From time to time, I end up going back, and retrying applications I originally thought were pretty nifty to see if new features have spawned, or items that I think are “missing” have finally appeared.

So I’m back to trying “Live Writer” from Microsoft again. I’ve found a couple of plugins for it that can do some things that the live editor can now do, however I’m still stuck on something that is driving me up the wall.

I wish it’d post “plain text”, rather than formatted HTML.  Okay, maybe not entirely what I meant.  When I’m editing in WLW, all is well, and it looks like plain text. However, if I post this to my blog, and then go back and edit it from Wordpress, all the text is on a single line, with HTML slapped all over the place. It’d be nice if the formatting was tidied up in the event that I went back an re-edited something.  Even simply putting in line breaks when a new paragraph starts would be nifty.

What a week. Most of this week has been dedicated to two things. The data center move, and the office move. Neither of which are fun tasks to say the least. Especially not when AT&T are jerking your chain on installs for office connectivity, voice services, and other fun items.

Whilst moving out data center from AT&T hosting, to our corporate office data center, we kept stumbling on a bit of a problem. IIS6 had terrible performance compared with IIS5. Basically it’s been keeping myself, and several of the data center techs up all night (2-3am). The behavior of the problem is that the IIS server starts generating SQL errors similar to the following:

SQL Server Does Not Exist Or Access Denied

This was odd, because neither the web server, nor SQL server were exhibiting any kind of performance issues, but we still seemed to be getting connection issues. So I started to look into it.

What I noticed was that the IIS server was opening ports up to 5000, and stopping. When it hit that ceiling, half the ports entered a TIME_WAIT state. During this time, the errors flowed freely. As soon as the TIME_WAIT sockets cleaned up, the errors went away.

I decided to do some research on TIME_WAIT sockets, and found the following item from port80software. For a quick summary, when a tcp socket is opened, data is transfered in 4 parts, a send, an acknowledgment, and finish, and a second acknowledgment. A TIME_WAIT socket occurs after the second ACK, and is basically a “lock” on the socket to keep it open to receive any stray packets that may have been delayed, or miss-routed. This stops any other application from using the port for safety. The last thing an application wants is to receive a packet that it didn’t expect, that has nothing to do with the conversation it’s currently having.

Armed with this information, I took at look on Microsoft’s support site, and found a handful of articles on TIME_WAIT stuff, KB328476 jumped out right away. It detailed TCP/IP settings that adjusted timeouts, and port settings. These looked interesting. It referenced another article on how to apply these settings in KB319502.

Applying the settings is easy, a quick registry change, and a reboot. When the server came back up, we restarted the load test again to see how the performance went. After a few minutes, the changes were obviously affective. Throughput increased dramatically, and the number of errors relating to the SQL server not existing dropped to 0. Error ratio was down from 45% to about 2% of the transactions. Transaction could really didn’t increase a huge amount, but successful counts was certainly better.

We’ve been having a nightmare of a time migrating to the new corporate mail system. Everything from missing accounts, to bounced emails. We’ve managed to whittle the issues down, but one kept on coming up. One particular user had issues with receiving emails, and it seemed rather sporadic. When emailing her, 2 out of 3 would bounce, and the third would be delivered fine. This was beginning to cause some headaches, and management wasn’t too happy. After spending several hours working on the issue, her account was recreated, but issues persisted. Then one of the techs that are managing our corporate exchange server recalled an option in Exchange, called the “X500” proxy account. This basically adds another option to the mail account profile, and lets the new account receive mail for the old one. Microsoft has an article on it here. Very handy to know, wish I’d known about it 2 years ago when I was moving mailboxes.

Rarely do I ever venture onto MySpace. But I was reading Technorati’s Tech section, and this one cropped up, and had my laughing quite a bit.

Some interesting factoids by the NSRP.

I caught a bit of this on NPR this morning, well more specifically the comments on how they are using MRIs to spot differences in pain levels caused by sitting, but this little article by ScienceDaily covers it a little more in depth. I’ve suffered back pain for a while, and I’ve found it mostly occurs at home. Probably doesn’t help I’m constantly picking up my son, and those with kids know how they are never in “the right spot” to be picked up, or wiggle, squirm, kick, and fight. My chair at work is great, I think an Aeron, which when I sit on puts me in a comfortable position. I generally have the seat reclined slightly and the back tips back too, so a rough estimate on the 135 degrees that has been found to be the ideal spot seems pretty close for me.

Okay, double pun there, I couldn’t help it. Ilya Yakubovich has a quicky on using LaTeX. It gives a quick overview, and an example. I’ve often considered looking at LaTeX just to challenge the brain a little, but seeing some of the syntax, and such, I get boggled, and usually turn away. Another one I’ve often considered looking at is SGML, more specifically the DocBook specification. Maybe there is something in that “latex” and “kinky” comment after all… I must be crazy.

We all really hate spam, and sometimes to the point of wanting to give up on email altogether, and just tell your friends to use a phone, or paper. Christopher Null at Yahoo Tech posts about a site called “10 Minute Mail”. Pretty handy. There are other options too, such as using the + sign, and appending a unique identifier, for example [email protected]. Not sure how many services support it, but I know that GMail does, as does any server running postfix, and sendmail if I remember correctly. You can easily use the + as a separator to filter mail.

I recently wrote about being on a creativity kick, and I’ve been reading a lot of food blogs recently, one such is The Culinary Chase. Today they have an interesting looking recipe for beef stew which I think I might try. Anybody got any other recipes they really enjoy? Or have been wanting to try? I’m thinking of giving this one a shot next weekend.