Bored Geek: August 2005

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Working again

Today is my first day @ Honeywell. Nice to be back to work again. I was given an architecturel document. It is nice to see that someone actually follows the standard laid out in "Documenting Software Architectures".

Saturday, August 27, 2005

Knoppix

OK, I downloaded a torrent of Knoppix 3.9 and burned it to CD. When I booted up from that CD after about 30 minutes I've got a nice picture of Earth, Sun and astronaut. No icons, on the desktop, no buttons, menus, even Ctl-Alt-Delete did not work. Do I have to run Linux to see a pretty picture?

Friday, August 26, 2005

session_end is evil

session_end is evil. Not only it is not get fired if you are using state server or sql server, it gets fired at random times: like an hour after the session is expired.

A good replacement for it could be this:
http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/PageTracking.asp

Thursday, August 25, 2005

More XP SP2 troubles

You would think all the problems with SP2 are solved by now. Guess what, I had to spend tow hours trying to figure out how to run a COM+ application! I had to configure the least secure configuration of DTC to get it to work. You would think SP2 is more secure, but it does require you to run the application with elevated privileges.

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

SmartPart

This is a web part for SharePoint which allows you to load a user control.
http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2004/06/10/152932.aspx

I still lust for a tool to convert a user control to a custom control. We'll continue to search... :)

Upgrading to XP SP2

Two major issues:

Could not access SQL server on localhost. Netstat reported that the server was not listening for connections. Turned out that my server was vulnerable to Sasser, therefore XP SP2 disabled TCP/IP connectivity to the server. After installing SQL SP3a it worked again!
Was getting "Out of memory" error when trying to access AS/400 from the web app. All unit tests and windows apps were working. Had to change process model from "machine" to "system" in machine.config. Which made the system less secure, the exact opposite of what XP SP2 was going to do.

Conclusion: XP SP2 is too secure.

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Drive letter changed:

Check this out, the driver letter change on Win2K Server, triggered by installation of new RAM! I loved the error message too: "Pagefile is too small or nonexistent" with recommendation to change the pagefile size, and then throwing me back to the login screen (trying to make fun, you bustards!). Thanks to KN article Q249321 I could remotely edit registry on the computer and finally log in. C: drive was changed to G: drive. After rebooting once again now I have both C: and G: and they are identical! Fun!!!