I can't believe it, I got an iPhone, and.... I like it.

A few weeks ago my lovely wife got me an iPod Nano for my birthday. This wasn't something on my list or anything I knew I wanted but I swallowed my dislike for all things from that white-clad trouble maker in Cupertino and gave it a try. The interface was very simple, I never had to break out the manual or even go looking for a feature. I thought the accelerometer would be cute and nothing more than a gimmick but it was actually useful in the control of the device (especially in the games). In short, I really liked it and I wanted more.

Zenoss

I am working on an HPSwitching ZenPack and needed a place to store the attachment.

HPSwitching ZenPack

Asterisk Still Rocks

A few days ago I heard a knock at the door and went to see who it was. I usually just don't open the door for people I don't know but the kid looked so excited for someone to open it that I did. He was offering Comcast IP phone service for $20 a month and offered to discount my Comcast High Speed Internet $10 a month if I signed up. Telephone service for $10/mo! I had to break the news to him that I had that price beat.

"How could that be?", he asked.

"Well, Asterisk".

SharePoint Services Upgrade from 2.0 to 3.0 Goes Horribly Wrong...again!

Those who do not learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them. Yep.

About a year ago I did an upgrade for a company from SharePoint Services 2.0 to 3.0 and basically fought it for 3-weeks on and off. I just did an upgrade for the company I worked for again and sure enough the exact same things happened. I assume you are here because the SharePoint upgrade didn't go quite right for you either. Maybe you didn't have all the permissions needed, you had administrative rights to the server but not the database, oops. I am blown away that the installer will let you corrupt the database to an unusable state, no fear, you can recover and here is how.

What you see: Unable to get global configuration data

This is the first indicator of trouble, for me it meant that I had partially updated my database schema but rolled back my WSS to 2.0.

Do This: Rerun the upgrade to WSS 3.0 and follow through the upgrade handling any errors below.

What you see: An Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPServer named "sql" is using the same id as the new object named "sql" of type Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPServer. Every object must contain a unique id. Either update the new object's id or delete the existing object and try again.

Do this: Clear out the Dependencies and Objects tables. To do this, go to Query Analyzer or Microsoft SQL Management Studio (Express) and enter "delete from objects; delete from dependencies;", select the SP database and click on EXECUTE. If you try to do these individually, you will get dependency errors that are pretty miserable to resolve. I know, I did first.

What you see: The pre-upgrade scan tool has not yet been run on this database SPContentDatabase

Do this: From a command line run: C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft Sharedweb server extensions12BINprescan /all then try the upgrade again

Microsoft is in trouble, Mac is using the Big Tobacco approach

My wife and I recently attended our kids 1st grade patriotic presentation. It was adorable and sweet, the kids all sang and gave speeches on American symbols like the flag and the statue of liberty. After the presentation we were taken back to the classroom and our kids got to show us the work they had done to prepare for the patriotic presentation including an individual multimedia CD. Being a tech geek myself I was very interested to see this presentation so we headed off to find a computer to view it on. There was a set of about 20 Mac laptops sitting on desks in the pod area, all in use by kids showing parents their presentation. The classroom computer was already in use. We headed off to the lab and found another 50 Mac's in-use and not a single seat available. Next stop was the library. There were 15 Mac's and 15 Dell PCs along the wall. Every single Mac was in use as well but the PCs sat untouched. My son looked up at me and said we would have to wait for a computer. I was in complete disbelief that my son, who had used a PC since he was 3 years old was completely PC illiterate. I told him to his surprise that we could watch his presentation on one of the available PCs. We sat down and I blew the dust off the keyboard and mouse and up came the Ctrl-Alt-Del login screen. I am not sure how a 6-year old is supposed to understand this screen and why the school would leave the corporate login screen active when it was just as easy to setup the more friendly Welcome screen up with fun icons to login with. I went ahead and gave the 3-finger salute and up came the username and password which, of course, my son had no idea what his login information was. The very sad part is that I work for the technology department for the school district and had to use my login to get to the desktop.

How to Copy Series DVD's into MythVideos

One of the big benefits of Myth is on-demand access to any episode of your favorite shows. I have a few full-series on DVD's and wanted to find the most efficient way to copy them onto my Myth system. The first tool you need is something that can copy the DVD episodes individually to be processed into AVI's. DVD Decrypter fits the bill nicely although there are many tools you can use. The big time saver is a nice little batch file called DVD Decrypter Multiple Feature Ripper. DDMFRip is a simple menu driven process that will allow you to define the basic structure of a DVD through a series of questions and then create multiple subdirectories correctly named for the series you want to copy. You can get a copy and a more in-depth guide here. I made one small change to the ddmfrip.bat file that capitalizes the E for episode in the filename so that a step in the later process of inserting video metadata into MythVideo will work correctly.

Call forwarding with Asterisk

This is more a note for myself to try later and then post my results:

 http://blog.carrel.org/2005/07/calling-features-with-asterisk.html