Nic's Blog

Simpsons Halloween Special 2008

Nic — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:51:10 +0000

Saw this on TV yesterday (yes, that’s right in the UK we get the Halloween special a week late ) Anyway, it made me chuckle. So I thought I would share it. However, I better add a disclaimer first. The views expressed here are entirely my own and not those of my employer.

Vista SP2 Build 16489 for x64

Nic — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 07:40:35 +0000

You may have already seen that Microsoft have released there first beta of Windows Vista SP2, as it was reported on several sites yesterday, one of my favorities is Rafael’s Within Windows blog. So you’ve probably already heard that there’s nothing much in there and it’s just a collection of previous fixes, albeit about a 290MB collection. Well standback and prepare to be flabagasted, because on x64 Vista Ultimate, that colection grows to about 490MB, it must be all those 64bit pointers

A little bit of nostalgia

Nic — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:00:15 +0000

What did the web look like 10 years ago to you? Well I was in my final year at university and was developing a new website for the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. This was my first attempt at doing anything HTML related (along with a few other technologies of the time such as server side includes and CGI-BIN). It was very basic by today’s standards. Anyway I was randomly browsing the web earlier and actually came across some of my original pages still being served up by the web server’s at NTU, complete with the original comments embedded within the HTML source

So this is what the web looked like for me 10 years ago.

Explore system restore points

Nic — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:37:52 +0000

I’ve done a little more work on my System Restore point explorer, and it now actually allows you to explore

I’ve made use of the excellent AlphaVSS library which exposes the Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) API’s as native .net objects. I’ve been having a few issues accessing these in Vista x64, but I have tested this in Vista x86 and it appears to be working ok. Again feedback is welcome via comments.

Download

Mauritius holiday

Nic — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:14:05 +0000

Well Julie and I have just gotten back from our holiday in Mauritius. We stayed at the 5* resort of Legends, which was absolutely fantastic. We also explored around the island and had great fun, especially walking with the lions. Here are a few pictures.

Delete system restore points?

Nic — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:52:02 +0000

A couple of days ago my C: drive ran out of disk space and I was a little confused, because only a few days earlier I had around 30GB free, so I decided to do some digging and figure out where it had all gone…

Anyway to my surprise it had been consumed by Vista’s System Restore feature, I had installed a couple of applications, decided they weren’t for me and un-installed them. Each of these actions had created a new system restore point. After figuring out how to get access to the “C:\System Volume Information” folder (I don’t really recommend you do this) I saw that some of these system restore points were up to 3GB each in size, but I couldn’t find any way to delete them.

I googled a little and some people seemed to suggest that the Disk Cleanup Wizard would remove them, but it didn’t work for me, in fact the only way I reclaimed over 40GB of disk space was to disable (which does remove the data) and then re-enable system restore.

But what I really wanted was a way to delete individual restore points and I couldn’t find anything already out there, so I set about developing a solution myself.

The more I researched the more advanced I thougt I could make this tool, so currently it does what I first wanted, allows you to delete individual restore points. But I plan to add functionality that will allow you to mount a restore point and browse it’s contents (hence it’s name System Restore Explorer)

It’s not really ready for public consumption yet, but I am planning to upload a beta copy here tomorrow, and hopefully I can get some feedback

Update

Well, as promised here is a beta for people to play with, use this at your own risk, if it happens to trash your entire computer it’s not my fault! This program requires .net framework 3.5 and has been tested on XP and Vista only.

Download

SyncToy 2.0

Nic — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:57:32 +0000

Microsoft have released v2.0 of there SyncToy tool, which is freely available from here. This had previously been available in beta form, but it is now officially released and has a native x64 version

Jon & Michelle’s Wedding

Nic — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 18:28:14 +0000

Well Sunday was a lovely day here, the sun was really strong and we had to get all dressed up to go to our friends wedding. We had a great day and hopefully the bride and groom did too Here are a few photo’s I took during the day, I have gigabytes more to go through But as today saw the final release of Adobe Lightroom 2 (and it comes in a native 64 bit version), I will be able to make good use of my 30 day trial period processing the rest of my photo’s.

Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 - RTM

Nic — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:09:31 +0000

Power Pack 1 - Come and get it!, that’s what the WHS team blog says. Power Pack 1 has been released to manufacturing and can now be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center.

PS. If you had previously installed the Release Candidate, then you’ll need to un-install this first and if your just lazy and have windows update enabled for your server, then you should receive it automatically some time in August.

Stanstock X

Nic — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:20:20 +0000

Well I have just gotten back from another years camping trip with my university buddies. We have been camping every year since graduation (that’s 10 years now!). Here’s a few pictures from the weekend.