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I am gearing up for a large consulting engagement, and I needed to move two virtual machines created with VMware Fusion on my MacBook Pro to VMware Server on my Lenovo Thinkpad. When I did this, and tried to start them, I crashed vmware-hostd.exe.

To fix the situation, you will need to edit the *.vmx file with a text editor and remove the following line:

serial0.fileType = “thinprint”

VMware Server does not support this feature, and crashes when you try to import the virtual machine. Before your virtual machine can be started, you will need to go into the Services and restart the VMware Host Service.

Long time between posts, and I wanted to provide some info for a common issue. Say you are an IT admin and a user calls the helpdesk, but they cannot remember their login name. You also want to see their group memberships as well in Active Directory. You can even reset that user’s password.

There are a set of tools from Microsoft called DSTOOLS that can help you with performing the following tips if you are not on a Windows Server. You can run these from Windows XP.

You could ask them to hit CTRL+ALT+DELETE and look there, but instead of having them feel stupid, you could also run the following command on your Directory Server (you can query by their last name). All of these commands are run without quotes. The quotes are there to identiy areas where YOU need to supply your own information on the command line.

DSQUERY USER -name “last_name” | DSGET USER -samid -display

If you also want to get their full name, you can run the following (once you get their login_name from above:

DSQUERY USER -samid “login_name” | DSGET USER -samid -display

Also, if you have the login_name, you can then see all of their group memberships by running:

DSQUERY USER -samid “login_name” | DSGET USER -memberof -expand

Finally, if you want to reset their password, you can even do that by running:

DSQUERY USER -samid “login_name” | DSMOD USER -pwd “type_a_new_password”

So I started using TrekPay a few weeks ago, and here is a short review.

First of all, if you want to get rich, go to college and get a job. If you want to spend maybe 5 minutes a day and make a dollar or 2 per month, sign up for TrekPay. It is cool in that you just need to give them your PayPal ID and you get paid once your balance hits $5.50 USD.

The web interface is dead simple, just go to browse/search when you login to start surfing for credits. There are also no time limits, but you do need to look for and click any TrekPay images you might find (so far I have only seen one).

The bad thing about this site is there is no way to translate your credits to $$. This is done on a weekly basis, however there is no published conversion table saying 100 credits = $.08 or something. I am currently at around $1.58, so I have also yet to get paid, so I can’t comment on the timeliness of getting paid via PayPal. This does look like a cool concept, so try it out and give it a shot.

If you are interested in signing up for free, click the banner below.

Just came across an interesting article here that finds that Bing search users have a much higher click rate than other search engine users.

From the article:

“Bing users showed a 50% higher ad click rate than Googlers, so at the time our preliminary conclusion was that Bing’s success was being driven in a big part by Microsoft’s huge, expensive advertising blitz.”

While Google still dominates with 84% of search traffic, this is certainly noteworthy.

FYI – Chitika is a pretty cool ad system that I use on my site. First of all, only users who arrive via search engine can see the search sensitive ads. You can click the link below to learn more about Chitika or sign up for a free publisher account to begin hosting ads on your web site.

When I first moved to Mac OS X, I knew I would have to figure out how to do a screen capture. This is done in the Windows PC world by ALT+Print Screen to capture the active window, or Shift+Print Screen to capture the entire desktop.

There are several ways in the Mac OS X world to do the same thing. Here are a few suggestions:

To capture the entire desktop, press Command-Shift-3. The screen shot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop.

To copy the entire desktop, press Command-Control-Shift-3. The screen shot will be placed on your clipboard for you to paste into another program. This is equivalent to Shift+Print Screen in Windows.

To capture a portion of the desktop, press Command-Shift-4. A cross-hair cursor will appear and you can click and drag to select the area you wish to capture. When you release the mouse button, the screen shot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop.

To capture a specific application window, press Command-Shift-4, then press the Spacebar. The cursor will change to a camera, and you can move it around the screen. As you move the cursor over an application window, the window will be highlighted. The entire window does not need to be visible for you to capture it. When you have the cursor over a window you want to capture, just click the mouse button and the screen shot will be saved as a PNG file on your desktop. You can also press Command-Control-Shift-4 to get the same functionality as ALT+Print Screen

You can also use a built-in program called Grab, which is located by default under Applications –> Utilities. Grab saves captures by default in TIFF format, and is more robust by doing things such as timed captures and capturing mouse activity.