Since yesterday I am upgrading my 5y old Dell XPS M1740 laptop from Windows Vista to Windows 8 Pro. Vista made me not using Windows anymore; the machine mainly collected dust in the past years since I stopped gaming. Recently I enjoyed the metro UI on my Windows Phone 7, so I decided to give Windows 8 a try to see what all the fuzz is about. Thankfully the machine just about fits minimum requirements for Windows 8. 

I thought upgrading is going to be simple, I just needed to download the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant and things will go smoothly. … not quite, it’s now 24h later and I am just about done. I did undergo a lot of pain as i kept getting an error message during verification of my machine. The exact error message was: Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant: Internal Error: Error retrieving the scan report. No further information, details or anything. Thankfully there was google, but most pages I found were suffering people left in confusion about this error, pointing out custom tools, configurations etc might be the cause and some systems just aren’t upgradable. 

Despite that depressing search results I didn’t give up but stubbornly attempted to somehow make my system upgradable. After all .. it is just a bunch of software, so why should it be impossible? I read a bit and got even more depressed, because there were lots of indications that customizations of any kind might be preventing Windows Vista from being upgradable. I haven’t used the laptop in the past 3 years, so how could I possibly remember what I had done back then – especially as I mainly used MacOS and CentOS in the past 3 years and forgot most about Windows?

Anyways, back to the upgrade procedure. It involved a lot of swearing and I also dug quite a bit around in the internet. First I had to find out where the damn log file was located that might indicate what errors occured: The file setuperr.log is located in a hidden directory under the user’s home directory in AppData/Local/Microsoft/WebSetup/Panther.

In my case It only contained 3 lines:

2013-01-26 23:33:59, Error                 CONX   [PerformTransform] [0x8007007e] Transform node failed.

2013-01-26 23:33:59, Error                 CONX   [CreateReport] [0x8007007e] Failed transforming report.

2013-01-26 23:33:59, Error                 CONX   Failed to retrieve the HTML report from the compatibility controller. HRESULT = 0x8007007e.

So the report assembly failed, nothing else seemed to be wrong with my system. Following ip on the particular error code let nowhere helpful. I resembled all my partial knowledge about pains of windows and decided to follow this path:

• Windows Upgrade – the solution to everything: I started with performing a Windows Update: as I hadn’t done one since early 2009. 108 updates were found and installed over a couple of hours, 2 failed to be installed, so I ran it again, also Microsoft Securiyt Essentials and Microsoft Windows Essentials failed too in the first attempts (ironically because another install program was running – Windows Update.. d’oh). So I installed them manually, rebooted and tried to run the Windows Upgrade Assistant again. The error still occured.
• Cleaning up the system: I uninstalled all software i don’t need anymore or where I didn’t remember what it was for. As I read in a post that it was suggested to remove Microsoft Office 2013 Preview, I decided to uninstall the Microsoft Power Point 2007 viewer (I’m working long enough with computers to not apply logic anymore..). It turned out the PPT Preview Install as corrupted and I couldn’t uninstall it. I found this Microsoft knowledge base article that helped on the deinstallation, sadly that didnt solve the problem either, Windows 8 upgrade assistent still failed the same error.
• Asking google about Vista update errors: So I searched again for Windows Vista Upgrade issues, and found another knowledge base article. I installed the System Update Readiness Tool for Windows Vista. Not too much to my surprise it didn’t solve the problem either.
• Reaching desparation – Just fix it: Pretty close to giving up I just searched how to fix a corrupted windows installation and found Microsoft fix.it. I selected as problem Install or upgrade hardware or software and selected Fix the problem with Microsoft Windows Update that is not working. It found a problem and repaired it. I restarted the upgrade assistant and the problem was gone!

So… either the last step or the combination of all of the above fixed it!

Then windows update was asking me what kind of data i want to keep. Just to be sure that I my data is save I tried to upload it to mega this failed as well as the upload speed for a 16GB archive was not sufficient, I ended up copying everything to an external hard drive and then proceeded with the upgrade procedure. After patiently watching progress bars for more than 1h I see now the start up screen about customizing Windows 8. Yeah! 

As I work in a cross function for the engineering team and have to respond to developer issues in an appropriate time I keep a close eye on my inbox. Concepts like checking mails only to specified times or not at all during the day don’t apply to my work flows, filtering mails into various sub folders makes them forgotten or unseen as I actually want to read all the mail – just not all the time. 

These days my mailbox contains these folders:

• Inbox: I usually try to keep the total number of mails in there below 100, only mails I have to follow up on or that are related to future events or where I am waiting for response in a mail thread are in there. I have notifications for my inbox active as I want to be notified if there is an important mail. Up until this Monday I got all the clutter of updates, mailing lists etc. in there too which was pretty distracting. 
• Now what I have setup now is a new secondary inbox and a filter that filters all those mails I don’t need to pay attention in-time. The filters are defined conservatively to ensure that I won’t miss an important mail. The immediate effect is that I got less than 20 new mails in my Inbox over night, 40 more I found in the secondary inbox.
• {Notifications}: There are a few tools and platforms I receive notification mails from I can’t configure so all status updates about everything is fine go directly in there – I couldn’t care less about. I only worry about something went wrong which stays in my inbox.
• {Projects} + subfolder: contain mails related to certain projects and initiatives I am working on.  
• {tech mailing list}: all mails to an internal mailing list – a very valuable source of information which I regularly use to look for answers as I usually remember having seen a related question before, but I never seem to remember the answer.
• Unsorted: all other mail that is either unrelevant, resolved or any other information. I used to have a much finer granulation, but at the end I don’t really care about threads that are out of date and hence I don’t need to make the effort to sort them.  

This might be common sense, but years of creating massive filters, creating no filters, having smart mailboxes, reading about suggested workflows I never found a solution tailored to my needs. Now it’s simple: I check the inbox as soon as I got the notification of a new mail, I check the secondary inbox 2-3 times a day.

Btw, while writing this I noticed that Gmail actually tries to do something similar with the Priority Inbox which seems to be the reverse approach of the above. 

For my private mails I took a different approach a while ago. For private mails I use Gmail which comes with a different set of features than the chosen mail server of my company. In the past I had a lot of subfolders, rules and configurations which ended up in a massive inbox with over 10.000 unread mails, tons of unread mail in other folders and I never really noticed if I had new mails or not and where they ended up. So one day I archived all mail and marked it as read disregarding if there was something I wanted to follow up or not and started with a clean Inbox – 0 mails. I removed all filters: all mail to my private mailbox gets delivered to my inbox, I delete it, read it and/or either archive it straight away, answer it or leave it for follow up. Goal here is to have less than 20 mails in the inbox and to have a clear overview of whom I owe an answer.

So long story short: Simplicity rules, automated filters and folders suck.

Due to some server outages I was looking for a tool that monitors internal and external web application on servers. The outtages were random, ping worked, web access to the installed applications didn’t work. The applications reported no interruptions, so it must be a network related issue. To report something more specific than ‘flaky access’ I wanted to get some more detailed records from my local machine. I looked around, didn’t find a tool at all, looked closer, found nagios, javamelody and other overkills, none of them really fit the purpose. The tool I have chosen is uptime.

The Tool: Uptime

Perfect little tool, after installation it requires to be started and then it works. I just added the sites I wanted to monitor. The best description of how to install and use it is this video: http://vimeo.com/39302164 If you run into issues, see below.

Installation

I ran into a couple of issues during installation:

• I hadn’t npm installed
• I had a version boost installed too new for mongodb. I had to downgrade it first, details here.
• Mac Ports fails to compile if the port shall be installed from a volume that contains spaces (Macintosh HD 2 fails as install resource, Macintosh HD doesn’t)

Finally I installed it to my mac environment, below the (cleaned up) commands:

Monitors

So far I added all desired machines for monitoring, interval is set to 15s.

As reference I also added google to exclude events if my line isn’t working.

• download and install Postgres.app. I won’t use postgres regularly and I don’t want to have it autostarting or deeply integrated in my system. 
• add postgress path to ~/.profile, all you need is export PATH=/Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/bin:$PATH. Otherwise an older, macos-native postgres client will be used.
• open postgres console from terminal using psql -h localhost
• create user create user <usr> WITH password ‘<pwd>’ CREATEDB;
• make user super user alter user <usr> with superuser;
• list existing databases \list
• drop a database drop database <db>;
  • in case of error: “ERROR:  database “<db>” is being accessed by other users”
  • run select procpid from pg_stat_activity where datname=’<db>‘; to get a list of process ids that are accessing the database.
  • in terminal run kill <pid> for all processes out of the list provided by the statement above
• exit postgres console with \q.

This is all I need for my test environment.

I found this page with lots of quicklook plugins: QLPlugins.com. One of the plugins there is QLStephen. Download it, mount it, then open Terminal and run:

 

sudo cp -R /Volumes/QLStephen_1/QLStephen.qlgenerator /Library/QuickLook/

qlmanage -r

 

Result: Manifest.MF is now previewed in Finder and I don’t need to open a text editor anymore.

To achieve this I used for the very first time Automator, a tool I didn’t really think would be providing a solution to any of my needs. What I did do:

• Open Automator
• New > Service
• In the drop down menus choose in Service receives selected files or folders in Finder.app
• In Actions search for Run Shell Script and double click on it
  • enter this as command line unzip -n “$1″ -d “$1″.zip
  • select for Pass input as arguments
• Click on Save and give a name, e.g. Extract Archive

To verify:

• Open Finder
• Right click any archive
• In the context menu select Services > Extract Archive

Note: As a filetype cannot be selected the menu is available for all files and folders. If you select something that is not a extractable with unzip you’ll see an error message.

• nobody except me seems to be able to read my handwriting, so sending out photos of whiteboards only causes WTF’s
• it’s kinda hard to annotate, rearrange or optimize what has been written down and photographed

So I had a look how to easily translate my drawings into something readable. I don’t own a visio license, I checked a few commercial tools but didn’t find the one that was made for me in terms of simplicity, usability and flexibility. 

My first find was yEd, a nice editor to easily draw diagrams. I did do a couple of server/network layouts with it, documented processes and it worked out quite well. But then there was a graph i couldn’t draw – basically a version control branching strategy for a set of enterprise products. I picked up one of my co-workers presentations and followed up with drawing in powerpoint which was better than expected but not quite satisfying. 

Today I had to draw just another graph and neither yEd nor Powerpoint fitted the requirements:

• I wanted to easily extend/modify the objects
• I did not want to arrange object manually
• I didn’t want to get distracted by moving pixels but i wanted to focus on content. 

I decided to use dot language as it is plain text, generates graphs and takes care about the alignment of objects itself. I used dot indirectly a few days ago when I used vizant to generate a documentation over a set of ant files and jaranalyzer to outline dependencies between jar files. The dot documentation looked a bit to brief for me so I did use the sample gallery and just picked a graph that contained something I needed and 2h later I ended up with my complete whiteboard in a nice and presentable way. All change request I implemented within minutes and the output always was a nice looking, technical graph. I used graphviz for visualization and export to image files. Graphviz is quite sweet, it loads file changes straight away, so I had my text editor and graphviz side by side to get an instant preview.It seems there is a reasonable community using it as all my questions were asked before and got answered at stackoverflow.com.

Here a little example for a graph:

digraph “G” {

  // general config

node [style=filled, color=grey97, fontname=Helvetica, fontsize = 12];

edge [color=grey50]

// ranking

{rank = same; start1, “start2″}

{rank = same; aDone, bDone}

// boxes

    subgraph cluster_a {

    [ label="a box", color=lightsteelblue1, style=filled;fontcolor=dodgerblue3];

subgraph cluster_aa {

    [ label="a box in a box", color=lightsteelblue2, style=filled;fontcolor=dodgerblue3];

    organge ; normal;

    } 

longLabel; 

}

 

   subgraph cluster_b {

   [ label="another box", color=gray90, style=filled; fontcolor=dodgerblue3];

taskB

      -> bDone;

    } 

 

    subgraph cluster_c {

   [ label="invisible box", color=white, fontcolor=dodgerblue3];

anotherLabel; 

}

 

    start1 -> taskA;

 

    “start2″ -> {normal organge } -> join -> taskA -> aDone  -> taskC -> done;

    “start2″ ->  longLabel -> anotherLabel -> join ;

 

    join -> taskB [label="edge label", fontcolor=grey];

    // node aliases and configuration

    node aDone [label="a",color=green2]

    node bDone [label="b",color=green4]

    node longLabel [label="a long label\nwith line break"]

    node join [label="join and fork"]

    node anotherLabel [label="another label"]

    node organge [label="organge",color=bisque2]

node done [color=grey80]

}

grep -inHR “search term” –include=’*.xml’ *

• i ignore-case
• n line number
• H Print the filename for each match
• R  –include=<Pattern> Recurse in directories only searching file matching <Pattern>
• * The preceding item will be matched zero or more times.

in all sub folders in a given folder all files that end with xml and contain search term are listed in the output with name and the matching line including the line number.

I used to use file search in ultraedit, however my license expired and ultraedit on mac is not quite as powerful as its Windows equivalent so I didn’t bother to renew. Grep is my new best friend. 

Update: sweet example:

grep -inRH “4.7.0″ –include=’*pom.xml’ * -B2

is looking in pom files that contain the given string and prints out 2 lines before.

LaTeX Error: File `wrapfig.sty’ not found.x

As I haven’t changed anything regarding emacs nor org-mode installation it took me a while to figure how to solve it. I have org-mode installed via mac ports, I might have done a port upgrade outdated at some point and this might have caused the issue. Now, how did I get it working again?

• sudo port selfupdate :: I haven’t touched macports in a while.
• sudo port upgrade org-mode :: I upgraded org-mode hoping that this would solve it. I got a minor upgrade (7.0.2 -> 7.0.3), the error still occured.
• sudo port upgrade texlive-latex-extra :: this is the file that supposedly contains all the missing file. 
• sudo texhash :: to rebuild TeX-inputfiles-database
• changing my emacs configuration :: I added the line (require ‘org-latex) in the ~/.emacs file and restarted emacs.

That did do the job, now the PDF export runs again. Jippieh!