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MADPASS Monthly Meeting Tonight!

The second meeting for the Madison Area SQL Server Users Group is tonight. The talk is about SQL Server Clustering for High Availability.

Meetings are always FREE and food is provided.  Details about the next meeting can be found below.
In an ongoing attempt to make the content presented useful to our members we start each meeting with a short Q&A session.  Unless noted in the meeting notes the schedule for each meeting will be:
5:30 – 5:45 – General Q&A session & Announcements
5:45 – 6:15 – Short Presentation
6:15 – 6:45 – Food & Networking
6:45 – 7:45 – Main Presentation
7:45 – 8:00 – Door Prizes & Q&A Session

Topic:   

SQL Server Clustering for High Availability

Date:

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011  5:30 PM

Speaker:

Michael SteinekeMichael Steineke is the Vice President of Information Technology for Edgenet – Big Hammer.  He has been working with NLBS and Windows Clustering on Windows NT 4 Server through 2008R2, creating clusters with IIS, File System, SQL, ISA, and Hyper-V, including geographically dispersed clusters.  Michael has designed and implemented multiple systems for scalability, high availability and disaster recovery.

Location:

2310 Crossroads Drive
Madison, WI 53718

Park behind the building and walk in main entrance.
Our room will be straight ahead on the first floor.

Live Meeting:
Click here to enter the meeting.

Add Meeting to Calendar:

Click here to add the meeting to your calendar.

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Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

Windows Phone – Samsung Focus

Picked up a Samsung Focus yesterday, device only, no contract. Testing it out. Going to do some development and what not. More to come on this front, but after using it for the first few hours..

1. Can’t connect to hidden wifi networks.

If you have your wireless network hidden, you are out of luck, you need to have the SSID broadcast

2. Facebook Sync doesn’t work (or work well) when you have Facebook account settings set to HTTPS

I can see this happening right now as Facebook just turned that on recently and the phone doesn’t know how to handle, but it should.

3. It’s light.

Can hardly feel it in my pocket

4. I like the UI but seems very “jumpy”

seems like you bounce around a lot.

Other than that, still getting to know it. I haven’t moved my SIM card over yet (btw, the iPhone 4 is a mini SIM, so you need an adapter), but I might, we will see.


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Agile Business Intelligence Geeky/Programming SQLServerPedia Syndication

Agile: Creating an SSRS Burndown Chart Part 3

In the previous 2 parts (see Part 1 and Part 2) of this series I showed you how to get your data ready, and how to get your report started and your Datasets and parameters where you need them. In this part, we will get the graph functional, and in the next part, we will make it pretty.

Start by adding title to your report “Agile Burndown”, then add a Line Chart to your report. Make it somewhat big, delete the Chart Title and Axis Titles,  and remove the “Details” from the Category Groups. You should have something that looks like this:

 

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Now to get the data on and finish it off!

Drag your values over to your Chart Data Values area like this:

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One thing we need to tweak, and this is on the PointsLeft Value. Right click on the PointsLeft series and go to “Series Properties”. To the right of the Value field, click the Fx button (for Expression Functions).

We need to change this series to not write out anything to the graph if there are no points greater than today. Why? If you don’t do this, your graph line for PointsLeft will drop off to zero for dates in your sprint after the current day, and we don’t want this. This is what the expression should be:

 

=IIF(Sum(Fields!PointsLeft.Value)=0 And Fields!Date.Value > DateTime.Now,Nothing,Sum(Fields!PointsLeft.Value))

 

Pretty cool, your graph should actually work now and function as a working burndown chart. But of course we need to pretty it up! Look for the next and final post soon.

Categories
Business Intelligence Geeky/Programming SQLServerPedia Syndication

SQL 2008 R2 IntelliSense May Stop Working After Updating to VS2010 SP1

Ran into this tonight. The other day I updated to Visual Studio 2010 SP1, and my IntelliSense in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 2008 R2 stopped working.

I updated by SQL 2008 R2 install to CU6 and the IntelliSense started working again.

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SharePoint

SharePoint 2010 Blogging: Turning on Comments and Comment Approval

Not sure this is the case in all configurations, YMMV. In SharePoint 2010, it seems like blog commenting isn’t “on” by default. Everything should work fine but once you start posting, other people won’t be able to add comments even though there is a comment link at the bottom of each post. How to get it blog post comments working? A few basic things that I will go into detail on.

First, get to your blog “site” in your browser, and go to “Site Actions->View all Site Content”.

Once there, you will see that Categories, Comments, Links and Posts are just SharePoint lists. Pretty cool. Go into the “Comments” list.

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Once in the Comments list, click on “List” at the top, and on the List Ribbon click “List Settings”.

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Click on the “Versioning Settings” link. In there, you want to check the setting:

1. Require Content Approval for submitted items? – yes. if you want to have some gatekeeper between new comments and them being published.

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Under “Advanced Settings” link

1. Item-Level permissions. You want “read all items” for Read Access and “Create items and edit items that were created by the user” for Create and Edit access.

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In the "Permissions for this List” link, you want to probably break Inherited permissions, and then add “Authenticated Users” with “Contribute” and “Read” permissions.

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As a final setting, you want to probably get alerted on new comments. So back on the main “List” ribbon, you want to click on “Alert Me” and set up the appropriate alerts, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

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That does it, after going through all those motions, you should be able to have other people comment on your SharePoint 2010 blog, get alerted, and approve comments. Pretty cool (For what it’s worth, this shouldn’t be this complicated!)

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Why don’t I see Windows 7 SP1 in Windows Update? Could be Video Drivers!

This weekend was Daylight Savings Time.. Spring Ahead. You are supposed to set all your clocks ahead 1 hour if your area observes DST. With that, you are also supposed to change your batteries in your smoke alarms, or that is at least what “they” tell you to do. Probably another good thing to do is run patches on all your systems!

I updated around 4-5 Windows 7 Machines at home, couple desktops, few VM’s, and it was fine. My work laptop (a Del Latitude E6410) I couldn’t see the update in Windows Update. I figured maybe it would get pushed later from WSUS or whatever, but also had a hunch something else was up, and I was right.

If you look here (Microsoft KB) there is a nugget about

 

Check whether you have Intel integrated graphics driver Igdkmd32.sys or Igdkmd64.sys and whether you upgraded the driver

Windows 7 SP1 will not appear in Windows Update if update 2454826 is not installed. Windows Update will not offer you update KB2454826 if you are using one of the following Intel integrated graphics drivers:

  • Igdkmd32.sys (32-bit), versions 8.15.10.2104 through 8.15.10.2141
  • Igdkmd64.sys (64-bit), versions 8.15.10.2104 through 8.15.10.2141

These drivers are known to cause problems with certain applications that use D2D (Direct2D). For example, if you use these drivers together with Windows Live Mail under certain circumstances, Windows Live Mail could crash. 
To check for the Intel integrated graphics driver and driver version, follow these steps:

  1. Start DirectX Diagnostic Tool. To do this, click Start

    Start button

    , type dxdiag in the Search programs and files box, and then press Enter. 

  2. Click the Display tab.
  3. Note the driver and driver version.
  4. If you have the Intel integrated graphics driver and driver version 8.15.10.2104 through 8.15.10.214, visit the computer manufacturer’s website to see whether a newer driver is available.

 

Well, that is what I saw on my laptop. So I updated the drivers, and rebooted, re-ran Windows Update, and boom! Windows 7 SP1 showed up. Nice.

Note: not sure this is the right link, but here is what I installed: Dell drivers and downloads

Categories
SharePoint

SharePoint Lists and Missing Items

In SharePoint 2007/2010, if you have a list and you create different views on the list, you better make sure that the filters you set up actually work, otherwise your views will get no items. It is always good to leave a “All Items” view with no filters, etc. That way you can verify that your list is “working”.

Just ran into the issue where a list had 3 views, none of which had any items. You could sit and add new items all day and they would never show up. It had no “All Items” view, which I recreated and saw all the items in the list. Went into the other created filtered views and tweaked the filter and they all worked.

No need to delete that default “All Items”, I am guessing they have it there for a reason 🙂

Categories
Geeky/Programming

ATI Catalyst HDMI and Overscan/Underscan

I bought a new Dell machine a couple years ago for the sole purpose of doing Windows Development (my main home machine is a MacBook Pro). Everything is fine on the windows machine, except the dang monitor. By default, ATI and their “Catalyst Control Center” – which I have found to be utter garbage over the years, decides to set to underscan at 8.5% by default. Which leaves you with a big black margin around your main desktop from the edge of your monitor.
I had this all fixed a long time ago, but Windows Update had an update for the driver, which updated the CCC from ATI, which was completely wacked. Wouldn’t even let me set all the settings I used to be able to set.

I went and found the updated CCC at their site and installed over the top, and now could set the overscan/underscan to 0%. It is beyond me why this isn’t the default setting to begin with. Back when I first got it I had to search around to figure this out, many other people have the same issue. Not sure why they don’t set it to 0% out of the box. Anyway, here is the place you can change it:

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Follow up to "Operating a Computer is like Operating a Car"

After getting said laptop from Dad and fixing, couple of things to note.

1. “System Tool” infection is wicked, but fixable: best fix here

2. Try try try to remove access to IE. But you can’t completely. But you can do this. Create an htm file somewhere on the C drive, and edit to say something in size 20 font like “Dad, don’t use IE, use Google Chrome” and link to Google Chrome path on the machine. Set it as the homepage (file://c:blah.htm)

Categories
Geeky/Programming Life Ramblings

Operating a Computer is like Operating a Car

Old people. Yeah, well, older than me. Not part of the “Nintendo” generation. Computers are “hard”. They didn’t grow up with them. They need to learn how to use them. Now don’t get me wrong, many people in that older generation are actually the pioneers of the computer age (Bill Gates? Steve Jobs?, etc), many are very good and know how to use. But I am talking about.. parents, your average joe’s, etc. They have no clue.

Analogy: Owning the computer, and operating is, is like owning and operating your car.

Giving a computer, especially a Windows machine, to a baby boomer and saying “have fun”, is tantamount to giving the keys for your car to a seven year old, and showing them how to shift and hit the gas. Yea, they will be able to drive it for a little bit, but they are going to crash.

And then you hear “well, I am only checking email and surfing the web”.. and I would say, ok, well just give your seven year old the car and have them drive around your yard. They are still going to crash, just into the tree in your yard instead of the ditch.

You just don’t jump into a car and know how to operate and drive it, you actually need to get training and get a license. Same thing should go for computers. Simple things like, “go to this address” or “run this program”, etc. Knowing how to type in a URL and hit should be like unlocking your car and buckling up. Just common knowledge. If it isn’t, you need training. One other problem? Most boomers that need the training (and probably “want” it) don’t really want to take the time to learn. They just want it to work. They want to get email, surf the web, do eBay, see pictures, and not worry. So, go to days of training, have family members or the geek squad fix your computer over and over and over.

Or just get an iPad.