Tony's Microsoft Access Blog

granite.ab.ca is back up

Tony — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 01:41:23 GMT

The upstream upstream provider, an unnamed major provincial telco, had, for reasons unknown, attached the ADSL connection to their network. They have moved the connection back to our upstream providers ADSL equipment.

Three frigging days outage. GRRRRR

Lessons from Vancouver - (water cooled) emergency generator failed

Tony — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 01:30:37 GMT

"But as soon as the fire department started drawing massive amounts of water in their attempt to contain the fire, the water pressure in the mains was reduced to a level where the (water cooled) emergency generator couldn't operate any more."

From comp.risks DR/BCM lessons from the Vancouver fire

Didja hear the one about the outfit with twelve hours diesel in a tank inside the building and seven days diesel in large tanks outside? Turns out the pump to move the diesel from the larger outside tank to the small internal tank was on external power and not the generator power.

granite.ab.ca is temporarily down

Tony — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 22:56:00 GMT

Folks

Since about 10 am MDT Tuesday the granite.ab.ca server has been unreachable. We thought it was just the server which needed rebooting which happened at lunch time. However this was not the cause. We have no idea but it's upstream of us We're very unhappy about this.

The upstream provider changed the static IP address on us on 2008 July 8th without any notification. This required lots of no notice scrambling to change IP addresses within the DNS servers and IIS on our web server. Fortunately this only took a few hours and within another few hours traffic was back to normal.

Update: Now it appears to be an issue between the upstream provider and their upstream provider the provinces largest telco. The bureaucracy involved just got larger by about two orders of magnitude. <sigh>

It also didn't help that I was taking my dad to a doctors appointment and didn't notice things for about four hours.

Tony

Vancouver Power Outage Walloping Some Domain Owners

Tony — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 22:46:06 GMT

Vancouver Power Outage Walloping Some Domain Owners

Some sites losing Telus phone service Gotta love that final quote "All of our major sites will not go down." So long as one of your major sites will stay up that will be good enough?

Power outage in downtown Vancouver extended

Tony — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:34:54 GMT

The outage caused by an underground fire at 9 am Monday morning in downtown Vancouver has been extended to Wednesday evening. 24 hour battery backup systems have already started failing.

Power and phones out until Wednesday in downtown Vancouver

Is your business prepared for such an outage?

It'll never happen to you, right? Wrong.

The 1998 Auckland power crisis was an event that occurred in the Auckland, New Zealand Central Business District. The area suffered a five-week long power outage in 1998.

The Hanukkah Eve Wind Storm of 2006 in the Seattle area including Microsoft. Some folks were without power for ten days although the Wiki article doesn't state that.

The Laptop Drive of Shame

Tony — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:14:19 GMT

The Laptop Drive of Shame <chuckle> Fortunately I've never done that.

However twice I've left the power adapter home. Well once at the motel room so no big deal. But once I left it at home and went out of town. So I had to have it placed on the Greyhound. <sigh> I use a Virtual machine installed on a clients tower to work that day.

I've been meaning to purchase a spare laptop power adapter or two but just haven't gotten around to it.

Many people who are excellent developers are lousy managers

Tony — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:04:26 GMT

"Many people who are excellent developers are lousy managers"

Now that I would agree with. Twenty years ago I would've been a mediocre manager. Now I'd be a decent to good manager. Maybe. However I wouldn't like doing it. I quite like being a developer. I quite like delivering systems to clients and getting feedback from them along the lines of "Yeah, that's how we work." Or "I didn't realize you could get the computer to work like we do."

"We don't really want to hire MBAs, because there's too much evidence that MBAs substitute book-learnin' for common sense or experience. "

And that I whole heartedly agree with. With a possible exception such as when you've been in the business world for about ten years or more. Then getting your MBA or similar might help you now that you have that experience. But even then I have my doubts.

Larger corporations should also understand this concept. There should be an alternate career path or salary grid or whatever recognizing that some peoples competency is not management. Of course generally larger corps don't understand this. Thus many hard core dev's work for smaller outfits or go out on their own. And yes I'm generalizing.

Googling your first name

Tony — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:18:53 GMT

Needless to say I have a lot of hits with my commonly used name - Tony Toews. However you need to enclose the search in quotes otherwise you'll get a Canadian politician and a Canadian hockey player. Neither of which are a close relative. Undoubtedly they're fourth or fifth cousins three times removed.

However I'm now upset with Google. Again. I've been relegated to the second page on the search results. In the past when searching on my first name only I used to be on the first page. Now I'm on the second page. Number 12. <sigh> What am I doing wrong? <smile>

Now you ask why would you search on your first name only? Jon Udell in his blog posting Your winnings, sir got me to thinking about this.

Up yours Adobe Shockwave

Tony — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:08:56 GMT

Grrrr!!! I went to install Adobe Shockwave and also got asked to install Norton Security Scan. Dirty rotten tricks.

Yeah, I know this happens lots but it still is exceedingly irritating. I'll be posting these as I come across these.

Toastmasters? What for? I’m a developer…

Tony — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:07:21 GMT

Toastmasters? What for? I’m a developer… Excellent idea. If you are at all uncomfortable doing presentations I'd strongly suggest Toastmasters.

Don't forget the small touches - Invoice number and Set date range to last month

Tony — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 21:23:01 GMT

I'm just finishing up adding customer invoicing functionality to my Fleet Management app. One bit of functionality a client requested was the ability to know if a customer service order had been invoiced separately by the branch office accounting department. The idea as that the mechanics would only give the customer a service order itemizing the work done, parts used, etc, etc while the accounting department would give the customer the official invoice. And most importantly the accounting department would ensure they got paid.

At first a simple check box was requested but then I realized putting an invoice number would be better. The accounting department would enter the invoice number. Thus not only the accounting department know that the service order had been put on a invoice they would be able to track the paper work better.

I also decided that a purchase order number field would sometimes also be useful.

The accounting department needs to review all the service orders to ensure they all have invoice numbers. And of course they are going to really want to do this for last month and this month. So rather than making them futz around with the date selection boxes and clicking on arrow buttons I decided to give them two command buttons.

The code behind the buttons is:

Me.FromServiceDate = DateSerial(Year(Date), Month(Date) - 1, 1)
Me.ToServiceDate = DateSerial(Year(Date), Month(Date), 1) - 1

and

Me.FromServiceDate = DateSerial(Year(Date), Month(Date), 1)
Me.ToServiceDate = Date

I might rename the command buttons as the names are kind of awkward. Nevertheless I'll publish the screen shot and four lines of code now.

I'll probably never hear from anyone about how useful these two little buttons are. But folks are going to use those somewhat and are, hopefully, be thinking "That's nice."

By the way the various selection criteria are enabled or disabled depending on whether the report has those fields. In this particular report the "Job Site zzzzz" list box isn't used.

Also note that this app allows the users to choose the names of the temporary and permanent location. In this testing database they are "Job Site zzzzz" and "Branch Office".

Dancing Cornstarch

Tony — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 00:45:55 GMT

What do you get when you mix cornstarch and water and expose the mixture to the vibration of a subwoofer? And what happens when you quickly walk across a vat of cornstarch?

The Dancing Cornstarch

Very interesting.

Top Tips for Effective [SQL Server] Database Maintenance

Tony — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 22:43:54 GMT

"Several times a week I'm asked for advice on how to effectively maintain a production [SQL Server] database. Sometimes the questions come from DBAs who are implementing new solutions and want help fine-tuning maintenance practices to fit their new databases' characteristics. More frequently, however, the questions come from people who are not professional DBAs but for one reason or another have been given ownership of and responsibility for a [SQL Server] database. I like to call this role the "involuntary DBA." The focus of this article is to provide a primer of database maintenance best-practices for all the involuntary DBAs out there."

Top Tips for Effective Database Maintenance

Note: I added [SQL Server] as appropriate.

"The real issue is that, like it or not, we're at war on the Web"

Tony — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:47:42 GMT

I was baffled and rather irritated at the following quote:

"The real issue is that, like it or not, we're at war on the Web," said Thompson. "Criminals, both organized and opportunistic want our PCs and our money, and they're attacking via the Web. It's no longer like the old days when they wrote this stuff for fun."

(The story is at Grisoft modifies its free AVG product after complaints which, if you're not familiar with the AVG/Grisoft screw up, you'll need to read to understand my comments.)

The real issues are:

AVG tried to hide their activities by disguising "the scans as coming from Internet Explorer 6 browsers". Supposedly this was done to fool malware. Smells like an excuse to me.
What took AVG so long to modify their product? Three days shy of a month.
(The above story states "On Thursday, Webmasters around the world noticed unusual spikes in traffic" implying July 3rd. This problem has been around for a lot longer than one week. The article AVG scanner blasts Internet with fake traffic is dated 2008 June 12th.)
Didn't anyone at AVG think about this? Even just a little?

... hit the big green TRANSMIT button.

Tony — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:53:50 GMT

... hit the big green TRANSMIT button. You know, to transmit it over the stockroom’s intercom. The Free Bird Database. So nice to read that lack of testing backups isn't a problem only in this century. Or indeed the last forty years.

Microsoft to sell hosted service subscriptions for $3 a month (per user)

Tony — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 05:14:02 GMT

Microsoft to sell hosted service subscriptions for $3 a month (per user)

Interesting that. A fellow Access MVP has been playing around, err testing, Access 2007 and Sharepoint and quite enjoys it. I'm not so happy about the lack of referential integrity and such.

But I do want to play around with Access 2003/2007 and SQL Server via the Internet. In particular I'd like to see what happens when the network plug is pulled for 2, 10, 30 or 60 seconds. Or other weirdness. While I did get a good way through upsizing a very large Access system a number of years ago I never completed it

Vulnerabilities in Microsoft SQL Server ...

Tony — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 03:12:12 GMT

Vulnerabilities in Microsoft SQL Server Could Allow Elevation of Privilege (941203)

No indexes on a 2.2 million record table?

Tony — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 23:46:22 GMT

Hastening an Inevitable Now this is truly ridiculous and very worth of a WTF page.

This page also illustrates how CPU speed isn't that important. 150 Mhz systems. Hard drive speed is where you should be spending the money on a server. RAM is also important but relatively inexpensive. Of course I'm over simplifying as there are many other factors such as network interface, switches and so forth.

I had a 10,000 record table of names and addresses in Access 2.0 on a 486. To lookup a name with no index took 25 seconds. Once I added the index it was so fast I couldn't really time it.

Vulnerability in the Snapshot Viewer for Microsoft Access

Tony — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 06:12:49 GMT

Microsoft Security Advisory (955179) - Vulnerability in the ActiveX Control for the Snapshot Viewer for Microsoft Access Could Allow Remote Code Execution

(I've always wondered how they can come up with a FAQ section on a brand new vulnerability. But hey, what do I know.)

Note that the Multiple Microsoft Access Snapshot Files Printing Utility on my web site uses the default Snapshot Viewer control. However this vulnerability is of most concern if the user browses a web site which opens up a .snp file.

Controllers and Doers

Tony — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 04:16:44 GMT

"So, it's my belief that the people working in IT fall into two broad categories (with occasional cross-over and hybrids). " Controllers and Doers An interesting blog posting.

And where do I fit in? Well, in the past I've most definitely been in the Doer category. In other words get the heck out of my way as I design and build user friendly applications. The IT departments are to be tolerated at best and generally despised. Although good folks can be found sprinkled through out.

But with respect to the shrink wrap app I'm working on I'm becoming more of a controller in that it is a well designed, well normalized app with lots of user friendly functionality and features.

I suspect most Access folks are of the doer kind.