Month: July 2012

Firefox updates to v15 and tabs are wrong.

Firefox updated itself to v15 this morning and now all my tabs are wrong.
If I open multiple tabs then the url that I type in on the right most tab actually gets loaded in the tab to the left of it. As you can see from the screenshot shown here, my current url is showing LogMeIn and the “Add New Post” screen is actually to the right.
Very confusing.

Interestingly, the far left tab does show my gmail content but the second from left only shows the google page – the bing results are not found anywhere.
Also anything I type in the current window (ie this blog post) only appears when my mouse goes up to the bookmark toolbar or above.
Update It doesn’t do it when running in safe mode so has to be an extension somewhere. Thats going to take some time to debug 🙁
Update 2 This issue is actually caused by New Tab King. Disabling this addon gets firefox working again

Dropbox successfully saved my photos today.

Today was the Columbus Color Run 2012 race, a great 5k race where you run through paint stations where dried color “paint” is thrown at you. Great fun, very colourful and an ideal opportunity for taking photos and video. I was there for about 3 hours before and after the run and took several photos. Towards the end, my phone suddenly asked me to put an SD card in the memory slot. I thought this was odd but maybe the card had filled up. Resetting the phone didn’t help. When I got home I took the sd card out, put it in two card readers and neither of the readers would recognise that a card had been placed in the slot as far as the computer drive letters were concerned (it detected the card was inserted but no disk was mounted – not even an unformatted disk).
Needless to say I was really annoyed as I had lots of photos and video on there that I hadn’t even seen yet. As it turns out, the quality of most of them wasn’t very good – shooting through ziplock bags is not recommended. I’m going to have to try plastic wrap next time. Anyway, this evening I remembered that I had Dropbox installed on the phone – this automatically synchs photos and videos taken from the phone up to the dropbox servers and then downloaded to your other dropbox client pc’s. Sure enough, when I checked my dropbox folder – all the pictures and videos had been synched – I had recovered all my photos. Needless to say I’m VERY pleased.
Note that you don’t have to synchronize videos and if I remember right the defaults are only to sync video when on a wireless connection but fortunately I had turned this to sync on wifi and 3G 😉
If you’ve not used Dropbox yet, then I highly recommend you check it out. It will allow you to backup contents of your phone automatically (and if you process the photos on your computer they will already be there when you get back to the computer – no need to fiddle with hooking the phone to the computer). You can also use it to keep your documents stored offsite safely – even if you only have one computer, you still have a copy in the cloud that you can access from a webpage if required.
The good news, it is even free to start with – you get 2gb for free and we both get an extra 500Mb because I referred you if you use this link to Dropbox
Incidentally my Columbus Color Run photos are on Facebook here – you don’t need to be a Facebook member to view them.

Fixed – Sharepoint returns “Could not access the Search administration database. A generic error occurred while trying to access the database to obtain the schema version info. “

I’ve been fighting working with SharePoint for about a week and trying to get the Search Service started on my SharePoint Server. The only thing that seemed consistent in all the troubleshooting was that the SharePoint error messages were only slightly more helpful than “An error has occurred”. I ended logging a PSS support call with Microsoft and didn’t get very far for a while. My SharePoint farm consisted of the SharePoint Server and a separate SQL server to host the data and attempting to start the service I would get ‘Could not access the Search administration database. A generic error occurred while trying to access the database to obtain the schema version info.’
There are several other posts out there on updating the version of SharePoint to the latest Service Pack, Installing the latest cumulative update(2598321) and ensuring that the protocols were enabled on the SQL instance. All things I corrected, applied and did not fix the issue. (Note that installing the latest cumulative update DOES require a reboot and may stop SharePoint working until you do reboot – so make sure you install this out of hours.)
Upgrading the database is done with ‘psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures’ After running this command I noticed that the checking the status of the server with (get-spserver servername).NeedsUpdate would work fine on the SQL server, but running against the SQL server from the Sharepoint Server, it would tell me the database needed updating.
On one of my servers, Add/Remove Programs said that the hotfix was not required yet the Admin console on the website said it was. This issue was fixed with a “psconfig -cmd installcheck -noinstallcheck” (Thanks to http://tinyurl.com/7pkrbem)

After starting the service on the sql server instance, we wanted to get the SharePoint Server working as originally intended. After a long time of troubleshooting, our next step was to uninstall the SQL Native Client and reinstall it. As I went to uninstall the Native Client, Add/Remove programs told me the package was not installed. A repair or modify would not work either. Opening Regedit and searching for Native Client under HKey_Classes_Root\installer and deleting this key meant I was then able to reinstall the NativeClient.
We then tried starting the service and this time it worked. The strange thing is that some communications between the SharePoint server and the SQL server were obviously working fine – the database on SQL was created with no problems and SharePoint could see the data – it’s just weird that the initialising/upgrading of the database required the SQL native client but did not give any useful information that pointed to this fact.