Tom Bennett

Yep it’s free and available from my-xda.com. Follow this link to get it!

Photosynth, software to view and organise hundred’s of gigabytes of photos of a place or object within a 3D environment, has been recently acquired by Microsoft.

Some of the Photosynth features include:

• Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
• Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photo whether it’s megapixels or gigapixels in size.
• See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
• Find similar photos to the one you’re currently viewing.

For more information, and to be truly impressed, check out the video from Photosynth’s creator, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, along with the Tech Preview at Microsoft’s Live Labs.

For the past few months, the flickr uploadr explorer shell extension has been crashing explorer.exe with

an unhandled win32 exception occurred in explorer.exe [2384]

message whenever I try to send two or more photos to it (a single photo seems to be fine).

I put up with it for a while, but then got fed up. I used ShellExView to disable all non-Microsoft shell extensions apart from the Flickr uploadr, and bingo, it was working again. Reenabling them one by one and testing, I found that the culprit is the excellent Notepad++ (i’m running version 3.8).

Maybe this is fixed in a future version of Notepad++, but until I’ve tested it I’ll keep the shell item disabled.

So, i’ve been experiencing the following error with exchange system manager

The operation completed successfully.
Facility: Win32
ID no: c0070000
Exchange System Manager

The error’s thrown when trying to expand the ‘Public Folders’ node in exchange system manager. Clicking ‘ok’ gets rid of the error and everything seems good and well until you restart ESM, where the same thing happens again.

Details for the server in question are

• Windows Server 2003 Enterprise SP1
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 SP2
• a recently installed Internet Explorer 7

Microsoft puts it down to the following:

a conflict between a newer version of the Psapi.dll file that Internet Explorer 7 uses and the older version that Exchange System Manager uses

Here’s the fix from Microsoft (knowledgebase link at the bottom):

1. Stop all Exchange and Internet Information Services (IIS) services.
a. Open the Services snap-in.
b. Stop the Microsoft Exchange System Attendant service.

Important Note the list of dependent services that will be stopped. For example, the list of dependent services may resemble the following:
• Microsoft Exchange Information Store
• Microsoft Exchange MTA Stacks

c. Stop the IIS Admin Service.

Important Note the list of dependent services that will be stopped. For example, the list of dependent services may resemble the following:
• World Wide Web Publishing Service
• Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)
• HTTP SSL
• AntigenIMC

2. Rename the Psapi.dll file. To do this, follow these steps:
a. Navigate to:
Drive_Letter:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\bin
b. Change the name of the Psapi.dll file to Psapi.dll.old.

3. Restart the Exchange services and the IIS services. This includes the dependent services that were stopped.

Further details can be found here:

• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932513
• http://www.petri.co.il/ie7_crashes_when_opening_esm_help.htm

Yesterday a representative from one of VMware’s reseller’s came over to FreshMinds to give a demonstration of their new Virtual Infrastructure 3 suite.

I am seriously impressed with it.

Just to give people an idea of what it does, and to quote VMware themselves:

“VI3 allows multiple unmodified operating systems and their applications to run independently in virtual machines while sharing physical resources.”

And it does that very very well indeed. It seems that VMware have created a suite of tools that will not just impress the systems administrator with what they can do, they will also make his life an awful lot easier to boot. VMotion is a prime example of this – allowing virtual machines to be seamlessly shifted between physical hosts with little to no visible effect on performance.

And they even provide a free version to get you started/hooked.

• VMware Player – a tool that lets you evaluate new or pre-release software contained in virtual machines, without any installation or configuration hassles. You can also share existing virtual machines with colleagues or friends—just use VMware Player to run any virtual machine
• VMware Server – VMware Server installs on any existing server hardware and partitions a physical server into multiple virtual machines by abstracting processor, memory, storage and networking resources, giving greater hardware utilization and flexibility.
• VMware Converter – VMware Converter quickly converts Microsoft Windows based physical machines and third party image formats to VMware virtual machines.

All are simple to use – VMware Server took me no longer than an hour to install, configure and perform a complete installation of Win2k3 – and they work ’straight out of the box’. Going to do some serious user testing over the next few weeks – i’m sure there’s much more praise to come!