Error 1325.’WebDesignerCore’ is not a valid short file name.

Needless to say, a brief episode of profanity ensued. But fear not: after a bit of googling and struggling, I managed to sort it out. Hopefully, if you are having the same problem then this will help you.

1. Open your temp folder. The easiest way is to hit Windows+R and type "%temp%" and hit OK.
   
2. In that folder look for files matching VSMsiLog*.txt. You are looking for the log file that was created when you installed VS2008 Beta 2. Check the Date Modified field if there are several - although I imagine there should only be one of these at this point. Open it in WordPad (Notepad seems to struggle with the size of this file - mine was 47 MB).
3. Search through the file for the term "WebDesignerCore" until you find a match that looks like a file path. In my case it was:
   

   MSI (s) (7C:48) [07:38:56:490]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Adding wcu_VWD.3643236F_FC70_11D3_A536_0090278A1BB8 property. Its value is ‘K:\WCU\WebDesignerCore\’.

   The VS uninstall script is looking here so if doesn’t exist it will fail. In my case it didn’t exist because K was the drive letter I used when I mounted the VS 2008 Beta 2 ISO image for installation and I had since unmounted it.

4. Put the original VS 2008 Beta 2 setup media in place so that that path exists. In my case I had to mount the ISO image (using Daemon Tools) and change the drive letter to K.
5. Now uninstall Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2!

Good luck!

The Subversion help describes the "export" command as follows:

export: Create an unversioned copy of a tree.
usage: 1. export [-r REV] URL[@PEGREV] [PATH]
       2. export [-r REV] PATH1[@PEGREV] [PATH2]

I mistakenly assumed that URL or PATH1 was required before the first path parameter. Alas, this is not the case and it took me a while to work out what I was doing wrong.

To export the HEAD of a path from the repository to a path on the C: drive you would use something like the following:

svn export svn://server/path c:\path –username stu
–password pwd –force

To export from the working copy to a path on the C: drive you would use something like the following:

svn export c:\workingcopy\path c:\path –username stu
–password pwd –force

Simple really. A bit like me.

I’ve been tearing out what hair I have left, trying to work out why the mp3 files aren’t updated when I change the metadata in Windows Media Player 11 on Vista.

I spent hours updating my music metadata, only to find that the metadata isn’t persisted to the underlying mp3 files. I tried using "Apply Media Information Changes" (AMI) but it didn’t seem to make a difference.

As it happens, all AMI does is raise the priority of the background task that persists all the queued media information changes.

But no matter how many times I ran it, and no matter how long I waited, the file metadata was never updated.

The solution, in my case, was to do with permissions: in my set up, the Music folder is redirected to the D: drive. I wondered if that was causing problems for WMP when it was trying to update the files. I loosened up the permissions on the folder, just in case,  and hey presto it works! (jeez, do people still say that?)

All I did was give Everyone full control to the Music folder. Then I ran AMI again and all of my metadata was written to the mp3 files.

This is obviously a pretty coarse-grain solution: it would be better to find the exact user that the AMI task runs as and the least privilege it needs. But it’s late, and I’ve had far too much wine. If I find out which user to grant the permission to I’ll be sure to update this post.

1. In the online status page of the router configuration screen you should see the Primary and Secondary DNS addresses.

 

1. To set those DNS settings up in Vista, go to Control Panel | “View network status and tasks”

 

1. Then click “Manage network connections”.

 

1. Select your network connection and choose Properties.

 

1. Select the IPv4 binding, and click Properties.

 

1. Finally, choose “Use the following DNS server addresses” and set the Preferred and Alternate servers to the Primary and Secondary ones obtained from the router in step 1, and press OK.

Hope this helped.

 

It claims it’ll also upload pictures. Now this I’ve got to see…

Pretty impressive! (and these image formatting tools are certainly an improvement over Office 2003).

You can also tag your posts…the categories are all pulled down from the blog.

Okay, enough of the image effects already.

Well I’m impressed. It actually works. Now there’s no excuse not to post…

 

According to Blaise Aguera Y Arcas, an architect at Microsoft Live Labs:

You can think about what PhotoSynth does as linking images together. Whenever photographs are taken in a common environment it’s as if you form a hyperlink between them. And so now, if you think of the emergent network of hyperlinks between images that can be built by, a crawler, say, going out and searching the whole web: that’s a very powerful idea.

Powerful indeed! PhotoSynth uses image recognition software not only to identify related images, but to place them in a 3D space relative to one another! Throw in some awesome 3D graphics capabilities and you have a very immersive way of browsing that space.

In the videos they talk about how your personal photo collection can become a “worm hole” through which you can access other similar photos. So for example, one thing you can do is take one of your own shots, and then, if you wanted to get a closer look at something in the shot you could zoom into someone else’s close-up photo of the same scene. Or you could find out what is next to your photo - or what is behind it.

What a compelling offering: Photographs + 3D world +The Network Effect.

You have got to check out the videos! Watch the overview first (the link at the beginning of this post), then the demo video (which can be downloaded from here).