The Johnson Blog

Tag: windows

  • Ugh: Windows 8, Metro and Desktop

    First I’ll say that every PC I use these days is running Windows 8.1.  That’s my home desktop, laptop, Surface RT, and work PC. Windows 8 is actually very good on the tablet form factor.  It’s fine on PCs if you’re wanting to stick to the new Metro style apps. But it’s horrible when mixing desktop…

  • Copy File Path in Windows Explorer

    Update: I’ve been notified by Mark that this is completely useless.  Please disregard 🙂   In Win7 and 2008 you get the same option by just holding down Shift as you right-click.  Thanks Mark! Ever find yourself in Windows, browing through files and needing to copy a file’s full path?  As a developer, this seems to…

  • Tracking down a Blue Screen of Death

    Since rebuilding my machine with a new motherboard and processor, I’ve gotten a few crashes in the middle of the night. I’ve come downstairs to a rebooted PC with an error message indicating the dreaded Blue Screen of Death has visited. So I decided to figure out what’s causing it, and maybe find a fix.…

  • FogBugz on Windows Small Business Server 2008

    I recently installed FogBugz 6 on 64-bit Windows Small Business Server 2008, and boy was it interesting.  I’ll first note that I’ve had excellent installations and upgrades of FogBugz in the past, so this really caught me off guard and took a while to figure out what was going wrong. Second, after finding out what the…

  • Backups and my first foray into PowerShell

    First, some background. Last week I received the final pieces of my backup strategy, a pair of 500 GB hard drives that I will be rotating periodically to some undisclosed location that isn’t my house.  Right now, my fileserver makes backups and sticks them on a mirrored RAID array.  These drives are simply to hold…

  • FTP problems on Windows Vista

    This is an addendum to On Windows Vista from a couple months ago. This weekend I’ve been making some modifications to the installation process for Chef, making it so the database engine isn’t packaged with my installer and making it such an enormous installation package. So now I have it so that when Chef is…