Tell Me: Griffo Info

For the past ten days, we have been travelling around U.K. with some great friends from Columbia, South Carolina. Astoundingly, the weather was just great the whole time, apart from one day when driving in the very North of England. That day we had periods of light and heavy rain.

The scenery around the Lakes District and North was fabulous. We had a fill of Castles and Churches and Ruins and Gardens.

The worst feature of the whole trip was the airport security checks. These are a farce.

Once I find and unpack my camera, I will post a few photos (or at least some links) here.

John Griffiths

A few weeks ago I ordered an external USB 1 Tb hard drive. This was to replace a 250Gb drive that I use for one of my backup regimes.

It costs less than US$90 and seems a little quicker than my older 250Gb USB drive. This is probably because it is 7,200 RPM in lieu of 5,400 RPM. And I think it has more internal cache memory.

I did not really need the extra room, but perhaps I will one day… The price was right, so why not have more free space available for backups.

Specs of the new drive are: SimpleDrive 1Tb Hitachi HDD.

Backups

Whilst on the subject of backups – I have recently trialed a few simple backup tools that let me schedule backups to remote FTP sites. Two I like are “Backup4All-Pro” and “GFI Backup 2009″

BackUp4All is about $49 and you can get it here

GFI Backup is free, and you can get it here

If you are looking for off-site backup space, you may look at DriveHQ

John

Today we had a birthday party for my 4 year old grand daughter.

We had a bouncy-castle delivered this morning and the guests had a ton of fun jumping for hours. I think they all went home worn out!

If you have a Gateway laptop and it ever fails to boot, then you are pretty much on your own.

I recently tried to get help for a family member who has a Gateway Vista laptop. it is about 3 years old. Now it will not boot. It does not even get through the progress bar on the initial “Gateway” screen. The progress bar stops about half-way.

There are on-screen option… F10 or utilities, F2 for BIOS.

Using the F2, the system start showing BIOS and Processor and memory info. Then locks up.

I tried on-line chat support from Gateway, and then 24Hr email support from Gateway. The common responses were just cut-and-paste sentences from some resource the responder has. In neither attempt (chat with their “expert”, or their email tech responder) were any of the concerns I outlined addressed.

Result = Pay $100 for 30 minutes phone support. This would only result in a wasted phone call. The machine is kaput! Their help sucks BIG-TIME.

Stay away from Gateway products as their support is pretty well non-existent.

It is a sad day when tech support has dwindled to such a low level. Bad Gateway!

It has happened again. An airline pilot has reportedly been removed from flight duty due to security detecting alcohol on his breath.

This makes one wonder how, a person clever and smart enough to have an airline pilot license, could get into such a predicament. It had me wondering until I read a very enlightening and heartfelt post on a pilot’s forum by a pilot who could have got himself into such a predicament. He claims he is/was an alcoholic and details the problem faced by people like himself.

I found reading his post to be valuable in being able to understand the differences in Social drinkers, Problem drinkers and Alcoholics. And it explains just how a Pilot gets into such a predicament.

To read his post, click here

I was doing some extensive software testing in a program that talks to a MS-SQL2005 database. I detected that a table INSERT/UPDATE Trigger was seemingly not firing.

I scrutinised the trigger code and could see nothing wrong, and know that it has been functioning well for several years in other applications, using both MSSQL2000 and MSSQL2005.

So what was different in this program? I searched the web and did not find an answer.

I added some code to a test program to work around the issue. That is when I started catching this error message:

Here I was trying to CALL a stored procedure to update some balances. Again, the stored procedure has been working great for many years with no change. So, what was this message all about? Back to the web again and still no resolution.

That is when I dug deeper and added some more tests into a couple of other test programs I wrote, each of which tried different approaches to see what was really happening.

Strangely, some tested OK with no errors, and others threw the same error! So, what was the difference?

The Answer

The original error it seems is caught by the SQL Native Client ( or perhaps Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) ) and translated for the ODBC file drivers I was using. A translation (or miss-translation) is performed and a meaningless message is captured by the ODBC based drivers and passed back to my program as “Executing SQL directly; no cursor”.

Comparing the test programs I was working with pointed me to the answer. It was all to do with permissions! Nothing about “Executing SQL directly; no cursor”.

I found in some programs where I was using Application Role permissions to access the backend SQL, that the Application Role I was using did not have EXECUTE permission on the stored procedure.

Back into MS SQL Server Management Studio I went, and ran this command:

GRANT EXECUTE ON [dbo].[jg_AllBalances11] TO [LMGaus]

Now all my test programs began behaving as expected.

Also, my TRIGGER began working. The trigger was calling the stored procedure to do some of its work, and so now it too performed as expected.

Next time you see the

Executing SQL directly; no cursor

error, check all your permissions!

Hope this helps someone.

John Griffiths

After a great summer DownUnder we are back in Texas for the northern summer. It is already nice and warm here with today around 90°F. Bring on the heat!

The journey was long and tedious as usual. My wife and I are both suffering from Jet-Lag and spend many hours awake at night. We have been waking at about midnight and not getting back to sleep until around 04:00. This should be over within a few more days. Then i will be able to get back and do a few programming tasks that have been piling up!

John

Recently I was invited to join a group of volunteers working on a software development project. As there were to be more than two in the group, I could see problems working through a swarm of emails, cc: emails and all the replies…

That is when I started researching web based Project Management Software.

As the project was to be a low-cost exercise, I think I have found the perfect answer.

We needed three components:-

A domain name ($10 p.a.)

A Site Host ($72) But prices can range from almost free to whatever you want.

Project Managment Software ( Free )

The Site Host:

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If you shop around, you can save on the Site Host account. Or even find a free one, but that is not recommended. You may already have a host that will allow an add-on domain at no extra cost. And, make sure that any host offers CPanel access, and not a  management tool they built themselves!

Project Managment Software:

==========================

The site host we selected provides dotProject and PHProjekt system installs via the Fantastico within cPanel.

We went with dotProject

I am truly amazed at the features and functionality in this free software product. You really need to try it to see what it will do.

It is PHP driven and uses a MySQL database for content storage.

I had a quick look at PHProjekt and it too looks great, but we had to choose one so we went with dotProject.