I was surprised to wake up this morning and find an email from Garageband.com (which I haven't logged onto in years) has chosen "Out of Darkness" to be the Track of the Day for the second time!  This time it will be featured on Saturday, August 18, 2007.  The first time it was featured was February 25, 2001 (yes, it's an old song, and still not published)!

You may notice that the "band name" is TCX.  That's what I went by back in the day and they don't seem to be too eager to update the band name to "Avian Waves."  Rest assured, TCX is Avian Waves (only a more lame band name, that's all).  I'm not hijacking somebody else's glory.  :-)

Labels?  Where are you?  It's a 6 year old track that still hasn't aged a day!  People love it!  Sign me!  (Yes, I'm begging -- but I'm a starving artist!  We tend to beg...)

So I went to that site that Burger King and The Simpson Movie is doing where you can transform a photo of yourself into what you would look like on the Simpsons cartoon.  For a movie/fast food tie-in website, it's a load of fun!

Posted the pic at MySpace here:  http://collect.myspace.com/reloc.cfm?c=18&fuseaction=viewImage&imageID=9149762&friendID=139508185&id=

What a Springfield stud I am... Enjoy!

Due to an unexpected financial crunch (darn mortgage, bills, and day jobs getting in the way of music!), the Avian Waves CD is hanging around in limbo, where it's been for much of the past few years.  But that's all the bad news...

Good news!  Avian Waves will soon be for sale through MySpace Music.  This serves several purposes.  First, people visiting this website wondering why it's so dedicated to music when the tech section is 100x more active will finally be able to listen to what I create and be given a chance to purchase it (support your local starving artist) through a fairly decent quality medium (with good prices to match).  Second, it serves as a make-shift "demo" for super high tech indie labels that don't evaluate unsigned artists the same way the majors do (in other words, just give me the music, jack, instead of boring press package with a boring bio of my nerdy life).

Believe it or not, I've had some interest from several different labels.  I am getting good feedback from the contacts I have (and awaiting feedback from some others).  The tricky part seems to be that last few inches where they go from "this sounds great" to "hey we'll distribute your stuff!"  Keep your fingers crossed...

If nothing else, I hope to press the CDs myself later this year and try to sell a hundred during the next year.  I'm aiming sort of low since "everybody is a musician" and it's hard to make a name for yourself when there is such a bad signal:noise ratio.  ie, good music is hard to find.  Well, I like to think I wrote good music.  I need some momentum...

Friend me on MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/avianwaves and send me messages, leave comments.  Reply in the blog or forums!  Listen to my music!  I want to write more...

Have some fun.  I know I have to have at least one friend out there reading this crap I keep posting...

So I ran into an issue installing Forefront Server that I can't find any information on in Google, but I was able to deduce the solution by analyzing the log files.

The immediate symptom is that Forefront installation fails at the step where it is installing MOM Reporting.  The error code you get is just...

Process: C:\WINNT\system32\msiexec.exe Exit code: 1603

That error code is completely generic - it just states that msiexec dumped for some reason.  You have to analyze the MOMReporting.log in the %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Forefront\Client Security\Server\Logs to find the true cause.  There are a variety of causes, mind you, with wonderful solutions on TechNet forums.  However, I couldn't find anybody talking about the problem I ran into.

The specific error in the MOMReporting.log file that was blocking my installation was...

VerifyPreRequisites: Result of Pre-Req check: PreReq_Requirements_Not_Met . See PreReq report for details: \MOMPreReqReport.html. Error Code: 0x80004005.

WHAT pre-reqs?  The Forefront pre-req checker told me I was good to go!  Turns out that MOM Reporting checks several things that the Forefront installer does not.  Run the MOMReporting.MSI by itself (hit next a few times, type in the reporting URLs) and you'll get the pre-req failed report.  Read it.  Now here's an area that got me stuck for a while.  IGNORE the SQL Reporting Services pre-req failure.  Apparently, according to this article, this is normal in SP1-rolled MOM installers and the set-up application works around it so all should be well as long as you don't run into any other pre-req failures.

So what was my problem? 

ASP.NET is not enabled

Well that's odd, Reporting Services IS ASP.Net so how can this fail?  Well, if you are running Reporting Services in SQL 2005, that's an ASP.Net 2.0 application and the pre-req checker is looking for ASP.Net 1.1!  So make sure Microsoft.NET 1.1 is installed, registered with ASP_RegIIS -i and also enabled in the Web Service Extensions in IIS.  All should be well now!

Another tip: I found out that ForeFront (actually the MOM Reporting part again) sometimes will barf when you use a named instance of SQL Reporting.  This seems to be due (but I'm not 100% sure) to the $ (dollar sign) being in the URLs to access SQL reporting services.  Now it may be coincidence, but I managed to clear up a failed install by simply creating new URLs in the Reporting Services Configuration tool and replacing the dollar sign with an underscore (_).  Good luck!

More information in the forums here.  Enjoy!  Have a great weekend!

...and you can see my dissatisfaction with my newest CafePress store at http://www.cafepress.com/bigoil

Buy stuff from there and support a starving artist (me).

:-)

Friend me on MySpace!  My page is located here: http://www.myspace.com/avianwaves

Still saving up money to press the CDs... Soon.  Soon!  SOON I will finally have an album out after 7 years of absense and reinventing my music...

:-)

This is an amazing tool I found on a TechNet blog.  It gives you advanced tab completion, allowing "intellisense" type of behavior for PowerShell commands.  Forgot that parameter name?  No problem.  Type the command, type the hyphen and hit tab and you got all parameters available.  Amazing!

http://thepowershellguy.com/blogs/posh/archive/2007/05/29/powertab-0-92-powershell-improved-tabexpansion-function-library.aspx

Ever launched a forms app from the command line where you happily outputted debug code to the console from within Visual Studio, only to discover nothing is output to the command line like you expect?  Me too.  Really, it makes sense, though.  Forms apps in .Net run on their own thread and therefore detach from the initiating command line right after you hit enter.  Well how do you see all that pretty console text then?  Disable application framework **shiver**?  No...

You can do it using your old friend P/Invoke to access unmanaged code in kernel32.dll.

Here's the P/Invoke declarations:

Declare Function AttachConsole Lib "kernel32.dll" (ByVal dwProcessId As Int32) As Boolean
Declare Function FreeConsole Lib "kernel32.dll" () As Boolean

These functions allow you to attach and detach from an existing console session.  So how do you find out which console launched your WinForms app?  You don't need to.  If you specify "-1" as the process ID, it will automatically attach to the console that started the application.  Here's how you do it.

AttachConsole(-1)
System.Console.Writeline("I am writing to the console!")
FreeConsole()

Really, you probably will only attach once and free once in your app, but that's just example code up there.

One caveat: Since your app is running in its own thread, it will write to the console asynchronously.  This means that the user will receive a command prompt for the next command before your app writes anything to the console.  The console will not block waiting for your app to exit.  Be sure not to write things at strange times that will confuse the user about why strange text is appearing on the screen!

Source of information: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=983493&SiteID=1

Check out the forums!  I posted screenshots of RD Tabs 2.0.  Let me know what you think in the forums and don't forget to vote!  :-)

http://forums.avianwaves.com/Default.aspx?g=posts&t=21