The Tech Blog of Dan Usher

Author: Dan

  • Charting it up… The story of my life…

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    If you’re a vigilant reader of XKCD.com, then you more than likely already saw this, but it cracks me up to no end… For those of you that like to graph everything, if you’re in the SharePoint or asp.net world, I’d recommend Dundas Chart.  If you’re into utilizing web based APIs, Google Charts is pretty…

  • EC2 Tips for Windows users…

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    So I won’t claim to be an MCSE or someone that develops custom driver code when for some reason a newly installed components unsigned driver apparently doesn’t work and without it I won’t be able to experience true gigabit Ethernet throughput… but I do know a thing or two about scripting and API hacking. Tip…

  • More impressions on EC2

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    So what more could I ask for than to continue to experiment with the Windows virtual machines available from Amazon Web Services elastic computer cloud? I could ask for more flexibility and ease of use… though I suppose it’s more just getting used to the way that Elasticfox works and how to connect machines together…

  • Doom in SharePoint…

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    While browsing through good ole Google Reader (shhhh, I don’t use Outlook for RSS feed aggregation…) I came across an interesting post over on Paul Galvin’s blog pointing to the End User SharePoint “Stump the Panel” forum. Under the topic of “Doom Web Part” the fun begins 🙂 Now Playing: Charlie Haden – Land of…

  • Amazon EC2 Dev Environment

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    So I figured that I would get my hands dirty with the AWS’s EC2 Windows servers for my development environment for SharePoint.  Can I just say that I’m blown away by the bandwidth that is available to these servers? Running a quick speed test from SpeakEasy.net I received a result back of 91458 kbps download…

  • Not quite Coke Zero…

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    Have you ever looked for something to zero out all of the frivolous extra space that Windows is “holding” for later use?  Then look no further friends, introducing SysInternals friendly and free “SDelete”. Get your copy now, quick and easy… helps to shrink down those EC2 Windows images prior to bundling too. 🙂 Now Playing:…

  • Home Lab Needs Replacing…

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    So this evening I decided to hook up my second monitor to my Dell Dimension E520 that has a Q6600 processor and 8 GB of DDR2 RAM and 1 TB of hard drive space spread out across two drives.  Things seemed to be working nicely with Windows Server 2008 Standard x64 edition running as the…

  • Q6600 Upgrade and RAM… lots of RAM…

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    A few weeks ago I happened upon Dell’s support manual for the Dell Dimension E510.  I was doing a little investigative research to check out how much RAM they supported and scratched my head when I saw that they supported 8 GB of RAM.  How could this be?  My Dell Dimension E520 only supports 4…

  • VMWare ESX 3.5i – Lenovo T61

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    BLUF – Attempted to load VMWare ESX 3.5i on a Lenovo T61. Failed to find device to write to in either AHCI or SATA Compatibility modes when attempting to use VMWare ESX Thin Installer. So you’re not familiar with “BLUF”? Bottom Line Up Front… Nonetheless, decided to attempt to pop in a spare 100 GB…

  • STSADM Extensions for WCM and beyond…

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    Further diving into the realm of STSADM extensions, I came across Andrew Connell‘s stsadm extensions for MOSS Web Content Management, providing the ability to quickly generate site columns, generate site content types or publish all items that are currently in queue of a web content site. If you’re interested in going above and beyond what…