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Well any national leader can make changes but electronics don’t always have to agree.

This morning I woke up to my VCRs (yes I have two, no PVR for me yet) having conveniently changed time back an hour. To anyone that has a real brain we all know that next weekend the time zone changes but to some of the pieces of electronic equipment that had no patching done last year the time change should be today.

I was reminded Friday that this weekend was the old time change for standard time instead of daylight savings but until this morning of course I forgot.

I will be interested to watch this morning and see what kind of automation is broke. There are probably more problems then just my VCRs but I will not kknow until after my coffee. A nd no the coffee machine, microwave and stove don’t care what day it is so they don’t think they are supposed to fall back.

I just got a new Blackberry today. Not even going to get into the whole argument of “Are Blackberries good or bad”.

Anyway the blackberry that I got had a flashing green light that had been driving me crazy all day. What to do? The green light no my blackberry is a network notification light.

Let’s fix my and your problem.

You can turn this off by going to settings (maybe a wrench icon?) Options Screen/Keyboard and turn off LED coverage indicator, this setting is around the middle of the settings on that page.

After you save the setting the flashing should go away. If the flashing does now go away it would be a notification. Then gO to Profiles select active profile and press option edit. Then go through and verify the LED is turned off.

I was working on my moms PC on the weekend and one of the problems that i have always had is that there is no easy way to have a light computer user to tell you their IP. Why would I want my moms IP address? Well everytime that the “internet is down” or there is a problem with the sorting in outlook i used to have to VNC into her machine or now just use remote desktop (RDP) to get in.

This may be easy for anyone used to the internals of Windows but when you have to get someone to start-> run -> cmd -> ipconfig sometimes you just wish for an easier experiencse for them let alone you.

I know that I could go to dyndns to set my parents computer up and then have a DNS address. I can cover this somewhere else but really it is more trouble to setup and maintain just to get a TCP/IP address.

I was poking around my computer and remembered a utility that i had forgotten. Back in Windows NT4 there was a GUI Ip tool that just shows you the IP address fo your PC. Simply drop this on your desktop, double click and you are there.

The tool is called WNTIPCFG.EXE and you just have to click on the link and save to your PC desktop. The file is only 88 kilobytes which is really small and does not even need to be installed.

Now, I just have to point my mom to this blog, have her right click the link, save to desktop…..

Recently I was the tech lead on a project at the company that I work for where we were doing a software upgrade. Upgrade is such a vague term in any IT organization and in this case the “upgrade” project was very extensive. The application that we upgrade must remain secret but it is a tier 1 application, an application with very strict uptime requirements. There were lots of changes and a long project so I thought this would make a nice case study on how to do the implementation of an application upgrade.

Environment Before Upgrade
Citrix 3.0 farm
Version 3 of app
Database of Oracle 9i on Windows

Environment After Upgrade
Citrix 4.0 farm
Version 6 of app
Database of Oracle 10G on Unix

Application upgrade
The application was running smoothly before our upgrade and during the upgrade and testing process we needed to iron out some bugs with a new app install process and validate the application as there was “rogue code” that was added to get the application originally into production three  years ago. During the testing phase over 6 months we went through three service packs and then three full cycles of user testing and at least ten very documented installs so as not to get into any problems during a long day to upgrade to production.

Citrix farm upgrade
As far as the Citrix farm upgrade went everything went very smoothly as the changes from Metaframe 3.0 to 4.0 was not very difficult.

Oracle Upgrade
We were very fortunate in the upgrade to Oracle 10g on Unix as we inherited unused hardware from another project which allowed us to run the upgrade many times with no problems, the best new feature that we were able to take advantage of was Flahback, a new utility in Oracle that allowed us to quickly move back to our original data if there was any problem with the load of the upgrade scripts. The old Windows environment was very stable but being able to move our staging to it’s own environment was a real help for performance even though we stressed to users that there were no performance testing guarantees in staging.
Day of upgrade deployment
The day that we did the upgrade was a Sunday and the upgrade because of changes to the application, Oracle and to a lesser extent Citrix made for a really long outage to the application. The upgrade was scheduled to take 12 hours and it took just that amount of time. Although you always have unforeseen issues when you do an upgrade we knew how long every step would take and did take. One of the great things that we used was a conference bridge throughout the day so that everyone would be able to communicate at any time to the entire upgrade team. The upgrade was a success and was really never in doubt thanks to extensive testing.

Challenges met and passed
Looking back is the best way to make sure that a large upgrade project will come together well. One of the reasons that the upgrade took so long was that there were so many changes to the infrastructure that changed in the one upgrade.
We considered doing the Citrix change first, then a few weeks later the Oracle on Unix change, then finally a few weeks later the application change. I would have preferred having a few shorter outages to do this instead of taking a Tier 1 app down for a whole day and also we would have reduced the risk to implement. This tactic was turned down by the project manager as he was more comfortable with having no question around the changes even if there were a lot of them all at the same time. Still not too happy with this approach for the future but it did certainly worked.

My workplace seems to be big fans of Toad software. I have used Toad as just a support guy for three years or so and have barely scraped the functionality needed by the tool. During an app upgrade a few weeks ago there are a few business people that need to run queries and such against the database so we have created read-only accounts to Oracle to facilitate this…oh yes and the installation of Toad on the user machines was needed as well.

One of the things that I found this week after trying to do a minimal install needed of the Oracle client is that when users need to create an ODBC connection as well that they need to have the Administrator install of the Oracle client. When installing the Oracle client there is first and option to deinstall products (and here I was calling it uninstalling for all these years) which is a good thing to do to get rid of 9.2 or other releases of Oracle that you do not need.

Next you have choices between and instant client, runtime, administrator, and custom installs of the Oracle client. If you need ODBC then from trial and error I found that Administrator install is the minimum that you need to get your TNSNames.ora file to have a place to go.

Oh, and if you have no experience with Oracle clients before, remember to drop the known good copy of your tnsnames.ora file into the \network\admin folder so that Oracle and other interfaces to your application can see it.

I was just hunting around about Apple Iphones coming to Canada and found one company that is selling hacked Iphones in Canada for $985 this is a lot of coin for a product that does not even include the Visual Voicemail feature that is being offered by AT&T in the US.

So let’s say that you do buy a Canadian Iphone for $985(I won’t link because this is a shitty deal) now you need to have a carrier for your phone and data. The only company that has a GSM network in Canada is Rogers and the Iphone needs a GSM network to work at all. Rogers charges a lot for data, in fact apparently they charge three times what a carrier in the US would charge so your Iphine is going to be a bit pricy with all the push-pull of data that an Iphone uses just to do all of the features that you expect for it. The cost would apparently be around $300 per month every month.

The Iphone is the most exciting piece of personal tech to come out in a few years but here in Canada there will have to be some really big changes by the cell carriers to make it work for any person at all in Canada to buy an Iphone.

And if you were hoping that Bell or Telus will start offering the Iphone I am sorry but we are out of luck. The cellular network that is offered by Bell and Telus in Canada is different and is part of the business plan that those companies have. The cost would be at least a couple billion dollars to change the networks as the network, cell towers, and infrastructure is completely different than the GSM network that an Iphone in Canada would need.

One of the great things about a corporate environment is the easy access to mapped drives for home folders and resource folders. One of the things that I tend to do on a semi-often bases is to upload and download from my personal FTP. I have just been turned onto an old Novell resource called NetDrive that allows you to map a drive to an FTP site so that you can have your FTP very closely integrated to your Windows machine.

After you install NetDrive you will get the following window to map your FTP and thedrive letter that you want it to show up as. Also as you notice is a logon username and password. This is a bit dangerous if it gets in the wrong hands but if you lose your computer you may be in trouble anyway.

After you have setup these settings you will also have a tray icon that allows you to set other settings.

I have used this app now as a way to edit web files on the fly. I am sure I will not let go of my trusty Filezilla but at least this is a great way to easily get files up and down to and from my FTP.

I hope that the links about to NetDrive work but Novell has abandoned the software and apparently have no license to it. According to Novell the best way to find a link to the software is to do a search on Google for netdrive.exe and spin the wheel, see what comes up.

I had not heard of Casalemedia before today but now I have a reason to write about it. I have been a long time believer that if someone could target me with ads on the internet that were of interest to me I would be much more intereted in the ads themselves. Of course I am not alone in this thinking as advertisers feel the same way.

A few days ago I was at a site that sells contact lenses looking to buy contacts online. Although I didn’t buy any contacts that day I found it strange that that very same company (which will remian nameless for now) had ads all over an about.com site about home theaters.

Strange I said in talking to a coworker. I moused over the ad and checked in my status bar and the ad was served by Casalemedia. I did a quick search for Casalemedia tracking habits and it seems that they place a tracking cookie on your machine and serve you ads based on the sites that you go to.

This of course is not new, what is new is that they seemed to have been looking at the algorithym and getting it closer to being right. Let’s say that I go to 200 pages a day, what should they serve ads for? What am I just merely searching though and what is really of interst to me?

I do not like the idea of spyware and I know that I should hate tracking cookies but now I am much more intrigues. How will casalemedia keep up a good database if I delete the cookie? Do they know me by IP, I have a work IP from this laptop as well as a home IP. This may look like very invasive technology but I am sure it will be refined over the next few years to the point where the sites that I go to will look significantly different than the sites that you go to. Will someone eventually just give you a toolbar ala Alexa that will just suggest you sites all the time that you would like to visit based on your surfing habits.

By the way Casalemedia is not the only provider of tracking cookies. Take a search around and you will see that there are many companies that do the exact same thing if you would like another resource to find out about how to stop the tracking there are resources at Spyware Warrior.