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.
7
Windows Mobile 7 has a chance (an article I thought I’d never write)
WARNING: Pretty pointless rant ahead…
Ok, let’s be real here. Windows Mobile hasn’t really seen an update since PC2000 back in April of the year 2000(Wikipedia). That’s a decade of not really putting money into this OS and it dominated the phone OS market for a long time.
Microsoft made what I believe to be a good decision when they decided to no longer support Windows Mobil 5/6 applications. Some people may be upset by this but let’s be honest, all your windows mobile 5/6 applications are not that good. The applications have been driving the leading mobile OS’s for the last few years. The iPhone lead the way with their very large and hyped app store and then Google’s Android followed suit. I mean really, what’s the point of having a powerful and awesome phone if there’s nothing you can do with it? Which leads me to the next question…
What applications are going to be available for Microsoft new mobile OS? Or will Microsoft leave the ability to use their shiny new operating system behind?
What Microsoft is offering is “SkyMarket”. I couldn’t find a ton about SkyMarket but it appears that Microsoft is going to have an app store!
So the next question of course is, how good is their SDK?
Well you can download it here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=71deb800-c591-4f97-a900-bea146e4fae1&displaylang=en
I guess you’ll have to play with the SDK your self.
Overall I think Microsoft is heading in a better direction than they have in the past but I don’t see any innovation or excitement around this release, which leads me to believe that it will not be nearly as successful as the current leaders in mobile operating systems.
Microsoft had a real chance to come out with guns blazing but I think they missed their chance again. I guess we’ll see on April 12th when Microsoft unveils their shiny new mobile operating system.
5
Bing.com blunder: Page 21 goes blank (FireFox)
Bing.com blanks out at page 21-22 of search results in FireFox.
Take a simple search in bing.com
http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford
This will give you page saying there are 160,000,000 results and you’re being shown 1-20 of them. That’s all fine and dandy but let’s say I want to just flip through the pages a little and see what’s new with Ford.
When you click on the pagination below the URL’s that your going to look something like this…
Page 2: http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=6&FORM=PERE
Page 3: http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=16&FORM=PERE1
Page 4: http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=26&FORM=PERE2
Page 5: http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=36&FORM=PERE3
You’ll notice a couple things changing in these urls. The first should be the “first” GET variable in the URL which appears to be some kind of page offset for the results.
The next is that FORM=PERE business which I’m not sure exactly what it does and it didn’t seem to matter if I removed it from the URL anyway.
The key thing I found was that if you click through the pages until you get to around page 21 or 22 the screen goes completely blank and the magic variable value is changing “?first” to a value that’s greater than or equal to 200. This seems to only be an issue in Firefox as far as I can tell.
I checked the headers with this and there doesn’t seem to be any significant differences.
$ curl -I http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=16&FORM=PERE4
$ curl -I http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=206&FORM=PERE4
Comment if you have any ideas?
11
Microsoft Patents sudo
Since I never get enough legalese from reading corporate documents on a daily basis, I’ve resorted to reading documentation that our wise patent office publishes. They’re pretty good about granting patents that stimulate intellectual growth and collaboration rather than hindering it as well as only granting patents for very unique, distinct concepts. When it comes to technology, they never grant patents to the undeserving. Which is why it makes complete sense that the patent office granted Microsoft a patent on sudo. Microsoft just deserved a go at some of the fun after the UNIX/Linux crowd had their way with sudo for 30 or 40 years.
And for the readers of Pointless Rants that don’t know me too well yet… </sarcasm>. 
2
I’m not getting a Zune because I use linux (a true pointless rant)
Today I was talking to Trevor and something dawned on me… I’m not buying a new Microsoft Zune because I use linux(Ubuntu). Years ago I bought one of the first generation 30gb Zune’s and it has served me well, until 2 years ago when I fully switched over to Linux. I tried to make it work with linux, I really did! I loaded up a VM with my old XP Pro installation and hooked up my media library to it (via shared folders), and this worked for a little while, but as time progressed something started to happen. The months rolled on an soon I realized that I wasn’t booting into this virtual machine I had built to sync my library…podcasts…vodcasts…all the changing media that I used to listen to was being left behind(well atleast as far as the Zune was concerned). Now I wasn’t any less up to date with the information that was contained in the media that I wasn’t syncing with the Zune, I just wasn’t using the Zune. Now I’m not sure if it was the extra step of firing up another operating system or if it was the hassle of trying to get USB to pass through to the VM, but I discovered something…..
20
I knew it! (bing!)
I knew there was something in the back of my mind that didn’t seem right about Bing.com!
11
Podcast Episode #7 – Search Giants
Hey, we’re behind again! But I think we had a good podcast. We are introducing a new member of the pointless rants team, Ben, who’s also in the IT field.
Topics:
- Serverfault.com
- Google Wave/app engine
- Microsoft Bing.com
- Pointless Rants!
