I can’t recall a time I have engineered any code worth its salt while not listening to music… One of my favorites is Metal/Alternative, Chillout/Ambient/Smooth Jazz/Downtempo and Native American. Grab winamp and check it out:
ShoutCast:
http://scfire-dtc-aa02.stream.aol.com:80/stream/1039
http://scfire-mtc-aa03.stream.aol.com:80/stream/1018
http://scfire-ntc-aa08.stream.aol.com:80/stream/1080
http://64.62.164.208:3002
*I use Pandora too, but this is free and they tend to have far fewer commercials/interruptions.
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Ever since the programmers.org server crashed due to a hard drive failure (mind you, while I was doing a defrag) it has been dropping off-line periodically (we are talking months here). I spent an enormous amount of time trying to figure out what was happening and why… all to no avail.
Finally one day after it dropped offline I trotted over to the console to see that it’s IP address was cut short. Oddly the last 2 digits seemed to have been cropped off. Checking all of the TCP/IP settings on both NICs in the machine the only thing I could find with any similarity was the DNS of the second NIC which was set to the LAN DNS… that similarity was that its string size and the string size of the newly cropped ip address were the same. Weird.
After tinkering around a bit with the settings I clicked apply and noticed a message I had seen previously but not really read. It said, as best I can recall, something to the effect of “Multiple DNS are intended for redundancy and may not function properly if not on the same network.”
HUH? What’s this I thought…. when I suddenly realized I did not need the second NIC to have a DNS at all since it was being used to communicate with the NAS and not the outside world. PLUS the other NIC was set as the primary so I could still browse the web from the machine as need be. Voila. No warning message, and no more server falling offline. Finally.
Until next time, happy coding 
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Since this saved me what would have undoubtedly become a migraine, I thought I would repost it here. All credit goes to the original Author (see the jump):
SQL Server Reporting Services and rsAccessDenied
rsAccessDenied was all that stood between me and high fives from the customer. The message from SQL Server Reporting Service (SRS) even displayed the clients log on name – so SRS KNEW who it was denying. No impersonation was going to solve this one.
The Redirect string was fine, because it worked in test and on the server for those of us with admin rights. (Yeah, I know — but this a practical blog — remember?) So I fired up Report Manager to see what it had to say about the security settings on my report folders. All I saw was the built in administrator and no way to add any more.
Hmmm. At the Home folder level, I could add roles. Since my client had access to the box, she must be in some local group or another, so I added Guests and Users with SRS Browser capacity. I sauntered over to the client and acted as if I expected the report to work now. It did. I took my bows and made my exit with no small relief.
If this stuff was easy, nobody would need developers.
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Recently asked to replace Crystal Reporting Services with SQL Server Reporting Services I went about reading, testing, reading, and testing yet again the features of SSRS.
I found the Report Designer (SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio) to be a bit clunky… but, it does work once you get the hang of it. My main complaint is that its so tedious to reference values =Fields!foobar.Value … not sure why these aren’t aliased as with Crystal Reports. And the WYSIWYG leaves me scratching my head a bit b/c it just doesn’t work as fluidly as one would expect it to.
Dipping a bit more into the programming I found I could use the Microsoft Report Viewer to display the report by specifying a URL (in contrast to using the web services which I did not need). Unfortunately it took me a full two hours to determine how to set parameter values! …. While I may have moments of lunacy, last I checked I was not an idiot, so why was this not made more clear by the documentation since it seems like such a common need?
For those of you facing the same issue, here is how you do it:
//dynamically set parameter values
ReportParameter reportParams = new ReportParameter(”paramName”, “yourValue”);
reportViewer1.ServerReport.SetParameters(new ReportParameter[] {reportParams});
*Note that the parameters are case sensitive.
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Some years ago I wrote a .NET Class that used the Microsoft Office Interop Services (Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel). While I wrote it nearly complete to the exact specification I found it was never quite fast enough since a) it was using COM and b) I had to deal with the .NET wrappers for that unmanaged code. Knowing I had to produce the report in binary for optimal performance I pretty much gave up on ever discovering the format of the file… until today, while researching SQL Server Reporting Services when I came across these links:
“OpenOffice.org’s documentation of the Microsoft Excel File Format”
“Microsoft Office Excel 97 - 2007 Binary File Format Specification (*.xls 97-2007 format)”
Happy coding.
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If you do any web programming you will eventually need to do some image conversions. This is especially true if you download icon libraries that are in PNG and need to convert them to transparent GIFs.
My favorite and free program for this is ImageMagick. You will find the command line tool especially useful for doing batch conversions.
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php
Note: If you can use PNG stick with it as you will lose opacity layers if you convert these to GIF. Unfortunately some older browsers don’t support PNG so I typically use GIF for compatibility reasons.
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This is amazingly fast… check it out. IE 9 is supposed to have hardware acceleration too…. (btw: this won’t work on XP)
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/03/02/presenting-direct2d-hardware-acceleratio
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Key bindings for SSMS default to Visual Studio scheme… again folks I highly recommend taking the time to learn the shortcuts. Force yourself to use them and your speed will eventually be unmatched.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174205(printer).aspx
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Those of you who do any cf programming have undoubtedly referenced Adobe’s LiveDocs quite a lot… however I find the way the site is structured to be a little slow with the frames and directory tree view. I noticed CFQuickDocs embedded as the default ColdFusion help in Eclipse (with the cf plugin) and it is nice and speedy…. check it out if you have time:
http://www.cfquickdocs.com
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