I continue to listen to Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point", a book which on the whole I find very interesting and thought provoking. "Mavens" are experts in a subject and are willing and eager to share their knowledge. "Connectors" are people who effortlessly and intuitively bring people together, and "Salesmen" are folks who can translate difficult subjects in a way that "sticks".

Along with sharepoint services, Windows 2003 server also includes Windows Media Services. Media Services provides for streaming audio and video over an intranet and is handy when there are large videos which you would like to make available (such as a speech by the company president, or training videos). More information about the various flavors of Windows Media Services and the version of Windows Server required is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/server/version.aspx.

I was able to install Windows Media Server on my sharepoint server with little difficulty. I created a separate "web" for it as a virtual directory with a different port (I used port 90).

Windows Media Server calls for a file extension of "ASF" but I've found that (so far) I can rename WMV video files to ASF and they will work.

Microsoft provides a variety of free utilities for working with and converting video files on their windows media site, here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/utilities.aspx. There are also some good free utilities including this one: http://www.any-video-converter.com/.

Any file located in the directory pointed to by the media web site will stream. All you need to do is reference it using "mms://" instead of "http://". This example will bring up the Microsoft Media Player on the client and play streamed video from the server: mms://entweb2:90/welcome_speech.asf.

If you would rather have the video window appear in the contents of a web page, then you need to use the media player active X control. This is not difficult. Following is an ASP test page that I placed in a folder in my sharepoint IIS folder that plays the same file in a media window which has been embedded in an html table:

<table>

<tr>
 <td>Welcome to the Media Page</td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td>Welcome Speech</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td>

<OBJECT ID="MediaPlayer1" WIDTH=320 HEIGHT=240
CLASSID="CLSID:22D6f312-B0F6-11D0-94AB-0080C74C7E95"
CODEBASE="http://activex.microsoft.com/activex/controls/mplayer/en/
nsmp2inf.cab#Version=5,1,52,701"
standby="Loading Microsoft Windows Media Player components..."
type="application/x-oleobject">
<Param Name="FileName" Value="mms://entweb2:90/welcome_speech.asf">
</OBJECT>

</td>
</tr>

</table>

This ASP causes an embedded video window to appear in an internet explorer web browser. As you can see, the page can also include HTML elements. I'm thinking that this might be an ideal candidate for a web part.

I've just finished the rereading Larry Nivin's entire ringworld series, starting with Ringworld, followed by The Ringworld Engineers, The Ringworld Throne, Ringworld's Children and finishing up with Protector. I did not read Fleet of Worlds or any of the other Niven "Known Space" books.

What a trip! This is something like 45 hours of Ringworld. I came out of it wishing that there were a Ringworld movie, that there were more artist renderings of the Ringworld and of the various alien species. There is Halo, I suppose, but it would be nice if there were a Ringworld movie using contemporary special effects.

I'm now reading an interesting book by Malcolm Gladwell called The Tipping Point. The book is an interesting and thought-provoking analysis of social trends and reminds me a lot of Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner.

On the subject of economics, I've been predicting that any new president would see an enconomy bounce as investor uncertainty over the presidential election dissipated and as foreign investors, their trust in the US renewed by the departure of Bush and their interest piqued by firesale prices begin to take a closer look at US equities.

Now that we have President Obama, I'll get a chance to see if I'm right.

I've been fiddling with Sharepoint Services 2003 for a couple of days with the intention of moving our company intranet from its current proprietary format to Sharepoint. I set up a virtual machine as test environment and installed sharepoint using the add/remove programs wizard.

This installs Sharepoint v2.0, and Windows update then delivers v3.0. However, at no point in the installation did I notice a prompt for which database server I would like to use for the Sharepoint databases. Perhaps I pushed the wrong buttons or overlooked something?

By default, Sharepoint installs MSDE locally on the sharepoint server. Since it uses BLOBs as storage for its rudimentary documents and because I wanted to use SQLExpress for data storage, I decided to move the sharepoint databases.

This turned out to be more of a puzzle than I had anticipated.

Here are the steps that I took to move the sharepoint databases from myserver\sharepoint to myserver\sqlexpress.

1) I installed SQLExpress.

2) Using Management Studio, I connected to myserver\sharepoint and made backups of the configuration (sts_config) database and my content database (which I had called sps_intranet).

3) I used the stsadm utility to move the configuration database to myserver\sqlexpress. This command creates an empty configuration database. STSADM is located in the c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\60\bin folder. To move a database, use the setconfigdb command as follows:
stsadm -o -setconfigdb -databaseserver myserver\sqlexpress.

4) On the myserver\sqlexpress server, I created a new database called sps_intranet and restored my backup into it. I also restored the backup of sts_config into the new sts_config database.

5) I updated the [instance] column in the [services] table in the [sts_config] database to the name of the new server instance. (It was "sharepoint" -- I updated it to "sqlexpress").

6) Finally, I made sure that the user account under which I had set Sharepoint to run was dbo for the two databases.

7) I restarted the sharepoint server and voila! I was able to access my sharepoint sites using the new database server.

Stupid Hyper-V mistake #1:

Never copy your hyper-V drive, change the drive mapping in the hyper-v administrator, ignore the warning about snapshots, then try to restart your virtual machine. The hyper-v drive contains only the base configuration of the virtual machine (prior to the administration of any snapshots). When you copy the drive, you lose the snapshots and any updates or changes to your virtual machine since the time you took the first snapshot.

If what you're looking for is simply to move/copy your virtual machine, instead of copying the hard drive image, look at "export".

The nice thing about hyper-v versus vmware is that you don't have to worry about driver support (as much). ESXi is supported only on certain hardware platforms. It will work on a lot of unsupported platforms, but isn't it easier to know for sure? If all you're looking for is a development test area, then hyper-v is easy and quick.

I've just returned from a week in Las Vegas, where I attended the yearly Inforum conference. I'm glad to be home.

The conference was, in my opinion, well structured and informative. I learned quite a lot while there and felt like the time away from home and the office was not wasted. I was there to learn more about Infor's ERP product, Syteline, and this I did. It looks like the newest version, V8, is far and above preferrable to previous versions, if for no other reason than because it's easier to deploy, support and modify. It is much easier to customize and has a rich event/workflow model and enhanced support for web services.

I was not as impressed by the city of Las Vegas, which seemed rusty under a thin veneer of gold. I feel for the people who work there. I watched drunken casino-goers harass and proposition a couple of young female shop-keepers in one casino, and while in the elevator in another I was approached by a pan-handler. Outside, shills for escort agencies lined up sometimes 15 abreast to thrust pornographic business cards at all passers-by (even families with small children).

The casinos themselves are a wonder, especially the Venitian and the Mandalay Bay casinos. The Bellagio has a nice indoor shopping boulevard and the conservatory/botanical garden is a treat.

One of the most popular topics of conversation at Inforum seemed to be virtualization. Everyone wanted to know more about it and the hottest question was does Infor support Syteline on virtual machines. The answer, even though Infor support personnel currently use virtual machines for their own testing, is not now--but soon. I guess this is reasonable considering the wide diversity of hardware and software that syteline runs on.

So far Hyper-V is working out well for me. I am disappointed that I am not able to use USB devices such as scanners or printers with my Hyper-V virtual machines. It would be nice if I were able to use VM-ware workstation in combination with Hyper-V, or if VM-ware server would work with 2008 64-bit (as of a couple of weeks ago it didn't).

The nice thing about having Hyper-V on my development machine is that I have virtual servers set up to perform various functions (web server, database server, etc.) and that if these servers are running when I reboot my PC, they're running when the PC starts up again. This is much more convenient than my previous VM-ware workstation configuration, where I would have to manually start up each server each time I rebooted my PC.

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It's easy to be despondent about the economy. My 401k has lost something like 25% of its value in the last six months. However, I do believe there are upsides, at least for software development folks:
1) Foreign competition will be more expensive as the value of the dollar falls.
2) Software is a great way to cut costs, and companies will be looking to do as much cost-cutting as possible, which means they'll be investing in software.

I may be naive, but I also believe that the economy will pick up after the election. I think there's a lot of "wait and see" happening right now. It does seem as though the administration is handling the nation's finances in a pretty careless fashion. Sort of a "let's see if we can spend everything before we leave" attitude.

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I've decided to re-read Larry Niven's Ringworld series. The series would make for an excellent movie, but I'd forgotten how ribald the books are. It would be neat to see what the ringworld looks like in pixar 3D.

I'm starting to have the same problem with audiobooks that I have with regular books...that is, it's easier to buy them than it is to read them, so my reading list is growing. Most recently, I found that Anne Proulx has a new audio book, Fine Just The Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3, and I can't decide if I want to read it, Leviathan (a history of whaling) or The Tipping Point next...

Well, today I took the plunge and installed Windows Server 2008 x64 on my computer at home. Really, I was hoping to take advantage of hyper-V. I had bumped up the ram to 8gb and was thinking that I should be able to run a couple of virtual pcs at the same time...

There are a lot of reasons for wanting to do this:

• I have some hardware (an hp photo printer, for example) that requires funky drivers and my hope is to isolate those drivers in a virtual machine so that I can turn easily turn them off and on when I need them.
  
• I'm also thinking that if I do my browsing in a virtual machine, then any viruses I might happen to catch would be contained within the virtual machine.
• I'd like to be able to isolate my VPN connection to work in a virtual machine. This will also enable me to "save state" so that I can quickly come up to speed with sql management studio, visual studio and the other tools I might need to solve a problem remotely.
• I'm doing some development work on a DLL that has to run in a variety of different environments. I'm thinking that hyper-V will be faster than VMWare workstation, for testing in different flavors of Windows.

So far, so good. My PC uses an Intel BLKD975XBX2KR motherboard and a Intel® Core 2 Duo E6700 Conroe Processor. The latest bios updates (available from Intel's web site) enable support for hardware virtualization and once I installed Server 2008 I was able to start using Hyper-V immediately.

I did have some problems with the motherboard's Marvell raid. I had been using a 4-drive RAID 5 configuration. The Marvell RAID device requires a software driver for the RAID drive to be recognized and I downloaded what I thought was an appropriate driver from Intel's web site. The RAID device did initially appear, but about an hour later I lost touch with it. I tried to reinitialize the array. Once I did that, my computer refused to boot into windows while the Marvell array was active. I had to unplug all four drives to get the computer to boot.

To be truthfull, the fault may have been my own tweaking. I've found several blog postings from people who are using Server 2008 as a desktop operating system and have been trying out tweaks found there. One of those tweaks could well probably have been behind my Marvel RAID malfunction. In any case, in the future I hope to go with a hardware RAID adapter that does not require windows drivers of any kind.

Here are some of the blog postings that I've found that contain useful hints and tips for using Server 2008 as a desktop O/S:

• Using Windows Server 2008 as a SUPER workstation OS
• Hyper-V and VMWare Workstation
• VS2008 Remote Debugger -- Here, I found that I could run the 64-bit remote debugger install directly from the VS2008 install CD. For some reason it did not install automatically.
• Use Flip3D with Windows Server 2008

I'm trying to get Nero to work in a VM now. If I succeed, I'll let you know.

Like many software developers, I spend some time thinking about my competitive strategy. How will I remain employable and employed in a flat-world future dominated by outsourcers? BaseLine magazine is one of my favorite IT magazines and they've published an encouraging analysis of the risks and dangers of outsourcing. Key points: The actual cost advantage of outsourcing is typically something like 20% and there are large risks including high staff turnover and poor communication.

Also in the same issue is an article about buy-vs-build which is interesting but which hashes over already standard rules of thumb, such as "Build if the system will give you an advantage over your competitors. " IE: Don't invest your resources in building commodity software even if it seems cheaper. In the long run, once support and maintenance are factored in, it won't be.

Infoworld has a related article, "how to keep your tech career afloat" which is interesting in that it spotlights unified communications as a hot area.

The New York Times ran an article a couple of days ago on a data visualization website sponsored by IBM called Many Eyes. On this web site you can use free visualization tools to examine your own datasets for not-obvious relationships. My favoriate visualizations are word trees, like this one for Sun Tzu's Art of War.