June 2006 - Posts
A couple good friends of mine and my wife and I just got back from Playa del Carmen. Check out a few vacation pics in our photo gallery.
We flew into Cancun on Friday morning and drove about 100 km to Puerto Aventuras (PA) where we had a little house on the beach. Puerto Aventuras is a great little enclosed community where you feel pretty safe walking around and riding your bike at any time of day or night. There was a lot of construction on some new condos there so you'd want to avoid the construction area but, otherwise, really nice place to stay.
The Omni Hotel in PA had some great meals but we really enjoyed trekking out in our jeeps to Tulum and Playa. Playa is a great place for shopping and dining with some great night-life. People were bussed in from all over to swim with the Dolphins in PA during the day but, at night, PA was a little quiet which was fine with us.
When in PA check out Gringo Dave's - the first round is always on Dave. By the way - he rents out his house in PA so you can eat at Dave's and stay at Dave's!
While in Mexico, we met a local guide in the Tulum ruins plaza with Edventure Tours named Danny who took us around to go snorkeling in a cenote, out to swim with some sea turtles (don't touch) and to a great estuary called Yalku Lagoon with gorgious gardens and many interesting sculptures - it was great - the time out with Danny was the best part of the week. If you go to Cancun/Playa/Tulum and you don't look up Edventure Tours, you're cheating yourself!
Yesterday I resolved some jobs issues on a couple of my sites by switching trusted connection off (see Don't use trusted connection...). When talking to some of the guys here at the office, it became obvious that there is more to this issue than just trusted connections. As a matter of fact, some people hold that the prefered method is to use trusted connections (your username and password aren't sitting in your web.config for the world to see should some malevolent soul gain access to your box).
So, here's the thought process: your website runs under the authority of the identity selected in the app pool of the web site (go to IIS, look at the Home Directory tab of your website to identify your app pool then go to the identity tab on the properties for the application pool you're using).
That user is the account that must connect to the database. When I checked for the account in my database, it wasn't explicitly included. I added the user, gave the permissions I desired for running Community Server, updated my web.config to remove username and password, added back trusted connection and tested...
Well, what do you know; all jobs are running!
Now, why did my site work at all if that user wasn't in my database for the site? I can only make a few guesses - maybe I'll update this post when I have a definative answer but I'm leaning heavily towards miracle right now... Ok, not really - there are logins at the server level in SQL and I'm assuming that my user had some access through that but for some reason the user could not run all of the jobs. By adding the user to my database and giving it explicit permissions I've fixed my issue. If I learn more, I'll let you know.
Short version of the story: trusted connections are ok!
UPDATE! Check out Trusted Connections: There's more to it than that for the rest of the story...
I've been having a nagging issue with a couple of my CS sites and finally spent some time to work it out. Basically, my blogs weren't tracking views and my membership statistics never seemed to update.
I didn't have any interesting exceptions in the exceptions report (control panel->administration->reports->exceptions report) but I had a few jobs that wouldn't seem to run (control panel->administration->reports->jobs report). While my SiteStatisicsJob and my ViewsJob seemed to run regularly and successfully, I wasn't getting any data. The indexing and search jobs seemed to be the ones that weren't running.
I pulled down my site to my local machine and started debugging and found that views were being recorded and all jobs were running successfully when I hit the site locally but on the server, I wasn't having any luck.
I started searching around the Community Server forums and found a post from Ryan Olshan about trusted connections so I gave it a shot.
Sure enough, using sql auth instead of windows auth solved my problem - views are being tracked now and my membership statistics are being updated.
So, long story short, in your web.config, when you supply your db connection string, provide a uid and pwd and set trusted_connection=no.
Again, check out Trusted Connections: There's more to it than that - trusted connections are actually a GoodThing[tm].
I had a few buddies over at my house last night for the Mavs' game. Jim Martin came over wearing a boot/cast on his right foot and my daughter, Brianne asked him what it was
Jim: It's a boot.
Bri: Why are you wearing it?
Jim: I was bitten by an aligator.
Bri: Why are you wearing that?
Jim: To keep the aligator from biting me again.
Bri: Oh, why don't you wear one on the other foot?
She's smart!
If you're a big Community Server user, you've probably played with Text Parts but, if you haven't, you've got to check them out. In my blog on ooto.info, I've started adding a bunch of words that I can drop in square brackets that automatically (when the post is saved) get turned into links. There's a lot you can do with these and I'm only scratching the surface but try it out.
In the control panel under any blog, go to Settings->Manage My Blog's TextParts (CS2.0). and click Create New TextPart. The first field under TextPart name put the word you want replaced (CS). The second field allows you to create a link with TextPart (http://communityserver.org). I do this with the word "ooto" (ooto.info). Finally, drop in the text to replace with in the bottom field (Community Server).
I use this for names of people I reference to point to their blog and things like "CS" (Community Server) and "ooto" (ooto.info). BTW, text parts are not case sensitive so putting cs or CS in square brackets yields the same result.
For more info, search the Community Server forums for "text parts."
Sometime last year, Rob Howard and I were talking about laptop technology. He was wondering when we'd see the replacement of platter-based drives with flash memory. There will be all kinds of benefits:
- 0 seek time
- Lower power consumption (no moving parts / spinning platter)
I don't know how it came up, but Xander Sherry and I were talking about this again yesterday and he made some great points for why we haven't replaced all our drives with flash drives yet:
- Flash memory is still expensive - a Gig of nice quick flash memory on Amazon still goes for almost $100. Even if it was only $30, a 100 Gig flash drive would be several thousand dollars - you gonna pay that?
- The times you can read and write to a flash drive is still somewhat limited compared to a traditional harddrive. I haven't researched this to know how limited but it's a good item to keep on the list until I learn more.
Interestingly, Xander found the following article last night about hybrid Seagate drives coming out with Windows Vista. "The most radical drive," the article reads, "is the hybrid Momentus 5400 PSD (Power-Saving Drive) which adds 256MB of Flash memory to a 5,400rpm SATA300 2.5 inch hard drive. The Momentus also has 8MB of conventional cache memory. The highest capacity model of PSD will achieve 160GB of storage with two platters and four read/write heads."
256 MB of Flash memory? 8 MB conventional cache? What is this, 1994?
My camera has 256 MB of Flash and I'm waaaaaaaaay behind the times. I've had 8 Meg of cache in my drives for, what, 4 years?
Great RADICAL idea but poor execution. How about something with a little testosterone? Maybe I'm just being a little too Tim Taylor here but wouldn't a Gig of Flash and 32 Meg cache sound better? The thing isn't going to be availble for another year - component prices are going to cut in almost half by then - step up to the plate, boys, and tell us why 8 Meg of cache is now inadequate, demonstrate how you can load small countries into your Flash and author your SOW, BRs, Project Plan and PowerPoint presentation without spinning up your hard drive. THAT'S RADICAL.