Error: No codec available to render this file.

or

The requested video codec is not installed on this system

There is an option in GoToMeeting to record in standard .WMV format, but chances are a) you didn’t know about it before you recorded your meeting and b) even if you did enable it, it takes a lot of time to convert the file, so you might not have the time (or patience) to convert it immediately after your meeting is over.

Geek Factor has some interesting solutions, here and here, but they don’t necessarily work.

Fortunately, there is a solution that worked for me — use an application from GoToMeeting called “g2mtranscoder” which allows you to convert the file from GTM format to standard WMV.    Here’s how I did it in Windows 7:

1. Navigate to your GoToMeeting program files folder.  Typically this will be in C:\Program Files\Citrix\GoToMeeting\320.
2. Copy your GoToMeeting recording to this directory.
3. Open the command line.  On Vista / Windows 7, click the Start button and in the search box type: cmd and press Enter; in Windows XP, click the Start button, select Run, and type: cmd and press Enter.
4. Type: cd C:\Program Files\Citrix\GoToMeeting\320\ and press Enter.  This should take you to the GTM directory.
5. Type: g2mtranscoder source=GoToMeetingRecording.wmv (replace with the name of your GTM video).

Hint: you can copy and paste into the command line window by clicking the C:\ icon from the command line window and selecting Edit > Paste.

Once the conversion has completed, simply open the file in Camtasia using File > Import Media, or use your favorite video editing software.

If full SQL installed

Use if full SQL is installed, or if you installed SQL 2008 with Visual Studio.

1. Install Windows Powershell if you do not have it.
2. Download the setup file of “SQL Server 2008 Express with Tools” or “SQL Server 2008 Express with Advanced Services.”
   • SQL Server 2008 Express with Tools – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=7522A683-4CB2-454E-B908-E805E9BD4E28&displaylang=en
   • SQL Server 2008 Express with Advanced Services – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B5D1B8C3-FDA5-4508-B0D0-1311D670E336&displaylang=en
3. Execute the setup file to open SQL Server Installation Center, click Installation -> New SQL Server stand-alone installation or add features to an existing installation.
4. Install setup files if prompted.
5. In step Installation Type, choose Add features to an existing instance of SQL Server 2008, select the existing SQL Server 2008 instance name in the dropdown list, press Next to go to step Feature Selection.
6. In step Feature Selection, select the checkbox Management Tools–Basic from Shared Features, and then press Next and finish the rest steps of the installation.

Referenced from: http://forums.asp.net/p/1326742/2658582.aspx

If basic SQL installed

Use for client installs, or any installs using the basic (non-developer) version of SQL Express 2008 (which includes some application bootstrappers).

1. Install Windows Powershell if you do not have it.
2. Download SQL Management Studio Express 2008 setup file: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=08e52ac2-1d62-45f6-9a4a-4b76a8564a2b&displaylang=en
3. Execute the setup file to open SQL Server Installation Center. Click Maintenance -> Edition Upgrade.
4. Install setup support files when prompted.
5. In step Select Instance, select SQLExpress and click Next.
6. In step Edition Upgrade Rules, fix any errors, and click Next.
7. In step Ready to upgrade edition, click Upgrade. The SQL installer will not appear to do anything, and does not have any progress indicator — just sit tight, it is working!
8. When completed, click Close.
9. Go back to SQL Server Installation Center, and click Installation -> New SQL Server stand-alone installation or add features to an existing installation.
10. Install setup support files when prompted.
11. In step Installation Type, select Add features to an existing instance of SQL Server 2008, and select SQLExpress. Click Next.
12. In step Feature Selection, check the box Management Tools–Basic from the Shared Features section. Click Next and finish the installation.

Referenced from: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms365247.aspx

If none of the above works

1. Go to Add / Remove programs and uninstall Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (leave all other SQL 2008 components intact) and Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express.
2. Reboot
3. Download the setup file of “SQL Server 2008 Express with Tools” or “SQL Server 2008 Express with Advanced Services.”
   • SQL Server 2008 Express with Tools – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=7522A683-4CB2-454E-B908-E805E9BD4E28&displaylang=en
   • SQL Server 2008 Express with Advanced Services – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B5D1B8C3-FDA5-4508-B0D0-1311D670E336&displaylang=en
4. Execute the setup file to open SQL Server Installation Center, and click Installation -> New SQL Server stand-alone installation or add features to an existing installation.
5. Install setup support files when prompted.
6. Check the checkbox for Database Engine Servers from the Instance Features section, and Management Tools–Basic from the Shared Features section. Click Next.
7. In step Instance Configuration:
   • Select Named instance and name it SQLExpress.
   • Set Instance ID = SQLExpress
   • Set Instance root directory = C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\.
   • Click Next.
8. In step Server Configuration:
   • Set SQL Server Database Engine Account Name = NT Authority\SYSTEM
   • Set Start Type = Automatic.
   • Set SQL Server Browser Account Name = NT Authority\SYSTEM
   • Set Start Type = Automatic. Click Next.
9. In step Database Engine Configuration:
   • Set Authentication mode = Windows authentication mode.
   • From Specify SQL Server administrators section, click Add and add System user. Click Next.
10. Correct any errors and finish installation.

If none of the above works for real

1. Go to START and type CMD.
2. Type: format C:
3. Go have a beer.  Or three.  Or just finish that bottle of gin.

Referenced from: a support call with Microsoft

There could be other causes for this issue, but this is what worked for me.  Enjoy.

• Schedule an automatic send/receive for your accounts. Go to Tools >  Send/Receive > Send/Receive Settings > Define Send/Receive Groups.  Select the group name “All Accounts” (or whatever group you wish to configure),  and click Edit.  Check the box for “Include the selected account in this group”, and then click OK.  Next, go to the “Setting for group ‘All Accounts’” at the bottom of the screen, and check the box for “Include this group in send/receive” and “Schedule an automatic send/receive every xx minutes” and enter your desired delay.
• Turn off the “send immediately when connected” option. Go to Tools > Options and click the Mail Setup tab, then uncheck the “send immediately when connected box”.
• Enjoy a little more sanity in your life.
• Bonus. Here is a helpful tip, which explains how to create a rule which will delay sending an email: http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook/archive/2008/04/14/a-safety-net-for-the-send-button.aspx

Yet there is one very simple core concept in time management that I don’t think is focused on enough — urgent vs. important.  Learning this one concept can mean the difference between success and failure, because no matter what “rules” for time management you learn or what tools you use, you must always be aware of which tasks fall into which bucket, otherwise you are almost certain to be spending your days working on the wrong things.

Urgent vs. Important

So what is the difference between urgent and important, anyway?  Sometimes it’s hard to tell.  Experience provides a good measuring stick, but sometimes there is no clear cut answer.  In some cases, urgent issues are fire-fighting type problems or system-down issues.   In other cases, the urgency is determined by the person originating the request, either by their status (an email from the CEO may require urgent response regardless of the subject), or their perception of the problem (someone may be dealing with an upset customer, so to them, the resolution is urgent — even if the problem itself is not significant).

Important issues typically revolve around strategy and planning, long-term projects and initiatives, or anything that requires a gestation period.  Important issues can also be those tasks that don’t have specific deadlines or any sense of urgency to them, but which help to build to your goal.  Urgent tasks have a way of wiping these important tasks off the map, and in some cases may ultimately cause extremely urgent issues to bubble up that could have been resolved in a less painful and time consuming way.

Managing the Urgent

In many cases, urgent issues can be resolved by delegating them.  When they are time sensitive, but don’t require a particular person’s involvement, this is often the most effective way to resolve an urgent issue, especially if you have many other priorities.  It’s easy to get caught in the trap of thinking that you personally need to handle the problem.  Maybe you can solve personally without too much effort, but that’s not the point — if you have people who can solve the problem quickly, it saves you from having a stack of urgent issues, all waiting for your involvement.

It’s also easy to fall into the analysis (or procrastination) trap — an urgent issue comes up, and instead of solving it immediately, the tendency may be to analyze it or dwell on it.  Attend to it immediately, and save the brain cycles for the important issues.   This can also help keep urgent issues from turning into a true crisis.

Getting things down on paper and out of your head can help to clarify what needs to be done, and also helps to keep you from getting overwhelmed.  This applies to both urgent and important tasks, but is especially helpful for urgent tasks, which may appear urgent just because you haven’t thought of them before.Finally — and perhaps most importantly –  recognize that just because an issue is urgent, doesn’t mean that it needs to be solved right away.  It may warrant some consideration or discussion, and it certainly shouldn’t be ignored, but there’s a good chance that it is not urgent at all.  Restate the issue in different terms and you may find that a solution already exists or that what is perceived as a problem really isn’t one at all.

Managing the Important

Prioritization is typically vital here — without knowing what needs to be done, in what order, it’s hard to know what’s important.  I tend to write everything down that I need to do or might some day want to do, and sometimes just the act of taking notes on tasks and projects allows me to see the task more clearly and recognize where it fits within the overall priorities.  If I don’t know what the priority is, then that’s a good indication that it’s probably not very important.  Priorities often shift over time, though, so writing down any task that comes to mind can help clarify the overall issue when it does become important, and can help you see how multiple problems can be solved at once, and whether a project should take precedence over another, or in some cases,  whether it makes another project obsolete.Working on important tasks at off-hours, when the urgent issues are not rolling in, can be a useful approach.  The downside is that if you spend your days on urgent items, and your nights or mornings on what’s really important, you end up spending far more hours on tasks that do not feel productive.  This is a quick path to 70 hour work weeks, and eventually, burn-out.

Establishing a sense of urgency for important issues, both for oneself and certainly when working on projects within a team, is also a good approach.  This helps to re-align priorities and keep focus on the tasks at hand.  This is a reflection of basic human behavior — our instinct is to be reactive to threats or problems, and so we always respond best to urgency.

More specific methodologies can be useful as well, especially when dealing with complex projects.  In software development, we have Scrum (an agile programming methodology, but at it’s core it is a time management tool), in life there is GTD (Getting Things Done, the aforementioned productivity religious movement) and Inbox Zero, and there are also programs and certifications devoted to project management.  A few of the top books on project management at Amazon are a good start.

No methodology guarantees that you will get work done, though, and you can’t get work done if you don’t know what to spend your time on.   Drink the kool-aid if you want and follow the exact rules of whatever methodology you pick, but I vote for applying the fundamentals of time management within the context of your own life and work habits, taking the bits and pieces that work for you from each methodology. Maybe I should write book on this, but chances are it will only have one sentence:

Figure out what’s important, and focus on that.

I’m back to the old standby – Mediawiki. I’ve actually had good success running it on a Windows platform — although Apache is the best option, which does not always live nicely alongside IIS — and will continue down that path.

Coming soon: a brief Windows / Mediawiki setup guide.

I’m going to make an assertion here, and please correct me if I’m wrong.

I believe that the vast majority of software product managers are running full tilt in their jobs, caught between the short term tactical cross-functional activities (working with Dev, Sales, Marketing etc) that are thrust upon us, and the important long term market research, business and product planning activities that are fundamental to managing successful products.

Which got me thinking about the role I play in my company, as the only product manager for the Windows-based software we sell. My response:

I would tend to agree with this — in general I think the more time that someone has to focus on the core elements of their work, the better the result will be.

First, some background: I work in a small software / technology company where I am the only official PM, although many others, especially the exec team, contribute heavily to the product goals and design. All told we have 6 developers and 2 main products (with many smaller, related products underneath), 1 of which I manage almost exclusively. I am also the project manager for 2-3 devs working on my product. To say I am the main product expert is probably an understatement. Because I understand all the different elements of the company and work with everyone on every level — from execs, to development, to design, to marketing, to sales and support — I am usually the resource that is most heavily used.

For me, the challenge is this: the short-term needs of my company do have a big impact on our long-term success (we don’t have deep pockets), so I feel it is important to stay close to the day-to-day needs of the company to make sure that as a unit we are all working effectively. My position, knowledge, and experience allows me to do that pretty well. On the other hand, it does mean that some of the long-term strategies are getting less attention than they otherwise might, and it does also mean that I am stretched pretty thin on a regular basis, and I’m certain that my creativity suffers as a result.

The only way I’ve been able to handle all of this is by being really good at managing my time (and I still have room for improvement there). Quite a bit of work, especially the creative kind, does get done outside of normal business hours when things are quiet, but I am also able to create certain hours in the day when I can work uninterrupted. The challenge here is being able to switch gears away from and back to a certain project, especially one that requires a lot of research or design or has a long process. Fortunately I am pretty good at that, although at times it does get frustrating.

Our track record so far has proven that this is working, as we are seeing products and profits improve. Our competitors are not able to keep up with the speed of our development either, and I’m pretty sure that we stay closer to the industry trends than anyone else in our market.

So for me the bottom line is that while I would love more time to focus on just the product management side, I don’t think it’s realistic or even recommended considering the size of my company and the speed in which we typically move. I accept this as the reality of the small business we are operating and I just do my best to juggle it all. Do I learn a lot and sharpen my skills regularly as a result? Absolutely.

So my point is that for our organization, as it stands now, I think I’m doing what I need to do. But the question remains — is the long-term strategy suffering because ultimately my company is focused on short-term results? And does it make sense to burden certain people so heavily that they really have no choice but to move on to something else eventually or simply burn out? How important really is deep research and strategy when you are running a small company that values quick decisions and single-person innovators? Does it make more sense to get a product out the door faster based on more narrow research, feedback and good assumptions, and make changes based on user feedback after the fact, i.e. focus on iterative development? (if you want a cool catchphrase this is “Googley”) Or does that just set you up for failure? (and you will fail at some point!) Failure on a large scale is certainly not an option, so perhaps the better question is — which approach offers less risk?

There appears to be a limit of about 30 or 40 open windows (including tabs in Firefox / IE7) in Windows XP, which can get pretty irritating if you have two monitors like I do, and often have many tasks going on at the same time (or many webpages open). When this happens, other weird things start to occur, like the inability to use the right-click function, or strange errors when attempting to open a submenu from some app or even an email in Outlook.

Fortunately, there is a solution, courtesy Tony Schreiner’s Blog — increase the size of the Windows Desktop heap via the registry.

The registry key is:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\SubSystems]

Look for the value
Windows=”%SystemRoot%\system32\csrss.exe

and edit it. You’ll see a long string like this:

ObjectDirectory=\Windows SharedSection=1024,3072,512 Windows=On SubSystemType=Windows ServerDll=basesrv,1 ServerDll=winsrv:UserServerDllInitialization,3 ServerDll=winsrv:ConServerDllInitialization,2 ProfileControl=Off MaxRequestThreads=16″

Just change the 3072 to a larger value such as 8192.

However, I’ve found that a lot of the nice extensions that I’d like to use — namely better search and the ability to import from RoboHelp (RoboHelp is our main documentation source for customer facing in-program help) — require a Linux server. Not that I have a big problem with this, in fact it’s quite easily to install and run on a VM with VMware’s free server tool. You can even get a pre-built VM appliance with MediaWiki already installed and ready to go.

The main issue with all of this is that our development environment is 100% Microsoft, and my task at the moment is to set up a wiki for our development team (they’ve heard good things about the wiki I’ve built for our customer support team, and are getting jealous). Not wanting to create any maintenance headaches for them, I naturally started looking for a .NET based ASP solution. It was surprisingly hard to find, actually.

Eventually I came across ScrewTurn Wiki, which is a fairly new wiki app that has been getting some good feedback, and which is also open source. It claimed to be very easy to install, which is always nice. I like learning new things, but if I can keep the frustration level down that’s a plus.

So much for the install being easy! The first time I tried to install, I loaded the “one-click installer” on my Windows XP laptop running IIS 5, and couldn’t get the darn thing to run. I went through all the troubleshooting steps, but no dice. I kept hitting an error “Active Server Pages error ‘ASP 0201′
Invalid Default Script The default script language specified for this application is invalid.” After some searching I found this article from Classic ASP and tried all suggestions including resetting all permissions based on Microsoft’s guidelines. A few more hours of playing around later and I was still nowhere. I really didn’t need to reinstall Windows on my laptop just for a wiki!

I gave up on the laptop, and loaded up a brand spanking new VM running Windows XP SP2. I got further than before, but still received an error message. This time the problem was very possibly my rush to get this done quickly, and I decided to RTFM and even go through the video tutorial. Hmm, still not working. Turns out that there are a few gotchas to the install that the one-click WebSetup installer couldn’t handle (even though the documentation indicated that these steps were only required for a manual install):

1. Specify that you want to use the ASP.NET 2.0: right-click on the Virtual Directory you just created and select Properties in the context menu. Select the ASP.NET tab. If it’s not available, make sure you have .NET Framework 2.0 installed and retry this step. If it’s available, select in the ASP.NET version drop-down list the 2.0.50727 item.

2. Setup the Public directory: go to the physical path of the Virtual Directory that you have just created, and create a new directory inside it, for example C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\MyWiki\public. Right-click on it and select Properties from the context menu. Go to the Security tab, and select from the list of the accounts IIS_WPG (Windows 2003) or ASPNET (Windows XP); check the Modify option in the list below (in the Allow column) and click on OK. You have to specify the name of this directory in the PublicDirectory setting in the Web.config file (see the previous section).

3. Register the ASP.NET engine. To do that, open a command prompt and type %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis -i then press enter.

4. Make  sure that the default page in IIS is set to default.aspx.  To do this, edit the virtual directory properties in IIS, click the Documents tab, and confirm that default.aspx is listed.  If not, add it.
After that, all was well and the wiki fired right up. More comments soon on how well this thing works!