I just found out that PC Magazine is going to stop publishing their hard copy, and go “100% digital.” I haven’t picked up a copy of PC Mag in a while, but it’s still sad to see it go. I had a subscription at one point a few years back, and it was one of the more useful magazines out there. Aside from continuing their web site, they will also continue to publish a digital version via Zinio. That’s kind of disappointing, since I’m not a big fan of Zinio’s reader. I’d really like to see them offer a Kindle version, but I haven’t seen any indication that they might do that. Looking at the Kindle magazine list, there actually aren’t any computer magazines in there at all. There are a bunch of computer-related blogs in the Kindle blog list, though. It is, of course, not hard to find tech news on the web, or on the Kindle, really, but it would be nice if even one general-audience computer magazine could survive in “dead tree” form.
Category: Windows
gradual Vista upgrade
I’m still slowly working on switching over to Vista on my home desktop machine. I just ordered a cheap new video card that should be a bit more Vista-compatible than my old one. I also ordered 2 gigs of RAM, so I can bring my machine up to 4 GB. (And, yes, I know 32-bit Vista won’t be able to use all of it.) I think this will leave me with a reasonably fast machine, capable of handling anything I’m likely to do with it.
more SQL silliness
Well, after thinking I had my SQL problem licked, it came back. I finally got a callback from a support guy at Microsoft, and he had me update statistics on all the tables involved. That fixed things, and everything has been working now for the last couple of days. I’m pretty sure I’d updated statistics on all these tables at least once since the original problem occurred, but maybe I didn’t, or maybe I just needed to do it two or three times to get everything back to normal.
I’ve always had a maintenance plan that updates statistics on all my tables once a week, and I don’t think I’ve ever had problems with statistics before.
I’ve been reading up on this whole statistics thing now, which I admit I hadn’t paid much attention to, until this little debacle. Here’s a blog entry by Kim Tripp that explains a few things about the auto-update mechanism, and another one by someone at Microsoft that explains a good bit about the way statistics work in SQL 2005.
SQL patching fun
After all the patching I did over the weekend, it seemed like everything was fine on my main SQL server. However, on Monday, we discovered that a couple of oddball SELECT statements weren’t working anymore, returning the error “Internal Query Processor Error: The query processor could not produce a query plan. For more information, contact Customer Support Services.”
To make a very long story short, I eventually figured out that I could get these queries working again by deleting all of last year’s data from one of our bigger tables. The table in question had about 32 million rows in it. I cut it down to 13 million after getting rid of the 2007 data. The moral of this story, apparently, is that you shouldn’t try to store 30 million rows in a single SQL Server table. I say this with tongue in cheek, since, obviously, there are other people out there with very large tables in SQL Server. Apparently, I can’t be one of them, though.
I put a call in the Microsoft support this morning, but they never called me back. Maybe tomorrow. If they do call back, and I get a support guy who seems to be a bit less clueless than usual, maybe I’ll try to see if we can figure out why my server chokes on this table. If I get the usual clueless support dude, I guess I’ll just tell him I figured it out on my own while I was waiting for a callback. I wonder if I get my support incident credited back if I solve my own problem while I’m waiting for the callback?
random patching
I spent a bunch of time on Friday night bringing my various home machines up-to-date with patches and software updates. The impetus for that was largely this security hole in Windows, which seems to be the biggest vulnerability that’s cropped up with Windows in quite a while.
I was also interested in updating my VMWare Fusion install to 2.0. Ars Technica has a good review of Fusion 2 up on their site. I did the upgrade, and it was pretty smooth, but I haven’t had time to play around with it enough to tell if it will work any better on my old MacBook than the previous version.
I realized that I hadn’t turned my Dell Vista laptop on in about a month, so there were plenty of patches and updates to run on that. And I hadn’t started the virtual machine I have set up under Fusion in a while either, so there were a bunch of patches to install on that too.
On Saturday, I remotely applied a whole bunch of patches to our servers at work. The main goal was to get that Windows patch on all the servers, but I also had a bunch of other patching to do. I’m embarrassed to say that I’d never updated our main SQL 2005 server to SP2. That had been on my to-do list for about a year. And I had to apply a cumulative post-SP2 patch file to our HR/payroll SQL server, since our HR/payroll software vendor requires that I bring the server up to that level before I can apply their year-end update. It took about three hours to get all that done. Happily, nothing locked up at any point, so I didn’t have to drive into the office just to power cycle a server. (And, yes, I know there are devices that would allow me to power cycle a machine remotely. But we can’t buy any new equipment right now.)
I have one Windows 2000 server that’s hanging up on one of the updates. I’ll probably have to bring that one up to date in safe mode or something. I really don’t know what’s wrong with it, and I’d like to just get everything off it and moved to a WIndows 2003 machine, but I don’t have the time right now.
I got some interesting errors on the two machines to which I applied SQL updates. There’s a long thread on this problem here, at the Microsoft forum site. I haven’t figured out if this error is actually going to be a problem or not. There’s certainly a lot of confusing (and sometimes conflicting) advice out there on it.
I’ve been watching the Jets game today, and enjoying the newest Mac vs PC ads that Apple’s been airing. The theme is basically how Microsoft is spending a bunch of money on advertising instead of fixing Vista. I have to say that I agree with that. This new security hole apparently exists in every version of Windows from Win 2000 to Vista and Win 2008 Server. There’s an interesting blog entry about MS08-067 and the SDL, covering the failure of the SDL (Security Development Lifecycle) to catch this bug. To quote from the article: “I’ll be blunt; our fuzz tests did not catch this and they should have.” I can’t help but think that a little bit of that Seinfeld cash might have caught this one earlier. I’m probably over-simplifying. These things are really complex, and a lot of stuff can go wrong that no pile of cash can fix.
Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to the Giants game this afternoon. It should be a good one. Well, this was a really long (and probably boring) blog entry, but I haven’t written anything in a few weeks, so I was due for a long one. I’ve got a bunch more random thoughts in my head, but I’m going to resist the temptation to make this entry any longer!
Vista – Aero problems?
I’m still trying to get Vista up and running on my desktop PC. I haven’t lost access to the network lately, so that’s a good sign. However, I’m now getting occasional messages saying that the “desktop window manager has stopped working”. This doesn’t cause any serious problems; the screen just blanks for a second, then everything’s fine again. This seems to be happening right after I access my USB Zip drive, which is a little weird. A Google search isn’t turning up much useful. Most reasonable suggestions related to this error point towards the video driver. I’ve got a fairly old, pre-Vista, video card, so maybe I should upgrade to a card that came out post-Vista, and that’s likelier to have good Vista drivers.
Vista – networking, development, etc.
I didn’t touch my home desktop PC at all over the Labor Day weekend, so I didn’t make any more progress on moving to Vista. I’m working on it now, though.
I just installed FolderShare, so I could have access to the shared library that I keep on all my computers. FolderShare works fine under Vista, as far as I can tell.
I’ve been having occasional problems with my network adapter not working under Vista. It started right after I installed Virtual PC. That may have something to do with it, or that may just be a coincidence. If I reboot the machine, that fixes the problem. It’s only happened a couple of times so far, so I’ll have to see if it becomes a real problem or not.
I’m trying to get started porting my Delphi comic book database application to C#. I mentioned this in a previous post. The Delphi app requires BDE, which I’m not keen on trying to install under Vista, though apparently, it’s possible. I’m thinking about using SQL Server Compact for my database. I don’t need anything fancy for this, nor do I need multi-user access to the data. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with SQL Express either.
Vista: almost done
I’m nearly done moving all my stuff over to the Vista install on my desktop machine. I de-authorized iTunes under XP, so I can use it under Vista. I moved my OneNote files over. Almost all of my key programs are installed and working now.
I’m installing Visual Studio 2008 right now. I haven’t used VS 2008 before, so hopefully I can spend some time playing around with it now. I don’t think I’m going to bother installing any older versions of VS. I don’t really have any independent projects in .Net 1.1 or 2.0 that I need to worry about supporting.
I have Delphi 4 on my XP drive, and I have one fairly important program written in it: the database program that I use to manage my comic book collection. This is a program that I first wrote in BASIC on the Commodore 64, and have ported (or rewritten) several times. It’s probably time to rewrite it again, this time as a Windows Forms app in C#, maybe. I’ll have to see if I can even get the existing Delphi program running under Vista. I never really made an installer for it, and I think I may have used a weird library or two.
I think rewriting an old Delphi app in C# is particularly apropos, since I’ll basically be following Anders Hejlsberg from Borland to Microsoft. I considered upgrading the project from Delphi 4 to the newest version of Delphi, but I don’t see much point in spending time on that right now, since Delphi programming doesn’t seem to be a marketable skill anymore. And the new version of Delphi costs a minimum of $400, whereas I got a free copy of VS 2008 from Microsoft when I went to the launch event a few months back.
Vista: point of no return
I think I’ve hit the point of no return on my desktop Vista install now. I’ve moved over my Quicken data file. It’s working OK, so I guess I’m going to start moving over other key stuff, like my Outlook data file, and my OneNote files.
I’m experimenting right now with mapping a drive to my MobileMe iDisk, and backing up my Quicken files to it. It works, but it’s pretty slow. Under XP, I’d been backing up Quicken to a Zip disk, which just seems so out of date now. There’s really nothing wrong with doing that, but I’m probably the last guy on earth still using Zip disks. Given how slow the iDisk backup is, though, maybe I’ll stick with the Zip disks for a while.
Vista progress
As I mentioned about a week back, one of the two drives in my home desktop machine died recently. Luckily, it wasn’t my main drive. I have now removed the dead drive, added a new 500 GB SATA drive, and installed Vista on it. So, now I have my old XP install on my old 250 GB drive, and the new Vista install on the 500 GB drive. I’m gradually migrating my apps and data over to the Vista install. When I’m done, I plan to wipe out the XP install and use the 250 GB drive for backups.
So far, it’s working well. I’ve got a fair number of key apps installed and working. Vista actually seems to be snappier than XP at this point. That may just be because I haven’t installed a few key apps that are probably going to bog the system down a bit. Well, hopefully, it’ll remain usable, regardless.