By Justin James on
6/11/2009 1:21 PM
I recently tried to change work item "created by" in TFS. TFS blocks you from doing this, so I tried the backdoor method: direct database updates. However, I found that just modifying the "Created By" column in WorkItemsLatest causes the work items to not allow themselves to be edited afterwards. The trick is to also update the "Created By" column in WorkItemsAre and WorkItemsLatest. As long as there is agreement for the item in all three tables, this will work just fine.
J.Ja
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By Justin James on
6/2/2009 10:00 PM
I finally put my finger on what drives me nuts about KDE. It's so petty and trivial: all of the applications insist on starting with the letter "K". Not only is it absolutely ridiculous, but it makes finding anything impossible. "KEdit", "KMail", etc. It reminds me of the "Mortal Kombat" games. KSeriously.
J.Ja
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By Justin James on
5/19/2009 3:35 PM
I had a problem where SharePoint was set to send alerts to users (in this case, when tasks were assigned to them), but it was not sending the alerts to everyone. It turns out, that if a user is not explicitly a member of any SharePoint groups, they won't get the email. I had put "DOMAIN\Domain Users" into the "Contribute" group (easy permissions that way), but adding the users to a group is what I needed to do for those alerts to get sent out. Hope this helps someone else out!
J.Ja
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By Justin James on
5/12/2009 12:00 AM
Tonight I went ahead and tried to install SP2 for Vista is the hopes that it would cure my Windows Media Player problem. No dice. Apparently, I need one that supports the 34 languages that I don't have installed. Why? Because at one point I did install them, then uninstalled them, and now, SP2 thinks they are still installed. Huh?
J.Ja
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By Justin James on
5/11/2009 12:13 AM
Despite what people say about Vista, I have had nothing but good experiences with it, until relatively recently. The first sign of trouble I had, was when I upgraded the Live Meeting client, and it treated every launch as if it had just been installed, and it wouldn't associate itself to the Live Meeting links right. More upsetting, Windows Media Player will no longer start unless I do "Run as Administrator", and it won't minimize itself to be the mini player in my taskbar. Good timing, since W7 is right around the corner. Since I've had this Vista install since the week it RTM'ed, I can't complain. Well over 2 years before bit rot sets in is a great run for an OS.
J.Ja
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By Justin James on
4/24/2009 12:14 AM
I first heard about this experiment about a year ago. Now, it looks like Microsoft is taking it a step further, and making it a full-fledged initiative. Good for them! I think that anything that helps people learn PC skills (even if it's mostly Hotmail and YouTube) in a way that they are comfortable with is a good thing.
J.Ja
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By Justin James on
4/2/2009 8:39 PM
CNet has a great article on Google's data centers. Some aspects of it were quite surprising. It really shows off the side of Google that I admire greatly, the same things that I admire about Sun and Microsoft, but which is increasingly marginalized at Google, unfortunately.
J.Ja
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By Justin James on
3/16/2009 11:57 PM
I finally figured out why the SQL Server 2005 SP3 install (for Express Edition) was failing on my domain controller... I had a DB on there set to "disabled" (instead of "manual" or "automatic"). The SP3 installer needs the DB to be startable in order to upgrade it. If you have SP3 still failing the install, check to make sure than all upgradable instances are startable.
J.Ja
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By Justin James on
2/23/2009 1:41 PM
One of the things I keep noticing, is that Microsoft "enterprise stack" of applications almost all seem to need a hole straight into the LAN from the outside to work right. This is rediculous. Why did I bother setting up a DMZ and a firewall, when every application needs direct access to the inner circle? I know why this is... all of these applications rely upon Kerberos, domain membership, Active Directory, and other things that don't play nicely through a firewall. But still, this is a dumb situation. Microsoft needs to respect my network topology. The last thing I want is for a problem with Exchange, OCS, etc. to become a security exploit in the middle of my LAN.
J.Ja
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By Justin James on
2/19/2009 12:43 PM
Am I the only one who finds it surpremely arrogant that OCS 2007 R1 did not work on Windows 2008 or 64 bit Windows Server, but OCS 2007 R2 requires 64 bit Windows Server?
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By Justin James on
2/8/2009 10:45 AM
Microsoft OneNote is just about my favorite application, other than Outlook. I'm not a huge fan of Outlook per se, but I spend a lot of time it in, and it doesn't break on me, so I am happy with it. But OneNote is a miracle. Two years ago, I started fiddling with it, because my life was an unorganized mess. About a year or so agao, I got serious about using OneNote. Now, I am nearly 100% paperless, but OneNote still needs some tweaking to be a great application.
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By Justin James on
2/6/2009 1:49 PM
I went to write something down, but I couldn't find a piece of paper. I mentioned, "this is what I get for going paperless, I can't find paper." someone else retorted, "did you go paperless in the bathroom too?" The only response I could come up with was, "yes, I use 3.5" disks in there."
J.Ja
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By Justin James on
1/27/2009 5:47 PM
This week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Scott Abel, CEO and co-founder of Spiceworks. We caught up on what's new in their latest release (version 3.5) of their network management software, and how the company is doing in general.
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By Justin James on
1/26/2009 2:48 PM
Over the weekend, I took the time to (finally) work on my mother's PC. One thing she had mentioned, is that it was a bit sluggish. Given the PC's specs (nothing fantastic, but definitely mid-range), and her usage of it (typical usage), there was no reason in the world to think that it would be slow. When I took a look at it, I saw a whopping 10% - 20% (constantly bouncing) CPU usage on both CPU cores!
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By Justin James on
1/23/2009 6:59 PM
By now, there has been a ton of stories all over the Internet about the woman who claimed that Linux made her drop out of college, and is suing Dell as a result. Let's leave whether or not her lawsuit makes sense out of the equation for a moment. Let's ignore the stuff that everyone else is railing about. Let's pretend that people aren't going to be trolling both sides of the open source debate. Let's look at the underlying problem here, which is how when a vendor tries too hard to make something "easy t
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