Month: October 2006

PLEASE do something about the tv ads!

I really wish the tv companies would increase their fees for advertising so that the politicians couldn’t afford to run their stupid mud slinging adverts which tell you absolutely nothing about what they will be able to do for the voter and that contradict each other. Some of the advert breaks are getting ridiculous with the number of political ads running one after each other. If the kids tv channels weren’t already running their christmas adverts I’d be watching the kids channels for the next week.
Politicians – grow up, stop slagging off the people you may well have to work with and get on with your job of improving the country and letting us know what you are going to be doing for the next few years.

MT Upgrade

Finally got around to upgrading to version 3.x of MovableType. I saw the notice that they had an important security fix come out just before we went on holiday and today has been the first day I’ve had a chance to sit down and look at the upgrade path. Almost everything looks good (the interface looks REALLY nice but when I click on Kristen’s or my blog in the main menu page I get the error message

Can’t call method “entry_id” on an undefined value at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 1956.

Not sure why I get this message on two of the blogs when the other blogs seem to be fine.

Cruise photos are up

The Cruise photos are now online at zooomr. There are a lot of them and a couple of big panorama ones too so don’t view them on dialup! All the photos are in the Cruise album or you can look at each country individually. Let me know what you think and what you think of the zooomr interface. There are a couple of things I’d love to change but at least it gives me free storage for the large amount of photos. All the photos are also downloadable in their original size too.

I get interviewed!

Victor from Immigration Tales interviewed me earlier on in the week over skype and my immigration memory from the uk is now online. If you’ve ever wondered what I sound like (and like british accents) then go and check it out. Hopefully there are some useful tips for people in the same situation. A couple of websites that I would recommend are Visa Journey for information on the visa process and also MSN expats mailing list and also there are my posts on moving to the states.
There are also several other interviews that have already been posted with some really fascinating stories.

Oh – and keep an eye out on In The Trenches for my next interview about my life and career as a techie (which hasn’t actually been recorded yet…..

cure to 0x800423f4 with ntbackup failing

One of our clients has been having issues with Volume Shadow Copy and SQL (MSDE) causing the backup to fail with the error 0x800423f4. By following the script at TazNetworks it looks like the backup might work tonight. It’s too early to tell but at least when I kicked the job off briefly it started to some work rather than just quit out of ntbackup.
Update Unfortunately the solution didn’t work for me, but I noticed that there was a hotfix available (904418) which is for x86 based operating systems. I noticed that they were trying to register the Sqlvdi.dll file, so I reran the registration of this dll (which wasn’t in the original script above), restarted ntbackup and the system state backup worked ok which was great news as it wasn’t working previously. I then kicked off the nightly backup to run though and it looks like it is working, so in short –

cd C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\80\COM
regsvr32 sqlvdi.dll