This is just a quick rant/question. Does anyone know why you have to type your password twice when setting up the Application Pool Identity in IIS?

It seems an extremely dumb feature as #1 you can copy paste the password or #2 just type it but given you usually include service accounts here with stupidly complicated passwords then why do you have to suffer typing it twice?

Windows “evolves” but the underlying things are exactly the same. Can’t Microsoft spare a little bit of time making Windows more usable and fix little itty bitty things like this one that overall will have a better user experience?

Oh well, who cares about devs anyway!

So I am taking databases offline and I need to find out which ones have active connections to them. People usually do a

sp_who

However that brings a lot of info that I don’t need. I prefer to use this query so I see the DBs with number of connections!

SELECT
DB_NAME(dbid) as DBName,
COUNT(dbid) as NumberOfConnections,
loginame as LoginName
FROM
sys.sysprocesses
WHERE
dbid > 0
GROUP BY
dbid, loginame
;

Brilliant query!

We had a spaghetti of database owners so I decided to get this straightened out. How to do it? Simple!

– Open New Query in SQL Server Management Studio in the database that you want to change the owner
– Run EXEC sp_changedbowner ‘domain\owner’
– Wait for Command(s) completed successfully.

As simple as that!

So Google Drive’s price hits rock bottom killing everyone else, $2 for 100GB and $10 for 1TB monthly. Should I stay or should I go?

So I have explained before why Google Drive sucks, but now at this price the name of the game changes. So there were two blockers for me:
– No throttling which dropbox does brilliantly
– No LAN sync

Ok, so Google Drive is still a B product against the competition and can’t do LAN sync. But there is a way to do throttling. Not built in, but it lets me use Google Drive without being shot (kind-a) by IT

Get NetBalancer by SeriousBit. I am not affiliated with them in any way but they have a killer product!

You can throttle your processes

And check this out. This is instant gratification for a geek like me!

It even has a very small gadget plus another one in the task bar just with the ups and downs.

Now only one thing pending, LAN sync! C’mon Google! Make it worth it!

One detail about LAN Sync: Nothing to do at this point. Google Drive is even so dumb that if you copy the files first it does not recognize that they are duplicate and creates copies

Today I find myself removing a stored proc from our dbml because it is no longer in use. This stored proc updates the document information to be exported.

I check our source code and indeed no one uses it. So I go ahead and remove it. Is that the end of the story? Usually it is, but I decided to use a bit of common sense to find out if this is the last step or no. It wasn’t. Let me explain and get to the moral of the story quickly:

– We have a requirement to export the information of up to several tens of thousands of documents into Excel/Word/XML in a single go.

– We used to need to make sure that the document information is up to date, and given the source is in XML and XPath is rather slow, we built an intermediate SQL Server table to be able to have speedy exports.

– We made a change and now information is always up to date in the intermediate exports table, however the code that CHECKS if the information is up to date was not removed.

– So the info is not updated as it is already up to date, but we are still checking if we should ACTUALLY DO THE UPDATE. The code is still there.

What does this translate into? An unnecessary and performance degrading step. We need to check to determine if thousands of documents are up to date (and twice but this is another story) when they already are. This means there are two queries that we could easily avoid and save time as they add zero value but take several minutes to execute.

Moral of the story: when making a change don’t focus only on the change, focus also on the side effects of a change.

This should be a rule of common sense for all developers.

Y pasa con todo. La regla general es que si vale $50 en USA vale 50 000 colones en Costa Rica qie son basicamente el doble. Que aguevado vivir en un pais tercermundista con salarios variables pero no tanto como pais de primer mundo y aun asi pagar todo a precio “premium”. Este es solo un ejemplo de hoy: