Archives June 2007

Okay, so I’m not really going on Safari, unless a trip to the local bookstore to look at all of the O’reilly books is ahead of me.

But here is how I came to find out about the Safari Library, and how it has changed my life! (for the better!)

One day some many months ago, I was looking for a certain book! They did not have it available at my local Borders or B&N, so I went the route of Amazon.
Amazon said “We’ll have it to you in 2 days!” I even went with the super-fast delivery.
Alright, sounds good, I ordered it on a Friday. It said I’d have it on Monday.

Comes Tuesday, and my order is suddenly on “BackOrder” for 30 days… WTF? What is this, Baltimization in action by Amazon?

So I canceled my order, and began searching for alternatives.

Enter Safari Library! I went with the initial ‘trial subscription’ to try it out, and bam! I was reading a few dozen books in a few minutes, which for me, is quite good times. Within the same day, I subscribed and have happily been a subscriber since.

The O’Reilly Safari Library totally rocks, and isn’t limited exclusively to O’Reilly press books. Includes MS Press Books, and a whole slew of other publishers, including a lot of the “Distilled” lines. Some books are even released to Safari before they’re released to Print, which itself does rock.
But it doesn’t end there. The bookmarking is nice, the ability to enter comments nice, the ability to download chapters is also a nice gesture, and the wide diversity of books is also good.

Great points:

But beyond these great points, there are still a whole slew of other features which I absolutely love to take advantage of, like the ability to have “Favorites” and whatnot.

Never the less, I’ve found it to be greatly useful and they’ve got my vote, as I pay out of pocket month after month. :)

Tell me about your Safari or similar publisher agreements!

Christopher Kusek

I’ve updated to a new version of WordPress, and strangely, since then.. I’ve had Odd characters appear in more than half my posts, as well as a syntax problem with forward quote vs regular single quotes. So if you notice any of those items for now, I’ll be working on it as time permits.

Hopefully intend to have all of the syntax problems completed by the week end.
*Update – Should be all resolved now, except for the Single Quote problem*

You get a phone call “Help! I have some odd situation, and no matter how I describe it to you, you do not understand what I am telling you”

Oh my! what ever can we do. Well, we can use Livemeeting… hmm, they don’t have that installed. Hey, go install VNC and open a bunch of ports in the firewall, k? okay, that won’t do it. How about WebEx? err.. I don’t have a WebEx Account.

I wish we had some kind of option which was point to point with an easy to install and deploy option! oh my! what ever shall we do!

… In walks Crossloop!

In seconds, you’ll be sharing your screen (or they’ll be sharing it) so you can fix their problem, or see their problem. Hooray!

Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Crossloop other than having used it to quickly help people fix problems, see problems and get results!

Check it out! – www.crossloop.com

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for quite some time… so take advantage of it today! you won’t regret it! :)

Christopher Kusek (Christopher.Kusek@PKGuild.com)

This is mainly for my reference, but if anyone else needs it, it is here as well.

If you do not know, by default MSDE 2000 (which is installed with a lot of applications) will by default eat up all of your available memory (up to 2gb). This is a very serious problem if you install an application with MSDE on an Exchange server, or other similarly shared servers. You’re best off limiting the memory. Some perfect examples are, on-box Anti-Spam Software, McAfee EPO, Blackberry BES Server, etc. So be aware.

DBCC SHRINKFILE(pubs_log, 2)

BACKUP LOG pubs WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY

BACKUP LOG pubs TO pubslogbackup

DBCC SHRINKFILE(pubs_log,2)

And if/when that does not work, you can also use…

DBCC OPENTRAN (database_name) – to check for open transactions.

DBCC SHRINKFILE (file_name, target_size)
DBCC SHRINKDATABASE (database_name, target_percent) – This works when shrinkfile hasn’t been working.

And to limit MSDE

Save as a .SQL File

USE master
EXEC sp_configure ‘show advanced options’, 1
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE USE master
EXEC sp_configure ‘max server memory (MB)’, MaxServerMemory
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE

USE master
EXEC sp_configure ‘show advanced options’, 0
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE

osql -E -S ServerComputerName\msfw -i Path\setchecksqlmemory.sql

*Update*

In the event that you need to do it all by hand using OSQL as a trusted connection, perform the following – Set to change it to 64mb of memory

————————————-

OSQL -E

USE master
EXEC sp_configure ‘show advanced options’, 1
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE

GO

USE master
EXEC sp_configure ‘max server memory’, 64
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE

GO

USE master
EXEC sp_configure ‘show advanced options’, 0
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE

GO

————————————-

That will drop the memory usage from 2gb down to 64MB almost immediately.
Disclaimer: the ‘max server memory’ keeps replacing the first single quote incorrectly, so it may need to be typed manually. Working on correcting.
INF: How to Shrink the SQL Server 7.0 Transaction Log

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/256650/

INF: Shrinking the Transaction Log in SQL Server 2000 with DBCC SHRINKFILE

http://www.support.microsoft.com/?id=272318

You may experience high memory usage on an ISA Server 2004-based computer that logs messages to an MSDE database

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=909636

OSQL Syntax

http://www.di-mgt.com.au/osqlUtility.htm

Christopher Kusek

*Updated this post to appear in 2007 as it’s been used more often than I did in September when I first posted this*

Quite regularly, I run into the case where someone has been removed from the Comcast White-list, and they need to sign back up.

So, for future reference when unable to get a rejection email to fix it, here is the url.

http://www.comcastsupport.com/Forms/NET/blockedprovider.asp

That’s all for this.

Christopher Kusek