January 2007 - Posts
Thanks to
RustyLime for this - I agree.... it says it all.
Derek just posted a comment on this blogpost I wrote a while back.
I tend to agree that it should be more officially noted that an update for FSX is on the way. Maybe a news item or something on the fsinsider.com website. However, I suspect that the team are simply too busy working on a pre-DX10 update for us all. That said, I have emailed the relevant people and I am making sure they are still listening :)
Derek... if you want official clarification that a service pack is on the way, read this post from Paul and this one from Adrian. Though I do not know if it will address the specific issues you mention....
Also, take that thing out of the draw you put it in and give it another go. This time, read the "What's your framerate Part I" and "Whats your framerate Part 2" articles that Hal posted to fsinsider.com.
As per this blogpost
Microsoft finally made the article live. Susan gives you the American way to get the patches.... here in Europe you call the local Microsoft support number and give the article number to request the patch.
You do NOT need to give them credit card information for a hotfix (as some people seem to think).
The more people that request the patch, the more prioritised the patch will become.
Yes, it happened...
During the match yesterday, I shouted "Ooowww mwayy gaaawwwd" (translated - Oh my God), in my finest Dublin 4 accent. This is a depressing step in my conversion from English roots to Irish Munster Supporter. If you are ever standing next to me at a Munster game and hear me say that, I give you full permission to smack me in the mouth.
The better team won on the day, the Leicester Tigers defence was amazing and they took the game to us. But that is not what I am here to write about as there are far better pundits than I! I am writing about is the good side of our loss at Thomond.... The unbeaten home record was one monkey that I am happy to see removed from the back of the team, so good riddance to that finally!
Maybe we are now going to see less "cling on" supporters in this tournament, that have started to ruin Munster games, as I very much doubt they will spend the money to travel to the away matches. There was a serious amount of people yesterday that could not get a ticket that were even more deserving than I, and certainly more deserving than most of the people I saw at the game. Yes, that includes you people that started to leave the game early from the south terrace! This is something that I have never before seen at a Munster match and another sign that the wrong people are getting the tickets... Roll on the new Thomond Park when we will all have room to see our team play.
I am still in no doubt that Munster will get to the Heineken cup final this year. I will be there, singing and shouting our team to a second European title.
Like last year...
This will teach me to step away from my computer for a weekend. Others have blogged all of this information, but for the two of you that subscribe to just my blog - here is the scoop....
Hal Bryan moved blog and proved he still existed.
Mike Singer joined the ACES Blogroll.
Paul wants a mission designer.
Oh yeah... we also have a new (completely redeveloped) Microsoft Train Simulator on the way. (That said, even I am not geek enough to enjoy a train simulator) ;)
There are some new developer blogs specifically for Train Simulator, they are:
Rick Selby - "Yard Limits"
Patrick Cook - "Sim Elations"
and, of course, you all know Mike Gilbert whom is now the Lead Program Manager for Train Simulator.
Thanks to
Jon Patch for the heads up here....
It seems that I managed to miss that Tim Gregson moved from his
old blog, to a
new one.
I am also embarrassed to say that I missed the fact that the community development manager for Flight Simulator,
Brett Schnepf has also joined the ACES Blogroll.
I have just updated the blogroll with the new links.
People... be careful.
First, I ordered Microsoft Voice Command 1.6 for my Palm Treo 750v phone. Then I find out that in America, you can get the upgrade version for less than half price from Handango, but not on their UK or Europe site. What gives...? Seems like a deliberate delay to make more money to me.
Second, I order the software online - as I really want the new bluetooth support - and I select the Palm Treo 750v as my phone model. What do they do... they send me the smartphone version and not the pocketpc version! Gaaaah....
Since Handango do not have a telephone line (that I can see anyway) for support in Ireland / UK / Europe, I have contacted them via their online form. That was nearly 36 hours ago now...
My suggestion... get Voice command somewhere else, and make sure that you are very clear on the version you need for your Windows Mobile 5 device.
Today, two men, both wearing sunglasses came to the front door. There was a flash of red light and that's the last thing I remember. Since then, this post lost it's links.
OK, here is the real scoop. Microsoft are very aware that this stupid and highly frustrating issue needs to be addressed and the teams are working hard on it. However... I still say not hard enough. You know guys (MSFT), you really do need to understand that if "Farmer Joe" down the road from me has his machine crash and get slow he does not care about your internal issues, he just wants a fix. Worse still, after it taking me a year to convince "Farmer Joe" that he should use automatic updates to keep safe and secure, he will turn it off and never look at it again.
What is worse? A patch that can cause issues on some machines or people disabling automatic updates and not getting patches at all?
I am willing to bet that, like Exchange server, there is - or will soon be - more WSUS installations by SBS R2 than by regular download of the product. That means that the WSUS team need to start to listen to us SBS'ers. Frankly, I believe that the WSUS team have ignored community feedback and have not prioritised this issue enough. Either that, or they have not been given the resources to fix this issue... either way, I don't really care... I just want a patch released by the end of this month!
I will say that I have heard rumours that there will be another interim fix released soon, but again not publicly... this time I am not going to publish the fix as we need people to call into PSS and request it. That way Microsoft may finally realise how many people this is really affecting. In this day and age of "community" that MS appears to still use the archaic "phone call count" as the yard stick of pain. These days a good search engine with the key words of svchost.exe CPU 100% and what not is a far better indicator of real customer pain.
I believe that the article will be here (and I just called in and got the fix for that number 927891)
Yesterday, I managed to "hit the right buttons" with Susan on this thread. I still stand by what I have said, as I am only voicing what every other Action Pack user is thinking.
The good news is that Susan has written an open blog post to Steve Ballmer regarding this silly situation. I am certain that he will do something about it too as he, of all people, understands that Microsoft have to make the licencing easier for all of us!
The other day,
I mentioned that Arno and I were messing with the new Object Placement tool in FSX.
Well, just a moment ago I got a notification from
Owen Hewitt's blog about a new
FREE tool called
Scenery Shortcut from Abacus that makes the whole thing easier again using this method. I have not tried it yet, but I am downloading.
Maybe this will save Arno some time on a
new tool.
Last week I also got a mail from a user with exactly the same question that Adrian
has just answered on his blog. I guess we all got mailed :)
Either way, you have an answer now to the 16:9 vs 4:3 2D panel issue in FSX straight from the Dev team.
EDIT: Links pulled again.... explaination in a blog post later.
I put these up before and took them down to keep the peace. Since no one in Microsoft is taking action to make this patch more publicly available I am going to. I can deal with the consequences (which I doubt there will be). Maybe soon we will have a way for intelligent people, whom care about their networks, can download patches without having to call Microsoft and be "screened".
There are two articles that are dealt with here. The first is the one I originally mentioned, 914810 which causes Automatic Updates to stop responding. The patches for that are:
Windows 2000 - Click Here
Windows XP - Click Here
Windows Server 2003 - Click Here
However... there is a newer version of the msi.dll file in this article 916089 for XP only. I would guess that this would mean that you do not have to install the one above for XP, but I do not know for sure. You can download that here
Remember people... use these patches at your own discretion. Backup first, and do not come moaning here if it breaks something else.
Another note is to ensure that the SoftwareDistribution folder is excluded from AV scanning!
A lot of us SBS MVP's have been asking for such a thing for a few years now. Finally the Windows Home Server is announced, and I simply cannot wait for it to be released!
In the mean time, you can go over to Susan's blog, where she dug out some links on the product.
I will leave everything to Vlad to say, but I echo his sentiments. They have obviously lost the plot completely.
I have an iPod, I may one day get a Zune (hopefully for free, just to see what it is like), but these adverts suck and do nothing to make me want one.
As you can tell from the amount of posts today, Arno and I have been checking out the new FSX SDK this weekend (that is only in the Deluxe version btw). One thing I have known about for a while is that there are some plugins you can enable to help with design in FSX.
There is a Object placement tool, an Effects tool and a Traffic Toolbox tool.
To enable these, open the DLL.XML file in the documents and settings\yourname\application data\microsoft\fsx folder and change the <Disabled>True</Disabled> to <Disabled>False</Disabled> in each case. Then you will have a new Tools menu when you load FSX.
Arno almost went crazy when he started playing around with the Object Placement / Mission Builder tool. We have already found some limitations, which we may be able to work around, but I am sure he will post something soon on his blog.
In the new GMAX SDK for FSX, there is a really cool tool that the ACES Studio (most likely Adrian - thanks Adrian) wrote for us all.
There is a small bug that I noticed when switching between LOD views using this tool where you would have to click the "Unhide All" button before selecting the LOD view you would like. Therefore, I had a chat with Arno and we found a workaround to the issue (until I speak with Adrian). The only downside is you get a "flicker" between the changeover.
Find this code in the LODandNameTool.ms script:
(
hide $*
global dummyString = 0
for obj in allLOD.selection do
Change it to add one line:
(
max unhide all
hide $*
global dummyString = 0
for obj in allLOD.selection do
You know.. since the release of Flight Simulator X, I have been a busy boy :) Working with Arno on kicking off the new fsdeveloper.com site, working on my own new house build, working on the business, the list goes on...
One of the things that I did not get to do was to try the new GMAX Gamepack (SP1) for FSX. Since I do not read manuals, and Arno knows this, I decided to give him a call on Skype to run over the basics of the new Gamepack that the ACES studio have given us.
Arno ran through the easy parts with me, then we started to explore a bit more. As I write this, a new blog post notification has just come in from Arno, and I see he has already explained some of the new things we found. All I can say is wow! the new export options are amazing.... I cannot wait to get a boned IK animation working on our gates and a tutorial posted for you all! (I also think we may be able to get animated stair trucks working with the same method)
As Arno says... we intend on getting together for more of these sessions to get deeper into the feature sets. When we do, we will try to get tools and tutorials designed and released to the community. The first one I am pressuring Arno for is a new version of ObjectPlacerXML that will give us the GUID's from the MDL file automatically. Pity Arno only has two hands, one brain, and two computers ;)
How to tell if SBS R2 is installed
Thanks to Susan for pointing this out, as the question has come up a few times to my email address as well.
Replacing NIC's in a SBS Server
Kevin posted this information on how to change the network cards on your SBS box. Another common question answeredtool Start!
1030 Errors on the workstation
Kevin also posted this information on getting rid of the 1030 errors. I would like to add to this that I have had success with running the password manager on the machine affected and removing all the saved credentials. Do this:
Open up Stored User Names and Passwords tool
Start / Run / 'control keymgr.dll'
Delete the Stored Password for the Domain Controller that you are connected to.
The "Banana Hack" - Connecting XP Media Centre Edition to your domain
One more via Kevin's blog. A much easier method! Thanks!
Another one of my late posts. Susan actually already posted about it here and here. She referred to them as Evil. I will refer to them as possessed.
I am going to skip all the detail and simply say that ISA 2004 completely died and stopped routing traffic due to crappy Broadcom drivers. Even top level Microsoft support had troubles tracking it down to bad drivers.
On Susan's blog, users have said that uninstalling the Dell preinstalled drivers and installing the Broadcom drivers fixed the issue. At the time however, this did not work for me... unless they released updated drivers since Dec 2006??
Anyway, my recommendation is to simply request Intel network cards when you order your Dell server. Just to be on the safe side.
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