Nerdzapper

Yesterday, around 7:00 PM Eastern Time, the last known instance of Windows ME was put to rest. At least that’s how it felt to me. You see my parents (two very bright people I’ll have you know) have been running Windows ME for the past seven years, to my horror. Saturday night they finally purchased a new computer and Sunday night I had everything set up for them.

I had begged my parents for years to upgrade to Windows XP, but they never got around to it. In that timespan, they went through three computer monitors, and “the computer is running so slow” phone calls to their loving son. My reply was always, “you need to upgrade”. When Vista launched, I knew they were going to need new hardware as there was no way their old Dell would be able to run Vista. In the end, the computer did my convincing for me, and I didn’t have the heart or free time to resuscitate it one last time.

The Windows ME machine didn’t go down without a fight, however. I hooked up their cable modem up to the new laptop and of course Windows Vista didn’t have any drivers to handle the device. “No problem”, I thought to myself. “I’ll just hop on the Internet and download the driver.” Then I remembered the only internet connection I had was on the ME machine, the same one that took five minutes to download a simple web page. Add to this a toddler who was giving my wife quite a workout, and the situation was stressful to say the least. We decided to hit the pool while the driver downloaded. I cursed at myself for not bringing my laptop.

Sufficiently waterlogged after an hour in the pool, we returned inside and my download was complete. I plugged the USB drive into the ME machine, rebooted (the only way it would recognize the drive) , and copied the driver to the device. Next I installed the driver on the new laptop and it recognized the modem. R.I.P. Windows ME.

Maybe my parents weren’t the last ones to be running Windows ME, but it sure felt like it. It sure feels nice now that they have bought their new computer. Windows Vista isn’t the greatest, but it sure will be easier for me to manage.

I’m not sure what my parents will do with the old computer. If it was mine I’d probably reformat the hard drive and install Linux. At some point we’ll have to get their data off the old machine onto the new one. That’s a project for another day. In the meantime, my Mom and Dad are very grateful to be able to connect to the Internet on their new computer, without have to wait a lifetime. I told them that was one favor I did for them compared to a thousand they have done for me.

Anyone else know of a Windows ME machine still out there in the wild?

I’ve pretty much written off trying to use Wine. I have 3 programs that I need to be able to run in Linux or find an acceptable alternative and then my wife will be done with Windows, too. None of those 3 programs run in Wine. I think that two of them might have Linux alternatives that she would like at least as much as the Windows version.

Since I already have Windows XP, I’m trying to find the time to shrink down my ext3 Kubuntu installation to make run so I can have VMware Converter make a new image of the XP instance for me. Then, I’m planning on having VMware take a shot at running Windows XP inside Kubuntu.

This is my long term plan because it will put me well on the way to getting little virtual instances of different Linux flavors to experiment with. Plus I’d like to try FreeBSD and maybe even OpenDOS someday just to see what they do.

But, Wine 0.9.44 has been released.

I don’t see anything that really gives any indication that it will help those three programs run, but maybe I’ll have to take a night and see what happens.

Content is king on the internet, right? Yet we keep throwing more and more junk into our sidebars.

I’m in the process of cleaning up the sidebars on another of my sites because it was starting to scare me.

Gayla at Mom Gadget was getting pretty frustrated because of how slowly her site was loading. I frequently joke with her about all of the gadgets and gizmos on her sidebar so I knew she should try to fix it before considering moving it since moving it probably wouldn’t help the pageload time much.

So I volunteered to find a way to get it to load faster and started hitting the refresh button to figure out what was going on.

The left sidebar would pop right up, the right sidebar would hesitantly follow and then up to 10 seconds later the content in the middle would decide to arrive. Not good.

It looked like the images from the MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog widgets were causing the delay.

But how could I fix that without getting rid of them.

I dug into the php files and noticed that the call to the sidebar was happening in the index.php, single.php and page.php files before the content. (There is not archive.php file in the theme).

Without even bothering to dig through the style.css file, I knew that there was something that slammed the left sidebar all the way left and the right sidebar all the right and then the content just fills in between.

So, I moved that one line call to the sidebar down to the bottom of those two php files and magic began. The page loads faster.

Technically the page doesn’t actually load any faster. The page just appears to load faster because the content shows up first. The right sidebar still trudges along but nobody notices because they are busy reading through the posts.

As a side benefit, in the html file, the content shows up before any of the sidebar information. So search engines will find the content earlier in the file. I’m pretty sure that I have heard that search engines like to focus on the text toward the top of the html file.

Anyway, if your site makes you go find a snack while waiting for the page to load, you might want to see if you can simply move the sidebar call to later in the process.

If you think you might have a similar problem and want somebody to take a look, let me know.

I learned a cool little trick the other day, something that will help me immensely with testing my SQL Server 2005 security setup. The trick I learned is the Execute As clause in T-SQL.

I have a database that I want certain users to be able to work with, but not others. In the past I would set up security as I thought it should be set up and then ask a user to test it out. This is a pain in the butt, to put it nicely. First of all, people are busy and don’t always want to be bothered to test things for a DBA. Second of all, people don’t like to know they can’t do things. With Execute As, I no longer have to bug any users. I can “Execute As” that user.

For example, let’s suppose I don’t want UserA to be able to Select from the ExecutiveSalary table in the Employee database. If I’m a member of the sysadmin role (which I am) I can simply say:

Execute as user=’UserA’

Select *

From Executive Salary

SQL Server will try to do the Select statement using UserA’s permissions rather than my own, and UserA never has to know. This is just one of those easy tricks that are sometimes easy to miss, but that really make an administrator’s life easier.

When I first purchased my laptop and started running Vista, I was a big fan of the new GUI interface, especially Window Aero. As I began installing my applications, however, I began to notice some problems with the interface. I wrote this post originally on my writing blog, but I thought I’d post it on this site as it fits better here (with a few edits):

As I mentioned in my hard-drive recovery with Linux post, my P.C. died a few months ago. In it’s place I bought a laptop,which came pre-installed with Windows Vista Home Premium. I’m not one to be an early adopter for anything made by Microsoft, but I also didn’t want to get stuck with an operating system Microsoft was going to abandon in a few years (I’m talking about XP - I hope they don’t abandon Vista). Vista has performed well for me so far, except for a few gotchas (don’t get me started on hardware compatibility, though).

First of all, though, I like the new look and feel of Windows. Sometimes, it’s just nice to have a change. Also, if you have the proper graphics card and such (I do), you can run a version of Vista that includes Windows Aero which has such features as translucent windows and Window Flip 3D. See the pictures below.

Not too bad for Windows, right? Unfortunately, there is a problem. Some applications disable Windows Aero. For example, if you use applications such as QuickTime or iTunes, Windows automatically disables Windows Aero, which means no more translucent windows and no more Flip 3D. I haven’t found a list anywhere that describes which programs are incompatible with Aero, so it’s kinda hit and miss when you install something new.

If your version of Aero seems to have stopped working, use MSConfig to see what you have running at startup (type MSConfig at the Run Command). If you are having trouble finding the Run Command in Windows Vista, simply press the Windows key and “R” key together. It seems they hid the Run command by default in Vista.

Anyhow, I just thought I’d post this for all of you Windows users who wondered why their desktops weren’t as pretty as they used to be. You are probably just running something that doesn’t play nicely with Vista yet.

********************UPDATE****************************

After downloading the newest version of iTunes, I seem to have less of a problem with Aero. I’m still having problems with my Vista Sidebar, as it seems to be disabled on startup 50% of the time, due to software conflicts. As I’ve said before, though, I really don’t use it much anyhow.

One of the downsides of actually having a job is that I am forced to work in Windows for a living. I miss the days when I got to work in Unix most of the day.

I regularly use a piece of software for work that uses a tabbed window like this:

The one for work has a lot of text fields that we use for mapping data from one format to another. Each tab has different data fields that need something keyed into them. On a day when I am creating a new translation map, I can easily spend several hours setting up the input side and clicking on each of those tabs hundreds of times.

I really hate any data entry type of thing where you have to click and then type for a couple seconds and then click again.

While doing this the other day, I accidentally found out that you can click Ctrl+Tab and it will cycle through the tabs. Ctrl+Shift+Tab cycles backwards.

I’m disappointed that I never stumbled upon something this simple that can have such a huge impact on my quality of work life. My doctor is going to be disappointed that I will be able to postpone any carpal tunnel surgeries for a couple years.

My parents have a computer running Windows XP Home Edition with Service Pack 2. It has not been defragged or reinstalled during the 3 years they have been running it.

I was able to get them using Firefox and OpenOffice. They only make minimal use of any of the other software and could easily be switched to Linux versions of those programs.

I am going to be installing another 512MB of ram soon. During that time, I will also be backing up all of their data and reinstalling everything.

Now that I am the newest Linux self-appointed evangelist, I’m trying to decide if I should just convert them over. I can’t think of one reason they would need to stay on Windows and they would always be able to switch back if they didn’t like it.

Now, I should point out that my parents know absolutely nothing about computers besides how to run a few basic programs. They are absolutely the surf, word process, unload photos from the digital camera, and occasionally play a CD straight from the CD player.

The one stumbling block might be that my dad is starting his retirement career as a home inspector and is planning on buying some specialized software for the job. The software runs on Windows.

I’m pretty sure he is going to end up using a laptop for that, though, so he can take it onsite and print the reports before leaving the job.

I think if I put shortcuts to Firefox, OpenOffice, F-Spot Photo Manager, and any CD music player on the desktop, they probably would barely noticed that anything that had happened.

I’ll probably set them up with Kubuntu, my current Linux flavor of choice. I’ve noticed that my wife only logs out of Kubuntu to run a few specific Windows-only programs. I’m guessing that a lot of normal computer users could make the switch without even noticing as long as somebody did the installation for them.

I’m starting to think that my parents might be the next Linux converts. I’ll just tell them that they don’t need to pay to update Norton every year…or any year…and that I only support Linux now.

Do you know any Windows users that you think could convert without any real problems as long as somebody did the installation? What are you waiting for?

I thought I’d share a little information with you today about something I came across when upgrading to SQL Server 2005, so you can avoid some of the frustrations I had to deal with.

In our SQL Server 2000 environment we had a few DTS packages which import data every night from text files via the scheduler. These packages were a pain in the butt to set up, because they were importing data from text files that weren’t delimited. This meant defining all those columns as fixed width using that horrible interface. Anyhow, when upgrading to SQL Server 2005 the last thing I wanted to do was re-create these DTS packages.

Luckily SQL Server 2005 has a conversion utility to convert these DTS packages to SSIS packages. This worked well and I had my packages in SQL Server 2005. I created a job to run my SSIS packages and that worked fine too. The problems arose when I tried to schedule these jobs. No matter what I did, the scheduled job always failed (even though I could right click on the job name, click Start Job at Step.. and the job would run successfully).

Each time I would get an error that said, “Failed to decrypt protected XML node “PackagePassword” with error 0×8009000B”. I had no real password protections on this package, so I really wasn’t sure what this error meant. Oh, I forgot to mention one thing: when we upgraded to SQL Server 2005 we also started on a new server, one that was 64-bit. It turns out this is an important detail.

Anyhow, that was the problem. The solution is a simple one, once you know it. When setting up your job, rather than defining the Type as “SQL Server Integration Services Package” as below,

instead choose “Operating system (CmdExec)”.

In the Command Window enter the following string:
“C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\dtexec.exe” /SQL “namehere” /SERVER ServerNameHere /MAXCONCURRENT ” -1 ” /CHECKPOINTING OFF /REPORTING E

Make sure to replace namehere with the name of your SSIS Package and ServerNameHere with the name of your server. Schedule this and it should run, using the old DTS execution engine.

I’ve been using Google, and only Google, for searches for years. I feel dirty when I walk into the room and see my wife or some relative using Yahoo! Search. It kind of feels like I walked in on them while they were looking for some strange kind of porn.

Anyway, I was dorking around with my Amarok today and accidently hid the menu bar. I tried right click up at the top of the window and nothing happened.

I tried hitting a bunch of different combinations of Alt+<some function key> and Ctrl+<some function key> and lots of things happened but the menu bar didn’t come back.

I tried cussing. Fortunately my wife and kids are out of the house.

I typed “amarok unhide menu bar” without the quotes figuring that I’m not the only person to accidentally do this before and found absolutely nothing that helped.

I went over to Yahoo! after shutting the curtains and locking the window and typed the exact same search phrase.

The #1 search result showed the exact answer to the problem I had created.

Isn’t that how search engines are supposed to work?

I seem to be getting fewer good results from Google recently. I’ll have to remember to try Yahoo! when that happens and if Yahoo! keeps finding the answer, I’ll have to switch over to them.

For those of you that might be interested Ctrl+M will bring back the Amarok menu bar.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am a subscriber to Popular Science Magazine. One of my favorite parts of the magazine, and the section I turn to first, is the How 2.0 Section. How 2.0 is basically a section of the magazine filled with D.I.Y. projects. They usually have an insane but cool project, a medium difficulty project, and one I could do and afford.

I’ve come to find that they have the How 2.0 Section on the web, which is nice because you can click on the links in the articles to buy parts, etc., something that obviously isn’t possible in the print version.

Anyhow, I’m lacking any ideas to write about today, I thought I’d share the link. I hope you find something there you like.