May 2007 - Posts
If the new TV you purchased doesn't put out any sound, make sure that the detachable speakers are ATTACHED and not on the coffee table. Don't let the professional installers leave while there are still parts are not attached to the TV that came in the box with the TV.
The sad thing is that neither the professional installers nor the manufacturer's tech support phone jockey realized that the detachable speaker wasn't attached.
Le sigh. At least it's all taken care of and working now.
So a few weeks ago, Kim and I moved into our new house. We love the new house in part because it has a lot more room than our previous home. One of the side effects of having a lot more room and a lot more rooms is that we just don't have enough furniture to fill the place. We decided that the "stuff" which previously furnished our living room wasn't quite up to snuff with our fancy new house, so all of that stuff was placed in the basement.
Furnishing a new house can be a very expensive proposition, so Kim and I have decided that we're going to do one room at a time, starting with the living room. We had it painted a warm taupe color before we moved in. The new sofa and chairs came from Italia Furniture where we felt we got a great deal for great quality leather furniture from Natuzzi. One of our neighbors has had this brand of furniture for 15 years and it's still in great shape. We've got the sofa and one of the chairs and we're waiting on the other chair to be delivered (we expect it in July)
When it came to finding a coffee table, the only one we could agree on was this $700 one from Pottery Barn, but the price was way too high so we kept looking until we found this one from World Market. They look almost identical and the one from World Market costs half as much with no sacrifice in quality.
A big feature in our lives is watching TV, and we felt it was time to upgrade to a nice big TV which can be mounted on the wall above the fireplace. Kim let me do all the research and I came to the decision that Sharp made the best LCD TVs on the market and their newest model had all the features we wanted. We went to Brandsmart and negotiated the price down $100 from Amazon.com's price for the Sharp Aquos LC46D92U flat panel TV. This saved us nearly $900 off Best Buy's sale price (not even advertised on their site).
We've already purchased a rug so the last things to deal with in the room are the drapes and art on the walls. Getting this far has been a difficult process b/c Kim and I have very different tastes. We tend to jump on anything we can agree on. It's tough to classify exactly what we each like b/c I don't know the right words for it, but I tend to like traditional things and furniture which has sort of a East Indie/South Pacific feel to it, sort of like the Ernest Hemmingway collection from Ethan Allen. Kim's taste seems to run more towards either junk or crap, but I'm not sure if those are the accurate terms ;-)
Anyway - I'll eventually post some photos for those readers who are interested (my parents).
Have you ever worked on some of those one and two thousand line stored procedures where the indentation was so messed up you couldn't really tell where that left outer join fit in? Wouldn't it be nice if there was a tool out there which would automatically format your code for you, correcting tabs, lining up outputs, and capitalizing key words and such? Turns out that there are several options out there. I've used two of them:
Reg-Gate produces SQL Refactor ($195) that does a bunch of things beyond just reformatting SQL statements. I tried the demo of this product and felt that it was a great asset and should be in my toolkit. Unfortunately, $195 is a bit steep for something that I don't need all that often as I don't really live inside of SQL Management Studio. Maybe a SQL DBA can justify this cost to their employer, but I couldn't.
I did come across SQLinForm yesterday - a free Java-based formatter which can be used as an online version or as a downloadable desktop version. It's not quite as nice or flexible as SQL Refactor, and it does required cutting and pasting code, but it does get the job done and show you where your missing closing parens are. This was very helpful to me in my hours of need last night.
Microsoft has just released another cool beta product - (thanks, John West, for showing me this! You are the smartest guy ever!) SharedView. The idea behind this product is very similar to a NetMeeting or LiveMeeting type of software. Basically, you can share an application (and files - called handouts) in a session containing up to 15 people. Everyone can view the application and can, one at a time, be granted control to type or manipulate the shared application. You can also see at all times the cursors of the other people in the shared session, including little circle blooms when they click on something. This could be extremely helpful in a remote demo situation, where you can give control to the actual participants (something you don't normally do in a Live Meeting)
I was looking through my blog for my post on predicates when I came across an image I'd apparently cross-linked. Apparently I wasn't the only one to cross-link the image and steal the owner's bandwidth. So, rather than simply remove the image or ask people to stop, the image was replaced with a horribly obscene one. Actually, some thought went into the image's replacement b/c it was scripted to be a different image every time it was loaded (I noticed this b/c the image was different when I opened the page up in edit mode to remove the link).
Really immature. Just remove the image!
Geeks have to eat too - we aren't completely fueled by Jolt Cola. So if you're a geek and you're planning on eating today, why not eat at 6pm at Max and Erma's in Dunwoody and join several of your friends in a social activity?
Please RSVP by clicking here:
Geeks planning on attending:
- Shawn Wildermuth
- Me
- Bill (Ryan?)
- Others...
Check out MC Wildermuth's post on the topic for directions
This was a surprise to me when I saw it, but nice to see that I am getting closer to a single update point for all my important software.
This past Saturday evening TechBridge hosted their 7th annual Digital Ball. The Digital Ball is a celebration of a years worth of hard work in the non-profit sector. The charity event was also the presentation of over $75,000 in cash, free software, and consulting services. The grand prize winner this year was the joint effort by the Fulton County Childrens' Advocacy Center and the Juvenile Justice Fund. These organizations worked together to develop a software system called CACTIS which enables 11 different government bodies to efficiently track and handle child abuse and social work cases.
The event itself was a black tie affair with what looked like 1,000 people in attendence. Brendon and I both managed to wrangle tickets and we'll eventually have a photo posted of us looking snazzy [edit - photos below]. The evening began with drinks and socializing. I ran into a bunch of folks from Intellinet (who were generous enough to give me the tickets Kim and I used), Todd Fine from Wintellect, and Atlanta's own Doug Turnure. Dinner was tasty, but the caprese salad before the meal and the chocolate mousse for dessert were the best parts.
Entertainment for the evening was titled Volaire and featured a pirate-themed version of Cirque du Soleil. This was more of a knock-off of Cirque du Soleil with some singing, acrobatics, and even dancing horses. It didn't have quite the same energy of a Cirque du Soleil performance, but was quite enjoyable nonetheless.
Brendon and I have invited some of the folks from TechBridge to come to the user group meeting tonight. These guys are working for a great cause and have a huge list of projects they could use some volunteer help for. I figured that we have a significant number of people in the Atlanta area who are looking to improve their development skills by meeting on a nearly weekly basis at the user groups. Perhaps some of these dedicated individuals would like to donate some of their time to help a worthy cause? We'll make some introductions and see what happens.
If you are interested in Business Intelligence and would like to work towards getting your certification with the new Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist for test 70-445 SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence come out to theAtlanta Microsoft Professionals user group tomorrow night.
The site we will be using to collaborate is located below:
http://www.atlantamspros.com/bi
Make sure to sign up as a user on the site.
It has been a while since I last updated the site www.devcowsoftware.com, but I finally got to it this weekend. Let me know if you have thoughts for improvements to the site.
To give you an idea of what it used to look like here is a sample of the home page.
In an effort to resolve a Kerberos authentication problem affecting Sql Server Reporting Services, a change was made to the security policy on the domain controller while following the advice of this Microsoft TechNet article. This change DID fix the authentication problem but caused the following unintended side effects:
We found that any computer which had been entirely rebooted since the policy settings changes experience the above symptoms, but any machine which had only been logged off did not. This has to do with the way services are not restarted with new login credentials until the system is entirely shut down.
We found that a System Restore does fix the problem, but only until the machine is rebooted (where-upon the incorrect credentials are loaded)
Following this forum posting, we were able to reset the group policy to the default values following these steps:
On the affected workstation:
1) Go to Start/Settings/Control Panel/Administrative Tools
2) Run 'Local Security Policy'
3) Go to Security Settings/Local Policies/User Rights Assignments
4) Double click on 'Create global objects'.
The correct default settings are 'Administrators', 'INTERACTIVE' and 'SERVICE'.
5) Double click on 'Impersonate a client after authentication'.
The correct default settings are 'Administrators', 'ASPNET' (if you have the .NET framework installed) and 'SERVICE'
Even if the settings are set correctly, you may need to 'refresh' them to fix the problem. To do this, on each policy, remove one of the entries ('SERVICE' is probably the best to remove), then press OK to save the changes, and then go back in and add it back in again (click 'Add User or Group...', type 'SERVICE' into the white box, and press OK).
Then close the Local Security Settings box and reboot. If you are running in a domain with Group Policy you might want to force a group policy refresh before you reboot by running 'gpupdate /force'.
Then, by rebooting an affected machine two times (the first time to get the corrected settings, the second time to actually USE the corrected settings), we were able observe that everything was back to normal.
********* Recommendations to prevent this sort of problem in the future *********************
This problem was caused by an inadvertent end-run around procedural policies. Changes to the domain controller should have been approved by the IT staff but were not. To prevent this capability, network users, developers, and consultants should not be using a Domain Administrator account to access network resources. If we instead had limited or no access to the primary domain controller, we would have had to request permission and justify the reasons.
Long term, it is recommended that you do not use the Domain Administrator account as an identity to run services and applications. Being in this situation makes it difficult to change the password to the Domain Admin account to prevent PDC access in the future. Instead, an AD group should be created and given permissions as power users or administrators on the required boxes and consultants should be added as members to this security group.
So, six customer service agents later and my home Internet connection is finally up. The problem is, so many of the Comcast CS agents are full of BS that it is hard to get someone who knows what is going on and will admit to that knowledge or lack of knowledge. The first service guy was on the live chat feature of their site (I connected from work) and he told me to get online and download an installer. Of course, the whole "get online" part was the entire problem. However, with his "walled garden" speech I figured he might know what he was saying and that it might work. Of course, it didn't.
So I started to call in for support. Of course, this leads me to a completely separate frustration - I have almost no cell reception in the house. If I'm upstairs by the windows in the bedroom, I might get two bars. Anywhere else in the house and the call drops. My home phone is Vonage and requires an Internet connection. So that was out. Le sigh.
So I moved the modem and cables and whatnot upstairs to work on this. From the bedroom window I call the first agent. Twenty minutes on the phone and she tells me that she's not sure what's going on but there is a reported outage *near* me so she thinks that's the problem. At least she credits the account for two days of service.
The second time I call in I get an agent who is able to report more on the outage. According to this guy, only 4 out of 480 modems on my grid are reporting themselves as connected. My modem is apparently completely not detectable. Ok - this guy sounds authoritative and he says the outage should be fixed in 90 minutes.
I call back at 9:30pm, 90 minutes after my previous call. The person I get this time doesn't know what outage I'm talking about, but he can tell something is wrong with my modem. I happen to own another cable modem but this modem doesn't respond either. So I'm transferred to an agent in the Modem Activation department. This guy spends some time screwing around before telling me that the outage must be responsible. So I tell him that I want to arrange for a technician to come to the house tomorrow. He transfers me to agent #6, back in the general tech support area. This guy had an odd way of speaking, but was the first person with actual skills that I spoke with. He was able to find my modem, see that it reported itself as on but disabled, and track that back to a mismatch in the internal Comcast provisioning applications. Apparently they use two systems to allow modems to access their network. Both contain an address, but only one of the two had been updated to reflect the new address. The guy fixed the mismatch and suddenly I was online! Yay for this guy!
So - the lesson is this. If you get that "Welcome to Comcast High Speed Internet" page with a link to a downloadable installer, call support. First have them check to see if your modem is online. If not, have them make sure that all the information in BOTH of their nameless provisioning applications agree with reality. Make sure that your account is active and that you have a gateway created. Once all this stuff is done, you should be online. You'd think this could have been automated, especially since they offer a "Transfer your service" web page complete with forms to fill out. It was all supposed to be automatic. I should have asked for the guy's manager to compliment him and complain about the general shakiness of the general customer service experience but I was too tired after two full hours on the phone.
So this morning I take the modem back downstairs, hook it up to the wireless router and the Vonage box. Now everything works as it should. Yippee. Now I just hope that Vonage doesn't go out of business and shut off its service.