Josh Wieder

I recently stumbled across this article on how to create custom hosting space field's for websitepanel, a cool control panel software for Windows Servers: http://websitepanel.net/developer-guide/custom-links-in-account-and-space-menu I have mixed feelings about control panel software generally (they make it necessary to troubleshoot two things - software and underlying services), but this one is as good as it gets in Windows and I have had to fix quite a few of them over the years. For these to be practical in production, customization is needed and I thought it was cool of WebsitePanel to have a fairly comprehensive developer guide on the topic.

So this is a weird one. I recently installed phpmyadmin 3.5.1 in a MySQL 5.1 / IIS 7.5 environment. Everything was going well until I realized that following the installation (which was fully functional) I could not login to MySQL (from the CLI) without referencing the hostname (-h flag). I figured that maybe the .sql script included with the installer messed with my grants, but a quick show grants revealed I still had the same permissions granted to root as when I started. So I figured that I would update the grants on root to what was displayed in show grants just in case. This produced an insufficient permissions error even though root had "full" privileges. To resolve this I added skip-grant-tables to my.ini, restarted the mysql service, logged in as root, flushed privileges, and again updated grants to what was displayed in "show grants". I then removed skip-grant-tables and restarted, and I was again able to login locally. I'm still not certain what caus...

Still amazing 170 years later.

Do you know who Tess Ferrandez is? If not, you are missing out on the author of what I consider the most lucid series of articles on the topic of debugging .NET. Check out her series of demos on how to fixxit all things .NET . The most useful post I have seen so far is her piece on how to capture dumps on 32 bit process within 64 bit systems  (without needing to DL procdump). +1 nerd points to Ms Ferrandez for making my job of learning all things Windows a bit less painful.

I am a data center guy. Layer 7 is the bees knees and all, but work doesnt really feel like work unless you can get electrocuted, yknow? So please watch the video above as Microsoft explains one of their first POC's for their DC cubes and share in the excitement with me. 2009 was a big year for modular data centers, and so the above video of Patrick Yantz (former Microsoft DSS Smarty Pants, c/o Hanselminutes on 9) is a bit on the older side. The industry as a whole hasn't caught up with this technology yet; we are still at the very beginning of the curve here. There is a lot of Business Nerd reasons for this - my intuition tells me that adoption will be in bursts driven largely by regulation not necessarily *preventing* the building of new DC's but slowing it down and uneasiness about long term demand paying off capitol outlays with whole DC buildouts - for the time being its still a very elite market, as most Normal folks will still simply lease and muscle DC provide...

Windows Server 8 set loose in the Cloud

Phil Zimmerman of PGP Encryption fame is launching a new project, Silent Circle -  The idea is an application suite complete with encrypted VOIP, email and IM. Exciting stuff! Lets hope it works out better than Hushmail !