Month: October 2007

Canada photos are up

The photos from our Canada trip are now uploaded. I haven’t entered any captions or explanations yet though – that will take some time to do. I had hoped to use Zooomr to host the photos but their infinite upload program just doesn’t work. It has uploaded a lot of the photos but a lot of them also come up as “Sorry this photo is currently unavailable”. I’m about to give up on Zooomr as there seems to be no interest in fixing the problems that have existed ever since the botched upgrade to version 3 took place back in May sometime. Unfortunately the head of Zooomr seems to be now focused on the Japanese market and gimmicks and less on the multitude of fixes. A real shame as they had a promising product. So, my pictures are hosted on my website for now and I’ll update the descriptions soon – honest!

Fiends In Tech 2007 special

Coming out of the Shadows this October 24th (tomorrow)…Fiends in Tech present our 3rd Annual Halloween Special:

“It’s the Great Server Chuck and Kreg”

Convinced that the Great Server will be making its yearly appearance, Kreg refuses to go Trick-or-Treating with the rest of the FiT gang and instead pulls an all-nighter in the server room.

Don’t Miss it!

…and while you are waiting, be sure to revisit our earlier Specials

The Server Room of Horrors
The Server Room of Horrors 2006

This is the second year that I’ve played a part in these specials – they’ve been really fun to do. I’ve not actually listened to the whole thing yet either as I’m waiting for the official release to come out tomorrow although I know it will be a good show. Don’t forget to keep an eye out on the main Friends in Tech blog for the release.

We’re back.

We had a great time in Canada visiting Niagara Falls and Waterloo where our friends lived. Had a very relaxing week but a long drive home. When we got home, we opened the tons of mail that had arrived during the week – tonight I get to pick up my new ipod from Key Bank for opening a new account. We also got a letter from our insurance company, Hartford, that said they had mislaid 3 backup tapes and that Kristen’s data was on the tape. They are providing the usual 1 year worth of credit monitoring for free (which nowadays seems like a cheap fallback option with no care being taken of the data) but the concerning thing is we were told a month after the tapes were lost and only her data is on the tapes. I’m not convinced this is accurate as surely my SSN is also on the data for the car insurance? We’ll be calling today to get the credit monitoring service set up, setting up a credit freeze and seeing about getting my data included too.

Having a great time in Canada.

Having a great time in Niagara Falls – whose tagline should be “Tackier than Blackpool*. The street that we walk down on the way to the falls is called Clifton Hill and is super super tacky. There are about 5 or 6 haunted house/horror house type attractions and we’ve counted at least 4 waxwork museums. Fortunately the Falls area is much nicer and there is some nice gardening going on to keep it looking good. Yesterday I went geocaching and walked about 6 or more miles – my feet now ache – and visited both the Canadian and the US side of the falls. Although I took my camera I forgot to bring my sd card reader with me so you will have to wait for a week until I can upload the photos. My first shot across the Horseshoe Falls should hopefully come out really well – as I took the picture a seagull flew straight into the frame – the thumbnail in the camera looks pretty good – hopefully the full size picture will be good too. Kristen and I also took some portrait pictures in the secret garden – again the thumbnails look good…..
Today we’re leaving Niagara and are heading out to Waterloo…now where did I put the Abba collection?

* but our water is cleaner – probably.

Dell OpenManage failing to start

If the Dell Openmanage console fails to open with a “page cannot be found” and the DSM SA Connection Service fails to stay running, then remove the Dell Openmanage software and then run the omclean utility in the openmanage\support\omclean directory. Reboot when prompted and then reinstall the OpenManage console and everything should work. This took 1.25 hours to work out with Dell tonight. I’m glad we got it fixed and hopefully this will help others.

Ohio Theatre Pics uploaded

I finished uploading the Ohio Theatre pictures to Zooomr yesterday. It took a while to process the pictures and narrow down the selection. I didn’t use a flash for most of the shots, but as most of the decorative items were lights, the flash wasn’t needed. For the few shots that I did use the flash, I often preferred the ambient light versions instead.
For those of you in Columbus, into photography and meeting up with other photographers, then I strongly recommend you keep an eye on the Flickr group and also the Upcoming group pages. (Both have rss feeds)

Removing an Ultrium tape

I didn’t know that you can only eject an ultrium tape drive when it is completely rewound. Detailed instructions from HP on removing an Ultrium drive are provided. Our Dell technician didn’t know this and we were given the ability to remove the tape *any* way we liked when a tape was stuck in a drive that was replaced. Now I’d like to know if this would have solved the problem….
Thanks IT Technobabble

Cannot connect to servername on a new sql instance

I’m not an expert at SQL by any means but I installed a new version of SQL server 2005 and got a cryptic message “Cannot connect to servename. Additional information – An error has occurred while establishing a connection to the server. When connecting to SQL Server 2005, this failure may be caused by the fact that under the default settings SQL Server does not allow remote connections. (provider: Named Pipes Provider, error:40 – Could not open a connection to SQL Server) (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 2)
I thought it was ironic that I couldn’t use the management software to manage the system to try and work out what was wrong. After enabling TCP/IP on the server interfaces I was still not able to connect. Google searches didn’t return any useful information. After a while of testing various things we discovered that changing the Servername entry to be servername\instancename it works. As this is a replacement server the instance for SQL is not the same as the hostname for the server. In my case I had to put the servername as server2\server (with server being the instance created and the same as the instance on the current live server).
Hopefully this will save somebody some time.