.
- Scrollbars on TextAreas
- Copy to clipboard from text.
- Multiple windows a-la XMosaic.
- THREADED news!- AND…I’m POSTING this from Netscape!
Cool!
Let’s think of some of the things Netscape did that helped change the Internet:
- 1. They created a web server application with a easy to use management interface (no need to edit nasty .conf files)
- 2. They said F-U to the man time and time again and set their own standards for HTML and extended the Hypertext Markup Language.
- 3. They created the first commercial web browser (then free, then commercial, then free … )
- 4. IPO! Here’s a company that when it IPO’d it signaled the start of the DOT COM bubble!
- 5. It simply made the Internet more accessible to all, it went from a tool used only by scientists and geeks to a key component of everyone’s daily life. You no longer needed to know secret geek-speak like GOPHER, FTP, USENET or TCPIP you could just point and click your way around the web.
For many the passing of Netscape is just another antiquated piece of software taking it’s place in history but it’s much more than that and because of all it’s done and changed for myself, my company, and society as a whole, I say raise your cup of coffee this morning and give thanks to Andreessen and the guys that started Mosaic Communications Corporation and released that very first beta version of Netscape, they truly changed our world!
(image from Peter Coffee’s 24 Killer Apps of All Time).
