March 12, 2010
For the last day or so, we’ve been working on rolling out the next release of our code to our QA environment. When it came time to build a new set of solutions I stumbled across a weird validation error.
An error occurred while validating. HRESULT=80004005
This error popped up on the setup applications for several new programs. Doing some searching I stumbled across a couple of posts that hinted on removing the project output from the setup, and trying again. This stopped the errors on the setup application, but not the actual application itself.
Then I saw a hint in the errors list…
Application Configuration file "App.config" is invalid. '-' is an unexpected token.
Checking into the app.config file, I stumbled across the cause. It looks like somebody had pasted code that had been “fixed” up by Outlook, or word, and broken a comment. Fixing this, resolved both the app compilation, and the setup validation error.
Technorati Tags: Work
Posted in Microsoft, Work
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March 8, 2010
We had great weather last weekend in Dallas, reaching a nice 62F, so we decided to hit the Dallas Zoo. It’s probably the first time I’ve got the camera out in a while, excluding some small photo shoots for the office. Lugging around my D70s, and my Sigma 70-200, managed to make a complete circuit of the zoo this time. We ended up walking about 2 miles, and another mile on the monorail. GPX file for the tour can be found here, which can be opened in Google Earth, or your favourite GPS manager. Tinkering with some new software Zoner Photo Studio Professional, which is capable of taking GPS information, and creating KMZ files, and append the images to the map, as you can see here.
The picture to the right is probably one of my favourite from the trip. More can be seen on my gallery.
EDIT: Forgot to actually link to the KMZ file… oups.
Technorati Tags: Dallas Zoo, Photography
Posted in Photography
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March 6, 2010
For the longest time, I’ve had a random image sitting in the right sidebar. It happily picks random images from my local gallery. Last night, I figured it was about time to play catch up on the Gallery2 install we had been using. After all, we were on 2.2.3, and they were up to 2.3.something. All was working well, gallery loaded, images were all showing, everybody was happy. Until I checked the front page of my blog.
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Technorati Tags: Gallery2, Wordpress, WPG2
Posted in Open Source, Technology
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March 1, 2010
Part of our move was including the building of the new DR environment. Like most people, we cheated, and cloned the production servers to the new environment. One issue was host naming changes. In our DR environment, the host names change due to the location, and roll of the servers. This means that various IIS config options are now incorrect. This is easily fixed with the new AppCmd in IIS7.
appcmd set vdir /vdir.name:"SiteName/virtual_dir" /physicalPath:"\\NewServer\Images"
The command is relatively easy to understand. /vdir.name is the path to the site, and virtual directory, and /physicalPath is the new path. Easy huh?
Technorati Tags: AppCmd, IIS, Microsoft
Posted in Microsoft, Work
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February 11, 2010
Snowing for about 24 hours now… Okay, so not as bad as up north… but I’m in Dallas, TX, we shouldn’t have snow…
**Statement as of 7:10 PM CST on February 11, 2010**
… Greatest all-time calendar day snow on record set at Dallas Fort
Worth…
… Record 24-hour snow for February set at Dallas Fort Worth…
… Record daily maximum snowfall for February 11th set at Dallas
Fort Worth…
Through 7 PM CDT… Dallas Fort Worth Airport has recorded 7.9 inches
of snow. This breaks the greatest calendar day snow on record. The
old record is 7.8 inches set on January 15… 1964 and January 14…
1917.
This also breaks the record 24-hour snowfall for February which
was 7.5 inches… set on February 17… 1978 and February 25… 1924.
Obviously… .this shatters the record daily maximum snowfall for
February 11th… of 1.4 inches which was previously set in 1988.
With the snow continuing… the snow total will increase. An updated
record event report will be sent later this evening.
Technorati Tags: Weather
Posted in General Ramblings
1 Comment »
January 25, 2010
I’m obviously playing catch up with a number of posts I’ve been meaning to do. This was something from something I read back in November by Tom Limoncelli, but was something I had planned on writing about anyway. The post, titled “Run, run, run, dead“, brings a nice analogy of things breaking in the analog/digital eras, and points out that as system administrators, we should be using the analog method of monitoring.
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Posted in Sys Admin, Technology, Work
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January 25, 2010
Back in November, a post on SysAdmin’s Journey had a follow-up to a Yahoo document titled Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website, specifically the fourth section. The author stumbled across an issue with AOL users not being able to see images at all.
The Yahoo document is a great source of little hints and tips, and the SAJ article is a good gotcha on one of those tips. Handy to keep around if you’re planning on tweaking your servers for a little bit of a performance boost for your users. Worth reading the document for some ideas…
Posted in General Ramblings, Technology
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January 25, 2010
“Major Hayden” has a handy tip for those running Irssi on a server in a different timezone…
/load perl
/script exec $ENV{'TZ'}='CST6CDT';
Also links back to the Irssi documentation with other handy tips.
Technorati Tags: irssi, tip
Posted in General Ramblings, Open Source, Technology
1 Comment »
January 24, 2010
PacketLife as an excellent collection of cheat sheets for networking professionals. Well worth a quick look and bookmarking for later.
Posted in Networking, Technology
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January 24, 2010
Sysadmin1138 has an interesting followup to an Ask Slashdot question about IT admin abuse… It’s a pretty complete answer, and good insight into what we system administrators have access to, and what we can do.
It’s easy to see from the response that abuse is easy for us, we have the access, the temptation is there, but we’re not all bad. I’ve known people to cross the fine line between doing their job, and looking a little deeper at somebody’s email account whilst “fixing”. It’s not hard for us to peek at chat conversations whilst we sniff out connectivity issues for servers.
Whilst we may possess the power to do so, most of us follow ethics, if not officially documented ethics, our own personal ones. And whilst there are always a few bad apples, it applies to all industries, the large majority of us are good, don’t let the few bad ones make you think we’re all out to spy on you.
Technorati Tags: Ethics
Posted in General Ramblings
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