Making Bootable USB drives from Win7

In preparation, you will need a copy of the BOOTSECT.EXE program that's provided on the Windows 7 DVD/ISO in the 'Boot' directory.

Also the USB device to be used must:

• Be at least xGB in size
• Have no data on it that needs preserving (device will be wiped and formatted)
• Be capable of being configured as a bootable device (many cheap/free USB sticks do not work as bootable devices)

Prepare the USB memory stick
Within an elevated (administrator) command prompt, run DISKPART.

Within the diskpart prompts follow these steps:

LIST DISK

Once you enter the LIST DISK command, it will show the disk number of your USB drive. It will probably be the last in the list - you can tell by its size. Be careful, a mistake here will be disastrous for data on your other attached disk drives!

Let's suppose it's disk 4.

SELECT DISK 4 (Replace “4” with your disk number)
CLEAN
CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
SELECT PARTITION 1
ACTIVE
FORMAT FS=NTFS QUICK
(Format process may take few seconds)
ASSIGN
EXIT

By now, the drive should be viewable in Windows Explorer with an assigned drive letter.

So make it bootable.
Run the following at the command prompt for the BOOTSECT.EXE executable.

BOOTSECT.EXE /NT60 H: (where H: in this case is the USB drive)

And that's it! :) If this USB stick is for use in deployment of an configured operating system in MDT's Deployment Workbench, the entire contents of your source directory can then be copied using the following command.

robocopy {source path} H:\ /MIR /XD USMT5

The /XD switch above ensures that version 5 of USMT is not copied should it happens to be found in the source, and we don't require it (say, if doing USMT4 based migration from XP to 7).

Microsoft Visio 2003, XML for Visio

My past development experience with Microsoft Visio 2003 was a workaround for the dropped CSV import functionality, as featured in previous versions.

Before 2003, 'CSV import' was something that many Excel folks relied on for "drawing" diagrams from their tabulated descriptions in a CSV file.

The worldwide financial data network mapping project that I was working on was affected by this. Initially we were stuck, as unlike other Office application software, Visio had no available COM methods for performing our drawings through VBA automation.

Luckily, after discovering Visio's VDX data format was essentially the hierarchical relationships between library shapes expressed in XML, my workable solution involved just mimicking that data file format using Office VBA together with a bit of XMLT.

Then, soon afterwards in 2004, Microsoft released VXD royalty free as 'DatadiagramML'. And the following documentation I could have done with! Grrrr...

Overview of DatadiagramML :
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff768582(v=office.14).asp

I did take a later look at VSDX, the new XML format of Visio 2003, and found it so different. I doubt I would have been able to recreate that file as easily as I did with VDX.

Introduction to the Visio file format (.vsdx) : https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj228622.aspx

Now come forward to Visio 2013 and I sadly find VDX / DatadiagramML is no longer supported!

Aye, things move on yet again! :(

Microsoft Office, Seen them all off?

For me it's been a never ending series of wonder.

• 1992 - Microsoft Office 4.3
• 1995 - Office 95
• 1997 - Office 97
• 2000 - Office 2000
• 2002 - Office XP
• 2003 - Office 2003
• 2007 - Office 2007
• 2010 - Office 2010
• 2013 - Office 2013

For all these products it was Access, Excel and Word that mostly got my attention, such that I was able to easily code up business applications for these environments using VBA.

I do need to experience Office 2016 / Office 365 sometime, but there are now so many free office suite alternatives also with programmability features.

• Google G Suite
• LibreOffice

They do have their different strengths and weaknesses though ...

Linux guest on Vmware ESXi, enabling cut and paste in Vmware Remote Console on Ubuntu desktop

Need to ensure that Open VM Tools is installed then reboot the guest OS.

sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools
sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools-desktop

The last line (often missed)

• Enables resizing of the guest display to match host console window or the VMware Remote Console Window for vSphere
• Enables text copy and paste operation between host and guest UI (either direction)
• Enables drag and drop operation between guest and host (either direction) for the VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion products (not supported on vSphere)

Note this depends on Ubuntu using X (gnome)

Also the following two lines need adding to the virtual machine configuration

isolation.tools.copy.disable = false
isolation.tools.paste.disable = false

Further details here,

Clipboard Copy and Paste does not work in vSphere Client 4.1 and later
https://kb.vmware.com/kb/1026437

VMware support for Open VM Tools (2073803)
https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2073803