Creating Windows Recovery Partition with AOMEI OneKey

Preconditions
 Installed Windows
 System Reserved partition is available

Steps
1. Install AOMEI OneKey backup
2. Run it and create recovery partition
3. Add a letter to the system reserved partition (one created during windows installation) - for example X:
4. Run command prompt as administrator and type the following commands:

bcdboot c:\windows /s x:
bcdedit /set {3940e26a-75e7-11e4-bfda-88dcdc879809} device partition=X:

where {3940e26a-75e7-11e4-bfda-88dcdc879809} is identifier of AOMEI entry (you can check it with bcdedit without parameters)

5. Move okldr.mbr, okcf.lst and okldr from C:'s root to X:'s
6. Remove letter from system reserved partition
7. (Optional) Test recovery

Note: When you run OneKey to recover, it will restore boot manager to the state when it was run i.e. AOMEI boot entry will point to C: - just repeat steps 3-6.

This covers the case when OS partition is formatted or essential files are deleted which in standard way won't work because AOMEI boot files are on OS partition..

Veeam Backup Free Edition Rant

I wanted to try this 'free' tool the ads for which were poking my eyes for a long time, but :

They want not only my phone but they do not accept 'public' email address. Also if you think that in the following screen:

you can sign in using Google+ account for example - think again (and read the underlined text). You will need to create account anyway. I don't want to link my Google+ account I want to log in with it and download the damn tool. In fact if the tool is free - I don't want to log in at all.

My conclusion: I am not the target audience. Whatever.

EDIT: Found it on Softpedia (no registration required).
EDIT 2: Softpedia version is 7.0.0.690 which does not support vSphere 5.5 . You need to download at least R2 patch which leads to the registration problem.

PS. Tried some alternatives:
1. NAKIVO Free Edition - does not support Free ESXi
2. Trilead VM Explorer - does not support latest version of ESXi 5.5 (2014-07-01) , but looks promising and probably when updated will support it.

EDIT 3: Latest 5.0.031.0 works and looks it will do :)

For the moment decided to use WinSCP + SSH on the host. Speed was around 100Mbit which works for me.

PS. After switching to 1000Mbit  had to enable rc4 and blowfish ssh ciphers on the server to get more than 20MB/s. By default only aes ciphers are enabled.

Steam 'Sweet' Today's Deal

I wish I could buy (or is it sell?) that :)

CM HAF XB EVO and Corsair HX1000

The distance between HDD cage and PSU is 40mm. I removed hotplug board - it is getting bad reviews anyway. HX1000 is 200mm long modular PSU.

Battleforge on Steam Summer Sale 2014

PHPUnit XML Schema for use with Netbeans

Here is a XML schema heavily annotated to ease creation of phpunit.xml configuration file for PHPUnit when edited in Netbeans IDE. I have used official one for version 4.1.1 as a starting point. See phpunit.md for usage information.

How to import cookies and bookmarks in Firefox from Opera 15+

In support article Import bookmarks from Google Chrome you can see that it is possible to import cookies and bookmarks from Chrome. Since Opera switched to Webkit from version 15 it turns out they use the same format. To import from Opera to Firefox do the following:

1. Backup your Chrome's cookies and bookmarks, usually located at C:\Users\<your_username>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\ . There are 4 files: Bookmarks, Bookmarks.bak, Cookies and Cookies-journal.
2. Overwrite the previous  4 files with Opera's ones, usually located at C:\Users\<your_username>\AppData\Roaming\Opera Software\Opera Stable\
3. Follow Mozilla procedure above (select cookies and bookmarks to import)
4. Restore Google's cookies.