Recently I’ve had to install SQL Server 2008 on a few machines. Some of these errors made absolutely no sense, but I found solutions that worked for me. Maybe they’ll help you.

Windows 2000 Server (32-bit)

“The procedure entry point GetConsoleProcessList could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll.”

That sounds pretty self-explanatory, right? Actually, this was the easiest error to make sense of. This is the error you get because SQL Server 2008 is not compatible with Windows 2000 Server. It comes from the fact that SQL Server 2008 needs .NET 3.5+, and that version of .NET is not Windows 2000-compatible.

Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server (32-bit)

Surprisingly, I received no errors while trying to install it on Windows XP. Everything went fine with Windows 2003 Server.

Windows 7 (64-bit)

OK, this was hell on earth. First I ran the setup, and mid-way through the installation, I received this gem:

“SQL Server Setup has encountered the following error:

Invoke or BeginInvoke cannot be called on a control until the window handle has been created..”

I noticed that this arises if you have the focus on another Window while the installer is running. I was browsing the web via Firefox and I received this. To make sure you don’t get this, don’t have any other Window running and only have the focus on the installer.

That wasn’t the only error I received. When I initially ran the setup, I saw a console window flash and then nothing would happen. (I waited for a few minutes and nothing. Setup.exe wasn’t even in the task manager.) When you run setup.exe, it fires landingpage.exe, which is the actual wizard installer. Unfortunately, it wasn’t running it. I even made sure I had the requirements, and nothing. I rebooted several times, and finally decided to run landingpage.exe directly. When I ran it, it finally saw the wizard. I was joyful, until it got to this part:

What the heck?! Where are the features?

Why would the wizard make it this far and then then not have the features to let me install? This was useless. If you’re curious, it should’ve looked like this:

Then for the heck of it, I decided to Install SQL Server 2008 SP1, without even installing SQL Server 2008 first. Don’t know why, but it let me install it anyways. Then when I ran the SQL Server 2008 installer again, but this time, I would see these features:

Ugh, still no luck. Finally, the only thing that I could conclude was that I may have a bad installation. So I restored my machine to an earlier restore point (to undo this installation mess) and re-downloaded the installation files.

Voila! No more problems. So that’s what it was. I was finally able to see all the features to install. So maybe the files got corrupted upon download or it was an incomplete download.

Recently, I needed to do some work from the Windows Command Line, and I needed to deal with a few images. Along the way, I found some great tools. All these tools are free. Can come in useful when automating.

Manipulation

ImageMagick – This is a collection of command line tools. You can do image conversion, view properties, transform, transparency, join, overlay, add special special effects, and tons more. Also has APIs for C, C++, Java, .NET, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and others. Highly recommend it.

Screen Capture

CmdCapture – Takes a screenshot of your desktop from the command line.

IECapt – Capture Internet Explorer’s rendering of a web page into a BMP, JPEG or PNG image file.

Cutycapt – Capture WebKit’s rendering of a web page into a variety of vector and bitmap formats, including SVG, PDF, PS, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, GIF, and BMP.

wkhtmltopdf – Convert HTML to PDF using the Webkit rendering engine, and Qt.

If you want to unlock files in Windows many of us know to use Unlocker. It’s a handy tool that I use often when a pesky process has a handle on a file. But what if you want to write a script that unlocks files from the command line. Welcome the tool “Handle” from Sysinternals by Mark Russinovich.

Then you could loop through the list of files by doing so.

While working with some IIS logs, I decided to start practicing my Python. I put together some handy Python functions to work with IIS Log files. These will come in handy. On a 3GB, 2.5GHz, running WinXP machine, these functions take about 3 seconds to process a 180MB Text file. Python code could be optimized to be faster if you’re dealing with larger sized files.

#!/usr/bin/env python
 
# An IIS log file can have various log properties. Everytime you add new columns to log for
# in IIS, it creates a new row full of columns.
import re
import os
 
MainLogDelimiter = "#Software: Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0"
TestFile         = "C:\\Dan\\IIS-Log-Import\\Logs\\not-the-same.txt"
BigTestFile      = "C:\\Dan\\IIS-Log-Import\\Logs\\ex090914\\ex090914.log"
LogsDir          = "C:\\Dan\\IIS-Log-Import\\Logs"
 
def SearchForFile( rootpath, searchfor, includepath = 0 ):
 
  # Search for a file recursively from a root directory.
  #  rootpath  = root directory to start searching from.
  #  searchfor = regexp to search for, e.g.:
  #                 search for *.jpg : \.exe$                     
  #  includepath = appends the full path to the file
  #                this attribute is optional
  # Returns a list of filenames that can be used to loop
  # through.
  #
  # TODO: Use the glob module instead. Could be faster.  
  names = []
  append = ""
  for root, dirs, files in os.walk( rootpath ): 
    for name in files:
      if re.search( searchfor, name ):
        if includepath == 0:
          root = ""          
        else:          
          append = "\\"
        names.append( root + append + name )        
  return names  
 
 
def isSameLogProperties( FILE ):
  # Tests to see if a log file has the same number of columns throughout
  # This is in case new column properties were added/subtracted in the course
  # of the log file.
  FILE.seek( 0, 0 )
  SubLogs = FILE.read().split( MainLogDelimiter )
 
  # SubLogs[0] Stores the number of different log variations in the log file  
  SubLogs[0] = len( SubLogs ) - 1    
 
  # Grab the column names from the log file, separated by space
  columns = re.search( "^#Fields:\s([\w\-()\s]+)$", SubLogs[1], re.IGNORECASE | re.MULTILINE ).group(1)   
  LogSameProperties = True
 
  for i in range( 2, SubLogs[0] + 1 ):
    # If there are columns
    if ( len( columns ) > 0 ):    
      if ( columns != re.search( "^#Fields:\s([\w\-()\s]+)$", SubLogs[i], re.IGNORECASE | re.MULTILINE ).group(1) ):        
        LogSameProperties = False
        break  
 
  return LogSameProperties
 
 
def getFirstColumn( FILE ):
  # This gets the columns from a log file. It returns only the first columns, and ignores another column
  # row that may exist in case new columns were added/subtracted in IIS. 
  # input: FILE
  # output: 1 single element List
  FILE.seek( 0, 0 )
  names = []
  # Grab the column names from the log file, separated by space
  names.append( re.search( "^#Fields:\s([\w\-()\s]+)$", FILE.read().split( MainLogDelimiter )[1], re.IGNORECASE | re.MULTILINE ).group(1).strip() )
  return names
 
 
def getAllColumns( FILE ):
  # This gets all the columns from a log file. 
  # input: FILE
  # output: List
  FILE.seek( 0, 0 )  
  names = []
  SubLogs = FILE.read().split( MainLogDelimiter )    
  # SubLogs[0] Stores the number of different log variations in the log file  
  SubLogs[0] = len( SubLogs ) - 1        
  for i in range( 1, SubLogs[0] + 1 ):        
    names.append( re.search( "^#Fields:\s([\w\-()\s]+)$", SubLogs[i], re.IGNORECASE | re.MULTILINE ).group(1).strip() )  
  return names  
 
 
# EXAMPLE:
# Loop through all the IIS log files in the directory
# for file in SearchForFile( LogsDir, "\.txt$", 1 ):  
LogFile = open( file, "r" )
if ( isSameLogProperties( LogFile ) ):
  print file, "the same"
else:
  print file, "not the same"
LogFile.close()

If you think that Log Parser is a bit on the slow side (i.e. if you’re dealing with big IIS logs) and you want to bulk import your logs into SQL Server, then you’ll have to remove # comments from the log files. Microsoft has the PrepWebLog Utility to do this, but it seems to choke for files that are > 100 MB. Also, you’ll have to write this as a batch file so it goes through a whole directory of files.

I wrote a Perl script that’s relatively fast (faster than PrepWebLog) and it can crawl folders/subfolders recursively. Here it is:

# parse.pl
# example: 
#   parse c:\temp\logs\logs*\*.log
#
# Requirement: no spaces in the directory names and file names.
# This gets called via run.bat. 
 
 
sub getFileList 
{    
    # This function returns an array of file list based on filter
    # This is the filter they can put in.       
    # Returns a file with full path. 
    # Example of filters: getFileList ( "*.log" );
    @files = <@_[0]>;
    return @files;    
}
 
 
sub remove_comments
{
  # Remove # pound sign comments from files. 
  # @_[0] = filename
 
  open (my $in, "<", @_[0] ) 
      or die "in: @_[0]";
 
  open (my $out, ">", "@_[0].txt") 
      or die "out: @_[0]";
 
  while( my $line = <$in>)
  {
      print $out $line
          unless $line =~ /^#/;
  }
 
  close $in;
  close $out;
}
 
 
########## MAIN #############
$arg = @ARGV[0];
 
# Location of root directory of logs files
#$arg = 'c:\temp\logs\logs*\*.log';
 
# Replace slashes
$arg =~ s/\\/\\\\/g;
 
# Loop through all the log files. 
for $file (getFileList ($arg))
{  
  print ( "Processing file $file ... \n" );    
  remove_comments( $file );  
}

The Perl script gets called via run.bat:

REM No spaces in directory and file names.
perl Parse.pl D:\statesites\W3SVC*\*.log
pause

My work often changes. I could be doing programming, then systems administration, then quality assurance. I often have to change from different toolset to toolset and I find it annoying sometimes having to rerun programs and moving them to the same locations. Then resizing. Eech. This is especially frustrating when I’m doing testing and I have to debug and read requirements all at the same time. One handy thing to do is to use AutoHotkey, the great scripting tool.

Here’s a handy script I put together that opens up two different programs, moves them on the screen and resizes the Window. Just copy and paste the same block of code for each program to open as may apps as you want with whatever on-screen configuration you want.

; Run Note.exe
; WinMove, WindowTitle, WindowText, X-Axis, Y-Axis, [, Width, Height]
Run, note.exe
WinWait, Untitled - Notepad2
WinGetPos,,, Width, Height, Untitled - Notepad2
WinMove, Untitled - Notepad2,, 500, 500, 200, 200
 
; Run your browser with the following URL
Run, www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS313&=&q=tigers&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g5g-z1g4
WinWait, tigers - Google Search - Mozilla Firefox
WinGetPos,,, Width, Height, tigers - Google Search - Mozilla Firefox
WinMove, tigers - Google Search - Mozilla Firefox,, 900, 200, 300, 400

Needed to backup my contacts in Outlook, but it would not save the emails in the email “To” dropdown field, when autocomplete triggers. This is because it’s stored in Outlook’s NK2 cache file. This file is not in readable form, but you if you have the patience, you can view the emails if you don’t mind looking through funky ASCII characters of binary data. In the process of looking for and trying various tools, I realized that not all tools were able to extract all contacts. Keep this in mind.

There’s a few tools out there that you can use to extract a list of emails saved in the NK2 file. Here they are.

Ingressor – is the best program, I was able to extract the most amount of emails/contacts, but you have to pay for it. I think it extracts everything, but you can’t save anything or copy anything. Use OCR software?

Debunk2– It’s free, but it missed 1 (could possibly miss more on different NK2 files) contact.

NK2.info– It’s free, but it missed 2 contacts, and it doesn’t show the names accurately, like Debung2 and Ingressor.

I thought this might be useful for those who are constantly uploading the same files. Whether you need to deploy a project live or constantly upload the same group of files, you can do this by creating a batch file in Windows using ftp.exe.

First of all, if you’re not familiar with FTP.exe, it’s just a command console way to upload/download files from an FTP server. You can run this program and start typing away…. OR, you can load a text file filled with FTP commands in FTP.exe. For example, the following are commands in a file called upload.bs:

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5
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7
8
9

open western.dreamhost.com
username
password
binary
hash
send index.htm
send frame.htm
send car.jpg
bye

The above should be straightforward. The “open” command is used to connect to the FTP server. The “username” should be your usename and “password” should be your actual password. “binary” is how your data should be handled on transfer – if it’s not text, it’s binary data, and should be “binary.” “hash” makes the console display pound signs (#) to serve as a progress bar as it’s uploading to the server. The “send” commands are used to upload the files. “bye” is exits the FTP session.

That was just a FTP script session file. You now need to call that file from FTP.exe on WindowsXP. You do that as follows:

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@%windir%\system32\ftp.exe -s:upload.bs

You can include that call in a file called “upload.bat” – To learn more about FTP scripting and how to merge the two files into just one batch file, you can check out this site. Also, there’s more information about this found here: tinyapps.org.

Ever had such an annoying message given by Windows?

It has many other flavors:

Cannot delete file: Access is denied
There has been a sharing violation.
The source or destination file may be in use.
The file is in use by another program or user.
Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use.

Now you have an option to unlock it using Unlocker. Now, sometimes it’s theoretically impossible to unlock all files, especially some DLLs that are burned into Windows, but for most applications that you run that are not part of Windows, you either have the choice of unlock, rename, and move. This program is free too and it tries to do it without actually killing processes.

Here are some reviews for Unlocker.

Got a small file you want to scan for virus? Here’s a few that I use for that quick scan.

http://virusscan.jotti.org/

http://www.virscan.org/

http://www.virustotal.com/

http://scanner.virus.org/

http://www.kaspersky.com/scanforvirus