Adventures in home working

I am a bit backup focused at the moment – I wonder why – so here are some useful things to backup:

Your windows deskbar shortcuts

C:\Documents and Settings\[your username]\Application Data\Windows Desktop Search\WindowsDesktopShortcuts.ini

Your ActiveWords

C:\Program Files\ActiveWords\USERS\[your username]

Windows media player really bugs me.  I want to be able to start it up with one click and have it play my favorite concentration music play list.  But it insists on making this a 3 or 4 click activity which is really distracting when I am working as I am always switching between different WMP activities.  Videos, podcasts, music and concentration music.

No problem, now that PowerShell has arrived it’s a simple job to automate WMP.

$WMP = new-object -com WMPLAYER.OCX
$Media = $WMP.mediacollection
$Playlist = $media.getbyname($strplaylist)
$a = $Playlist.item(0)
$WMP.openplayer($a.sourceurl)

Just replace $strplaylist with the name of your playlist.  This blog post has all the details.

Now in my case I wanted to be able to type

work [F8]

or

[CTRL][CTRL] work [RETURN]

and through the magic of ActiveWords this would run the script.  But to make this work you need to configure PowerShell to execute scripts (default security is VERY tight) and the details on how to do this are here.

When I installed Windows Desktop Search 3 I re-discovered the deskbar and the really quick and easy way it provides to create shortcuts to folders, documents, applications and web sites.

I really disliked the default hotkey though and still do and I also got annoyed by its limitations, the last straw though was that I tried it in Vista and – it’s gone!

So I have switched to ActiveWords which provides everything that deskbar shortcuts did and much more and it has a great hot key [CTRL] [CTRL] as well is in place active words (just type anywhere and hit F8 or [SPACE][SPACE].

It’s great!

In XP and W2003 I liked being able to search any explorer by simply clicking [SEARCH] or by pressing F3.  The search was very fast, especially when just searching on filename.  Along comes Windows Desktop Search 3 for Windows 2003 Server, which is working great BUT the folder search bar is rubbish, really slow and clunky.

To get the old search functionality back – but without breaking all the other great features of WDS just make the following registry key change:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Desktop Search\DS

Then double-click on ‘ShowStartSearchBand’ and set the value to ‘0′

Search within Explorer is much improved in Vista, but sometimes I just wished for a fast type down search by filename that I loved in X1.

When I reinstalled FeedDemon following my rebuild I found that there was not context menu to subscribe to a feed.  I previously used “send to default feed reader” which must have been added by NewsGator or one of the other products I have been testing.  Still easily fixed:

This web site

http://glenn.typepad.com/news/2004/01/adding_feeddemo.html

provides details on how to achieve it manually and this one

installer program

has a script that will do it for you.  Works great for me.

After reading about my rebuild nightmare you are probably thinking that I would be migrating fast to web 2.0 sites.  Wrong!  I really like some of the web 2.0 sites and work extensively in the browser – but I like to use the best tool for the job and right now I think that’s:

1. 2003 server
2. Driving 3 screens
3. Running most applications local but with background synchronization of data onto servers where it makes sense

I just love the customizability, the great integrated experience and the fact that from one desktop I can run local apps, smart apps, web apps, terminal served apps, virtual machines etc. 

I also love the fact that I can leave my desktop running and grab my Tablet and have everything synched but have a completely different environment optimized for a very different type of activity and different form factor.

So for me web 2.0 is a complement to the desktop, not a replacement.  My desktop has been rock solid for 2 years and largely because of my own messing around has probably cost me 3 hours of downtime to fix.  Not a bad trade off for the productivity benefits and fun I have had over those 2 years.

I switch to a new machine and Vista in a few weeks, I am pretty worried that I won’t get the rock stability I am used to but here’s hoping!

On Monday I started to notice that IE and Maxthon were not working correctly following the installation of IE7 on Windows 2003 server (my desktop).  IE would just stop opening new web pages completely, Firefox was fine but Maxthon is too integrated into my working practices so I decided IE7 must go and did a de-install.  Unfortunately the resulting machine running IE6 was badly broken, IE6 would not browse to any web pages, just download them.

I poked around for 30 minutes but failed to fix it, not to worry I thought a quick repair would fix it, but to no avail and this tipped me over the edge and I decided to do a rebuild. 

This machine – my current desktop – is about to become my server when my new desktop arrives in January so a rebuild was due anyway as this build has lasted me a couple of rock solid years.

Just at the end of the build (after lots of installing and lots of patching) I di a final restart and horror of horrors I get some error about services.exe won’t start because some dll is missing.  Using the repair console I copy over the dll, no joy, then I do a full repair – no better so I had to do the whole rebuild again!!!  I am not sure but I think it was VMware or the latest ATI drivers that did it.

Anyway the second time was much better and I took more care with the install sequence, my machine was running great.  I had been working on my laptop during these rebuilds so not much time had been wasted. 

At the end I thought I will do a quick image backup using Ghost 2003,  I decided to avoid the Virtual Partition utility that’s included as I thought there may be compatibility issues but made the mistake of invoking the image from the windows UI which without asking installs the virtual partition and reboots to that. 

Anyway the virtual partition doesn’t seem to be compatible with 2003 server!  It boots first and it’s impossible to get out of it.  After deleting this partition, changing boot.ini and marking my 2003 server partition active (thanks to BartPE) I was up and running again.

WHY NOT USE A BOOT FLOPPY!!! to run Ghost you may well ask, my floppy drive has been broken for 3 years and I have never had to fix it.  A new USB floppy drive is on the way from eBay!

The moral of this story, pay some attention to system backups.  I have great data backups in place and have coped seamlessly with a disk and 2 motherboard failures without a hitch but I always said to myself it’s as easy to rebuild -  NOT AFTER 2 YEARS OF FINE TUNING ITS NOT!!!

So I now do a weekly ASR backup as well as daily data backups (my software library is part of my data backup).