Manoj Nagpal's Blog

Update: Microsoft has released a very useful open source tool to create USB flash drive for installation. Have a look at Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool at CodePlex. – 01/01/2010.

I recently bought an Acer One Netbook which comes with Windows XP preloaded. Since these Netbooks come without built in DVD drives, upgrading to another OS is a challenge. With the high storage capacity USB drives becoming cheaper by the day it is a perfect medium to installing Windows.  Although this tutorial is for Windows 7, you can use these steps to install Windows Vista as well.

Pre-Requisites

• A Computer or Netbook that can boot from USB Drive. Check your BIOS for boot options, It should have an option to boot from USB disk or Removable drive.
• A computer with an OS and/or software that can mount an ISO file.
  On Windows, I prefer using Slysoft Virtual Clone Drive to mount ISO. It supports both x86 and x64 bit platforms and is free.
• USB Flash Drive with 3 GB or more space.
• Windows 7 ISO (or Windows Vista ISO)
  Microsoft has published Windows 7 RC for everyone to download and test. This version can be used for 1 year. You can download Windows 7 from Microsoft Technet Website.

Prepare your USB Flash Drive

In order to boot from USB Flash Drive – you will need to mark the USB flash drive partition as Primary and format it in FAT 32 mode. Please be careful as while performing these steps. An incorrect step can render your current installation useless.

Step 1 – Open Command Prompt

Open command prompt in Administrator mode. (Click on) Start Button –> (Click on) All Programs –> (Click on) Accessories –> (Right Click on) Command Prompt –> (Click on) Select Run as Administrator –> (Click) Continue. You should a command prompt start “Administrator: “ in the title like below.

Step 2 – Setup USB Drive as Bootable

These following steps are very straight forward, but be careful with these steps, make sure you select the right drive. Read these steps and look at the screenshot before you start entering these commands.

1. Enter command diskpart
2. Enter command list disk – this will list drives on your computer. Check the size column and note the Disk ### for your USB drive
3. Enter command select disk #, here replace # with the number of your USB drive.
4. Enter command clean
5. Enter command create partition primary
6. Enter command select partition 1
7. Enter command format fs=fat32 quick
8. Enter command exit

Copy Windows 7 Installation files

Mount the ISO that you have downloaded from Microsoft Website and copy all the files to the root of your USB Flash Drive

Reboot your computer & set the option in BIOS to boot from USB or Removable Drive

Nice and Easy. Now wait and see how fast Windows 7 installs.

The Big Bang Theory is a US comedy TV series that circles around the geekiness of two physicist Leonard and Sheldon.

About the Show

Leonard and Sheldon are brilliant physicists, the kind of "beautiful minds" that understand how the universe works. But none of that genius helps them interact with people, especially women. All this begins to change when a free-spirited beauty named Penny moves in next door. Sheldon, Leonard's roommate, is quite content spending his nights playing Klingon Boggle with their socially dysfunctional friends, fellow CalTech scientists Wolowitz and Koothrappali. However, Leonard sees in Penny a whole new universe of possibilities... including love.

This is a must see TV show for all the geeks out there. Here is a quick preview of the Pilot:

And the cast is on twitter as well:

• Leonard Hofstadter
• Sheldon Cooper
• Penny
• Howard Wolowitz
• Rajesh Koothrappali
• Leslie Winkle

It has been possible to update your Facebook Status from Twitter using the official twitter application on Facebook. But if you don’t want your friends to go crazy and comment on every tweet you publish, there is another Facebook application – Selective Twitter.

Here is what you do in 4 easy steps:

Step 1: (Optional) If you have Twitter application already installed on your Facebook profile – remove or disable it

Step 2: Search and install Selective Twitter Application

Step 3: Authorize this application and provide your twitter username

Step 4: Go to Twitter and post a tweet. If you want to update your Facebook Status with a tweet – end it with #fb

And YES – the application removes “#fb” before updating Facebook status.

Recently I had to re-format my work laptop and I decided to fix one of the most annoying thing that I dealt with everyday but I was too lazy to research.

My company has a group policy setup for UAC. We need to have it enabled at all times but the pain of entering the username (domain\username) and password every time I wanted to start visual studio or IIS console was very unproductive and tedious.

Turns out a simple command at CMD prompt can do the trick:

net localgroup Administrators /add domain\username

Behold – no more password – one click and we are elevated. Oh the joys of Windows Vista.

Update: This works for Windows 7 as well. – 8th June 2009

Following my series of retrieving HTML from SharePoint - I had to recently retrieve the HTML from the Blog post in SharePoint.

One again - it is pretty straight forward but as the Blogs are a different site compared to SharePoint MySite - you will need to develop a feature at a Site Collection level.

public bool Convert(string ItemId, string SiteUrl)

{

    //Get Site, Web, List and Retrieve ListItem

    using (SPSite Site = new SPSite(SiteUrl))

    {

        using (SPWeb Web = Site.OpenWeb())

        {

            SPList List = Web.Lists["Posts"];

            SPListItem ListItem = List.GetItemById((Int32.Parse(ItemId)));

            HTML = String.Format("<html><body>{0}</body></html>", 

                   ListItem["Body"].ToString());

        }

    }

}

The list you are retrieving data from here is "Posts".