The underlying truth
by DotCom on Feb.18, 2010, under Truth or Not
I have suspected with the way things are going in the economy and how the government seems to have forgotten they represent the people that there would be a place and time people started flipping out. Today a sad but inevitable event happened where a guy couldn’t take anymore of the years of government manipulation and twists to our nations laws. He finally went over the deep end.
Since the larger portion of the press do not truely cover whats truthful in many cases, word for word, I decided I would post the letter left by the software engineer(pilot) as it surprised me how the excerpts they used truly painted the picture in my head differently then what his letter did.
I am sorry for any of the people injured or involved and my wishes go out to you.
Ahhh Memories
by DotCom on Sep.16, 2009, under Arcade, Crack 4 Geeks
Recently at work we had an arcade game down and I remember my good old days of working with A&A Services in the southern region of the US on the arcade games they supplied to many military installations down there. Well got to dig into an old Wells Gardner monitor which are popular for use in many of the arcade games in the industry. This game was from the 80’s, so when opening it and looking at the board it brought the memories flooding back. It was pretty sweet that I didn’t need a flowchart to check the components as I remembered most of them. This monitor needs a cap kit but other than that the humor of the issue was that the board ended up good to go. What ended up being the problem on this monitor was the cabinet had been rewired and they drove the monitor power from two switches in the cabinet and the one switch had somehow knocked itself into the off(non service mode) position. The Service switch for the door had been remounted due to the fact the door was warped and wouldn’t hold it in properly. Pulled it out back into service mode and bingo. A few adjustments later, its back up and running. But for you techies I got to digging around and found a few things that can help you troubleshoot your old arcade games and monitors.
A little how a raster monitor works
Some Randy Fromm videos(Serious arcade genius)
SQL Server Errors out with 80071736 “The cluster Resource ‘Sql Server’ cannot be brought online” Problem
by DotCom on Jan.22, 2009, under Engineers Corner
We have been working on a remote distributor Highly available SQL 2008 / Windows Server 2008 installation. We have come across many issues in doing this. Microsoft claims they are geocluster capable. FALSE**** The truth of the matter is that many geographically distributed datacenters in many cases due to security and the such also have there own VLAN’s or Subnets. The old solution to clustering across datacenters was to create a VLAN that spanned the two datacenters.  With Geoclustering this was supposed to be solved.
Â
Well after working with Microsoft teams and getting to the guys in the SQL development group. There geocluster solution requires that each server have a NIC with the IP address of each Subnet the cluster will live in.  Guess what? That means you still have to stretch the VLAN/Subnet across datacenter opening possible security issues. Geocluster my butt. Even there developers have been arguing its not truely geoclustering.  They say that in future versions this would probably be taken care of.  Anyways now to the new errors we had installing the solution.
Â
When installing SQL on the primary cluster node, toward the end of the install it will attempt to bring the cluster online. If it doesn’t and errors out with the code above, you may want to check to make sure you have the NIC IP physically set, instead of using DHCP. We got this error because it was set to DHCP and we are not running an environment that DHCP is supported in, so theres no servers to dish out IP’s.
Another Error we ran into was when we “Add a SQL Node” on the secondary nodes was “INVALID SKU” error. You must retrieve the Cumulative Update #1 for sql 2008 to fix this issue.  They say it will be in the first service pack for 2008 but as of right now you must request it from Microsoft.Â
Â
I will try to keep people up to date on our implementation and issues we see as we progress through this. I am also curious to hear from others what there experience is in the 2008/2008 installs.
Fireman’s Poker Run 2008
by DotCom on Jun.27, 2008, under General
Well over last weekend there was a poker run to raise money for a local fire department. Its one of the bigger 
ones in the area and me and about 8-10 friends decided to go out on the run.  It was pretty sweet. Altogether I believe there must have been 450 bikes in this run.
As we took off in the morning and through out all the towns we went there were people out in lawns and on the streets just watching us all go by and waving. Â
Â
Had some great food both at the eagles when we left and at our first stop in Kilkenny (Liquor Hole). Then we drove to Elysiah (The thirsty Beave), Union Hill, and then back to Eagles in Shakopee. Was a total of 160+ miles for this particular run.Â
A couple weeks ago was another we had gone on that was a charity run for Suicide prevention, and then of course the pullman run to benefit a family. This Saturday I believe we are going to the open house/Party at American Thunder. Should be a good time, free food, drink, contests, and burn out contest. Will have a few pictures to show after that.
Approaching my final mods
by DotCom on Jun.27, 2008, under General
Not a very good picture of my bike but will do for now. I have spent a lot of time on it since I bought her new in April and now I am working on the final stages of the Stage 1 Kit.  
Air Cleaner is probably only thing I have left.  So far I have chromed out the Pegs/Grips, added a drag bar which I internally wired, braided break line, New D&D Exhaust, and new chromed Kuryakyn LED flashers.  The stock flashers were pretty plain jane, along with the fact they like to burn out quite a bit due to vibration I would imagine.Â
SQL Error codes…..!
by DotCom on Apr.07, 2008, under Engineers Corner
Recently have noticed it was a little more of a challenge to find the actual error codes you might have to handle in a case of timeouts or connectivity issues.  Normally you can easily get a list of error numbers/messages by viewing the master.dbo.sysmessages table. But what error codes do you get in cases you can’t even communicate properly with the DB itself. Well it is hard to find the answer to these. Which I think is a little wierd since I can see many use cases of where I would want to determine wether its a connection error or processing error in order to know how to proceed on indexed data. Anyway the list I could come up with is as follows, not sure how accurate it is since there is very little information around it.
-3: ZeroBytes
-2: Timeout
-1: Unknown
1: InsufficientMemory
2: AccessDenied
3: ConnectionBusy
4: ConnectionBroken
5: ConnectionLimit
6: ServerNotFound
7: NetworkNotFound
8: InsufficientResources
9: NetworkBusy
10: NetworkAccessDenied
11: GeneralError
12: IncorrectMode
13: NameNotFound
14: InvalidConnection
15: ReadWriteError
16: TooManyHandles
17: ServerError
18: SSLError
19: EncryptionError
20: EncryptionNotSupported
Spring is around the corner.
by DotCom on Apr.06, 2008, under General
Spring is around the corner and I am getting the itch.  So I have been out motorcycle shopping. Found my self at the Wild Prairie Harley Davidson grand opening this past weekend.  I finally decided I am going to get the Dyna Low Rider, new of course.  I demo’ed the first available demo’s this weekend. I rode both a Dyna Low Rider and a Softail Deluxe.  Both rode fairly well the dyna vibrated more at an idle but smoothed out very nicely once you took off.  This is due to the rubber mounted engines.  The Softail was pretty uniform in vibration all around, but you could feel more of the road due to the suspension having the under side mounted shocks. The Dyna has side mounted ones.  So this week I will be doing the finalizing to hopefully have the bike next weekend.
 For those curious based no some information I have gathered up, it looks like dealers get a 21% markup from cost at sticker price. This gives a guy some good negotiation room. I wouldnt expect more then 10% off the sticker price though.  Can’t wait to get back out on the bikes this year.Â
Rolling File TraceListener
by DotCom on Apr.04, 2008, under Engineers Corner
Ever been in a situation you needed to use the logging mechanisms of .Net’s System.Diagnostics and the file output from TextWriterTraceListener became huge and theres not a lot of control over it.  Well recently I created a custom listener to overcome this problem.  To use the custom class all you have to do is specify the FQN and the DLL it lives in, in the type field of the listener in the config.  This is a modified version of TextWriterTraceListener as just inheriting the class still was not allowing the filename attributes to be accessed. Two added attributes that you can specify in your config file is maxfilesize and numrollovers to have more control over the files and there size.  Default in the code is 10000000 and 10 respectively. The main difference in this custom class is the method: IsFileSizeReached(string filename) This is used and checked from the Ensure Writer and checks to see if you had specified a file as output. To use custom attributes if you so choose to change this you can look at the overridden method: GetSupportedAttributes()
I have attached the class file for anyone who wishes to have a sample or play around with it.
Another thing to note is that this class still allows you to pass custom stream or textwriters for those that use those.
World of Warcraft Junkies
by DotCom on Feb.08, 2008, under Crack 4 Geeks
For those that view World of Warcraft as crack for computer geeks, you might be interested in the site that hosts the Guild series.  They are pretty funny flicks about a few friends and how the disconnect between outside world relates to the warcraft world and the personalities that go along with it. All worth watching if you have played online role playing games and might see the sense of humor protrayed in these videos.
Hello all!!
by DotCom on Feb.07, 2008, under Fresh-Start
Hello all, finally got my blog space up since over a year ago.  First experience with WordPress so am excited to see what we have in store for me. Got the idea from our CTO Jamie Thingelstad and decided to run with it.  In the next few days we will be updating look and feel and playing with the options to tweak the site as necessary.
