Vambo Rools in Hot City

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band is alive and well and living in Parma and Brooklyn and Cleveland Ohio. Playing under the pseudonym of Vambo Rools, SAHB can still rock the house!

Last night the Winchester Music Hall in Cleveland played host to a special tribute to the Sensation Alex Harvey Band, one the greatest things to come out of Scotland since Glenlivet. "Alex Harvey" doesn't seem to have aged much (unlike the hundreds of avid fans that turned out and overwhelmed the tavern's bartenders), but like his audience, Alex seems to have put on a few pounds.

Two fantastic 80 minute sets were unleashed on a big crowd that pretty much all knew where every chord, fill and cymbal crash were supposed to be. The band had the chops to pull it off. Playing much better than their MySpace videos, all aspects of the band were on. The latter part of the second set got a bit sloppier, but I am not complaining. It was a real rock show and a comprehensive tribute. The band consisted of two guitars, keyboard, bass and drums, with "Alex" playing nothing except an (awful) harmonica on one number. Alex and Zal Clemenson were in character ("Zal" with face paint and miming). "Zal" taunted Alex and chided the band in mime throughout the show.

Schoolboy's 96 kHz 24 bit Zoom H2 recording filled 5.85 GB! It sounds very good, and shows how nice the sonic balance was (there were only a few times where leads were a bit buried). I didn't remember the Winchester having the main PA speakers that were hanging from the ceiling. They looked like the same ones the Beachland used to have in the tavern, doubled, and they sound better in the Winchester's bigger room. Those same speakers used to be very harsh at the Beachland.

From what was said on mic, it seems like this is the second time they have played this tribute but that the shows may be at one year intervals. For Sensational Alex Harvey Band fans who missed it, it's a SAHB story - you missed the "Last of the Teenage Idols" but hopefully you will get another chance.

Vambo lives!

Demo Day at Holiday Valley

The Saturday before Christmas (December 19th) was a great day to go to Holiday Valley. Although winter had been a little slow in our region, you can usually count on reasonable skiing in Ellicottville, New York this time of year. My son had a final exam (AND it was his 22nd birthday too) so he couldn't come. My friend Bryce, an excellent skier who has made the Holiday Valley trek with me (and Matt) a number of times, came along and brought HIS son and several of his friends.

Little Mountain Limited, a ski/sports shop and travel agency located about a mile from my house, had a very reasonably priced bus trip, so we tagged along. I intend to go on at least a couple more of their day trips this year.

It was "demo day" at HV. This is when ski manufacturer's reps set up tents and allow you to try the latest gear, all set up for maximum ski lust. I normally use some pretty old, long skis, and Bryce' are even older and longer. We signed up for demos, and each got to try two - one Blizzard and one Line. Both were great experiences. The Blizzards were the best skis I ever had on. It was amazingly easy to carve up even steep, ice crunchy sections of hills. Nice. The Lines were not so good for control but man were they fast.

From The End of the 00's

From The End of the 00's

We had lunch at the brand new John Harvard's Brew House in the new Tamarack Club at HV. The place had been open less than a week, and you could tell. Everything was clean and the staff was green. Our server had no idea what kinds of beer were served (we were part of her first ever shift there). It turns out the beer is quite good. I had a pleasant stout and a good biting IPA. Bryce had an Amber ale he said was tasty. The food was much less memorable - the menu is pricey all-American fare ($15 meatloaf, $8 sandwiches with fries).

The Hearth restaurant at HV has been part of my New York skiing tradition for decades. It was always classy and there is a fantastic view. I still liked it even when they chopped off the better half of the dining room. The menu was old and tired, but not as boring as John Harvard. I guess I will go to the new place for the next few trips (my next trip is to Holimont anyway, and that is always a fancy bring-your-own-picnic and drinks affair, no restaurants).

After lunch we went to get more demos. The reps were all packing up because a storm was coming. We were at a ski resort where they get 300 inches of snow a year, for crying out loud. I called them a few very politically incorrect names and we went on our way, laboring with our old skis. The storm never came. Wimps.

Problems Indexing an EML Inside a ZIP in SharePoint

Previously on Bob Klass.Info (I've been watching too much TV lately, re-watching several seasons of the "Dexter" series in the last few days):

"Friday, December 18, 2009

Adding Zip Search File Type in MOSS 2007

I am a little behind the curve on this. Better late than never.

1. Get the filter pack here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=60C92A37-719C-4077-B5C6-CAC34F4227CC&displaylang=en
2. Install it
3. Set up the item type in the SSP
4. Set up a new key for .zip in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\
5. Give it a value of {20E823C2-62F3-4638-96BD-90F4F6784EBC}
6. Restart the search service

That is the shorthand version! This is done for you in SharePoint 2010."

That was all fine and interesting, but then the real interesting stuff turned up. My Foxit PDF ifilter and standard MS text ifilters both seemed to function on files nested within ZIP files. But EML files did not (and EML's further have attachments!).

It turns out there is a property of the ifilter called "threading." This threading is simply an object property to say whether it works in single or multi-threaded modes.

A utility called IFilter Explorer will help you look at threading. I don't know if there is another tool like this anywhere or an alternative to this tool. Running this on my test indexer seemed to work OK, but it is old (in software years - like doggie years, it is about 80) and it seems to be an orphan (widow?). But it beats sifting through the registry manually.

Now it gets (unnecessarily) messy.

I was looking to find how EML indexing works. It uses:

• c:\windows\system32\mimefilt.dll
• content type message/rfc822
• GUID of {5645C8C2-E277-11CF-8FDA-00AA00A14F93}
• related PersistentAddinsRegistered of {89BCB740-6119-101A-BCB7-00DD010655AF}

I should have found the threading model set as "both" indicating that BOTH single threaded or multi-treaded daemons can use it. I found it marked as "Bo" in the two places in the registry.

I changed the first "Bo" entry to "Both" and the second one magically was fixed. Time to restart the services and re-try the indexing ... and ... it worked. Even PDF's attached to the EML inside the ZIP were indexed. This "Both" corrupted to "Bo" burned up a few hours of troubleshooting.

Dexter's usual actions would be justified if he could find a guilty party in this case.

Adding Zip Search File Type in MOSS 2007

I am a little behind the curve on this. Better late than never.

1. Get the filter pack here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=60C92A37-719C-4077-B5C6-CAC34F4227CC&displaylang=en
2. Install it
3. Set up the item type in the SSP
4. Set up a new key for .zip in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\
5. Give it a value of {20E823C2-62F3-4638-96BD-90F4F6784EBC}
6. Restart the search service

That is the shorthand version! This is done for you in SharePoint 2010.

I've Been Promoted ...

... from Acolyte to Initiate on the Beer Advocate web site. This is a promotion from the lowest of first time public users, to the next to lowest. Although I should consider this insulting considering the amount of premium brew I have consumed in my lifetime, and as a graduate of THE Ohio University in Athens, Ohio (a supreme school of partying for over 200 years), I am instead thrilled!

If you like beer a lot, you should become a member at Beer Advocate (http://beeradvocate.com). Although it is a great source of beer info, it is more importantly a great place where you can record your beer observations (in public). I have been doing this for four years, mostly for my own records.

For a while I have been wondering what criteria gets a person a promotion at this institution. I had been a member for a long time and I have submitted well over 100 beer reviews, but no promotion. Their system is mysterious, kind of like my employers' salary and partner info (but obviously of less consequence). Very hush hush. The writings I have published are far more interesting than the same old recanting of the color, head, aromatic characteristics, etc. I thought perhaps one needed to subscribe to their magazine or something, as some people seem to get promoted quickly. That's my guess since I never did that. But my efforts and long term advocacy of Beer Advocate have finally been acknowledged.

Take a visit to the Beer Advocate web site today and look for me there under my beer alias "Schoolboy."

Asus O!Play HDP-R1

Sometimes I feel like I am a little slow adopting some technologies. Of course this isn't really true. There are just some I don't like. MP3's, for instance. They don't sound very hi-fi, like most digital TV (and it's all digital now, isn't it). I didn't get a DVR right away, but we've had one since we got Uverse (maybe a year ago) and we love it. I am almost always bleeding edge on Microsoft products. I convinced myself, I'm not a Luddite.

I like my video hi-fi too. The Uverse DVR is reasonably good (like the Uverse service), and I have a Blu-ray player, and that stuff looks and sounds great. I have a lot of video content (most of it high definition) on the 3TB of internal disc in my Windows 7 machine. I had been sneaker- netting it to my Blu-ray sometimes (or watching on the 25" LCD monitor) but I got the idea that a media player would be way better. This is also better than trying to attach a PC to my living room HDTV (I tried this in 2005 when I got it and it didn't work well - I needed better stuff).

Shopping for media players, I found there are a bunch. A few are expensive. A couple don't have a network connection (that won't do). I stumbled on the Asus O!Play HDP-R1 and gave it a long look due to the great price and the Asus name. When you are building a computer, Asus is always a brand you should consider - their stuff is first rate. This product is VERY new.

I don't know much about what is in the box. It's small, and consumes very little power. The Oplay is running some flavor of Linux.

The Asus forums had lots of posts from dissatisfied customers, but reading between the lines, I thought I would be able to make it work just fine and that it would do exactly what I needed - play just about any video or audio file, connect to my network, host ESATA, etc. It does all it was supposed to do, and well. This post on the Asus forum has the secret to getting it working with Windows 7.

If you buy one, it will probably come with firmware version 1.07N on it and the network will not work right for Windows 7 machines (other computers will be OK). Set up a Windows 7 user "OPlayer" with password "OPlayer" and give it permissions on shares that hold your media. Reset the Oplay to factory defaults, load firmware version 1.13N, and the network connection will work perfectly (UPnP will work too).

So I have another cool gadget! It is a highly recommended toy!

SharePoint 2010 (Caveman Edition)

I am hopelessly (humorously) politically incorrect and caveman readers probably will be offended, but it seemed like the 2010 beta was aimed at them. I mean this as a big compliment to the killer Install Software Prerequisites option in the 2010 installer and the smoothness with which a simplistic stand alone install runs.

Install Software Prerequisites does the following steps from a one click operation:

• Application Server Role, Web Server (IIS) Role
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Native Client
• Microsoft "Geneva" Framework Runtime
• Microsoft Sync Framework Runtime v1.0 (x64)
• Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
• Microsoft Filter Pack 2.0
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services ADOMD.NET

Any installation "cookbook" will be streamlined by this (assuming it is putting in the right settings).

The configuration wizard of the 2010 install failed when I first ran it Tuesday morning. I got the same "Failed to create sample data" error lots of people did. I corrected it Wednesday (when I didn't see anything official posted) by removing the two references to "allowinsecuretransport" (deleting both entries entirely) from the Client.config file in the 14 hive /WebClients/Profile folder.

I don't think this change is recommended, but it gets you over this hump for now. This is a pain future cavemen will be spared. More time for Visio cave wall workflow diagrams.