Anon Coder

Coding diary of an anonymous coder.

[anoncoder-blog]

vmware "parent of this virtual disk could not be opened"

I recently moved my VMware machines onto a new 2TB disk, but found once these were copied I could not longer start them due to the error:

""parent of this virtual disk could not be opened"

Worryingly, when I started Google-ing around it appeared that I would need to edit the VMDK file (a binary-based file) and change the headers using a custom tool that no longer existed. eek!

After a bit of digging around in the VM's files, I noticed that the vmx file itself had a number of "search paths" that it looked for parent vms, and these contained the old path reference.

So all I needed to do was to change fileSearchPath to include the new VM directories and everything started working again! Phew!

[anoncoder-blog]

Data Mining

Here are some great links for people who need to develop a data mining solution:

Introduction to data mining

Mining massive data sets

Wikipedia: Data mining

Wikipedia: MapReduce

Wikipedia: CRISP-DM

[anoncoder-blog]

SVG Stylesheets don't work in Chrome and Firefox

When you reference an SVG image from a CSS background-image property in an HTML page AND said SVG image contains its own CSS file reference (either via an xhtml:link or xml-stylesheet) IE9 renders the SVG with all the styles correctly, but the latest Chrome and Firefox do not.

After some network sniffing it appears that the stylesheets don't even get requested.

Interestingly, if you load the SVG file up into a window of its own, the style is applied - so the problem only occurs when the SVG is references as a background-image in an html page.

As a workaround I wrote a server-side function that draws the SVG to the page. This makes the SVG inline, so it can be manipulated using the page's own style-sheet!

This obviously increases the amount of HTML that needs to be loaded when the page is first loaded, but as my solution is Ajax-based, there is only one page load so the performance hit happens as the program is first loaded in the browser and not every time an action is performed.

Broken behaviour found in:

Chrome 24.0.1312.57 m Firefox 18.0.2

Works on:

Internet Explorer 9

[anoncoder-blog]

When installing Exchange 2007 on my Windows 2008 R2 domain controler, the Exchange Transport windows service wouldn't start; it remained in the starting state but never succeeded or failed.

Looking in the Event Viewer, I noticed the error:

Process MSEXCHANGEADTOPOLOGYSERVICE.EXE. Topology discovery failed, error 0x80040a02 (DSC_E_NO_SUITABLE_CDC)

It turns out that I disabled the IPV6 adapter on my NIC because I didn't need IPv6 on my local test network. Re-enabling it and killing the hung service resolved this problem.

Thanks to the link above for pointing this out.