While importing a Virtual PC image into our enterprise VMWare server, the process kept bombing out with sysimage.fault.ReconfigFault.  I Googled high and low, and didn't get any hits on sysimage.fault.ReconfigFault (or anything that appeared to be related).  I decided to try to convert the VPC to a VMWare Workstation image so I could try playing it in VMWare Player, and I got the same results.  I was resigned to giving up.

Then I noticed that VMWare Player included Microsoft VPC in its list of compatible images.  On a lark, I loaded my VPC image in VMWare Player, and it started a short conversion process.   Sure enough, it bombed out with "A required archive (driver.cab) could not be found in the source OS."  Hmmm.  Something else to Google.  Thankfully, this new Google search was a bit more fruitful in its results.  This guy's solution fixed the problem in VMWare Importer as well as VMWare Player.

I'm totally surprised nobody else has run into this.

Update 3/18/2007:

So it looks like this is the #1 hit on Google for resolving this issue.  That's pretty cool.  So I decided that, just in case the above link breaks, I'd grab the pertinent part out of the above link (in case that site ever disappears).

1. Find another computer running the same operating system and service packs.
2. Copy the "%windir%\Driver Cache" directory into the same location on the VPC image.
3. Shut down the VPC.

That's it!

Hey, if this helps anyone, please take a second to drop me an email or leave a comment here.  I'd love to hear from you.

After 9 hours of arguing with Visual Studio 2003, I'm tired, frustrated, but triumphant.

I have no freakin clue what went wrong, but the end result was every time I tried to build my Web Deployment project, it bombed out with "Unable to build folder CBI".  Turns out that there are multiple folders spread out throughout the project tree named "CBI".  And VS2K3 doesn't like that when it's building an MSI.  If I went through the web project and renamed all those CBI folders, it worked fine.

The really weird part was that the project built fine on my workstation, but not on my build server.

Long story short, I uninstalled and reinstalled all my project dependencies on the build server, did a rain dance, and built the code on the c: drive instead of the d: drive (since that's where the original developer built his project).  Voila...  it works.

9 freakin hours.

I'm back!

I think the issue had something to do with Google Sitemaps, the fact that I signed up for said Sitemaps, and I didn't actually have a sitemap deployed.

After chatting with Scott Hanselman about it, as soon as I get a a few extra hours, I'm going to build a Sitemap handler for dasBlog.

You know, it's times like this when I realize why I love the Internet.  (SFW)

Man, I haven't posted any good technical articles in a while.  Here I've got a blog called "The Net Guru," a title given to me by my friend and coworker Misfit, and I'm not doing any guruing.  How lame.

Well, since I'm on a streak, why stop now?  I'm writing a ton of code on multiple projects at the moment, and there's sure to be something good coming out of that, but in the meantime, let me flaunt my geekiness with this freaking hilarious Darth Vader movie.

I'm still not showing up in Google's index.  According to this guy, you can send an email and request re-inclusion.

I wonder if my hosting provider (actually, my friend Sean's hosting provider, since Sean was the one who gave me a subdomain to his hireageek.net domain) was down when Googlebot came calling.

Update:  No dice.  I sent them a message and got the following reply: 

Thank you for writing to Google. We'd like to assist you, but we only respond to messages submitted through our online contact form. Please visit http://www.google.com/support/ to submit your message, and we'll get back to you soon. We apologize for any inconvenience, and we look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,
The Google Team

If you can find the online form they mention, you've got more patience than I do.

Somehow, I've disappeared from Google's index.  WTF?  I know I was there at one time.

I guess Googlebot is pissed off at me or something.  MSNBot still likes me.  Maybe Googlebot got jealous.

Just got back from seeing Superman Returns.  That movie ROCKS.

It's not a remake.  It's a sequel to the Christopher Reeve movies, taking place 5 years after the events of Superman 2.  I mean, you have to suspend disbelief in that Superman 2 was filmed (and obstensibly takes place) in 1980, yet this movie clearly takes place in modern times.  That said, director Brian Singer (the dude that did X-men 1 and 2) was totally respectful of the original movies, including the theme music (John Williams) and the opening credits (the 3D "whoosh" captions).  Plot points from the original movies figure in as well, including Lois and Superman's interview at Lois' apartment in the the first movie, as well as Lex Luthor finding Superman's Fortress of Solitude in the second movie.  Thankfully, nothing from the third or fourth movies was mentioned, and they seem to be ignored.  :)

The guy they got as Supes (Brandon Routh) is really good, and Kevin Spacey was born to play Lex Luthor.  They even used archive footage of Marlon Brando as Jor-el, Superman's dad.  Wow.  

I just cannot say enough good things about this movie.  I was really afraid that Hollywood would screw it up, but I was wrong.

Go see it.  Now.  Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

I was playing around with Google's custom homepage today, and I found a gadget for a site called SongTapper in the content listings.  It's a site that guesses what song you're thinking of by having you tap the rhythm using your space bar.  I was only able to stump it with a few obscure Duke Ellington songs, but it still had heard of my songs (just not with my pathetic sense of rhythm).

Intrigued by Scott Hanselman's blog post and podcast on Office 2007, I finally managed to carve out some time to give the Beta a try.  I'm totally stoked about the overall usability improvements, particularly in Word, but, as with all Office releases, Outlook is the application by which I live and die.  Outlook 2007 doesn't disappoint, although most of its improvements are really subtle in nature.

I installed Office 2007 Beta on a VM, as I wasn't going to install it on my office workstation or laptop (I've been busted for that sort of thing before) and I don't really have time to play with it at home (since I'm usually spending time with my wife and kid).  But once I got it installed and running in my VM, I figured there wouldn't really be any harm in having Outlook connect to my Exchange message store on the corporate network from my VM.  It was in that way that I was able to try out some of the cooler functionality, like calendar overlays using my coworkers' shared calendars.

That said, I discovered a couple rather interesting features.  The first problem was that I couldn't get my Outlook profile to operate in cached mode.  It kept throwing an error that the offline cache file wasn't a valid PST file.  Then it would present me with a dialog box to select an OST file.  The only OST file in the dialog, Outlook.OST, threw the same error, so I assumed it was the file that caused the problem in the first place.  I tried giving the dialog a PST file, but it then told me that the file I had given it wasn't a valid offline cache file.  Well, no kidding!  But an OST file isn't a PST file, and it complained about that, too.  Sheesh.  So I gave up on cached mode and just ran in online mode.

The other problem, which caused a fair amount of anxiety for me, was when I started Outlook and it complained about my rules being bad and having to convert them all to client-only.  This wasn't what bothered me.  What bothered me was when I went back to Outlook 2003 on my laptop and none of the rules actually worked, I couldn't delete them, and I couldn't add any new server rules via the "Create Rule" context menu in the inbox (only client-only rules, although the Rules dialog seemed to work to create new server rules).

True, I could workaround the rules issues, but I don't like workarounds.  I like things to work the way they're supposed to work.  That was problematic for me, though, because I don't know thing one about Exchange Server, and I could just imagine the trouble I was going to be in if I had to go to the Exchange Server admin and ask him to fix it.

Luckily, as it often does, Google saved my butt.  Turns out I'm not the only one who had the problem.  I didn't have access to Web Outlook as one of those posts mentions, but a little more Googling turned up the /cleanrules switch.  I ran Outlook 2003 with /cleanrules, re-built my rules (luckily I only have 5 or 6 of them), and all was right in the world.