Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts

Fun and Games with Error 1316 - yet another reason why we don't want or need the Windows Installer

Posted by pchelptech at 7:12 pm | Sunday, May 09, 2010

This morning I was trying to upgrade my Sametime 7.5.1 to Sametime 8.0.2 to see if I could fix (once and for all) some long running issues with external group loading and Voice Suite.
After downloading the ST 8.0.2 binaries, I closed my ST 7.5.1 and double-clicked on the sametime802.msi to start the install. Assuming it would auto-detect the existing, older version of Sametime on my system, and let me choose an upgrade option, I was a bit surprised it just exited, telling me to uninstall the old version first.

So, like an obedient little end-user, off I went to Start > Run > control > Add/Remove Programs (it's an XP Pro system) and found the IBM Lotus Sametime 7.5.1 entry. I clicked remove and after about 2 seconds, I got this message:

Error 1316. A network error occurred while attempting to read from the file

C:\Windows\Installer\sametime802.msi

Now, you could get this error with almost any program that you were trying to install over the top of itself, upgrade or uninstall - it basically seems to occur when the msi entry is missing from the registry (I think, at least, it was that in my case) - it's not a Sametime specific issue.

Image via Wikipedia

You're obviously not going to get this if the program doesn't use or need msi, and I think software companies really shouldn't ever use the Windows Installer (msi). I'm not sure why any of them do, because it's terrible and a common source of problems. I remember myself and a work colleague having a nightmare with upgrading Symantec from version 9 to 10 a few years back on about 50 machines. I almost always failed with a cryptic error code, and in the end we had to run NONAV to completely remove every trace of Symantec 9 before we could get the version 10 installer to complete.

Anyway, I digress. If you're still reading, you obviously want to know how to get your program installed/upgraded/uninstalled, so I'll stop drivelling on... Here's how:

1. Go and grab yourself a copy of the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility from Microsoft (note: you can read all about it here)
2. Double-click on the executable file you just downloaded - it should be called msicuu2.exe
3. You'll get the usual startup (unless you're a Windows 7 and possibly Vista user, where you'll just get a VBScript error instead ;-) and then you'll get presented with a list of all the programs you have installed that use msi, which looks like this:

4. Select the program you wish to remove, and click "Remove"
5. You'll see a typical Microsoft "Are you sure?" screen, but it explains that you are not actually uninstalling the program, but are in fact just removing the entry from the msi (Windows Installer) database:

6. Click OK, and you're done. You can now proceed to do whatever it was you were trying to do before, and it should work - no more Error 1316!

There's a new kid on the corporate email block

Posted by pchelptech at 9:23 am | Sunday, April 25, 2010

Image via Wikipedia

Cisco are most famous for their networking offerings, but they've been about much more than that for a long time now. With WebEx, they took more that their fair share of the corporate screen-sharing, web conference and IM. They have VoIP, they have video conferencing. In short, they have networking, in all its forms.

One of the few things they're missing is mail, right? Wrong. Cisco WebEx also provides mail services, but SaaS-based (in the cloud), rather than traditional, hosted services. They serve the mail service from the cloud, and support customers who choose to use Outlook as their mail client.

What next? Well, they replace the client-based Outlook experience with a fully online client offering, called Ciso Inbox, which will allow a user to do all the things they'd normally do in Outlook, but without ever having to leave the comfort of their browser.

This is starting to sound like gmail, right? Well, not really, because Cisco Inbox users can sort mails by "Topics", where they can classify mails by topic. This is not at all like gmail labels. No, honestly.

Still not convinced? Well, here's another way it's different to everything that's gone before, especially gmail:

You can link your inbox to social networking sites. One site, anyway: LinkedIn. That's right, the shit one that nobody in their right mind would ever be interested in.

What? It's like Buzz?! What do you mean? It's nothing like Buzz! You can't link Buzz to your social networking sites, now can you?

OK. So you can link Buzz to your social networking sites, but you can't post to them from Buzz, only the other way 'round.

Woohoo! Cisco Inbox scores.

Wait, no it doesn't. gmail can post status updates to Facebook.

So now I'm sure you can see all the reasons why Cisco Inbox is going to rule the world of corporate mail. Watch out IBM. Watch out Microsoft. Watch out Googl... Actually, google, you're safe.

Who would've thunk it? MySQL owns MS virtual territory

Posted by pchelptech at 11:51 pm | Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Image by betsyweber via Flickr

With Microsoft's heavy involvement in SecondLife, you'd think that its back-end DB would be SQL Server, wouldn't you? Well, you'd be half right - it's got SQL in there somewhere.

Lotus Notes is 20!

Posted by pchelptech at 9:58 pm | Monday, December 07, 2009

IBM Lotus Notes 7 customized Welcome Page

It was 20 years ago today -Image via Wikipedia

Ed Brill reminded me today that Lotus Notes just turned 20. Didn't it grow up fast? I first started using is back in 1996, but since 1999 I can say I've used it every single working day, so I've known it for half its life. How nice.

In that time, I've sent mails, used application databases on it, chatted in it, replicated mailfiles and other DBs on it, collaborated through it, designed applications and LotusScript doodahs for it, installed it, upgraded it, customized it, loved it, hated it, swore I'd never work with it again, and then did the very next day.

No matter how much I've criticised Notes (and found myself nodding along with this guy), I probably wouldn't use Outlook over it. Obviously, there's integration to consider in some cases, and if you're in a Microsoft shop with Office, Sharepoint and the rest, you might have other needs, but in a mixed shop, or an IBM one, it's probably the best choice. The majority of Fortune 500 companies seem to think so.

It's not just me - Firefox doesn't like Windows Presentation Foundation either

Posted by pchelptech at 10:04 am | Sunday, October 18, 2009

You may have seen this "Add-ons may be causing problems" window recently.

It seems that there's plenty of evidence to suggest that Microsoft's .NET Framework Assistant and WPF add-ons cause serious instability and can leave your computer vulnerable to remote code execution.

If I'd installed these add-ons, I'd say fair enough - uninstall them for now, wait until MS patch them, and install the patched versions.

I suppose I happened to visit a site with some (or lots) of Silverlight content. I was told that I needed these add-ons to allow the content to be displayed properly. I allowed them, restarted and the content was loaded. Presumably. To be honest, I don't even really remember doing it. Perhaps I didn't.

It seems that these pesky parasites latched on to my lovely browser when I installed .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. They are slipped in the back door, without so much as a by your leave. For most of us that have these add-ons, they were installed around February this year. That's eight months of risk.

So, there they were, and they were leaving our browsers vulnerable to crashes, and worse.
They're disabled now, and I'll be uninstalling them shortly. I'm not impressed that the warning came from Mozilla and not from Microsoft. I imagine that Mozilla noticed them in user-submitted crash reports and opened a ticket with Microsoft's security team to say that their .NET / WPF add-on / plugin was causing crashes. MS probably said it was a browser issue, for Mozilla to sort out, and so on...

You might like to take a look at Mozilla's list of dodgy add-ons - you'll also see the Apple QuickTime Plugin, v7.1.*, which also can allow remote code to be executed on your machine. I have version 7.6, so I guess that's safe, for now.

You can also view the details on these add-ons, and the .NET / WPF add-on thread on Bugzilla is especially illuminating. It pretty much says that Microsoft advised Mozilla to just go ahead and block the plug-in, probably because they missed it in the Patch Tuesday roll-up, and the next one is still some way away.

David Baron [:dbaron] says:

It does show up in
http://people.mozilla.org/~dbaron/crash-stats/20090929-interesting-addons ,
although the correlations that show up aren't necessarily signs of causation. 
However, that shows that it's quite common in the wild: it's installed for the
users submitting 48% of our Windows crash reports on Firefox 3.5.3.

If Microsoft is recommending disabling it (all versions, or just some?) because
of security vulnerabilities, then I'd strongly support adding it to the
blocklist.

I'm was not too impressed that MS didn't quickly release a patch themselves - but reading further down in that thread, you can see that there is some doubt creeping in - perhaps they did?

George Robert said:

Is there a particular reason why these are being blocked two days after
Microsoft released a fix for this issue?

MS09-054 was released on 10/14/2009, which the linked technet article in
comment #23 very clearly states resolves this issue for both IE and Firefox

Yay! So I'm safe and I can enable it again? Well, no:

Matthias "matti" Versen said:

Read
http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2009/10/16/net-framework-assistant-blocked-to-disarm-security-vulnerability/
MS agreed to the plan to blocklist it according to the security post.

It seems that the reason they had to put a blanket ban on all versions of the WPF plugin, is because:
a) There is presently no way for Firefox to hook into the OS list of installed MS patches
b) MS don't bother putting version numbers on their WPF libraries - they are just called NPWPF.dll
c) MS didn't put a new version # on the WPF plugin or .NET add-on to indicate that it was downloaded / installed after the patch was applied

Ultimately, this decision to add them to the blocklist was arrived at by mutual consent, which is clearly stated by Mozilla's Mike Shaver. This is the final word on the matter, and I'm satisfied that Mozilla did the best they could in the situation, even if some administrators in the field who got Firefox approved as the browser of choice in their company, and use some of the affected technologies will be very put out.

So, tough luck for MS. Now most Firefox users will have a slightly lower opinion of them than they did before and this is another setback for WPF, its advocates and users.

Oh, and while all you Firefox on Linux users are welcome to have a little chuckle about it, you'd better check if you have Moonlight 2.0 (BETA) installed first.

Windows Presentation Foundation has some serious issues

Posted by pchelptech at 10:37 pm | Wednesday, October 14, 2009

All is not well in Microsoft's attempt to improve the Windows user experience for Vista, Windows 7 and subsequent releases.
I still don't have Silverlight installed on my home PC (No! It can't be so!) - I need to use it for collaborative work with Microsoft on my computers at the office, but I can't say it enriches my experience as a user.

If I was a .NET developer, dependent on MS for new SDKs and APIs, I'm not sure I'd be too happy to read this, but InfoQ are going around and saying it has some serious problems, the biggest hitter probably being the fact that it memory leaks like a big bucket full of memory with a massive hole in the bottom.

Other members of the blog-o-sphere spotted this issue before, so I'm not sure why it took so long for the InfoQ guys to sniff it out. The point is that they eventually did, and they even identified some major areas where it was leaking.

Read more about the basics of WPF, Microsoft's own WPF library, a site for its fanboys, and the Windows Presentation Foundation SDK.

Boot up faster

Posted by pchelptech at 10:21 am | Saturday, September 26, 2009

If like me, you are still using Windows on your primary PC or Notebook, and - heaven forbid - are still using XP, and you're not a fan of re-formatting and reloading the OS every time things get bit infected, or slow and heavy... Pause for breath... You're probably either just not interested, or , quite the opposite, you're fond of poking around the registry, tweaking and optimizing.

When I get a virus, trojan or other nasty, I like to remove it, clean up all traces of it, and kill off the previous System Restore point(s). I have Nod32, Xoftspy, Malwarebytes, Spybot S&D, Spysweeper and other tools to help me out in this regard. I don't do "re-format and rebuild" - not ever. You learn nothing, and you lose too much. It takes time to lovingly customise your user experience. Reloading XP might be quick, but all the little flourishes you add over months, even years, is definitely not.

The downside of all this, is that eventually, things start to slow down over time. It gets tougher and tougher to clean up the remnants of this and that. One by one, the applications, files, pictures, movies and mp3s accumulate until you're short of resources; CPU, memory and disk space.

So, you do your best spring clean and you look at what you can optimise.

This is a minefield... Many so called optimisations can do more harm than good, so it's best to stick to the few that are known to work well. Keep it safe, at least at the start.

Boot up - we all want that to be quick.
System readiness from logon - that's really important.
Application loading times - Firefox, anyone?

I'm not going to go through all the things you can do to improve performance, because this article makes a pretty good fist of that, but the most important thing to me to start with is boot time.

BootVis can really help here. There's a really good article on it from OReilly, but the best resource is straight from the horses mouth, and was written recently. The document, imaginatively called "Windows Platform Design Notes - Fast System Startup for PCs Running Windows XP" really explains the ins and outs of BootVis, if you really want to know. Otherwise, the OReilly guide is more than good enough.

If you don't feel like using a tool like BootVis, you can always turn on boot logging and read through the boot traces. You'll be digging around for ages, but you'll learn a lot this way (I picked up a thing or two, anyway). You can really see where the bottlenecks are occurring, and can address them one by one. You can read all about this painstaking approach and try it out if you want. Another alternative is tracelog.exe, part of the Win XP SP2 Toolkit, which is described in detail in an article on citrix.com.

One way to get a startup trace whenever you want, is to add the /BOOTLOG and /SOS boot switches to a new OS entry in your boot.ini. This is pretty organic. Just don't mess it up - I promise you'll regret it if you do ;-)

Happy boot optimising.

Microsoft's new tablet notebook offering looks like it could be useful

Posted by pchelptech at 11:35 pm | Wednesday, September 23, 2009

It's called Courier and it's beautiful

Some people are complaining because it's hinged. So it has a hinge? So what!?
Journals, diaries and binders have "hinges" - nobody moans about that.

Seriously - if Microsuck can deliver on this, I might just stop calling them Microsuck. This could single-handedly make up for Win ME, Vista and even Visio.

MS .NET 3.5 users: beware fix pack 1

Posted by pchelptech at 11:29 pm | Sunday, June 07, 2009

I don't use the .NET 3.5 framework myself, I'd rather stick pins in my eyes, but for those who do: watch out for fix pack 1 - it'll open up a security hole. The vigilant will probably notice that you have a new add-on in Firefox that can't be uninstalled without some registry diddling. I'm sure it'll be patched some time, perhaps next month.

Of course, if you're one to install the .NET framework in the first place, you're probably not the type to check these things.

Here's a particularly inflammatory post about it.

A BSOD with a difference :)

Posted by pchelptech at 6:09 pm | Wednesday, November 19, 2008

If your PC dies with a BSOD specifying the error:

*** Hardware Malfunction
Call your hardware vendor for support
*** The system has halted ***

NMI: Channel Check / IOCHK

Visit http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315223 and download Windows Memory Diagnostic tool from here:
http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

When I got this error the first time, I simply restarted the PC and it was fine for a week. This morning it came back with a vengeance - rebooting wasn't an option as I was getting a string of BIOS beeps (indicating a memory problem).
I had to reseat each and every memory module, one-by-one until the BIOS beeps stopped and the PC could be started. Next step will be to burn this memory diagnostic tool onto a disk and do a check. Another day's work :)

Cringeley's "Triumph of the Nerds" Part 3 of 3

Posted by pchelptech at 11:42 pm | Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Note: This is part 3 of 3

Part 1 of 3
Part 2 of 3

Cringeley's "Triumph of the Nerds" Part 2 of 3

Posted by pchelptech at 11:40 pm |

Note: This is part 2 of 3

Part 1 of 3
Part 3 of 3

Cringeley's "Triumph of the Nerds"

Posted by pchelptech at 10:52 pm |

12 years is a loooong time in the world of computing, but this is still one of the finest programmes on computing ever to grace the television screen:

Note: This is part 1 of 3

Part 2 of 3
Part 3 of 3

Microsoft Surface - has touchscreen technology finally grown wings?

Posted by pchelptech at 10:11 am | Sunday, October 05, 2008

Microsoft Surface Demo @ CES 2008

I'd love to know what the unit cost is of these things. Are they punitively expensive? Could MS turn a profit on them?

The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny (of power tools)

Posted by pchelptech at 5:44 pm | Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Nod profusely as you read through Scott Hanselman's 2007 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows.

You'll see Notepad2, many offerings from SysInternals and the most powerful Firefox add-on ever, Firebug. If you've ever used them, even just a little, you'd have expected to see them in his list, but I was pleased to see a few things I've never tried, such as FolderShare, WinSnap and Ultramon.

Can't wait to get 'round to sampling them all.

Also, SysInternals have created a live share space for their utilities, so you don't have to have them downloaded in advance before you run them - handy if you're on the road, with a customer and you've forgotten your pen drive. From the readme.txt in the root directory:

What is this?

This is a file share allowing access to all Sysinternals utilities. We have developed this to test an alternate distribution mechanism for our utilities. This will allow you to run these tools from any computer connected to the Internet without having to navigate to a webpage, download and extract the zip file.

Microsoft promises to support the Open Document Format by next year

Posted by pchelptech at 4:00 pm | Thursday, May 22, 2008

However, this has done little to impress interoperability watchdogs ECIS, who are still itching to file a plethora of anti-trust lawsuits against them.

DirectX 10 for XP?

Posted by pchelptech at 4:33 pm | Monday, March 03, 2008

This is currently in the alpha stages, and will probably make your XP system unstable, but be my guest ;-)

If someone does make this port stable, then there will be no reason on earth left to upgrade to Vista.

Microsoft in court again

Posted by pchelptech at 12:22 pm |

Microsoft are in trouble for setting recommendations for minimum hardware requirements for Vista too low. This resulted in legal action and a demand for internal emails on the subject to be published, read them here.

Google and the quest for the answer to life, the universe and everything

Posted by pchelptech at 11:20 pm | Thursday, January 24, 2008

Google's Search for the Universal Search
Google sows the seeds of its own destruction by thriving...?
Meanwhile, IBM goes down the pan

App of the day:

Pidgin

Bring on the Vista SP1 hype!

Posted by pchelptech at 8:48 pm | Thursday, November 29, 2007

ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley has posted on the upcoming SP1 for Vista. We knew it was coming... has she got anything interesting to say about it?

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=986&tag=nl.e622

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