If you just try and install it normally from the Microsoft Live website, the installer Bork’s and tells you that its not for Server 2003.
Its just that the installer does not work under the 2003, not Messenger itself.
The solution is to.
I installed Windows Live Messenger 8.0.0787 and it worked fine on Server 2003 R2
If you set up a TeamCity server, don’t tell it to check out your project into a path that is root of a drive.
Don’t Try This At Home Drive
You would think that checking out ModuleX into “Checkout Directory” C: would result in
C:ModuleX
That’s how CVS and SVN clients normally operate and you would expect.
But it looks like TeamCity takes the root of the module as the path itself OR it decides that the checkout directory needs to be emptied for some reason, possibly at config time to prevent any issues with dross left behind from previous builds?
So now I have established that TeamCity by default seems to empty the “Checkout Directory”
Which in this case is C:
I managed to fry two machines before working out that TeamCity has this highly dangerous gotcha.
The first time I thought this was a Windows Update that went rogue.
In the second machine I tried this on E: where TeamCity was also installed.
Now I can’t uninstall TeamCity at all.
That’s two machines to rebuild.
Out Poor System Adminstrator (He made me type that) 🙂
I would not be upset if I thought I had done something stupid, like pressed the button that said “Delete Everything And Your Little Dog As Well”.
The default settings telegraph nothing of the impending right hook to your hard drive.
Mostly Harmless
My recommendation would be that the Config page warn that the directory will be emptied and maybe even give an obvious shrill warning if that’s the root of a drive.
Maybe C: should be right out?
Telling you where files would be created (and destroyed) would go part of the way to deciphering what you are going to end up with. At the moment its a black box of string concatenation via hidden logic with hidden results.
Now that I have the model of what is going on in my head I won’t make that mistake again.
Its just a pity that I had to learn it.
May contain spoilers.
Thank goodness because its been 8 years since the last novel featuring The Culture and I was beginning to give up. Mind you I consider “The Dwellers” from The Algebraist to be the “The Affronters” from Excession which could put it in the same Universe, although probably Pre-Culture – a stretch I know, but their description and behavior seem identical and …
…yes I like the Culture books that much and you can start slowly scrolling quietly backwards now.. 🙂
The book delivers on some good Culture ship names (“ROU: You’ll Clean That Up Before You Leave”), a possibly homicidal Drone disguised as a dildo and some “Special Circumstances” action. For my liking there is not enough Knife-Missile play, but is there ever?
The final showdown takes 95% of the book to set up, and is set in a medieval shell-world using the plot device of “the boy who would be king usurped by his regent”. Per weight the book is more of a medieval political thriller with a guest appearance by the Culture.
Despite that, the 5% at the end is full of some some hard and fast anti-matter lobbing, field flicking and plain old nuking from orbit till they glow in the dark, cause as we all know its the only way to be sure 🙂
Everyone who dies does so suddenly.
I liked it.
PS. Read past the liberal Appendix or you will have no idea what happened at the end.
My first “post” of the year – work has been keeping me very busy.
Looks like there is a lot happening in the world of Wii homebrew 🙂
http://www.virtualhosting.com/blog/2008/how-to-homebrew-wii-games-73-tips-tutorials-and-resources/
Pebble bed reactors will be safe and available in 20 years. We will be left with the moral question of who disposes of the waste, the country that used the fuel or the country that mined and sold it, and of course how do you stand guard over it for hundreds of thousands of years. I favour dropping it into the sun, mind you if we had the energy to do that we would not need to build more reactors 🙂
There is of course one non technical reason that will stump the pro-nuclear lobbyists for a few generations to come.
When someone mentions “Nuclear Power Station” the first thing that pops into my head is.
Homer J. Simpson
I foresee in twenty years time a rewriting of history, a publicity campaign at which the core will be the redemption of Homer as Nuclear Plant Safety Officer to defuse this little gem of bad publicity.
Got a report that by blog has stopped working in Firefox. “Bad Element in position 1,1”
Tested it myself and all I got was Blank page.
I decided – now was the time to upgrade to the latest version of dasBlog.
Alas when I went to the dasBlog site I got the following message.
I think I will wait for the bugfix 🙂
Elizabeth Sladen is to me, what Felicity Kendal is to Rick, The People’s Poet
When I was a lad watching Dr Who, Elizabeth Sladen (Who played Sarah Jane Smith) was certainly one of the sexiest things on TV.
After watching the 2007 pilot for The Sarah Jane Adventures, I can confirm she is still as cute as a button.
Elizabeth Sladen holding back the hordes of 30-something Dr Who fan-boys
I remember 15 years ago talking about the logical progression of gaming hardware and predicting that consumer demand would end up putting superior performance in the games consoles, and then they would then be used for “evil”.
The future is weirder than we can imagine.
Hot on the heels of the more esoteric hijacking of a gazillion parallel 4×3 matrix operations in video cards to crack passwords.. we have…
“Security researcher Nick Breese used a PS3 to crack supposedly strong eight-character passwords in hours.
…
In a presentation given at the Kiwicon security conference in mid-November, Mr Breese said a powerful Intel chip could crank through 10-15 million cycles per second.
The architecture of the Cell processor meant it could speed through 1.4 billion cycles per second.”
My next prediction is that every Iranian child will get a PS3 for of all things, Christmas, only to have them mysteriously taken away on New Years Day and installed in a giant underground bunker where they will be set to work simulating nuclear criticality. That, or the worlds largest Virtual Reality porn server farm.
Probably both.
There is an unwritten social contract between we the punters and social networking sites that make money by data-mining our activities and targeting ads at us.
That contract is essentially that we will let them have our personal data in return for cool services.
So far this has gone rather smoothely for both parties.
Google with its “You can make money without doing evil.” seems to be the poster-child for this relationship.
At first people were weary, even paranoid about putting personal information online, but this has relaxed as we dipped our toes into services and found that nothing really bad happened.
Bad things did happen, but it happened to other people using other services.
Trust has grown and people have moved into these sites in droves.
As long as the services didn’t cross some invisible line and offend or scare us personally it was all pretty good.
Maybe the worst that could happen is that the site would secretly stab you in the back and sell your email address to a mailing list, fine – my spam filter just works a little harder.
Now Facebook’s Beacon which tells your Friends what you have purchased online, seems to have crossed that line – the social network equivalent of “What happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas” no longer seem to apply.
Its not like Facebook are stabbing you in the back privately, they are doing it in a room full of people and broadcasting it on a loud hailer.
It seems that people are noticing.
Facebook is targeting people who are active on the net, who trust the net to make online purchases.
If you imagine what the heuristics of Beacon are to maximize ad audience, those targeted probably have a larger than average number of Friends they can complain to, so I suspect the maths is against Facebook on this particular feature.
Now a Facebook group has been created to fight it.
Hoisted by own petard I think.
James McParlane's Blog 