Lewies Blog

I’ve been learning quite a bit lately about restoring databases from a complete database failure.  Although rite now, I’m am working with a test to verify we can restore from one.  I’m not involved in all the steps such as tape restoration, but I am involved in one of the most critical parts.  The restoration of the Master database.

It turns out that you can’t just restore a master database in SQL Servers normal operation mode (multi-user).  I had to start the service in single-user mode from the command line.  From there on out, you can go into enterprise manager and restore the master database.

Why is the master database so important that it needs single-user mode?  Because it contains all the data that the server itself uses for its own operation.  Everything from maintenance plans, other databases in the ssystem, user accounts, etcetera.

Just make sure if you restore a master database, that the version of SQL server is the same that it was backed up from.  This includes having the same service pack installed as well.  SQL Server SP3 master database can not be restored on SQL Server SP4.

A few years ago, I purchased a new phone.  I really went all out on it. I got a camera phone with internet access and a color screen.  It was even capable of running programs downloaded from the internet.  Coolest of all was its screen that could flip.  It was the Samsung SPH-A600.

Step a head to the present and my phone is out of date.  Sure, it does everything I need it to.  That is, it makes phone calls.  Everything else is just for kicks.  I’ve been over-paying my cell phone account for a while now building up for this big moment.  A pocket-pc phone.

Yes, I have a pocket PC.  I have one of the first.  Just like my cell phone, I purchased the pocket pc on the first day it became available to the public.  The HP Jornada 540 still works, but has the same problems.  I couldn’t upgrade its operating system like the other two that came out that day.  It doesn’t support the .Net framework that I program with today (the existing software I made programs on wont even install on my computer anymore).  Also, it was a pain to even type since that screen started getting out of synch with where I tapped the stylus on the letters.

So today, this little Pocket PC had all of those things worked out.  It has a sliding keyboard, and runs latest version of Pocket PC (which should let me program for it again). My mobile phone company has other handheld assistants, but they are for the Palm and Blackberry platforms.  I don’t know where to begin for programming for those.

When I asked about hands-free sets, the associate directed me to bluetooth ear attachments.  I’ve seen people using these things before, but I had assumed that they were the entire phone.  These things look like something from star trek where a small gadget attaches to you and does everything for you.  The only problem is that you look like you are going around talking to yourself when you are not using it in the car.  I was in the restroom once where someone was using one.  Talk about potty talk and bad mannors.

So anyways, the money I have in my mobile account would do more then pay for it.  I could get it for $449 today but they were out of stock.  I’ll have to look up some other stores in the area to see if they have one in stock.

I was watching my favorite show on the DVR tonight and saw a commercial for the second season of Dr. Who.  Wow.  I kinda got really excited over that.  I had to pause the tv, jump up and find my wife to tell her the news.  We purchased the first season back in July.  We had ordered it just as the season ended.

The funny thing is, I’ve been hearing bits and pieces of the second season from a podcast I listen to from the UK - DarkCompass.  Today DarkCompass came out with some kind of game called Trumps.  Lost of Dr. Who. stuff today here and there.

So today I ate chinease.  Half the time, fortune cookies are horrible at giving fortunes.  It’s usually a statement, or some wise saying.  Today I got one that was just plain insulting.

You should be able to make money and hold on to it.

And to make things worse, it had a smiley face at the beginning and end of the fortune.  Ok, so this cookie is assuming that I either don’t make money, or I can’t hold onto it.  Even worse, applying “In Bed” or “Between the Sheets” onto the end of it makes it sound like I’m paying for services, or servicing others.  What is up with that?

They should have worded it different like “You will be able to make money and hold on to it.”

Is it ludicrus to sue a chinease cookie company for punitive damages or misadvertisement?  I kinda expected a fortune in my fortune cookie and ended up being insulted.

What do you know.  It seems that I now have a way to blog from within SecondLife.  I created a seperate account for my avatar “Dedric Mauriac” to post to this website.  So be on the lookout for SecondLife information from him for now.

So I’m working on my little log program for my transactions. I look into moving my hard-coded strings into a resource file as good practice. I’m finding that in .Net framework 2.0, it is so much easier. I mean … easy easy. Everything is done for me

I added a resource file to my project and just start typing away names and values for each of my strings. From there, every string is directly accessable from a class that the resource designer makes for me as static methods. I’ve never had it so easy.

In the old .Net framework 1.0, It seemed like I had to jump through a few hoops to pull out resource strings. I’m liking the .Net 2.0 more and more every day.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll go ahead and start running FxCop to help me apply Microsoft suggested practices. I usually try to apply them, but I haven’t gotten around to downloading the program for my new compie.

This entry was posted by Second Life resident Dedric Mauriac from Higgins.

So last night, I was able to figure out how to download a log of all my transactions throughout the day

Authenticating with cookies was a pain because the CookieCollection object gets confused with cross-subdomain cookies (ie. .secondlife.com instead of secondlife.com)

So anyways, tonight I got on the ball with XmlSerialization - this handy namespace has an XmlSerializer that can serialize/deserialize xml into objects

Without it, I would have to create an XmlDocument and loop through each element off of the root document

Then depending on each child element, i would have to assign the innerText to different properties on my objects

Let’s just say XmlSerialization takes a lot of work out of the equation

Problem!

SecondLife transaction elements do not share a common name. Each element name has the id appended to it! i.e. transation_1234567. This makes it painful. Why the ID is in there i have no idea as “id” is repeated as a child element of the transaction.

To get around this, I simply used a regular expression.

xml = Regex.Replace(xml, “”, “”);

So yea … that solved the problem there and I was finally able to get my deserialized object just fine

I took it a step further an used a generic collection rather then an array. collections were introduced in .Net 2.0 and they are a god send!

[XmlElement(”transaction”, typeof(SecondLifeTransaction))] public Collection Transactions

So with that all done, I’m setting happy

well … not quite

I have issues with microsoft. I love to catch every exception within my debugger. even when they are caught and handled. My beef is that microsoft decided to look for assemblies that don’t exist for user-defined serializers.

so the MS Core library decided to complian that assemblies didn’t exist … twice. ugh! Although this doesn’t raise an error to the end user, it raises an exception to me as the developer.

Come on mr. gates - can’t you actually communicate amongst your core library without raising exceptions? or at least prevent me from seeing your “core” exceptions since I don’t have access to that code anyways.

To get around the problem, i created an empty library called LogViewer.XmlSerializers and referenced it from my LogViewer project. that fixed the exception problem just fine

End of Line

This entry was posted by Second Life resident Dedric Mauriac from Higgins.

Ok, I think this is going to happen.

I’m typing away within the world of second life

and hopefully this little watch i’m wearing from slstats.com will record all of it

then it puts it on http://slstats.com/user/view/Dedric+Mauriac

and hopefully (fingers crossed) it posts it to http://www.lewismoten.com/

Drumroll please ….

This entry was posted by Second Life resident Dedric Mauriac from Huin.

Bean bag chairs, it seems, are expensive.  Who would have guessed that a new one starts at about $150 US.  It has me wondering how much it would cost to build one from scratch.  It seems I would only save 33% and be left with something small that wasn’t professionally made.  Ugh!

What a day.  I got much further on Oblivion today.  I went through a gate and visited what appeared to be hell.  In one tower, the walls were just slimey.  I was on another quest helping these two brothers fend off a few creatures from there farm.  I played it over about twenty times before both of them survived.  I returned to town and there pop was just happy.

I ended up dragging the couch closer to my television and angleing it so my neck wouldn’t have to feel cramped.  I’ve got to figure out a better solution then this.  Maybe I should look into one of those bean-bag chairs that you can toss anywhere.

In SecondLife, I saw that I sold a particle lab for 3999 L$ on SL Exchange, and also a victorian dunking booth for over 700 L$.  I estimate that I made about $15 in US currency on those two sales alone.  That should pay up for my next two months of land fees.  I need to make some improvements for that particle lab to gain more attention soon.