21
Tell Me What’s Wrong, Please
I recently finished college – graduated in May – and started working at my first job. I have now officially been a developer at Sonoma Partners for two weeks.
Due to the fact that I like Linux and open source software in general, it has been a bit of an adjustment to transition to a place where almost every tool or technology I use is provided by Microsoft (Sonoma Partners is a Microsoft partner which sells, customizes, and provides consulting services for Microsoft Dynamics CRM software). Some might say that I have sold out to the man (in fact, several people already have), but I figure that as long as I am not paying for Microsoft software, I have no problem using it.
At least, that’s what I was thinking when I accepted the position. For the most part I still feel that way, but lately it seems like I’ve been spending a ridiculous amount of time troubleshooting installation/configuration errors and not very much time actually doing useful stuff. It’s not even the errors that I’ve been getting that I really have a problem with – it’s the error messages. If my software messes up, I would like it to at least tell me what happened that made things go wrong.
Here is an example of an error message that I got (after searching through the log – the original message just told me that my login failed) using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 yesterday:
Error: 18456, Severity: 14, State: 11.
Login failed for user 'DOMAIN\user'. Reason: Token-based server access validation failed with an infrastructure error. Check for previous errors. [CLIENT: ]
Now, that seems straightforward enough, except that it says something about an infrastructure error, which made me think that something with the actual application went wrong, not just that I have the wrong login. Furthermore, when I checked on that “State: 11″ business, I found that it means “Valid login but server access failure” (see here for reference). That made me think that something was wrong with my attempts to access the server, as well.
After a bunch of troubleshooting, I finally found out that it wasn’t any sort of strange problem, but rather a case of my Windows Authentication account not being a user in the database instance. All I had to do to fix my problem was start the database instance in single-user mode (by adding “-m” to the start-up parameters, see here for details), make sure that there were no other programs running that were connecting to the database instance, and add myself as a user.
So yeah, Microsoft, I’d like to see some better error messages. Why can’t you tell me that that user doesn’t exist in the database? That would be fantastic – please don’t give me this crap about it being for security reasons.
To see the forum thread that finally got me on the right track, go here.
5
My Experiences with the Jaunty Jackalope
I wish I could say that Ubuntu was all fun and games. I really want to love it with all my heart, but, unfortunately, just like with any relationship, sometimes it sneaks up on you and stabs you in the back (maybe that speaks to my relationships). For me it happened with my upgrade to the latest distribution upgrade: Ubuntu 9.04.
2
Ghetto Mic
When Tom first suggested to me that we actually do a podcast instead of just talking about it, I went out to buy a headset. In India there aren’t a large selection of electronics stores to pick from, so I had a friend take me around the town nearby (Hosur) and we eventually found a little shop that sold a “Zippy’s” headset (it’s a popular brand here in India). The headset seemed to work in the store when he let me try it and it was only $5 (Rs. 250) so I bought it.
8
The Big Permissions Scare :O
I gave myself a pretty big scare yesterday. I was happily going along, using my computer like usual when I started to run into some internet problems. “Oh, I haven’t changed my DNS servers today,” I thought — sometimes the DNS doesn’t seem to work quite right here and I have to use OpenDNS if I want to go to any websites. So, since I’m running Ubuntu, I opened up System->Network, clicked on Authorize, and entered my username and password. I waited expectantly for it to authorize me, but it gave me a message that said “Error: could not authenticate,” or something along those lines.
29
Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is Restricted! (Steam Ubisoft Sales)
If you’ve been following the steam store at all this week, you probably have noticed that there has been an Ubisoft sale going on. Each day a new game has been put on sale (Monday Assassin’s Creed, Tuesday Prince of Persia 4 (? the latest one), Wednesday was Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway, and Thursday saw a good deal on Far Cry 2. All of them were exceptionally good deals and I want to play all of them (except I already played through Assassin’s Creed) – I probably will when I get back to the states. However, the weekend deal was the greatest one, in my opinion: four Ubisoft games – Beyond Good & Evil, IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946, Far Cry, and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic – for $10! Supposedly.
read more
13
PHP Contextual Navigation in Symfony
I am currently working on a project using symfony and got to a point where I wanted to add a contextual navigation menu. In other words, I wanted to have a menu that would show a list of pages, but not show the current page. After considering using slots, components, and component slots, I decided on a solution that I like. Read on to find out what it is. read more
11
Hacker News Scalability
OK, this is pretty funny. I’ve been reading hacker news since I read Jeff Atwood’s post where he advocated it. Today, I clicked on the bookmark icon for it and the following popped up:
