“Inspiration can come from many places.”

Coffee Cup from Country Style

I’ve been keeping this coffee cup in my car for several days as it reminded me of someone but I was not sure who. It was someone who always seemed to get into an unexpected adventure. Someone who appreciated the journey more than the destination and always stopped to appreciate the small stuff.

This morning while reading a blog I realized the simple empty text box in the cup made me think of my friend Sameer Vasta. If you are looking for inspiration you need to check out his blogs: I Tell Stories and Squandrous. On these blogs you will find the thoughts of a man who has made it his daily mission to make people smile. In fact there is no other place you will find the headlines like “Lost iPhone, and other good news.”!

Thank you Sameer for being a constant source of inspiration.

Notes on the Outlook Email Address Cache (Auto Complete)

I recently had to remove a couple of users Outlook profiles and re-create them due to some problems.  A couple days later they contacted me noting that the email address cache (aka auto complete) was no longer populated with all of their contacts. Unfortunately the data is now lost and they will have to rebuild it over time. I made a mental note to always back this information up moving forward. This would also be a nice touch when moving a user to a new workstation.

Where it is stored.

Enable hidden folders and navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\ and backup the file named <OutlookProfile>.NK2
 (Source: WindowsReference.com). This was tested on Windows XP & Office 2003 and may be slightly different in Vista or Office 2007.

How to remove/edit values stored in the cache.

In Outlook just get the bad one to come up and hit the Delete key and it will be removed from the cache.  There does not appear to be any free way of editing the NK2 file but there is an application named Ingressor desktop. I can’t imagine editing the data in the NK2 file being worth $40 though! (Source: IISHacks.com)

What I get out of Twitter.

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of posts attempting to outline the different agendas a Twitter user may have. At the same time I’ve been trying to get some people I know to join. This made me think about why I’m on Twitter and what I am getting out of it. 

• Instant crowd sourced answers to a wide variety of questions ranging from technical problems to whether or not a local eatery is worthwhile.
• Meeting neighbours in our new area. Using the GPS functionality on my iPhone I was able to find someone who lives right next door and has all kinds of valuable insight.
• News as it happens (I have almost abandoned RSS feeds in favour of Twitter). With the added benefit of discussion.
• Hooking up with great people who share similar interests whom I would have never met otherwise.
• A constant source of entertainment, there is never a dull moment with some of the people I follow.

I would encourage anyone of any technical level to give Twitter a try. What have you got to lose? Should you decide to check it out I recommend Tweetdeck as a desktop client and Tweetie for the iPhone.

Useful T-SQL Queries for MSSQL Administration

Unfortunately we had to lay off the individual responsible for managing our Microsoft SQL Server at work. As a result I have been struggling to manage it the best I can as time permits. I’ve written two queries to help me zero-in on problems quickly.

The first section will output any jobs-steps that have failed in the past 24 hours and the second one will output any jobs running longer than 30 minutes (unusual in our environment). This has been tested using Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Comments welcome.

use msdb
declare @days_back as integer
declare @max_minutes as integer
select @max_minutes = 30
select @days_back = 1

print ‘Job Steps Failing’

select left([name],50) as Job,
step_id as Step,
left(step_name,50) as [Description],
[message] as Error
from msdb..sysjobhistory join msdb..sysjobs on (sysjobs.job_id = sysjobhistory.job_id)
where run_date > convert(varchar(8), getdate()-@days_back,112)
and run_status = 0 — Failed
and step_id <> 0 — Exclude overall job failure

print ‘Job Steps Running Long’

select left([name],50) as Job, step_id as Step,
left(step_name,50) as [Description],
run_duration/60 as Duration
from msdb..sysjobhistory join msdb..sysjobs on (sysjobs.job_id = sysjobhistory.job_id)
where run_date > convert(varchar(8), getdate()-@days_back,112)
and run_duration > @max_minutes*60
and step_id <> 0 — Exclude overall job duration
order by run_duration desc

Vista Annoyances – Snipping Tool is Not Working Right Now

There is a little tool built into Vista which you may not know about called The Snipping Tool (SnippingTool.exe). If it is not on your system you may have to enable Tablet PC support.

The Snipping Tool is kind of like a GUI for people who do know about Print-Screen and Alt-Print-Screen. It does have the interesting ability to do a ‘Free-form snip’ which allows images like the one on the right (I’m not quite sure what practical use this has!).

Unfortunately when I went to show the Snipping Tool to someone today it came back at me with a vague error as seen below.

A quick Google search revealed many people are struggling with this problem. Some suggestions included running Microsoft Office Diagnostics and Microsoft Resource Checker (SFC) against the binary. Neither of these solved the problem and ultimately I had to give in and reboot Vista again. If anyone knows how to solve this without rebooting let me know.

Rogers SMS Plug-In & Outlook 2007

This afternoon I tried to install the Rogers SMS Plug-In for Outlook and found it does not work with Outlook 2007. Pretty ridiculous when you consider Outlook 2007 launched almost 2 years ago (November 30th, 2006)!

Rogers SMS PlugIn for Outlook

The error message with its missing white space after each variable used left me wondering if it is a good thing the install failed. Either way if you are interested in running thise on Outlook 2007 send an email to support@telemessage.com!

Update 2008-10-06 330PM: TeleMessage Support actually got back to me pretty quickly and offered a beta copy of the software. So far it seems to be working pretty good (screenshot below). The only annoying thing is that I’m used to hitting ALT-R to reply to emails and now ALT-R gives focus to the Rogers menu. I will likely just enable/disable this plugin as needed to get around this.

Rogers Outlook SMS PlugIn in Action

Visual Studio 2008 Debug/Release Toggle

I recently switched to a new workstation and noticed Visual Studio 2008 no longer had the Debug/Release toggle in the toolbar. It turns out getting this back is not as straightforward as you would think.

• Click Tools and select Options
• Ensure ‘Show All Settings’ is checked
• Expand Projects and Solutions
• Click General
• Ensure ‘Show advanced build configurations’ is checked’

For good measure you might want to restart Visual Studio at this point.

• Click View, Toolbars and ensure Build is checked.
• Right click the Build Toolbar and select customize.
• Drag “Solution Configuration” to the toolbar.

Office 2007 Shortcuts & Vista Start Button

If you like doing as much as possible with your keyboard you are likely a big fan of the Vista search functionin the start menu. Unfortunately it seems as though a lot of people are having problems launching Office 2007 applications this way. If for example you type “excel” and hit enter it should launch Excel for you.

ShellExView Screenshot

A good tool for debugging this problem is the freeware tool ShellExView by Nirsoft. It will help you identify & manage shell extensions installed on your system. In my case it ended up being a text editor named Jujuedit by Jujusoft that was conflicting with the handling of LNK files.

Windows Update Error 8000FFFF (Vista)

While trying to upgrade Visual Studio 2008 to SP1 I kept getting a vague installation failure message. After a little digging I found that all Windows Updates were failing on my Vista-workstation with the message “Some updates were not installed” and “Code 8000FFFF“.

I searched newsgroups, Google, Technet, MSDN/etc and found a bunch of dated but promising tips but none of them solved the problem. Just when I was started to consider drastic measures I came across AU Check (open source) by Eddie Bowers @ Codeplex. After running his tool and rebooting the problem went away!

iWeb Pages Show Question Marks

If you are finding annoying special characters showing up on your iWeb pages read on. This problem will specifically effect people who are not using .Mac and are uploading pages via FTP.

Your FTP client may actually be corrupting the character encoding. To turn this off in Fetch go into Preferences -> Misc and uncheck ‘Translate ISO Characters’. You may need to search the documentation for your particular client.

Before I figured this out Therese and I were baffled as it was showing up fine locally. We tried changing fonts, turning off smart quotes etc. But it was still showing the funny question mark for any captions which we left blank.

Hat tip to Tom Gewecke for posting a solution on the Apple support discussions.