new title coming soon blog

Logged in to the “My Adobe” site today and was greeted to this:

We're making improvements to support the newly combined Macromedia and Adobe community. Please update your password to 6-12 characters.

After typing a “bad” (strong, secure) password, I received this:

The following error(s) must be corrected before this form can be completed:
Your password must be between 6 and 12 characters and cannot contain consecutive spaces or colons.

Not good, Adobe.

I had installed Windows 7 Professional on the a SSD. Didn’t think I needed any of the features of Ultimate. Turns out booting from a VHD requires Ultimate. Fortunately I learned that “Windows Anytime Upgrade” will upgrade any version of Windows 7 to a greater version and the MSDN keys work for this. Within 5 or 10 minutes of running the upgrade, I was up on Ultimate. Little while later I was booting Windows 8 Preview Release via VHD.

We had been seeing a ton of “The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Launch permission for the COM Server application with CLSID {46063B1E-BE4A-4014-8755-5B377CD462FC} and APPID {FAAFC69C-F4ED-4CCA-8849-7B882279EDBE}” errors in the event log for our SQL 2008 R2 server. Looks like other have had the same issue and posted fixes here and here.

We’re not running SQL server and agent as a domain account since we’re not in a domain in production, but the situation is basically the same and the solution had worked so far – basically using Component Services to give the appropriate user/group Launch access.

Update I didn’t find any other issues reported about Microsoft’s time server having issues, so we’re suspecting some thing with the ESXi settings on our VM provider’s setup.

Today apparently Microsoft’s time.windows.com went wonky – or could have been our hosting provider. Caused 4 hours of pulling our hair out since several web servers weren’t able to validate sessions and users couldn’t login. Finally we looked down at the time on the server and it was 8:35pm on September 22nd, 2010! Updated the time and all was working. Our provider changed the time server out of Microsoft’s hands.

When deploying a new app in production yesterday, we struggled for hours on our configuration connecting up our WCF service through MSMQ. The key is that you MUST use the machine name of the MSMQ server – no hostname/domain name will work when using net.msmq endpoints.

This is documented here and here, but we missed it. Worked for us in our integration and UAT environment because the machine name and hostname are the same, but in production, our provider manages the VMs and uses their name as the machine name.

I’m sure the Amarok guys had good intentions with Amarok2, but I just don’t like it. Actually I hate it and think it really sucks. Not intuitive at all – I just want to play my music. The “upgrade” is an unfortunate side effect of upgrading Ubuntu from 8.10 to 9.04. I’m going back to 1.4.

Ah… yeah, now I remember… I do have a blog!

I felt like dusting the blog off and posting again.

Life sure gets busy when you have a kid! I had a grand plan to go back and add entries for the important dates – and maybe I still will, but for now I’ll just start posting.

Julien Patrick was born on September 20th, 2008, at 6:04pm. Jen went into labor around 10:30am. She had a completely natural birth – it was awesome!

Jen said I was posting too much tech stuff and she’s right.  Sorry about that, but that is what I tend to post about most…Anyway, the baby is doing great.  We’re (most likely) having a boy according to the ultrasound.  It is quite an amazing thing to see this awesome guy growing inside my wonderful wife.  And we get to hear the heartbeat during our monthly (soon to get more frequent) visits to the Midwife center.  More and more now I’m feeling the baby crawling around inside Jen – it’s so cool!

I painted the baby’s room a few weekends ago. “Brown Teepee” by Behr is an awesome color! Last week I pulled up the old carpet. The old carpet was pretty disgusting and I’m glad it’s gone. I’d like to keep the hardwood, but Jen wants new carpet installed. Either way, the room is starting to come together! Oh, we ordered the crib and dresser/changing table – really nice looking furiture!

Once I got OS X booting on my Dell desktop, I thought I’d give it a try on the laptop, a Dell Latitude D600.  I read that OS X would indeed install on the D600, since it does have SSE2 – it’s a Pentium M – using one of the OS X images floating around.  I won’t detail the whole process as others have done that.  The main down side it that the ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 is not supported – or at least not supported well, so I don’t have any hardware acceleration, but I did get it running at native resolution of 1400 x 1050.  It works pretty well – speed it comparable to XP and Ubuntu which I also have installed on the laptop.  Wireless networking worked out of the box as did sound.  The wired network connection required a kext (kernel extension) patch to get working.  All in all, not to difficult.  Why do this you ask?  1) I like OS X, 2) I can’t afford a new Mac right now and 3) It’s a cool, geeky thing to do.

No, software update doesn’t work for the system patches, but I can live without that for now.

I’ve been using an Enermax Crystal aluminum keyboard for like a year now and love it.  Since I’ll be working from home more once the baby’s born, I’m trying to get my home office as productive (or more) than my work office – that means getting my computer up to snuff.  I’ve always liked the feel of laptop (aka scissor-switch) keyboards and the Crystal keyboard has one for desktop use.  The new Enermax keyboards - apparently they don’t make the Crystal any more and it was a bit pricey - have the “L” shaped enter key which I detest, so that was out of the question for a new keyboard for home.  Luckily I found the Kensington SlimType keyboard while making a pit stop at MicroCenter the other day.  For $30 this keyboard rocks!  It’s got a really nice feel and the layout is the same as the Crystal.  Once again, I’m a happy camper.