On Dell machines running Windows Server 2003 they are nice enough to stick an ugly bitmap on your background. So when you VPN and RDP into the server, you get to sit and wait as it paints this image:
Thankfully, you can remove it.
Just use regedit and navigate to:
HKEY_USERS.DEFAULTControl PanelDesktop
Then delete the key for WallPaper.
It’s that simple!
I went to the last 2 Sox games: the make up “must win” game to force a tiebreaker, and the tiebreaker with the Twins, which the Sox won 1-0. Great result!
The game was a “black out” where all the fans wore black, and while I expected only 50% or so to do so, I was amazed to see almost everyone was wearing black.
It was electric!
Ok, this is awesome!
We utilize data driven subscriptions in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to automate several reports and their distribution to a group of people. For example maybe when a work order is created in the database a report with info about that order is emailed to everyone who will have to be involved in fulfiling the order.
We realized that some of these reports were not going out. By looking at the log files (located at ) it became clear that we were hitting a permissions issue:
ReportingServicesService!library!4!09/25/2008-08:15:04::
e ERROR: Throwing Microsoft.ReportingServices.Diagnostics.Utilities.AccessDeniedException:
The permissions granted to user 'MYDOMAINsomeuser' are insufficient for performing this operation., ; Info: Microsoft.ReportingServices.Diagnostics.Utilities.AccessDeniedException:
The permissions granted to user 'MYDOMAINsomeuser' are insufficient for performing this operation.
Ok that seemed to make sense. The user “someuser” had left our company and so I’m sure his account was disabled. After looking around at the report, it’s definition, the subscriptions, the data access, nothing was tied to this old employee.
But…. the subscription itself still is.
The downside of this is that there is no way to change who “owns” the subscription.
However, you can make the changes manually in the database with the following code:
DECLARE @OldUserID uniqueidentifier
DECLARE @NewUserID uniqueidentifier
SELECT @OldUserID = UserID FROM dbo.Users
WHERE UserName = 'MYDOMAINsomeuser'
SELECT @NewUserID = UserID FROM dbo.Users
WHERE UserName = 'MYDOMAINnewuserhere'
UPDATE dbo.Subscriptions
SET OwnerID = @NewUserID
WHERE OwnerID = @OldUserID
Presto, your subscription has a new owner and will once again start running correctly.
UPDATE: I am going to try to work on something that will monitor the subscriptions and notify me if one of them fail. Check back later.
Here is a great article about some of the techniques for displaying chart data using CSS.
Examples: http://apples-to-oranges.com/goodies/css-for-bar-graphs/
I recently rebuilt my computer, and after reinstalling and running trillian for several days, I realized that I never moved over my log files from my old drive.
No problem, thanks to this awesome merge tool:
http://www.zalbee.intricus.net/programming.html
It’s a simple command line utility written in java. Took me like 5 minutes to merge all my files. Awesome!
I have been poking around with NHibernate for a while now, but I am actually writing a small app with it at the moment.
During my time getting it up and running, I came across a few well written tutorials that I want to catalog here in case I want to return to them at some point for more in depth reading.
Great NHibernate Faq:
http://www.tobinharris.com/2007/2/3/nhibernate-faq
Fluent Interface for NHibernate:
http://blogs.hibernatingrhinos.com/…nhibernate.aspx
Alan Northam’s Tutorials:
http://devlicio.us/blogs/alan_northam/…part-i.aspx
http://devlicio.us/blogs/alan_northam/…part-ii.aspx
http://devlicio.us/blogs/alan_northam/…part-iii.aspx
http://devlicio.us/blogs/alan_northam/…part-iv.aspx
David Szetela has a series of an articles on the science and methods behind successful PPC strategies.
This goes into the basics of testing different ppc ads, copy, landing pages, and maximizing ROI. They say a 200% return is baseline acceptable, but 1000% is more what they are looking for.
Interesting and worth reading.
This is a great article on 10 ways to build websites faster.
They include the obvious ones like using a menu generator, but they also include some cool things like a site from Adobe for selecting color schemes.
When doing testing, you might find yourself wanting to delete cookies for some URLs on your development machine.
Now, you need to be careful about how you delete these cookies, because Microsoft decided to pull a little trick on you. They created a folder:
C:Documents and Settings[user]Cookies
This folder seems to contain all your cookies! But, actually it doesn’t. Deleting these cookies really doesn’t clear out the cookies you think you are deleting because the REAL cookies are stored in:
C:Documents and Settings[user]Local SettingsTemporary Internet Files
This folder contains cookies and other temporary internet files, but of the most importance here is that THIS is where you need to clear your cookies from.
I came across another thing on a recent project is that you can’t test for the existance of an outbound cookie.
If Response.Cookies.Item("ASDFA") Is Nothing Then
Response.Write("This Will Never Execute")
End If
Why is this? It is because with the Response.Cookies collection (but not on the Request’s cookies collection) when you request an item from the collection that doesn’t exist it CREATES it, with a value of an empty string.
Chris May 