July 2006 - Posts
Saturday evening saw a rough stormfront bludgeon its way through Atlanta. On its way through, it disrupted power and phones at my company’s corporate office. Our network communications were temporarily disconnected, but the UPS batteries on the servers did their jobs and the servers stayed online through the outage and were humming along just dandy when power and network came back up.
Then, at 11:30pm-ish, someone went to the electrical room in the back of the building and manually pulled all of the main breakers. See that slot machine looking arm on the right side of the image? Six of those had been pulled down, disconnecting the circuit. This killed power to the entire building. I didn’t know power had actually been restored at any point so I figured it was a power company problem and that they’d just get things working again. After I fielded more than 100 phone calls from our store locations I decided to call the power company myself. Marietta Power informed me that I was the only one to report an outage in the area (which is mixed residential and commercial). They recommended I go to the office and check the breakers. So I drove 45 minutes to arrive at the office at 1pm. It’s hot and dark. The server room must have some serious UPS batteries b/c the big servers were still on and running. It was 110 degrees in the room, according to the mercury thermometer we keep in there. Now, I didn’t know the electrical room existed so I had to call the power company to come out and fix the power. It took them an hour to get here (with me sitting in the hot dark the entire time) and they found the problem immediately. I went back to where they showed me the problem and I flipped the power back on. Back in the building we had lights and more importantly AC. Sweet AC! It’s now about 3:30 and I’m making sure all the servers in the server room are OK. The SQL Server is beeping at me something horrible and a 30 minute call to Dell later (to fix the external RAID arrays) and the beeping stops and my brain stops bleeding. During the hour I was working in the server room the temperature fell from a scorching 110 degrees to a balmy 98 degrees. I spent another hour or so stomping around making sure everything I could was up and running (and it was during this last hour of my time at the office that two of my co-workers showed up to help out) before leaving at 5:20 to try to make it across town for dinner at 5:30. We pushed dinner back 30 minutes and the Asahi beer and hibachi food both tasted great
By the time the weekend was over, I’d been in the office on Sunday for 4.5 hours and had fielded something like 200 phone calls. Needless to say, we’re already implementing a phone tree to alert all remote locations in a more efficient manner should something like this happen again.
If you haven’t tried it before, you should definitely check out the relatively new
Coke Blak. It’s a yummy fusion of Coca Cola and Coffee flavors. Despite being sold in stores on the same shelves with the energy drinks like Red Bull, Coke Blak is actually not an energy drink laced with extra caffine. It’s being marketed as a “premium” beverage. Each beverage only has 45 calories and a 4 pack of these bottles normally costs $6. However, they are on sale at Kroger this week so I picked some up yesterday.
I don’t know about everyone else out there, but I’m a keyboard shortcut junkie. I love to be able to hit things like Window-Key + ‘E’ to get the Windows Explorer up and running, or assigning macros to key combos inside of Visual Studio. I just got this random newsletter from Microsoft which includes the following highly useful tip. It’s all about how to assign a keyboard shortcut to an application. CRTL + ALT + ‘W’ now opens MS Word on my machine. Sweet!
<newsletter content>
Use keyboard shortcuts to launch applications
Of all the programs installed on your computer, you use maybe five regularly, right? Creating a keyboard shortcut is a great way to launch them fast.
1. Right-click an application's shortcut icon and then click Properties.
2. Click the Shortcut tab and locate the Shortcut key text box.
3. Type in a letter, number, or assign a function key (for letters and numbers, Windows adds Ctrl-Alt to your shortcut).
Now your favorite application is just a keystroke away.
Featured tip is courtesy of the book Windows XP Killer Tips by Kleber Stephenson.
</newsletter content>
This seems like it should be easy, but a lot of people still cannot find where to modify the SharePoint pages in Personal View and Shared View. Most people can find how to modify the page in Shared View and are notified by a message saying they are editing in Shared View like below. They simply select the obvious Site Actions button.
Let’s take a quick look at where you did this in SharePoint 2003. If you know where it is in SharePoint 2003 look below for SharePoint 2007.
Personal and Shared Views in SharePoint 2003
In SharePoint 2003 you selected the Shared and Personal View in the same location.At the top of the menu it identified which version of the page you were working on.
Notice there was no way to exit this mode without clicking on another page such as Home.
Personal and Shared Views in SharePoint 2007
Now in SharePoint 2007 the menus for Site Actions (Shared – highlighted in RED) and Individual Actions (Personal – highlighted in GREEN) are in two different menus.
1) To edit the page in Personal View select the drop down of the user you are logged in with. Such as Welcome Brendon Schwartz
2) To edit the page in Shared View select the Site Actions menu.
3) Notice also that in either Personal View or Shared View that you now have the option to Exit Edit Mode
Matt was working on his MVP profile this afternoon when he sent me an IM that he had finished updating it so I could look at. Well I went to the site and it appears all of the BS he put on there broke the site. Good luck MVP web team I have tried to fix the problems he has created on web sites before and it is going to be tough to fix I guarantee.
If you want to get up to speed with SharePoint 2007, follow all the advice from Arpan Shah's blog entry about SharePoint 2007 Training.
- Get the Beta and play with it
- Get the Tech resources DVD
- Visit Microsoft E-Learning and run through the courses and clinics
- Get some real training
- Read the blogs
- Use online resources like the virtual labs
- Go to conferences
- Build stuff
Here at DevCow, we're always interested in the next big thing. We're also always interested in the next free thing!
That being said, how would you like to have access to your home or work PC while not at that location? Or, how would you like access to your mother's computer...all the way across the country? There are existing solutions such as Remote Desktop and VNC, but these free solutions generally require known IP addresses or valid WINS lookups to find these machines. Firewalls also block these. There are others solutions such as the Citrix GoToMyPC program which work across firewalls and use a website to keep ever-changing IP addresses abstracted away from the user in the form of fancy graphics. The problem with GoToMyPC is that it isn't free.
LogMeIn.com uses the GotToMyPC model of web based access - you log into a website and see if your machine is available for remote control.
If your machine is online, a simple mouse click will connect you to the remote machine. According to LogMeIn.com's marketing material, you can even use this from a PocketPC device! It works as well as VNC to connect you to the remote desktop and is completely free for personal use. You are always offered the opportunity to upgrade to the Pro version, which offers the same kinds of extras that GoToMyPC offers like file transfer and remote printing.
Be sure to check out www.LogMeIn.com for your future tech support needs. I can't tell you how often I've had to talk friends and relatives through "complex" setting changes such as accessing e-mail and sharing printers. This tool, which lets me make the changes myself (required when it comes to registry changes!) is invaluable as it means I can shave valuable Xbox time out of a tech support call and I can show my "clients" what I'm doing rather than try to talk them through it. Now, if only I could find a free version of Adobe's Captivate software to record the session and generate a transcript out of my screen actions for future reference!
The Atlanta Visual Basic .NET Study Group met at it's new location for the second time since loosing the LaVista Rd. facility. Last night's meeting featured me talking to the group about SharePoint 2007 and Groove 2007.
Before I went on, Jim Wooly Wooley wrote a quick demonstration app that showed how to implement a queue for logging purposes. The question a member asked was how to handle multiple simultaneous application accesses of a log file. Jim showed how a simple queuing app can handle writing to the log by popping updates off a stack and how multiple apps can send messages to the stack at the same time.
Next up was my discussion of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. I covered a lot of the same kind of material covered by Microsoft's E-Learning Clinic 3370: Getting Started with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. I blatently ripped off some of the graphics and bullet points from their slides for my own. This was actually a discussion last night - about how much free Microsoft stuff is out there in terms of free tools and training when compared to companies like IBM and Oracle. It's honestly amazing! Anyway - after I covered the basics of what MOSS 2007 offers, I stumbled around in my seriously underpowered VPC attempting to demonstrate some of the great new features of MOSS 2007.
Once I finished up the MOSS portion of the talk, I showed the group a little bit about Groove 2007. I had a great slide deck for Groove that I nabbed off of the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Beta 2) Technical Resource DVD. This is actually where I got my VPC for the SharePoint demos as well - as the VPC I built didn't allow any SharePoint sites to be created/browsed. However, my demo VPC did work with Groove installed, although without a network connection and another machine to show the changes, it was sort of useless to show the demo. Whatever, the people seemed to be impressed.
We had 8 people present at the meeting, and six of us went out for a beverage after the event where conversations ranged from software topics, future of the study group, quantam computing and cool TV programs.
If you couldn't make it to my preview of SharePoint 2007, try to make it to next Monday's meeting of the Atlanta .NET User Group where Brendon will be presenting MOSS 2007 for the first portion of the meeting.
I was working in a VPC, installing SharePoint 2007 and the new beta Office tools. The number of reboots wasn't painful or anything, but I am seriously sick of the Windows Server 2003 Shutdown Event Tracker.
A quick look around online and I found that by following these steps I was able to stop myself from unnecessary pain:
- From Window's Start menu, select Run and enter GPEDIT.MSC
- From the Group Policy Object Editor, expand Computer Configuration | Administrative Templates | System
- Double-click Display Shutdown Event Tracker from the System Setting list
- Select the Disabled option button
- Click OK
- Close Group Policy Object Editor
Thanks to Charles Maxson of the Office Zealot blog, particularly this post, for the above answer. I even nicked his screenshot!
Occasionally this is a frustration for some of my users. They want to be able to send and receive files which are normally restricted. Executables, batch files, registry files, etc. Rather than try to instruct them in the fine arts of ZIP and FTP, I'd rather just open their machines up to catastrophic possibilities and grant them the ability to send and receive these files. This is purely motivated by me not wanting to be hassled with this anymore.
There are two security levels built into Outlook when it comes to file attachments. The first level is configurable by the user - these attachments can be saved from an e-mail message to the machine's hard drive. The second set of security restrictions is more strict - no file in this group is allowed to be interacted with in Outlook. You simply can not send or receive these files and there is no way to change this.
Well, there actually IS a way to change it, but nothing out of the box. If you want to change the Outlook file attachments security levels, you can either download the
Outlook Permissions Add-in or you can make the following changes to your systems registry:
1. Start...Run..."regedit"
2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Security
4. Create a new string value called Level1Remove
5. Enter in the file extensions you want to use, such as .exe or .bat
6. You can have multiple file types separated by a semicolon like this: ".exe;.com"
The following are a list of the file attachments that are restricted by default
.ade Microsoft Access project extension
.adp Microsoft Access project
.asx Windows Media Audio / Video
.bas Microsoft Visual Basic class module
.bat Batch file
.chm Compiled HTML Help file
.cmd Microsoft Windows NT Command script
.com Microsoft MS-DOS program
.cpl Control Panel extension
.crt Security certificate
.exe Program
.hlp Help file
.hta HTML program
.inf Setup Information
.ins Internet Naming Service
.isp Internet Communication settings
.js JScript file
.jse Jscript Encoded Script file
.lnk Shortcut
.mdb Microsoft Access program
.mde Microsoft Access MDE database
.msc Microsoft Common Console document
.msi Microsoft Windows Installer package
.msp Microsoft Windows Installer patch
.mst Microsoft Windows Installer transform; Microsoft Visual Test source file
.pcd Photo CD image; Microsoft Visual compiled script
.pif Shortcut to MS-DOS program
.prf Microsoft Outlook profile settings
.reg Registration entries
.scf Windows Explorer command
.scr Screen saver
.sct Windows Script Component
.shb Shell Scrap object
.shs Shell Scrap object
.url Internet shortcut
The above registry list and file extensions were taken from here.
Over the weekend I received a notice that I had a $400 credit waiting for me on Amazon.com. This, plus the Xbox I received, completes my winnings from the TechNet Magazine Subscription Contest. Be looking for me online!
I am going to show you the quick steps to create a Windows shortcut to your site definitions. Anyone working with site definintions or just working with SharePoint 2007 probably already has a shortcut created. Also if you went to TechEd and saw any of Todd Bleeker's presentations then you have probably already seen what to do. By the way this is just the standard way to create a shortcut to a folder in Windows.
1) On the taskbar right click and select Toolbars->New Toolbar…
2) In the New Toolbar dialog navigate to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE and click OK
Presto! Down in the bottom right you now have a quick way to get to your site definition or xml files.
Although the box it came in is a little worse for the wear, the Xbox 360 is here on my desk. I've also heard from the fine folks at Winternals who have said that they are purchasing the Amazon.com gift certificate today. Super sweet!
We're still looking. I previously posted an image of a sitting bull. I was actually envisioning a cow hunched over typing on a keyboard, but my drawing skills are terrible and my photoshopping skills are not much better. So I had to stick to pasting together some clipart images I found online.
Here are some other ideas
Last night's Geek Dinner was a great one, and heavily attended too. We had about 18 people RSVP that they were coming and all but one showed up. We sat outside on the covered deck at 5 Seasons brew pub, which features some of the best food I've ever had at a brew pub. Conversation ranged from WPF application ideas to video games and beyond.
If you missed out this time, be sure to pay attention to the DevCow calendar so you can see when the next one is happening.
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